Welcome to the WrapUp by CyberNet. This is a collection of news stories, downloads, and tips that we have collected over the last few days, but never got around to writing about.
Every now and again I use StumbleUpon to see what kind of unique sites I can find, and last week I found a rather nifty one called Keyboardr. It's a search engine that distinguishes itself by not actually having (or needing) a search button. Results are show to you in real-time as you type.
According to Alexa Wikipedia is the 7th most visited site in the world only to follow behind companies like Google and Yahoo. Seeing that they receive millions of visitors each day it should come as no surprise that people would use the tools at hand to make their own customized layouts and designs for the site.
Ever since Apple's App Store launched, we have been waiting for a free app to view Wikipedia articles. Up until today, the only Wikipedia application for the iPhone that we knew of was called iWik, but you had to pay for it. Today Wikipanion launches, it's nearly perfect, and it's free.
It looks as though Mahalo is opening up a bit more and taking advantage of all of the knowledge and writing talent that is out there. A recent change now allows all registered users to contribute to the site by creating and editing pages. Previously, only chosen, paid editors were given the right to do this.
It's crazy to think about how unpopular encyclopedias have become thanks to the various references found online, and the same thing is happening to dictionaries. These days word processors (and other apps) are integrating dictionaries so that they are even more useful to the end user.
Back when Wikipedia first launched (formally) on January 15, 2001, it grew faster than anyone even imagined. By the end of the first year, people around the world had contributed to over 20,000 articles that were written in 18 different languages. Both the number of articles and the number of languages were impressive.
Good thing they make those belated birthday cards for people like us who on occasion, forget to celebrate a birthday the actual date! Yesterday was a big day for Wikipedia, it was the day that they turned 7 years old.
Each year, popular dictionary Merriam-Webster names a word of the year with the help of the visitors to their website. They're given a list of words that were submitted by users and then asked to vote on which word they feel should be the #1 word of the year. The big winner this year is the word "w00t" - an interjection used to "express joy." While some of you may use this word and have heard others use it before, the main crowd of people that use it regularly are some of the hardcore online game enthusiasts.
Have you ever wondered what software powers sites like YouTube, Flickr, and MySpace? Wonder no more because Pingdom has the scoop! The results are located in the table above, and as you can see Linux, Apache, and MySQL are among the most popular tools. In the end this is how the stats play out:
