How Wikipedia Works

You've all visited Wikipedia of course. What would you do without it? There's even a name for the people who write and edit pages for Wikipedia --- Wikipedians. You can see what a Wikipedian looks like on Facebook , which has several Wikipedian groups. Andrew Lih, an early Wikipedian himself and a former colleague of mine at Columbia, just wrote The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia . Operating much like a a city, it is -- according to Andrew -- a "global community of passionate scribes." Do you trust what you find on Wikipedia?

Facebook---Advertising Giant?

Who hasn't heard of Facebook as an online social network, but did you know that it is becoming an advertising giant? This from one of the most emailed articles today in The New York Times:

New 'engagement' ads ask users to become fans of products and companies--sometimes with the promise of discounts. If a person gives in, that commercial allegiance is then broadcast to all of the person's friends on the site. A new kind of engagement ad, now being tested, will invite people to vote -- "What's your favorite color M&M" for example -- and brands will pay every time a Facebook member participates.

If you are looking to a career in advertising, think interactive as well as print. Here's what one interactive account director says about the future: "Advertising used to be a one-way communication from advertiser to consumer, but now people want to have a dialogue. And Facebook is becoming the default way to do that, not only in the States but really the whole world." Facebook recently introduced advertising tools that let companies target messages according to the language they use on Facebook or their geographic location.

Read the whole story to see how Facebook is changing how we communicate with each other and the world. Are you a member of Facebook? How do you use it and how many friends do you have? Have you signed on as a fan to any product?

Serendipity & The News

Serendipity is a word that means "an occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way" or - in other words -- tripping over something you didn't expect to find. "Serendipity" is what happens when you turn the pages of a newspaper and find yourself pulled into an article by a headline or a photo. And it's what happens when you get your news from a news aggregator like Yahoo News. This morning I tripped over Bankrupt paradise on my Yahoo desktop. Thumbnail photo showed an alluring beach with palm tree and the teaser copy read, "World's most indebted nation...This island playground for the rich has incurred enough debt to equal its entire economy." I had to click on the link to satisfy my curiosity.

The story was written for Fortune , an American financial magazine and not one that I usually see. So thanks to the serendipity of Yahoo News, I tripped over it in cyberspace.

Do you know where the Seychelles are? Do you know anyone who has ever vacationed there? Why do you think the information in this story might be useful to someone in Abu Dhabi?

More Dubai Doomsayers

Poor Dubai! For a long time, it has gotten more than its share of international press -- and wanted it! But lately, the news has taken a negative turn. Here's Econmist.com blogging on an article in the Guardian from Britain with the headline Look on my works, ye Dubai-watcher . Here in Amman at the Columbia University Symposium, I just heard that the Dubai Dubai Lagoon has been shelved. Ozymandias, indeed.

Photos Tells Stories, too

Magnum, arguably the world's most prestigious photographic agency, was founded in Paris in 1947 by four photographers to reflect the mix of reporter and artist. One of those founders was the late Henri Cartier-Bresson , considered the father of modern photography. This week we will be visiting an exhibit of his work at the Emirates Palace. Comparing the camera to a sketch book, he took his Leica into the streets and into the countryside to capture mood and events. You will see 160 of his photos, taken around Europe between 1929 and 1991. Read The National's review of the show.

Happy Birthday World Wide Web!

Yes, I know. You can't remember a time before WWW, but it was created 20 years ago this month. A computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee looked at the Internet and decided the rapidly expanding global network of interconnected computers could use some organizing. Berners-Lee, now Sir Timothy, wrote a proposal called, "Information Management: A Proposal" and here we are. The Economist celebrates by exploring how the "bland title" changed everything about the way we do science - and how we live. Sir Timothy planned to blow out the candles today.

Word of the Day

"Globally, English has become the leading media language for international communication," William A. Hachten and James F. Scotton write in The World News Prism: Global Information in a Satellite Age. But, they add, one of its appeals is that "it is easy to speak badly." The Internet can help you expand your vocabulary a word at a time. Wordsmith, a worldwide online community of about 500,000 readers, has been sending out a word-a-day since 14 March 1994! It was quite a revolutionary concept back then. You can sign up for the free service at A.Word.A.Day . How useful it will be, I don't know. This week's theme is 15-letter words like subintelligitur and infundibuliform , which don't exactly roll off the tongue.

Try OneLook Word of the Day instead. OneLook works like this: every hour a computer program selects five words lots of people are looking up in an online dictionary. "These words tend to reflect topics that have appeared in the world news or in discussion groups across the Web," according to the site. And the words look much more practical -- as well as shorter! Bookmark the site or sign up for home delivery.