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gleanings
Haven't done one of these in awhile, so the links are piling up...
- Attack of the Zombie Copy! Advice on purging marketing-speak from your writing.
- A model of San Francisco made from Jell-O. Remarkably accurate. I don't know whether to be impressed or afraid.
- Yahoo! Answers -- an online question-and-answer community. More from Search Engine Watch. Post a question, anyone in the community can post an answer. Gee, this looks awfully familiar.
In the coming weeks, LookSmart Live will transition into a more community-oriented format. The idea is that users will be able to share their knowledge with each other, via forums. Ask a question, and another forum member will provide an answer. There will also be an associated ratings system, so that you can tell at-a-glance the reputation of someone providing an answer. Furthermore, should you be dissatisfied with answers on the forum, LookSmart will then send its own editors out to do some research, Smith said.
I was an LS Live editor; it was my first job out of library school, back in 1999. The service died a slow, ugly death -- they finally pulled the plug in the fall of 2000 or thereabouts. Was Live merely ahead of its time? Or was there some fundamental flaw in Live that makes this community and others like it more effective? Or maybe these will all fail as completely as we did. I suppose time will tell. - The word most looked up in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary this year? Integrity. Hmm.
- Finally: the pitfalls of trusting Wikipedia. (Disclaimer: I actually like Wikipedia and find the information it contains generally reliable. But this is stil funny.)
I
That model of San Franciso? Be afraid; be very afraid.
Re: I
Yes, that struck me too. Of course fiction is very different from marketing copy, but there is definitely food for thought there.
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