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Scandals at Wikipedia
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has been the talk of the net this past week. Anyone can edit the pages of Wikipedia and some people have been abusing this priveledge. First there was the story of a former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, whose Wikipedia entry suggested he may have been involved in the assassinations of both Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy. (He was not). Then, on Dec. 1st, it came out that podcasting pioneer Adam Curry was anonymously editing out references to other people’s podcasting work in an article about podcasting. (He did). Is this the end of the collaborative encyclopedia? How useful can a resource be if it’s wrong?
UPDATE 12-9-05: Wikipedia now requires users to register before they can create articles.
Is the Antivirus Scanning of Gmail a Bad Thing?
Some people think so. The virus scanning cannot be turned off in the options, a feature that is convenient for technology professionals who are involved in antivirus work. Other people are complaining that Google won’t reveal which company’s antivirus technology they are licensing. Why should it be a secret? I’m not sure why they won’t say….unless it’s an in-house technology that they aren’t ready to reveal yet!
Windows Live
Windows Live and Windows Live Mail now support Firefox, so I went to take a second look. I can add content (RSS feeds) pretty easily to the Windows Live page, and there are a handful of gadgets of the usual variety (weather, stock, etc), and my hotmail emails display as well. However, logging into the Windows Live Mail, I was surprised to find myself in….Hotmail. If there are new features here, I can’t find them (can you?). It’s Hotmail. And to top it all off, the giant image ad that was displaying on the right was a "nail fungus" image ad — a big foot with a cracked-up toenail. Ewww. Give me Gmail’s sponsored links anyday over giant, disgusting image ads.
More XBoxes Coming!
New shipments of the XBox 360 console will be arriving at retailers by the end of the week according to BetaNews. But what the article doesn’t say is how many, what day, what time! Are we going to have to camp out to get one?
Google Stuff I Missed
(In my defense, I decided to have a life for a couple of days.) However, in the meantime, I missed some very cool Google stuff. The first thing is GTalkr (thank you, Nick Starr, for the link). Although not an official Google product, GTalkr brings GoogleTalk into your browser, so you can access it from anywhere. Not only that, but you can also access your Gmail and there is an extension for Yahoo! Maps (why Yahoo! instead of Google, I don’t know). Even if you’re not on the Google bandwagon, you have to at least go check out the GTalkr website. Now that is the power of Ajax!
Item #2 is that Gmail got anti-virus! (Again, via Nick Starr)
Item #3 is an RSS feed that combines all the official Google blogs. Nice.
Firefox 1.5 is Officially Here
I’m a little late blogging this, since I was very busy watching an excellent episode of "Lost" last night…but Firefox 1.5 is now here. If you were waiting on the official release, now is the time to upgrade. One new thing in 1.5 is that Answers.com is now embedded into the search bar. More new stuff includes draggable tabs (yes!), quicker forward and backwards buttons, more privacy and improved popup blocking capabilities. What have I left out?
