RSS Feeds
communicate
SoundUnwound is Amazon's Wikipedia for Music
Posted by Adam Pash at 8:00 AM on September 4, 2008
Web site SoundUnwound is Amazon's new music web site designed to provide comprehensive articles and information on bands, musicians, and their discographies and lineups. Mimicing Wikipedia's user-edited model, anyone can edit a SoundUnwound article; the main difference is that all changes are approved by SoundUnwound staff before it's included on the site. Beyond that, the layout of the site is interesting and will potentially provide lots of great information, allowing you to drill down into everything you'd want to know about the artist. Right now, however, the site feels a bit low in info, and considering the existing strength of Wikipedia as a go-to source for this sort of info, SoundUnwound's got its work cut out for it. If you give it a try, let's hear how you like it in the comments.
iPhone/iPod touch only: Free iPhone app Wikipanion searches Wikipedia through a fast, native interface. Complete with autosuggest, landscape mode, and large, readable text, Wikipanion offers a fantastic way to browse Wikipedia on-the-go. The application's bottom row of buttons provide simple navigation (back and forward), links to sections for quick navigation of large articles, and access to every link on the page, including Wikipedia category links or external links. The free Wikipanion is simple, but does exactly what it promises.
Windows/Linux/Windows Mobile: It's not the whole world-knowledge shebang, but Pocket Wikipedia drops 14 million and 24,000 images onto your PC or Windows Mobile device. The articles are hand-picked to cover the widest array of material you can fit into 175 MB, and the interface is condensed to offer quick searching and indexing on mobile devices. Great for knowledge-digging or bet-winning when you're offline or on the go. Pocket Wikipedia is a free download for Windows, Linux, and Windows Mobile systems. Looking for the whole of mass-edit knowledge? Try 
Breathing new life into the 90's game 
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is trying out the technique that succeeded in putting together an online encyclopedia—opening it up so that anyone can edit it—to improving search results. Wales' user-edited search engine Wikia Search is now out of alpha and open to the public for edits. Search for a term on Wikia Search and rate the results to change their ranking, edit link titles and descriptions, and add links to results. To see what's perhaps Wikia Search's best feature, click the Annotate link. This lets you select a section of text on the web page to clip and add to the result. 
The Online Tech Tips Blog digs into Vista's Start Search box—which 
Windows/Mac/Linux (OpenOffice): The Sun Wiki Publisher, a free extension for the OpenOffice.org office suite, lets you edit and contribute to any MediaWiki-based page on the web, assuming it accepts anonymous editing or you have credentials. The real benefit lies in being able to use OpenOffice's styling tools—bolding, lists, tables, and the like—instead of having to remember the MediaWiki markup style. Creating a new page is relatively simple, but editing an existing page requires, at least with this version, copying and pasting an article in Writer, then sending it to the wiki for updating. For those 
Previously mentioned service 
Google Maps has integrated Wikipedia articles and geotagged photos so you can see points of interest and images of any geotagged photo on a Google Map. The data, accessible through a new More dropdown button next to Traffic, can be toggled on or off by simply ticking the check box. Once turned on, Wikipedia points of interest show up on the map as a "W" and images show up as small thumbnails. Clicking either will give you a closer look at the object. Both tools promise to bring an excellent layer of information to the already impressive Google Maps, and who knows—soon Street View may be overshadowed by a wealth of geotagged pics.
