Lots of people know the United States Congress made edits to political biographies on the Wikipedia (huh?); adding point-of-view and such. Well, I’ve found the Parliament of the United Kingdom have also made edits, however none of those are malicious.

The IP address in question is 192.60.38.10, and that IP has made 397 edits to the Wikipedia (to date). The IP’s first edit was in March 2003.

The majority of the edits are to add more detail or correcting simple errors. It’s good to see how our government isn’t abusing this website.

What remains a mystery is the identity(/ies) of the editor(s). I would think it’d be interesting to discover.

You can view the IP’s contributions on this page.

Tags: politics, UK, democracy, wikipedia, government

Clipmarks is a website which enables you to clip images and text onto a website to store and, optionally, share. Just like how you can take magazine and newspaper clippings, Clipmarks allows you to do this on websites.

Clipmark requires you to install a Firefox extension or an Internet Explorer toolbar.

The idea behind Clipmarks isn’t just to store things – it’s to share them. del.icio.us is a bookmarking service designed for storing and sharing bookmarks. However, on del.icio.us you do not have the option to keep these bookmarks private. Clipmark is a bookmarking site with a twist.

When you post a clipping; you can specify a title, write a description and also you can tag it. For public Clipmarks a title and tags are compulsory. It is also possible to search clips using the tags attached to them. One of the aims of Clipmarks is to provide a people-powered search engine where you discover and rate web clips, participate in discussions, explore links to sources, and connect with people who share your interests..

Clipmarks also has a Digg-like feature which allows a user to pop a clip. Popping is a bit like a Digg. People can also comment on clips and add them to their own clipboard. The hottest clips get on a Hot Now page.

The site also uses Ajax. Actually, in my view, it’s an excess of Ajax. It’s still quite a coding achievement, and something to be proud of. It’s not the best colour scheme I’ve seen, it’s a little heavy. I expect the Ajax would appear far better in a lighter colour scheme.

Also, the way you clip text and images is pretty nifty. It allows you to select individual images and paragraphs of text. As you can see on the screenshot on the right.

An interesting point, which I have thought about, was raised by Problogger. When does a Clipmark become a copyright breach? Copying copyrighted images and text (in quantities larger than an excerpt) surely isn’t fair use. A problem is finding the person responsible for this. It is a little like P2P software; is LimeWire LLC responsible if someone decides to use their software in copyright theft?

An interview with the site’s makers is available at eHub and the official clipmarks blog is here. As a simple Technorati search shows, the site has had quite a hype.

Digg this!

The cheap hosting is very feasible for those webmasters which can’t afford the expensive rates of the hosting plans, offered by numerous hosting companies. The dedicated server is one of the centralized server of the hosting service providers which offers the guaranteed 100% uptime to their clients without any systematic failure.

Tags: Web 2, Web 2.0, Web2, social bookmark, social bookmarking, bookmarking, bookmarks, web2, social, clipping

I was reading SavvySolo and I found this post: The Week That Blogging Died. Basically; the Chicago Tribune has claimed, according to Gallup pollsters, that blog readership is down (here; it’s a hard read – I suggest the blog post)^{(registration required, BugMeNot login available)}.

These Gallup polls claim that 9%, of the 1 billion, of Internet users frequently read blogs; 11% occasionally; 13% rarely read them; and 66% never do. This is essentially unchanged from last year’s. So 20% of people use the Internet for reading blogs. 87% of people use it for email, 72% for news and weather, 52% use it for shopping and travel planning. I wonder out of that 72% how many are reading blogs without realising.

Michael Pollock has shown just to what extent blogs have grown – which aren’t reflected in the above poll. He’s chosen 3 A-list blogs: Lifehacker, Gizmodo and Problogger as his examples.

Using these blogs Sitemeter statistics, he has tracked their growth. In Feb 05 Lifehacker had 400,000 visitors, last month they had 2 million; that’s a massive growth! Gizmodo had a growth of 3.5 million, from 4.5 million in Feb 05; not quite as impressive proportion wise as Lifehacker, but much more significant. Why was it significant? 3,500,000 more readers in a year, on just one blog, shows the growth in interest in blogs. And finally, Problogger. Problogger is mainly used by those already in the blogosphere; but they have had an 11 fold increase from last year, rising from 10k to 110k. That is probably the most significant. Presuming the majority of readers are blog pros, semi-pros, and semi-pro wannabes; it can be assumed they are far more people how blog as a hobby. These people will probably also read lots to stay up to date.

Many media companies such as the BBC and the Guardian Unlimited and The Times now have blogs. Are the companies scared? Or do they think of this simply as a new generation of media? I’m pretty certain some people must pick up papers and visit these blogs – increasing the reading of them.

At the moment you’re reading this, many more blogs will be made, currently there’s nearly 30,000,000 blogs listed on Technorati. And remember, not all blogs are listed on Technorati, just the good ones!

Tags: blog, blogosphere, web 2, web2, web 2.0, blogging, media

How many of you have ever wanted to make a window top-most? Perhaps you wanted to view video while typing in MS Word? When you select the MS Word window, your video player goes out of view. This really lowers your productivity – as you end up not using Word, just watching the video. There’s a solution.

DeskPins is a simple, 96KB, download which lives in your system tray/notification area. Simply click on the icon, and then a window, and the window you’ve selected remains top-most until you remove the pin by clicking it.

Download

BlogMad are having a bug day tomorrow (Saturday) from 10AM GMT (5AM ET). The beta testers, such as me, and selected members will get the chance to test BlogMad!

The day will be full of interviews, webcams of the BM team, bug fixing, games, tournaments and random prizes.

The majority of the day’s activities will be in BlogMad’s forums and their IRC channel. More information will be posted onto the forums and the main site.

Come by, join the forums and IRC channel, and watch the admin team eat pizza, drink coffee and fix every bug. Be sure to witness one of the biggest blogging-related sites of the year getting ready!

blogosphere