Will a Lack of Editors Affect Wikipedia Accuracy?

From WebPro News

Wikipedia is a very useful site for anyone looking to find information on any given topic. Chances are that you have used it for research at one time or another. Even if you don't start by going directly to Wikipedia, results from the site are often at the top of search results in Google, and you'll get there anyway. 

Those Google results likely play a significant role, but Wikipedia's popularity is as great as ever. Right now, it is cited as the fifth most popular site in the entire world. It gets 325 million monthly visitors, and the number of visitors grew 20% in the 12 months ending in September, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing data from comScore. 

The WSJ also says that the number of editors Wikipedia has is dwindling. They say thatWikipedia lost over 49,000 editors in the first three months of 2009 alone. During the same period the previous year, Wikipedia lost only 4,900 (WSJ attributes these figures to Spanish researcher Felipe Ortega. His thesis on the subject can be found here [pdf]). 

The accuracy of information on Wikipedia has always been something to be leery of, simply because of the open format of it. If you give the public access to things, some people will abuse it. Even if their intentions aren't bad, they may still just post inaccurate information. Wikipedia's has taken measures over time to try and weed out the bad, by making stricter policies for content addition. These days, altering or contributing to Wikipedia content is no easy feat. 

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Google Wave Gets a Feature for "Following"

from WebPro News

Google has added a "follow" feature to Google Wave. The feature is designed to let users stay up to date on public waves of interest. In other words, if there are waves out there that are available to everybody, and you want to follow it, simply click the follow button for that particular wave. 

When a user adds you to a Wave, or if you contribute to one, you will automatically be "following" that wave. You can remove waves from your inbox by hitting the "archive" button, but they will come back when they are updated. Users can switch between unfollowing and following waves as often as they like.

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Google to Show Off Chrome OS This Week

From WebPro News

Update: According to TechCrunch, Google will be holding a special Chrome OS eventon Thursday morning, where they will show off demos and give an overview of the product, now said to be launching next year.

Original Article: Michael Arrington from TechCrunch claims to have heard from "a reliable source" that Google will be launching the much-anticipated Chrome OS within a week. The tech industry media has been punked on Chrome OS in the past, but as Arrington notes, Google has said to expect it in the fall, and fall is running out. 

Chrome OS is Google's attempt to "rethink what operating systems should be." It's an open source, "lightweight" operating system to be initially targeted at netbooks.

"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS," Google said upon the Chrome OS announcement. "We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

"The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform," the company continued. "All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."

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Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

From WebPro News

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google? 

Don't worry, it hasn't had an impact...yet. In an interview with WebProNews, Google's Matt Cutts told us that speed may soon be a ranking factor. 

"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."

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5 Less Obvious Online Reputation Management Issues

from WebPro News

There are a lot of elements to online reputation management. Really, depending on how far you want to take it, the elements are basically limitless. Any web property out there that gives people a voice caters to potential reputation smearing. 

There have been entire books written about online reputation management, and countless articles, but I just wanted to take the time to point out five things to keep track of that you may not have considered (or maybe you have...if so, good thinking). 

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YouTube Connects News Outlets With Citizen Reporters

YouTube has launched a new video platform called YouTube Direct that allows users to submit relevant videos to participating news organizations for broadcast.

All videos submitted to news organizations and approved by their editors will appear on YouTube with a link back to the news site.

Key features of YouTube Direct include:
   

• Built on the YouTube API, this 100% open-source solution provides you with an easily-integrated audience engagement platform for your website
• The customizable interface allows you to tailor the look and feel of the tool precisely to your audience
• Visitors can answer your call for content by uploading their videos to YouTube via your site without leaving the page
• A moderation panel enables your editors to review and approve/reject all submitted videos, deciding which ones meet your organization's editorial criteria

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YouTube Talks Up Social Side

from WebPro News

YouTube wants you to know that it's not just a place for individuals to watch videos.  This afternoon, the site released some stats (and used the word "social" about six times) to show that users are interacting with each other and with different sites in all sorts of ways.

As usual, YouTube kept a bunch of numbers to itself; don't go looking for either a whole lot of data or many specific digits (think "1.63 million" as opposed to rounded-off descriptive words).  Still, the first fact that a post on the YouTube Blog shared was that "[o]ver one million people are AutoSharing videos to Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader," which is an interesting detail.

Then here's another one: "Each AutoShared Tweet you send out from YouTube turns into an average of seven new sessions on YouTube.com."  So it's not like a bunch of people are just spewing out clips into a void.

Finally, "Over a million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube based on our Friend Suggest feature."

YouTube's turning into quite the little community, then.  And since it plans to keep introducing new social features (and probably reminding us about the existing ones), this aspect of the site is liable to grow.

Google Chrome For Mac May Hit Beta In December

Mac users who've been feeling left out since the introduction of Google Chrome (which occurred way back in September of 2008) may finally be set to receive a sort of nod of inclusion.  A Mountain View-based product manager has indicated that a beta version of Chrome for Mac will launch in December.

Nick Baum wrote yesterday in a Google Groups post, "The extensions team has been working hard to get BrowserActions ready, and they're already working great on Windows and Linux.  We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI.  We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well!"

Then Baum got to the Mac-related heart of the matter, continuing, "Why make the switch now?  The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December.  We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that.  If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"

And since it took Google about three months to remove the beta tag from the first version of Chrome, that may mean that a finalized Chrome for Mac will available before February.

This isn't a firm timeline, of course, but it at least looks almost certain that Google is going to ramp up its efforts.  Hat tip goes to Stephen Shankland.

Thin Film's Solar Share to Double by 2013

from Semiconductor International

With the price of polysilicon cut by more than half last year, thin-film photovoltaics has lost its edge against crystalline silicon technologies. Nonetheless, its share of the solar panel market is expected to grow from 14% last year to 31% in 2013, according to iSuppli. more » » »  

8 Reasons You Need to Stop Ignoring Twitter

There have been many articles written about why to use Twitter, and we've certainly published our fair share of them. However, the landscape is constantly changing. New trends, ideas, applications, and features come out, and they further emphasize Twitter's place in said landscape. Following are some reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to marketers.


1. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won't be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it's not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.



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Twitter Expands Into More Than Just 2 Languages

from WebPro News

Update: Twitter is now supporting the Spanish language.

Original Article: Twitter announced that it intends to roll out the service in the French, Italian, German, and Spanish languages. Currently it's only available in English and Japanese. 

Expanding into more languages should have a profound impact on Twitter's growth in new users. The company doesn't plan to stop there either though. Co-founder Biz Stone says that's just a starting point. 

Twitter is taking a cue from Facebook and calling upon users to help with translations. The company has launched a tool for people with experience in different languages to suggest translations for the Twitter site itself. "Then, we'll follow up technically," says Stone.

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By Tweeting, You Could Appear All Over the Web

from WebPro News

Twitter has introduced a new widget for the Lists feature. If you are unfamiliar withTwitter's widgets, there is one that lets you display your most recent Twitter updates on a web page, one that lets you display search results in real time, and one that lets you show off your favorite tweets. 

The Lists Widget is fully customizable. You start off by selecting the username of the account you want to pull lists from, then choose the list name, title it, and give it a caption.

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Thinking Beyond Facebook and Twitter for Social Relevance

from Web Pro News

When you think about social media marketing or building your social media presence, you probably think about Facebook or Twitter, or perhaps YouTube or MySpace. That's good. These are some of the top places on the Internet where people are spending their time online.

That said, there are probably plenty of places that you are either overlooking or just plain ignoring. They might not have the broad user-bases of the aforementioned services, but there are people there, and the more people you can reach and engage with, the better off you may be in some cases (depending on your goals for social network use). 

According to Hitwise data, the top ten social networking websites and forums by US market share of visits looked like this:

To be clear, the Hitwise data from which MarketingCharts compiled the above graph is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from Hitwise's sample of 10 million US internet users. It's unclear exactly what all kinds of sites fall into the social networks category.

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