Can wikipedia really stay impartial?

I was recently reading an article about a business where for $50 this dude would write and submit a description of your business to wikipedia for you. When Wikipedia found out about this they yanked his posts. Is there really an issue here? Isn't it safe to say that many of the posts on Wikipedia are self-serving in some manner or another? Isn't the purpose of the review team to root out corporate promotion for the sake of promotion? So if these post passed muster and made it to the site originally shouldn't they be good enough to stay there?

The power of collective thinking grows.

Turns our farmers are wired on more than just grain alchohol. The popularity of the internet is growing in the farming fields right along with the corn. With 51 percent of the US farms having internet access, up from 48 percent in 2003, more and more farmers are helping each other out by leveraging the power of collective thinking. The virtual conversations taking place in internet forums and chat rooms, like those on ageweb.com and agriculture.com, are replacing the old style talks over a cup of joe at the local coffee shop. The forums are reporting significant usage increases, some nearly doubling over the past two years, and its no surprise. Through the forums farmers from various cities and states, with different backgrounds and methods of farming are connecting and sharing their experiences and tips. Farmers using the forums are saying that by tapping into this extended knowledge sharing they've been able to improve production and save precious dollars by avoiding costly mistakes in planting, feeding, equipment purchasing, maintenance and more. Welcome to farming 2.0.

Wikinews

After reading a recent Chicago Tribune story of the potential acquisition of the Tribune company's newspaper division by Gannet, I was stuck by the reporters point about the company's issue of diminising advertising revnue. While this was not any big surprise, it did get me thinking about what the future of news media might look like. As the prevalance and popularity of Wikis and widgets increase, more and more news sites will increasingly open more channels and opportunities for user-generated content. We're already seeing many local news sites asking their communities to submit stories they'd like to see covered. (what a way to generate content/story ideas...and for free!) Given the fiscal appeal of this "free" content will news sites eventually become a gathering (portal) of user-generated content pulled using widgets from third party content sources? Will they create some sort of revenue-sharing model with their content providers, where they don't even sell ad space, they just take a "commission" or percentage of the revenue their content providers generate through their own advertising (Adsense for example) channels?

Create your own pop up video.

Mojiti an innovative online video product that allows users to include personalized commentary, opinions and insight in web videos. Take the example here using the widely popular web video of OK Go's "Here it Goes Again." Thanks to user feedback, the person watching the video learns a bit more about the band. Pretty cool stuff.

What's your mindset?

While on the subject of search engines, I thought I'd take a moment (for those of you who may not be aware of it) and talk about the Yahoo! Mindset search engine. Yahoo! calls it the "Intent-Driven Search Engine." The slant, if you will, is this engine allows you to sort search results for your query based on whether you're shopping or just researching. The idea being that if you're out there researching a topic, you would probably appreciate not being bogged down or distracted by ecom sites. Yahoo! Mindset is still in beta, but now is your chance to "play" with it and even shape its future because Yahoo! is encouraging participation and asking for your feedback hoping to levarage the power of the collective mindset.

Better Searching?

As part of my day to day I like to test out various search engines to keep abreast of what's out there and I must say I particulary like some of the functionality of the SearchMash.com search engine--its no surprise its good this is actually a Google product used to test new innovations.



What I like about the engine is how it brings back results not only from web pages, but from Blogs, images, videos and Wikipedia and organizes them into buckets according to these categories. It also includes a feedback function where users can let them know if the results (by category) were useful--a nice meld of user participation with technical intelligence. Google should fast-track intergation of some of this site's features, like the catgorized results, into into the mothership site, they really make navigating the results much easier. Check it out, if you have not done so already.

Corporate sites benefit from user communities.

I've written and produced a few pieces about how companies in the B2B space can benefit from Web 2.0 principles and technologies. Take a look at some of the points made in this recent AdAge Post. I particularly liked this point:
"Visitors to [corporate and brand] websites have a much higher propensity to recommend products," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer of Nielsen Buzzmetrics, whose research shows more than 40% of people who give a brand e-mail feedback are likely to recommend it to others."

Companies can benefit from the creation of their own user community.