Google Doctype, Google’s newly launched Website is like a Wikipedia for Web developers. In a brief introduction of this Website, Google said this Website, all of its content will be written by Web developers, for Web developers. Whether or not you’re in the middle dabbling in HTML, JavaScript, or CSS, or really dives into these open Web tools, this one is definitely for you.

Similarly to Wikipedia or Citizendium, it remains true to its commitment to user-generated content. In other word, those who own a Google account can edit any of the content. In this case, it might follow the hidden risk of what Wikipedia gone through, i.e. allowing anonymity, and hence some users who created fake accounts could submit some wrong materials to this Website. I’ve to admit this is a premature scenario, as most of the Web developers are all willingly to foster a healthy and long-term community and help promoting open Web standards.

Currently, this Google Doctype is available in English and Spanish. I particularly excited about this when I found out that there will be a new JavaScript library, in which 8,000 lines of code which originally developed and tested internally at Google will be available in Google Doctype.

To learn more about Google Doctype, there is a video which embedded in the below.

via [Google Operating System Blog]

After few days of off-blogging activities, Powerset is the next big thing that I waiting for and be the first that brought me back to blogging life. I’ve to admit here I’m a big fan of Powerset, as I did profiled several posts on this alpha search engine. If you read Powerset, it is a search engine that based on natural language understanding technology, and has taken on a new, and yet important complexion. Typing a few keywords to Powerset search engine will probably not making you understand what its core technology and how it’s differentiate itself from Google or Baidu. But you definitely aware of its organization skills, and a lot of Ajax effects on its search engine. It’s not that surprise, I read that Powerset’s interface was built by Ruby on Rails, and this programming framework has thus become a ubiquitous tool for Web development.

Although several search engines have enjoyed a significant presence on the Web, there’s still not cater to all the needs of the users. In other word, there are still many opportunities for improvement. Playing around Powerset will introduce users to a new view of what a search engine can present to the users. The launched of Powerset’s first phase product is a clear example of how a search engine can make in order to be a most appropriate tool for interacting with users on all the archive, history news. Put an example, I just input several keywords on football, and especially my beloved football club, Arsenal. The results appeared remind me how great this football club it is, albeit that I deeply sad for the fact that Arsenal did not won any trophies for the past two years. I know they’re not afford to buy a lot of superstars, but without all those big names, I still find several Arsenal success stories on Powerset’s Wikipedia article search results. If Powerset continue to improve its natural language search technology, historical news might be the mainstay of most users’ retention strategy.

This is my first thought of Powerset. Frankly, I need a second look on it. As Powerset still positioning their search strategies and framework, I’m looking forward to use it as a search engine for historical news.

If you want to know more about Powerset, there’s a video I’ve embedded in the below. Also read the key man behind this search engine, Barney Pell’s words on it.

A new search engine created by Ex-Googler called Topicle has been launched today. It was Steffen Mueller’s own idea, to launch a search engine community which business operating model is similar to Wikipedia that allowed users to create or edit the content, in this case, i.e. search results. Steffen Mueller, previously held as the Product Manager at Google, and played a part in the launching of Google Maps, Google Web Search and Froogle, believed in search engine should be performed better if the results are relied on human efforts rather than computer algorithms.

Topicle begins with the Internet users, i.e. you. Of course, in this sense you can say the value of Topicle is lies not so much in advanced and unique technology, but in the critical mass of the URLs the users submitted. In illustrate this, Topicle has provided an about page to show users how they can make Topicle a better search engine. First, an user can create her own search engine by enter the search engine name such as Best Recipe Sites, and below the column user can submit the URLs that she think is most suitably. Apparently, Topicle’s technology will check the URLs in order to qualifying the URLs as well as checking the invalid URLs, resulting the spam sites may not easily be shown on the Topicle search result pages. Besides, users can edit the URLs others submitted and they are allowed to vote each of the URLs in the scale from 1 to 5. Click on the link “URLs are waiting for your rating” will enable you to do the edition either “Skip this URL” or “Report Spam.” And thus, for the long term, Topicle has the potential to collect all the best yet hidden Web link in the search engine sector.

The deepened between Topicle and users tend to fill a gap that other search engines available on the Web by allowing users to keep control of the search results. Apparently, users are the clear winners, as all the URLs are handpicked by users, in spite of the back-end search engine are provided by Google Custom Search technology. However, the future success of Topicle depends on the contribution of users, will the users are more than happy to submit the URLs they like to Topicle still an unknown factor. Nevertheless, it will be really interesting to take a look at Topicle a few years from now, as more and more URLs are submitted by the users.

As of present, Topicle is the first Web product of Zoolium and is getting major publicity for the launched of this vertical search engine.

via [ReadWriteWeb]

Frankly, I started to watch closely on the Search Wikia, Wikipedia and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ newest project since last week, after Wikia purchased the Grub Web crawler engine. The Grub Web crawler tool has since then released under open source license the first time in four years.

No doubt, Wales advocated the open source is the business model of the future and he was in the middle of building a great open search engine. However, we must understand a fact that it’s a long term project, maybe last for more than five years. According to Wales, “As to the pace, I can only advise people to have a bit of patience!…… Hopefully we will have the first stab of something that sucks up by the end of the year. And then we will start to revise, reconsider, rethink, delete, add, edit, change, until we start making something better and better over time. Will it take 2 years? 5 years? I dunno. It will take however long it takes. But it will be fun.”

A recent buzz in the blogosphere is the cracking of HD-DVD encryption key that appeared on Digg. This is a short code that allowed people to decrypt and play most of the HD-DVD movies in Linux. There are two responses from Digg toward this matter and as a consequence, some users got banned from Digg and others faced submission difficulties. In other word, Digg has chosen to shut down the story submissions at one time. Indeed, the CEO of Digg Jay Adelson has wrote a blog post that entitled, “What’s Happening with HD-DVD Stories?” but later the founder and chief architect of Digg Kevin Rose has made it clear that Digg won’t delete any stories or comments pertaining to this HD-DVD encryption key matter and they will going to deal with whatever the consequences might be, according to the latest Digg’s blog post.

As this HD-DVD stories get along, it’s remind people that Digg is the user-driven content web application, there’s such a huge power when all the users pull together in the same direction. However, I noticed that another favorite user-driven site, i.e. Wikipedia has took a totally different approach towards this HD-DVD stories, either the HD DVD page is protected or semi-protected by them. Moreover, the talk page has been deleted, and protected to prevent re-creation, especially when you key in HD DVD Encryption Key.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:HD_DVD_Encryption_Key

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=HD_DVD&action=edit

Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger has launched a new project called Citizendium for quite some time and now it is in beta version. Citizendium, stands for “The Citizens’ Compendium” consists of over 1,100 articles in its database and 187 editors at the time of writing, the founding purpose is to create a much more credible information than the predecessor Wikipedia, according to Larry Sanger.

As I visited some of the articles listed in Citizendium, the information, example is business is neither not updated nor is not comprehensive. Meanwhile, you’ll only find the articles categorized under the 1 and A to G. It seems that they are lack of sufficient people in drafting the articles on the web. To report accurately and fairly, to see the world in the global perspective, and to be the citizens’ voice in the world, a simple fundamental an organization must-have is: you need a lot of people. No doubt their idea of founding is good: To better than Wikipedia and thus, the editors are carefully selected and they almost all hold credible qualifications and positions in their own fields, but my sense is that for a news startup, setting a strict criteria in qualifying an editor in such a manner, as real name, biography of up to 100-500 words, and etc. their ideas is great, but I wonder how many of us will want to join as an editor unless one hold a very impressive academic and work background. If not, the peer pressure is there. As a human being, we always need a reason why we should do a particular thing, in this case, join and act as an editor where we still have the chances to make Wikipedia a better place for us to find information that we want.

Broadly speaking, the success of Wikipedia is attributed to the participation of a huge group of people worldwide. Participation, edition, feedbacks, albeit these all are little things, but little things made the big impact and they are the building blocks of a success web 2.0 model.

Lot of talks about the user-generated content found on the web in the past few years. And I just finished reading an interesting article from Knowledge@Wharton that entitled, “Make Room, Wikipedia: Internet-based Collaboration Could Change the Way We Do Business,” this article discussed the web 2.0 and some collaborative websites will eventually open up the economy and revolutionize the way that business is conducted in the 21st century.

Not surprisingly, we’ll see a lot companies launch the web 2.0 initiatives to share their best ideas. It had became a source of competitive advantage on the web now. Some blogs and web leaders even goes further by citing web 3.0, they have been at the forefront thinking about the emerging trend on the web that build around user-generated content. But now I more concern of what really work on the web, what is the right strategies that will work for the small and unknown players?

Update: I deleted the last paragraph that I believed was out of the topic being discussed here. I made a mistake. Sorry for any inconvenient caused.

As the picture showed in the above, a web 2.0 called A Million Penguins has launched in the market recently. This is a wiki-novel project co-founded by Penguin and De Montfort University, U.K.. The idea of building this “A Million Penguins” is quite simple: A Million Penguins is an experiment in creative writing and community. Anyone can join in. Anyone can write. Anyone can edit…..If you want to take part, please take a moment to read the technical and ethical guidelines shown on the left. We will ask you to register to participate (create an account here), and to look at the terms and conditions before you join in, according to PenguinWiki’s home page.

My sense is that their idea is similarly to the Wikipedia. No doubt, the rising popularity of Wikipedia has caught the eyes of the people worldwide. I wonder that the PenguinWiki is tend to be a copycat of Wikipedia by inviting a “million” of people in writing a good novel. However, we can argue the success of Wikipedia can be attributed by the first-mover advantage it has achieved, and writing the encyclopedia is not hard for most of the people too. Most of the people can write a good encyclopedia with confidence. On the other hand, writing a good novel required a right novel writing system. By this logic, when compare a novel wiki and wikipedia, it seems that A Million Penguins will definitely needs to put in more effort in encouraging people to use as well as to edit the PenguinWiki. Though both the concept of A Million Penguins and Wikipedia is the same, Wikipedia was a much more powerful web 2.0 than the other.