wikis 2

The science museum’s wiki "object wiki" has an intersting homepage, with a featured object column, but apart from presentation, there seems to be very few signs of life.

There are only 250 articles about what the museum contains and possibly only three paragraphs of information on each, sometimes less.

There is an opportunity on every article to "add your memories"where anybody can post what they thought of the object and their opinions on it, which is a good idea, but because of the lack of people going on the wiki, there are very few responses and therefore almost becomes pointless.

"Think wiki's" page contains just over 1,000 pages and 6,000 members, it is therefore considerably bigger than the science museum's. And with over 35,000 page edits, it shows more signs of life as well.

On its homepage, it has a lot more links and it is easy to navigate around the site. It even has advertising so the site must get relatively high numbers of users for companies to pay them to advertise on it.

However, many of the articles seem to be only computer programs and some don't even contain any text.

The home page for "Wiki fish" seems somewhat bland and doesn't look very engaging because of it mostly being normal text.

The search engine on the wiki is extremely slow and extremely vague, giving over 50 results with not much relevance.

The Portable Globe!!

Google Earth is a three dimensional model of the planet that you can zoom in and out of to see almost any place in the world!
Google Earth works by using satellite images taken from space with varied resolutions depending on place in the world.
Apart from being used as an atlas, google earth can also be used as an information search engine where you can search for places of interest, and it will show links near the place giving sites on the internet that are connected to your search.
Webcams have been connected to the program so you can watch live videos of places around the globe!
You are even able to look around points of interest and places of historic importance, such as Tutankhamun's tomb.
Google Earth is also an excellent database for geographical features and contains many facts about specific places in the world.
The results of natural disasters, such as hurricane Katrina can be viewed and the results of global warming around alaska and many other places.
Google earth isnt just limited to the earth. You can even search the stars using it! There is also a specific program for viewing the stars and galaxies called google sky.
Even flying around the skies is a possibility with the new flight simulator.
Now that Google earth is available as an application on apple's iphone, you can search the world wherever you go!

Wikis

Wikis were created so that people could collaborate work and edit it over the internet. Anyone can create them for any purpose at all, from planning a holiday, to creating an information centre (Wikipedia).
The word 'wiki' comes from the hawaiin word which means 'fast'.
Larry sanger and Jimmy Wales Wikipedia originally started off as project by nupedia, a free English language encyclopedia.
Because anyone is able to edit an article on wikipedia, it is essential if using it to collect information that you make sure the information is correct by checking with other websites to verify the information collected.
There are over 12 million articles on wikipedia that have been contributed by the public in order to help others.
Not all of the articles have been written by proffesionals and is something that comes unsurprisingly.
However, every member of wikipedia can check every edit that is made to any of the pages and the vandalism of the articles can be kept to a small number.
From its first year, there was an increse of over 850% Wikipedia over the first three years.
Just like any other wiki, it started off as very small containing few articles.
But as time progressed and more people joined its community, it grew in numbers to what it is today and is still growing!

What's the point of blogs?

Weblogs help everyday people, from all over the world, transfer news to the rest of the world.
All types of people keep blogs; politicians, celebrities, sports personalities and many more.
A web blog is no different to any other web sites except that they are usually writen about something specific.
It is hard to distinguish and differentiate between a blog and a normal website. There is no exact cut-off for what a blog is.
You can use blogs for posting news about yourself.
For example, people will write about a trip they're going on and tell their readers of all the exciting things that had happened and keep them up to date with what they're doing.
Weblogs first came into existence just over 11 years ago when John Barger started to write daily posts and put links up of things that he thought were interesting (things like politics, books, culture, etc.). People started to catch onto this idea and started creating their own blogs about themselves and the things they liked.
Some people use blogs as online diarys and put a lot of personal information online for everyone to view. People do this on social networking sites aswell, sometimes by accident, and that is why you should always check your privacy settings regularly setting them to your level of comfort.
It's important you do this and that you are aware of the dangers of sharing personal information to anyone that you dont know.You should be aware of this, but also accept the internet as being a tool to share things and be accepting of it.
Another main feature of blogs was the creation of RSS (Really Simple Syndication).
This allowed people to customize their blogs and show what they were interested in and share it with constant feeds from their favourite websites.