Profy

In the end of every year Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit institution behind the famous Wikipedia, launches the efforts of raising funds to run Wikipedia next year - to finance salaries of employees, numerous servers or whatever else it may be that is needed to run a huge website that Wikipedia has grown to be over the years.

I guess it is pretty hard to find anyone online who has somehow managed to avoid all the tips and advice regarding how unreliable Wikipedia can be if you use it for any study or work-related purposes. We've even heard doctors specifically claiming that Wikipedia should not be used for health-related research because it can be very harmful...In the end of every year Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit institution behind the famous Wikipedia, launches the efforts of raising funds to run Wikipedia next year - to finance salaries of employees, numerous servers or whatever else it may be that is needed to run a huge website that Wikipedia has grown to be over the years.

I guess it is pretty hard to find anyone online who has somehow managed to avoid all the tips and advice regarding how unreliable Wikipedia can be if you use it for any study or work-related purposes. We've even heard doctors specifically claiming that Wikipedia should not be used for health-related research because it can be very harmful.

But I guess no one will dare to deny the fact that Wikipedia is actually one of the most useful things that exist online - simply because even if you can't trust the user generated content of the human-edited encyclopedia 100%, you can at least get the basic understandi[...]

The tech blogosphere tends to be very happy when we see new signs of how various governmental authorities go social and adopt various social tools like Twitter or Facebook. Of course it is obvious that we want every single government regulator to be on Twitter and for citizens to be able to get some services they need by posting an @reply or a direct message - instead of visiting some office and standing in some line...

I know that there are some lucky people that have managed to persuade their bosses that social networking can actually be beneficial for their work and can enhance the overall web presence of the company they work in. What's more, there are some lucky people (me included) who can actually engage in various activities on social networking websites and this is considered to be work for them...

As everyone is obviously aware of by now, last week the world finally witnessed the public debut of the latest operating system from Microsoft, the glorious Windows 7. The newest OS has received tons of positive reviews and everyone seems to love it and people keep comparing it to Vista that is now considered to be one of the hugest failures in the world...

Today I've seen a rare piece of news in my feed reader: about one of the most popular online task management applications Remember The Milk graduating from beta 4 years after the team began its development. The example they quote is obvious: now that Gmail is finally out of beta (with so many people trusting Gmail for their personal and business lives), other web services are entitled to do the same - especially if they are mature enough...

We keep talking about how important it is for corporations to build social media presence everywhere they can and what advantages they should expect virtually immediately. But the problem is that sometimes the field of social media is simply beyond the control of people in the corporations - and the results can be unpredictable instead of positive.

Unfortunately sometimes even the most advanced and knowledgeable corporations make social media mistakes and demonstrate how miserable an action online can be if done wrong. The recent example is Nokia deciding to close its Russian-language community in LiveJournal...

What do you pay attention to when you visit a profile of some new Twitter follower? I am quite sure you do notice the Twitter background and this is what sends you a certain message in addition to that in the bio and the latest updates.

I myself have a few observations regarding what a background may mean on Twitter. For example, a default background or one of the standard themes is often an indication of a spammer or yet another faceless account that will try to sell me something...

Now it is not surprising that the entire blogosphere is abuzz over Microsoft's Bing deal with Twitter and Facebook about adding real-time search in public Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates. Of course real-time search is supposed to be a hit these days and everyone somehow tends to think this is exactly what is supposed to revolutionize the web - and it sure will revolutionize the web at least for those hard-core geeks that can't live a minute without knowing what's going on in the world (especially the tech world) at this very moment...

Today is the day marking the beginning of international expansion of Amazon Kindle e-book reader. Amazon sends products to various countries around the world but for some countries the list of available products is only limited to books and CDs or DVDs. Starting today Kindle is entered on the list of available gadgets for 100 countries globally, including Russia where I live and can witness the reaction myself.

This decision is obviously good at least because I personally don't like any limitations and opening yet another window to the huge Russian market is hopefully a wise decision for Amazon...