1. There is no cabal! I mean what lousy website doesn’t have a cabal?
2. The Wikipedia’s like Britannica… but for Commies.
3. The Wikipedia isn’t controlled by a group of fat Westerners
4. It’s controlled by only one: Jimbo Wales!
5. Your history lecturer doesn’t like it
6. A neutral point of view is boring
7. It tries to hide the biggest cover up in human history: the librarians are hiding something!
8. It’s free (gratis). The Britannica costs infinitely more and therefore must be better!
9. Daniel Brandt doesn’t like it
10. But Daniel Brandt isn’t notable enough to have his own Wikipedia article! Oh, and he also thinks that Google and Yahoo! are evil too!
11. Who can take a Klingon encyclopaedia seriously?
12. Even the English Wikipedia isn’t in English!
13. They don’t let you violate copyright!
14. You’re not supposed to vandalise it. What’s the point in a wiki you can’t vandalise?!
15. The Star Wars article is longer than the Star Trek one (56.3KiB vs 38.4KiB!)!
16. It isn’t very secure… you can edit pages
17. Treason!
18. Wikipedians actually find this funny
19. The article for ‘42′ is for the year and not the meaning of life!
20. Since when is Tony Blair (Right) Honourable?
21. Consensus is a horrible thing! To think that more than one opinion has to be listened to! How democratic! How appalling!
22. The Wikipedia has lots of systematic bias unlike that ‘other’ wonderful encyclopaedia.
23. Since when should encyclopaedia be spelt encyclopedia?
24. The Uncyclopedia is much more factual
25. And the Encyclopedia Dramatica is much more… umm… dramatic!
26. There are no adverts. I want something to brighten up reading about the Disputation of Tortosa!
27. It keeps asking for a donation. Just like a beggar. Why doesn’t it go and get itself a job?!
28. They’re greedy with their PageRank sticking nofollow to links where credit’s due!
29. There are more atheist Wikipedians than Lutheran ones and the population of elephants has tripled in the last 10 years
30. Wikipedians dominate all the protocols: BitTorrent, email, IRC, USENET and even the HyperText Transfer Protocol!
31. The Wikipedia obviously prefers chavs to nerds, with the chav article being many kilobytes longer!
32. One word: wikiality!
33. In the fine words of Larry Groznic 2 years ago: “How can you justify a “Weird Al” biography of only a paltry 850 words?”
34. It’s a hivemind… just like the Borg. Is Jimbo Wales the Borg Queen in disguise?!
35. Jimbo’s cheating on Google
36. The co-founder defected to form another project.
37. A website’s too popular when it is mentioned in The Simpsons Comics
38. In Communist China, you don’t read the Wikipedia, it’s blocked
39. The Wikipedia is not a social network, crystal ball or anything else besides an encyclopaedia but it is quite possibly V’ger
40. The Wikipedia is the World’s largest encyclopaedia… for trivia!
41. What respected publication doesn’t use an all rights reserved copyright?!
42. That white background uses a lot of electricity!
43. The site is bigger than many countries with nearly 5,000,000 registered users on the English Wikipedia alone! Too much influence…
44. My government edits it
45. The German government pays people to edit it
46. The US government vandalise it!!!
47. The Wikipedia thinks that it is a certain Abrahamic religion.
48. Most of the 1.9 million articles are about Pokemon!
49. The Wikipedia is so arrogant that it has a page that says “I invented the Internet“!
50. I’m sorry, but who really cares about an uninhabited island in the Outer Hebrides or an islet in the middle of the Atlantic?
51. The Wikipedia says that America is the third biggest country in the World… Britannica disagrees!
52. Why do you think the article on acne is over twice the size as the article on love?
53. Not feeding the trolls is cruel!
54. Open formats are boring… I mean really who reading this actually knows how to play an OGG video?
55. The Wikipedia is one big massive multiplayer online roleplaying game… not an encyclopaedia!

(more…)

“Everything that can be invented has been invented” is a quote infamously attributed, albeit falsely, to US Patent Office commissioner Duell. We all know he was wrong.

Andrew said an interesting thing to me the other day “all the new start-ups suck”, naturally this excludes Greenvoice .

Can you invent an entirely new idea online any more or is it just distorting ideas which already exist. Take Pownce as an example: Twitter distorted blogging and Pownce distorted Twitter!

Looking at Mashable today, I can only see one idea which I haven’t seen repeated a million times already - a weight-loss tracker The Daily Plate - and I no longer read Mashable for the sole reason that it only ever seems to cover ‘General Social Network 101′ these days.

I love ideas like MOO which is a Web 2.0 reincarnation of a pre-Internet idea that brings the ability to print high quality materials to the average Joe without leaving his computer desk!

But how many new ideas can be invented for use on the Internet without massive jumps in technology (such as volumetric displays)?

I grow less and less enthusiastic about Web 2.0 every single day as I no longer see as many new ideas as there used to be.

I feel like perhaps Webby’s World should blog less about Web 2.0 to match my loss of enthusiasm. What do you think? Please email me or comment here!

Tags: web2.0, web2, web 2, web 2.0

Blogging break: No posts until next Sunday as I’m on holiday.

Thanks.

To my recollection, in my 2 years of blogging I’ve been lucky enough to save being ‘tagged’. ‘Tagging’ has nothing to do with folksonomy, but instead is where someone links to you forcing you to partake in a meme. Unfortunately (:P), Ali has broken this 2 years of luck by tagging me in the meme 8 Things You Don’t Know About Me.

In all fairness to Ali, it’s not all bad as by tagging me he made an outgoing link go to me which means just more link love! Please do forgive my sarcasm in the paragraph above!

The meme asks for me to post some rules and then list 8 things you didn’t know about me. So here goes.

The Rules

• Each player must post these rules first.
• Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write about their eight facts on their blog.
• At the end of your blog post, choose eight people to get tagged, list their names, and link to them.
• Don’t forget to contact them telling them they’re tagged. Also, point them to your blog post so they know what to do.

My 8 Random Facts:

1. I can’t programme any proper languages (I’m limited to (X)HTML & CSS) but I have just started to learn C (and to a lesser degree C#)
2. I speak English and I’m learning French, German and Polish.
3. I have been able to code in HTML since 2001
4. 50% of my computing time is spent in Windows XP with the other 50% in Ubuntu. That doesn’t count PocketPC time, though.
5. I have a Wii because I’m awesome
6. I have a DS for the same reason that I have a Wii
7. I am a Wikipedia
8. I am a massive fan of Star Trek

And the lucky people that I tag are Azhar, Neil Turner, AbsoBlogginLutely , Sarah, rashbre, Cas, Andrew and Capt. Picard.

Tags: meme

We’ve recently seen Flickr and YouTube localise themselves. But why? It would be logical to deduce that they realised by being English-only they were losing a significant amount of (potential) users from non-anglophone nations.

Some sites have never had a single language approach to the Internet; the Wikipedia has had foreign language encyclopaedias since March 2001 (2 months after the English Wikipedia was founded). Today, there are 7.8 million articles in about 253 languages from Korean to Klingon! Surprisingly, it took YouTube and Flickr have taken 1 and a half years and 2 and a half years (respectively) to launch localised version.

Perhaps language isn’t as important for sites such as Flickr and YouTube (which may I say has done a shoddy job at localisation) as their mediums are more visual than textual however I’m sure the French use sites such as Dailymotion more than most people (besides those who wish to watch copyrighted media :P).

Localisation is important to social networking, though, because I know I can’t easily communicate with a non-English speaking Spaniard nor can he easily communicate with me. Whilst the Internet being an international community is great, at times it is impractical.

Take Orkut as an example where social networking differs vastly internationally. You might not even have heard of Orkut because despite that it is Google’s premier social network, it’s not that big in the UK or US. That’s different in Brazil who account for 56% of Orkut’s users! It is only the 31st most popular site in the US but is the 8th worldwide (according to the English Wikipedia)!

Compare that with MySpace. 46% of MySpace’s traffic originates from America, using the terribly unreliable Alexa as a source, with a further 6-7% coming from other English-speaking nations. The second biggest contributor to MySpace’s traffic is Spanish and English speaking Puerto Rico (which is under American control).

MySpace’s traffic rank in the US is 3, but it only has a single digit traffic rank for 5 European countries (UK, Greece, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro). It seems relatively popular in various other nations of the Americas (although it only ranks as the 35th most popular site in Brazil!).

Sites such as Mixi, meanwhile, occupy the Japanese social networking market. Mixi is the 3rd most popular site in Japan but 95% of its traffic relies on that nation. Perhaps it would be wise for them to indeed localise into English etc!

I’d advise Web 2.0 sites to make themselves available to as big an audience as possible by translating their service into different languages whenever they get the funds. Don’t do a YouTube of it, though, leaving English banners etc in place!

Tags: web 2.0, social networking, web2, web2.0, web 2, language, localisation, localization