Wikipedia Comes to the iPhone with Wikipanion - ReadWriteWeb

Wikipedia Comes to the iPhone with Wikipanion - ReadWriteWeb

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A new school year is about to start very soon and students nation-wide will be clamoring for ways on how best to keep up with their school work. With many schools starting to offer free iPod Touches, iPhones, and laptops, the iTunes App Store will be one of the first places to go for back to school apps. The new school year also means that research via Wikipedia is going to be on the rise. Fortunately for those with iPhones and iPod Touches, they can now access Wikipedia anywhere while on the go with Wikipanion from the iTunes App Store.

Wikipanion Review

Wikipanion (iTunes link) is the best application out for Wikipedia on the iPhone and iPod Touch. This app is simply genius and gives you a simplified version of Wikipedia without leaving out any of the site's extra features. To simply the site to fit the screen size of the iPhone, the normal links that you'd see to each section of an article are foregone on the main screen. Instead, there's a small icon located at the bottom of the app that's similar to the bookmark button in Safari on the iPhone. Using this button, users can access all the sections of an article.

Amazon Acquires Shelfari: Moves To Corner Book-Centric Social Networks

Amazon Acquires Shelfari: Moves To Corner Book-Centric Social Networks

Shelfari, a social network for bibliophiles, has been acquired by Amazon for an undisclosed amount. Amazon has been a longtime supporter of the Seattle based startup, having invested $1 million in the site in February 2007.

The move comes less than a month after Amazon’s acquisition of AbeBooks, a vendor of rare and used books from independent publishers. As part of that acquisition Amazon also got a stake in Shelfari’s competitor LibraryThing, which AbeBooks had previously purchased a 40% stake in.

This resulted in an awkward scenario - while Shelfari and LibraryThing are similar and could conceivably be merged by Amazon pending a dual aquision, there is bad blood between them. LibraryThing’s founder has openly criticized Shelfari for spamming users and astroturfing blogs, and generally behaving as a “bad actor”.

In light of the tension between the companies (and their locations on opposite sides of the country), we speculated that Amazon was going to have to choose to acquire one of the competitors and divest its shares in the other. Amazon has clearly sided with Shelfari, though a later acquisition of LibraryThing is still feasible.

You can see Shelfari’s blog post on the acquisition here.

Howard Rheingold's Vlog: Why Teach About Social Media

Howard Rheingold's Vlog

Portal:Featured portals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portal:Featured portals - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This page highlights portals that are regarded as being particularly useful, attractive, and well-maintained. Of the many portals on Wikipedia, these featured portals are those which stand out.

What Linux Will Look Like In 2012

What Linux Will Look Like In 2012 -- Linux -- InformationWeek


Virtualization in the Linux kernel -- either in the form of KVM or Xen -- will make it that much easier to run Linux side by side with any other operating system, either as a way to migrate non-destructively from an existing Windows installation or as a way to expand Linux's own native functionality (for instance, by running multiple kernels each tailored for different needs).

Amazon.com: No Video Playback In Vista - flip video Discussion Forum

Amazon.com: No Video Playback In Vista - flip video Discussion Forum: "After trying lots of things, I stumbled onto Vista Codecs ... a free download. I can now see and hear video although sharing doesn't work."