Help:Water Cooler (news)

Water Cooler

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Water Cooler News   post
The news section of the water cooler is used for news or updates that are expected to require public discussion, rather than, say, specific actions, or discussion on their own talk pages. Centiare milestones should be posted at Centiare:Announcements; all other news should go to the community bulletin board.
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ERB Notification

An Editorial Review Board policy that explains how copyright protections are provided to contributing authors, along with Centiare's semantic promotional capabilities, has been posted here. Snerfling 17:39, 18 January 2007 (PST)

Entity Relational Tags

The entity (government) relational (rollup) tags are ready for use. (Since there'll always be additions & modifications, I won't say finished.) If you start at the United States, you can drill down into the respective states, counties, cities, districts (school, sanitation, etc), organizations (little league, etc), departments (state fish & game), etc.

Note also the attribute names for each entity, along with the different categories. The use of modular names for relations, attributes & categories provides, in essence, a 3x3 matrix. This means one can ask very powerful, and highly granular, queries to get detailed & linked results.

I will be writing up a technical overview explaining how these tags work, but I figured people might be interested in using them immediately. Snerfling 12:31, 19 January 2007 (PST)

Greg's Interview

In case anyone missed it, Greg was interviewed by the Associated Press regarding his views about Microsoft and paid editing at Wikipedia. Follow the link here to read the full story. Snerfling 13:58, 24 January 2007 (PST)

Greg's appearance on G4 television

Centiare's co-developer will be making his first national TV appearance -- LIVE -- Thursday night, January 25th. He will be on Attack of the Show at approximately 7:10 PM Eastern. This is broadcast on the G4 network -- proudly ranking # 57 out of the 64 major basic cable networks.

Satellite DirecTV Channel 354 Dish Network Channel 191 or 515

Cable Verizon FiOS Channel 320 Comcast Channel 136 Click! Channel 163 Time Warner Cable Channel 105 Cablevision Channel 175

I hope you'll join me by watching! We'll be discussing the various problems associated with commercial participation within Wikipedia. (I hope to plug Centiare.com about 5 or 6 times, too.)

For more about G4, there's always... Wikipedia's article about G4.

--MyWikiBiz 05:30, 25 January 2007 (PST)

To watch a YouTube clip of the appearance right now, go here. --MyWikiBiz 11:02, 29 January 2007 (PST)

Front page news?

Personally, I think this should go on Centiare's front page for at least a couple of weeks. We need to show our visitors that they are on a site that's already getting page views that are competitive with other major business, news, and academic sites. Our users need to tell their friends about Centiare, to keep our traffic figure moving up, which will only help their own content get more attention. --MyWikiBiz 20:08, 28 January 2007 (PST)

Recent Centiare traffic stats, versus the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Small Business Administration, the Baltimore Sun, and Dun & Bradstreet

Embed

In case anyone is interested, there's a new parser function called <embed> that has been enabled that allows for a greater range of external applications to be run within Centiare. You can read more about it here. Snerfling 03:09, 13 February 2007 (PST)

Squidoo

I don't know if this is really news per say but I've done some investigation into squidoo and it looks to be ~20-30% similar to centiare in functionality but doesn't really target small business's or individuals. It seems a little like digg actually with user created internet tidbits.

Having a decently similar nature I plugged the site into alexa and found this. The 804th most popular site on the web! What I want to know is how they jumped from 50,000 to 1,500 in one day back in late 2005 and how we can do the same. Garrett 20:24, 14 March 2007 (PDT)

I'm the last guy to ask about web traffic stats - I just stick to the tech stuff. Greg, on the other hand, has become quite the expert. I'd be interested to hear his perspective. Snerfling 20:38, 14 March 2007 (PDT)

And I'm apparently the last guy at the Water Cooler to see that questions are being directed to me. Sorry. Squidoo's meteoric climb is likely explained by the fact that it's owned/operated by Seth Godin, who was already an Internet guru ("permission marketing") with a huge following. On December 8th, 2005, he blogged to his audience only the words "It's ready" and the link to Squidoo. The rest is history. Helps to be famous and THEN launch a website. Though, it certainly hasn't worked for Jimbo Wales and Openserving.com, has it? --MyWikiBiz 15:17, 18 April 2007 (PDT)

Dynamic Content

Everyone should take the chance to review some of the new directory listings that have been added for gadget/widget developers. These listings include not only the firms, but also profile some of the gadgets/widgets they've made available at Google, Widgetbox, etc. I believe these types of scripts & extensions are the easiest & most effective way to add dynamic, useful & compelling content to Centiare.

While it is true that Web sites do not benefit from the number of links associated with any particular widget/gadget (ie if 5,000 copies are downloaded, Google does not count 5,000 links), the directory listing itself is still picked up in reference to its semantic tag and any external links bookmarked as a result of users wanting to re-visit the Centiare listing to read and/or use the information. Snerfling 13:07, 15 May 2007 (PDT)

System Upgrade

Centiare is now live with Mediawiki 1.10 and SemanticMediawiki 0.7! This is a major upgrade with a significant structural changes to both program files and database tables. It will be interesting to see how many other wikis are able to make the transition. Two points of interest:

1. If you're using FireFox, you may need to clear your cache to have the newest javascript factboxes and ASK query reports render properly. To clear, just click on the Tools tab, then 'Clear Private Data';
2. ASK can now "page" through additional results past any initial limit. (System default is 50, but it can be set lower - see documentation). However, in order to see additional results, the page variable has to be explicitly set.
   That is, while we can still use attribute:={{PAGENAME}}, where pagename=address, for single page results, any secondary listings need actual hard-coded references eg attribute:=address, etc.

Let me know what you think of the system, including any performance improvements (or degradations), semantic features, ASK, etc. Snerfling 17:51, 28 May 2007 (PDT)