Those Pesky Offers

You know those subscription offers magazines that come on a postcard size piece of paper? I just opened my latest Wired magazine and, like I always do, thumbed through and pulled them all out. I've been doing this for a long, long time. Do you remember Omni magazine? (Yes, despite previous posts, I do like Wikipedia, I just don't want kids thinking it's the only truth out there.) It was the precursor to Wired, and covered science fact, the paranormal, and more.

Anyway. One day, I called Omni and complained that I'd had to pull out 11 -11! - subscription offers and I thought that was just way too many. Shortly after that, Omni stopped publishing. Wired only had five, but I can't help but feel that so many has an air of desperation about it. What's the perfect number of these things?

Fork in the Road: Citizendium from Wikipedia

A few months ago, I wrote about Jimmy Wales wanting to burn Wikipedia to CDs and distribute them to kids in developing countries. While a worthy thought, I was and am concerned that poor kids are going to get poorly vetted information that they will take as fact. There's a reason why colleges and high schools are banning the use of Wikipedia as a source for papers.

Citzendium plans to fix this with a different model of open source knowledge. Fast Company has a nice, concise explanation of Citzendium's objectives.

(On an aside, Slashdot reports that Jimmy Wales has stepped down as Chair of the board; Wikipedia confirms it.)

May I Introduce Ms. Dewey?

Oh, oh, oh, too, too, too wunnerful: I was introduced to Ms. Dewey by a DCWW Web Women post. Ms. Dewey is a flash-powered, smart alek interface to the world of search. Ms. Dewy must be named after the dewey decimal classification system (which, yes, is alive and well). Never mind the search results, with which some people seem to have a problem. Or the fact that the results are sorta hard to read. At this point in the experiment, let's just enjoy the show. Visit Ms. Dewey, then get the inside dish from David Ewalt of Digital Download on this Microsoft Live project.