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To say that Wikipedia is OK, that it is about as accurate as Britannica, not fantastically better or worse, is not much of a news story. Much more melodramatic to say that Wkipedia is a disaster, a threat to civilization, full of lies etc. The reality is that a system that is open for anyone in the world to try to post a lie, that has only been going for a few years, whose contributors don’t get paid has only managed to produce a couple of pretty obscure hoaxes. The truth is that it is a much more accurate reference tool than the Internet as a whole, than most books and, as has just been suggested in a blind test, its pretty much as accurate as Britannica. Its true that the Britannica test was only for scientific articles – but to be honest, if anybody seriously believes that topics like…

Build your own search engine with no hardware cost, with Alexa: $1 per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded. John Battelle’s Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game

Writely continues to add word processing features which are actually useful, unlike Word which takes several thousand options and millions of calculations per second to provide the functionality of a typewriter. It looks like the entire Microsoft edifice is held up by Excel, the only product I can think of that is better than competitors’. Is Excel really worth as much as a medium sized country, in the long term? Web word processor adds PDF conversion | CNET News.com

The worst mistake we made at Moreover was to raise too much money. The Bay Area prides itself on the sophistication of its investment structure, but most of the successful Web 2.0 ‘exits’, from a founder perspective, have been non-Bay Area companies or ones that didn’t raise too much cash. Perhaps the further you are from Mountain View, the less likely you are as an entrepreneur, to be seduced by Bay Area style startup investment. If you are in a casino and you are $5M up, the best thing you can do is walk away from the roulette table. If you are a young entrepreneur $5M is a life changing experience and selling a company after bootstrapping or a seed round of investment can give you that. A series B round could very well give you more – but it is a much bigger gamble and as recent evidence suggests,…

Riffs is a very nicely executed relook at reviews, another slot in the web 2.0 trend of looking at things that are a good idea but haven’t had a makeover since the dotcom days. Interestingly enough Riffs founder Bruce Spector was behind one of the original web components – the first online calendar app. someone with enough vision and clout to propel Riifs. Publishing on the web is becoming standardized the way the browser and search engines standardized Internet based information retrieval. Before the web, full text search was a relatively obscure area dominated by the likes of Verity. Today the lack of full text search within Windows seems amazing, the web having made it mainstream. Looking at services like Riffs, which make publishing content an almost subconscious activity, something interesting is happening: the interface for publishing is gravitating towards the same interface as search. Google has a bunch of…

“Attention shoppers – some Web sites ditch the online cart and offer new experiences” “it isn’t just Etsy that is trying to innovate. Wists (www.wists.com) allows users to bookmark pages visually via a small image and summary, which can then be shared with other users. This sort of thing makes sharing wish lists of goodies with others easier, for example.”