Grassy Knol

Google has launched its 'other' wiki tool, called Knol. This will an interesting experiment to see whether the introduction of advertising cash and author accountability injects some formality into the wiki process and what impact this is going to have on the quality of the information.



TechCrunch is predicting a lot of attempts to monetize and a kind of land-grab approach, presumably people will rehash wikipedia's content to do this. It seems an odd idea but this is definitley a potential tool for peer review of ideas that sits outside of the published journal method...

Grand Central

Ah, if only this worked in Australia. On the long list of Things The World Really Needs But Doesn't Know It Yet a unified and easily configured communications system is very close to the top.

Gimmethetoy!!

Invisible competition

Another from the geek shall inherit the earth file:

The greatest gains in this new world are likely to go to people who are methodical planners or who love the game for its own sake. Some people plot their competitive strategies far in advance. These �planners?�be they crazy or just highly �productive?�don?t need anyone breathing down their necks, and indeed they often work best alone or in small groups. ... Planners? behavior may manifest itself in competitive forms, but their underlying psychology is often not very rivalrous at all. They are ordering their own realities, usually for their individual psychological reasons, rather than acting out of a desire to trounce the �competition.

The ?invisible? quality to competition in massive distributed groups is leveling the playing field, or is it simply providing a medium for expression, an outlet or conduit that doesn?t necessarily favour the brash and classically competitive who thrive in s smaller context?

The New Invisible Competitors - by Tyler Cowen

Jihadinets

This article posits a startling idea - militant groups using virtual worlds to conspire. Is Neuromancer really so close to becoming a fact?! [Via the excellent wanabehuman]

The Wisdom of Crowds

I know a lot of people beleive in the Wisdom of Crowds but Mister Splashy Pants thinks it's more like the lowest common denominator.

Websites

It's been a bit of a struggle learning how to use Joomla and getting components and modules in approximately the right places but the BCA website is now doing about 90% of what I think it should be doing. It also now has a blog for all staff so there'll be some cross-posting here from there once I get everyone posting on it.

Now for the next little struggle, learning SEO from scratch...

Experimental workblog

I'm going to try something very new for me; I'm going to make this a workblog.

In line with my new role at work which has a greater focus on flexible learning, with eLearning forming a big part of it, I will be making this page a log of things I learn, find interesting or just want to share. It will include links, podcasts, articles if I have time and general items of interest.