NowSourcing

I think Google Reader has just got a damn sight more sexier and any lingering disloyal thoughts I might have had about going back to My Yahoo are now well and truly gone. The reason for my unwavering loyalty? Notes! Yes you heard me right - notes!

There’s now no doubt now that Google is gradually building a social network to rival all other social networks but it all seems to be in dribs and drabs and it’s a bit confusing how they are going to eventually connect it all up. I mean, let’s look at the various strands :

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It seems that plans are in the works for a slimmed down, condensed version of the German Wikipedia to be made into a printed encyclopedia book and it will be sold in bookstores for 20 Euros ($32). As many people have said, it’s “reverse publishing”. I say it’s a bit of a scam on the part of the German publisher Bertelsmann.

I am a nitty-gritty practical kind of guy and my initial thought was this : if Wikipedia is made up of voluntary user contributions, does Wikipedia first of all have legal permission from the writers to print the material? Did they get legal waivers from each contributor saying it was fine to use their work?

If so, is Bertelsmann allowed to make any money from it (seeing that the contributions were voluntary)? If so, shouldn’t some of that money make its way back to the writers who wrote the articles in the first place? I mean, every writer is entitled to a royalty. By denying the writer their royalty, Wikipedia is ripping them off big-time. No, in fact, let’s not beat around the bush here. Let’s say it for what it really is. Wikipedia is SHAFTING THEM.
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Coming from a police family, I have always had enormous respect for law enforcement and the job they do, and after having just seen the Facebook application for the Greater Manchester Police (GMP) in Great Britain, I am even more impressed.

This just goes to prove that Facebook CAN be useful. Take away all the pokes, games, fortune cookies and other time-wasting applications and you can actually come away with something useful in the end.
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Never a day goes by without me hearing of another case of how people are getting more and more hacked off about Facebook and its never-ending crappy applications. All I can say is, I can feel the pain.
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My current social media obsession is Friendfeed. I like it for a variety of reasons but the main reason is that it pulls together nicely all my various online activities. Being a tech blogger, I tend to try out every online service under the sun and so it gets more and more difficult to keep track of them all. Friendfeed brings everything together under one umberella and then it gives you a RSS feed to hand out to anyone interested in tracking you. So if you have an online stalker or six, life has just got a lot easier for them. Who needs Google Alerts anymore?
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