Posts Tagged ‘Wikipedia’

Prominent web commentator Seth Finkelstein is no fan of Wikipedia - and even less so of its founder Jimmy Wales. Finkelstein’s Infothought blog regularly features sharp criticisms of both, and while sometimes it can be perhaps overly negative about Wikipedia itself (he likens its functioning to that of a sweatshop, due to the ‘exploitation’ of unpaid contributors), I cannot help but feel that when he is critical of Wales he is sometimes right.

Slideshare.net is looking like a real winner in the online media sharing market. Their Youtube-style content portal is designed for hosting and sharing slideshows, presentations, and ’slidecasts’, and is currently the leading site in this sector. I had a little explore of the various features on offer to see just how good it really is…

The first thing new visitors will recognise is the layout - the homepage features a search bar, a tag cloud, and then selections of most popular, most downloaded, and recently added shows. Further down there are links to users and groups (like Youtube, Slideshare encourages users to register into the community - though you can use the site without doing this).

Ever considered the carbon footprint of a website? Heap Media Australia - the people behind Blackle.com, clearly have and are now encouraging more of us to do the same…

They are providing an alternate search homepage, powered by Google Custom Search, which displays its results using a black background rather than Google’s traditional white. As some monitors require less energy to display black pixels than they do for white ones, Blackle hopes to help lower the carbon footprint of our everyday Google use. The folks at Blackle calculate that the site has saved over half a million Watt hours already, since its launch in January 2007, and also done much to raise the profile of green computing.