Internet

Foreign bloggers across China enthusiastically greeted the recent de-blocking of BBC News, but the key to the story was that the Chinese language service was still blocked. Now even the Chinese site is available in once city.

As a rule, internet censorship in China is more stringent when content appears in Chinese. The assumed reasoning is that, while many Chinese internet users can read English, Chinese language sources, especially produced by something like the BBC or Voice of America, are more likely to be blocked. It's also a common and somewhat reasonable assumption that people who already know how … Read more

This year's big international web conference is in Beijing next month, and hundreds of innovators from around the world will see the Chinese internet first hand.

The 17th Annual International World Wide Web Conference, held by a nonprofit that puts together these confabs somewhere on Earth every year, has given the conference the theme of "One World, One Web"--playing on the Olympic slogan "One World, One Dream."

Though the majority of the program is, as usual, devoted to innovations in the world wide web, several speeches and panels will take up the Chinese internet. … Read more

Ten million articles.

That's how many Wikipedia has now, if you count all the articles in the 250-plus languages the encyclopedia is available in.

According to a release from the Wikimedia Foundation, the 10 millionth article was created at 5:07 p.m. PDT on Wednesday. It is a "short biography of 16th century English goldsmith and painter Nicholas Hilliard" and was created in Hungarian by a user called Pataki Marta.

The largest version of Wikipedia, the English version, has 2.3 million articles. But when counting all the others, the number swells quickly to the more … Read more

On January 31, 2008, a video depicting hundreds of people standing perfectly still in New York's Grand Central Station was posted on YouTube. The video quickly became a phenomenon, and to date, nearly 9.5 million people have watched it.

Why, you ask? The standing still was actually part of an elaborate prank, pulled off by "agents" of a group called Improv Everywhere. The idea was that the hundreds of people would simultaneously "freeze" in the middle of Grand Central, with no warning nor explanation to those nearby, and stay that way, no matter what, … Read more

Can heads of state Twitter?

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to expect anyone in as lofty a position as U.K. PM Gordon Brown to spend their time actually posting to Twitter themselves. But it appears that someone out there in Twitter-land has started an account that purports to be the "official Twitter channel for the Prime Minister's Office based at 10 Downing Street."

Looking briefly at the official Web site for the prime minister's office, I don't see any mention of Twitter, but whoever is posting from that account is doing … Read more

Living in public housing is nothing to write home about, and certainly nothing that offers lifestyle advantages over what most people fortunate enough to afford something more elaborate have.

But thanks to the Internet Archive, and its founder, Brewster Kahle, residents of one San Francisco public housing development may soon have something over everyone else, especially those who like high-speed Internet connections.

The Internet Archive says it will allow those who live at Valencia Gardens Housing in San Francisco's Mission district to access the Internet at 100 megabits per second. By contrast, my Comcast Internet service delivers 6Mbps via … Read more

It's been a good week for the coffers of the Wikimedia Foundation.

On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving $3 million over three years to the organization that runs Wikipedia.

And on Thursday, top-dog venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his wife, Neeru, said they were going to donate $500,000 to the foundation.

This is good news for an organization that has been recently criticized over its finances, particularly from those who say founder Jimmy Wales may have played a little fast and loose with the foundation's credit card when it came to personal … Read more

When I wrote this morning about an LOLcat contest in which Icanhascheezburger.com users would be contending to create one of five bottle labels for a soda company, I mused that it would also be nice to have a politics-LOLcat mashup.

Wait no more. In fact, even as I wrote it, the nice folks at Icanhascheezburger hopped in their time machine, went back 24 hours, and launched the exact site I wanted yesterday.

Well, OK, maybe there was no metaphysics involved. But either way, on Monday, Icanhascheezburger launched Pundit Kitchen, a site for LOLcats, except with politicians.

The same folks … Read more

Talk about hot foundation-on-foundation action.

On Tuesday, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced it was giving the Wikimedia Foundation--which runs Wikipedia--$3 million.

The money will go toward supporting "Wikimedia's organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services."

Among other things, the announcement said the money would go specifically to a new Wikipedia feature called "flagged revisions," which will "allow experienced editors to publicly and visibly grade the quality status of articles--in effect, functioning as a kind of 'nutrition labeling' for Wikipedia content."

I … Read more