Last week, Google opened their ‘Knol’ site for the general public: It’s a knowledgebase and it’s targeting the other knowledgebase we learnt to hate and love, Wikipedia. The web itself is divided in the (usual) camps: Love it and Hate it. To me, it looks like Google has actually learned from the problems that Wikipedia (still) has: the site is actually a lot easier to read, plus, contributors don’t seem to be hiding behind usernames. For example, there’s this excellent article on colon cancer, which, by far, seem to be more informational than Wikipedia’s entry. Additionally, it seems that Knol contributors seem to disclose their affiliations to commercial entities. I only find Google’s choice of name a bit unfortunate.
The other site I want to mention is NASA images, which is a site, powered by the Internet Archive, that hosts, you guessed it, NASA images from the past. There’s way too much to discover on that site and I wouldn’t do it an honour to try to fit it in a small paragraph: The Spaceflight section is amazing and comprehensive, albeit a kind of obnoxious to navigate through (kind of ‘sliding’ pictures pop-up interface, that isn’t all to user-friendly). Pictures and photos can be zoomed in and downloaded (for free, of course).
And not at all related, I’ve always been impressed with Truthmapping which at one time I considered to be a useful tool for creating test scenarios (can’t find the link right now at xsamplex). Apparently, the only clone (which claims to be superior to Truthmapping) I’ve found is ‘DebatePoint’, which is open-sourced. It sort of reminds me of Halfbaked (which makes an excellent tool for mapping out ideas).