The question is can you download the whole wikipedia on your computer. YES. Wikipedia maintains periodical database dumps and they measure in Gigabytes (from 20 GB onwards).

If you plan to download Wikipedia at any stage, visit http://download.wikimedia.org

Be aware, but, though Wikimedia foundation gives free access to download the Wikipedia, you will be successful only if you have a ultra-fast broadband and comfortable download limits
(Say at least 30 – 40 GB). You can choose to download only few sections, however.

For example, the September 2007 edition of Wikipedia (static html pages) can be download from this site http://static.wikipedia.org/downloads/September_2007/

SOS Children has made use of the Wikipedia articles and has released a DVD, “Wikipedia Selections” for school children that contains selected articles from Wikipedia.The first edition was released in 2006 and 2007 edition got just released. Wikipedia for Schools provide more information on these developments. Thousands of volunteers were involved in editing and choosing suitable articles for young children.

Once you download, you need a Unzip program, 7 Zip – a free utility (Winzip or Winrar are also doing the job).

The $100 Laptop (One Laptop per Child) will have a more comprehensive “Wikipedia Selections” installed in it. The information has finally become free. That’s Sweet.

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Social Network.

Wisdom of Crowds.

These are few buzzwords that have become obsolete because of their overuse. Welcome to isolation.

Isolator , a social  personal network anti-network for pure fun. The creator of Isolator will answer no more questions other than those found on their faq page.

There are more than 1000+ social network sites and applications available on the web and you can not easily differentiate between them. Here’s is a megalist of social networks and social web applications available on the web. Yep, you can download it as a spreadsheet.

But, on a serious note, do you know how many people on the internet actively uses at least one social network?

You will be in a shock to know this – just under 7% of all the internet traffic goes to social networks.

Looks like we are living in a bubble, huh? Come on people, join us – dont get left behind.

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If you do online shopping, then without spending another penny, you can donate a percentage of your spendings to a charity. Confused? Usually, the affiliate marketers and publishers get a percentage for every referral they make to such online stores. Giveness springs from the same concept but they help to direct such commissions (affiliate sales) to charity programs.

Giveness is a social network for philanthropists who love shopping. When you buy something from online stores such as Amazon or eBay, via Giveness, they donate a percentage of their earnings to a charity of your  choice directly.

Giveness lists a big basket of about 134 online charities ranging from Children of Rural Africa to Sustainable Harvest International. When you sign up to Giveness, you can choose your favourite charities, before you do shopping. When the online stores send the commissions, all 100% of the money is sent to the charities. Now, you would have had a double joy as your shopping has not only fulfilled your need, but also some percentage of your spendings went to fulfill some higher cause.

Apart from this, Giveness is all about social networking, you will find people who are interested in common things. You can have a personal page, share things, chat or message friends. They should be good souls as they believe they can make a positive difference in this world by doing a small bit for the world.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell a thing. You can also start a charity fund. You can define a purpose – it could be a global problem or it could be even a neighbourhood’s issue. You can organize a charity and start your social service.

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If you are living in Australia, you know that there are few things that are not written in the same way as others do. One good source to get used to the Australian spellings is to refer the Macquarie English dictionary. For instance, Australians prefer to use ‘-ise’ for ‘prioritise’ instead of ‘prioritize’. But, when I typed the ‘ise’ firefox will show as an error.

Quick fix (for only firefox): Tools –> Options –> Advanced–> General –> Languages — Add ‘English [Au]‘ to your list and hit ‘Move up’ till it reaches the top of the list.

Another way to overcome this problem is to edit the “Custom.dic” file that comes with the most of the applications such as Word, Outlook or Firefox.

Where to find the custom dictionary file to edit:

Firefox
C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\ \persdict.dat

Word / Outlook /Powerpoint
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof\Custom.Dic

Now, all set except the typing of every word in the dictionary file, you can do this manually by typing one word per line.

There are pre-built custom dictionaries available for free around the web. For Australian English (rejoice), such dictionaries are available at justlocal.com.au (courtesy of Kelvin) for FREE.

You can download the dictionary for openoffice.org and use it for firefox, outlook or word. For instance, download the kelvin_en_AU_V2.2.0.zip file from the site and unzip it. You will find a text file that can be opened with notepad. Copy and paste the list into your application’s custom dictionary.

There’s also an Aussie slang dictionary available at their blog.

That’s it, a perfect spell check from next time onwards.

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In the last few months, facebook is the fastest growing social network on the web.

Touchgraph has developed a facebook application that allows you to visualize your facebook friends network.

You can browse through your friends shared photos, follow their network through tags and browse the common friends interactively.

You need a latest java plugin and you can run the application from Touchgraph facebook site.

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Imagine if your personal information can find way into the computer screens of baddies, the consequences will be unimaginable. Am I scaring you? Not at all. Just follow some news items.

Who has the responsibility for protecting you online? The answer is not a firewall program or your ISP. You should protect your privacy – You are responsible for your online safety.

What you can do to protect your privacy?

1. Use nicknames only.

2. Create an email-id to sign-up for newsletters / social networks.

3. Check if an E-business site is Verisign secure (Click on the logo and verify it).

4. Post only thumbnail photos.

5. Never tell your personal information. E.g. Real date of birth.

6. Don’t tell everything (share your personal problems) about yourself to an online friend. Wait until you gain some trust.

7. Do not think everyone is good.

8. When someone asks for your postal address, ask why?

9. If someone is offering free money, then there is something wrong.

10. Do not blog your personal details.

from Geek And Poke’s Future of Web by Oliver Widder

Related Readings:
EFF’s Top 12 Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy – very exhaustive, lists some online tools and services that help you to protect your privacy.

CDT’s online guide to online privacy: Top Ten Ways to Protect Privacy Online

Get safe Online – an expert blog that has excellent blog posts, tips and resources on being safe online.

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There are 414 screenshots in the flickr set and it is continuously growing in numbers.

Click on the image to start the slideshow.

Click on the “Options” link in the right-bottom corner to show the title and description. The description contains the actual link to every website.

Pretty, pretty – is it not?

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Some wiki articles for samples:

Save Face on Facebook: Facebook Etiquette

• One should not friend another whom they have no association or connection with whatsoever. Doing so makes you what I like to call a ‘creeper’.

• Poke with moderation and caution (I stand firmly by this etiquette principle).

• When speaking with someone whom you have been casually ‘facebook stalking’, try to pretend you do not know everything about them. Avoid comments like: “So, I saw you and Mike broke up on facebook…”

Get Back Into Work Mode After Vacation

1. If possible, take a few afternoons off. Or at least, leave early. Most people, especially after a relatively isolated vacation, find themselves easily distracted and often waste the day away dawdling or worse yet, reminiscing about vacation. After vacations is the best time to exercise your flex time.
2. Take an extra day. Schedule your vacation so that it ends one day before you’re due back into the office. This allows time for you to get back into your regular routine. Pretend it’s Sunday… okay Sunday evening. Unpack, do some laundry, check your email, and rinse that crazy notion of early retirement out of your hair.

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At 43 things, you say, “What you want to do?”

At WAYN, they ask, “Where are you now?”

Now, I propose a new idea for another web service. Answer a simple question, “Who are you?”

Huh, you don’t say a thing. Let your friends say all about you. Let your friends add tags (sort of one-word testimonials) on you saying, ‘sexy’, ‘brave’, ‘good guy’, ‘SOB’, ‘BS’ or whatever. Part this idea is inspired by the movie “Citizen Kane”. What if we sit back and ask our friends to describe us. We can borrow a dictionary of adjectives; let the users tag their friends. We need not develop this as a web service (enough of existing social networks), this service can be developed as a facebook application.

Ok, you heard this idea from me. But, I no nothing about programming or APIs (I know there are geeks out there, come on!). I can give more details on this idea, we can develop a cool widget.

Wants to get famous, Precious?

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Google reader allows you to make certain things public (the feeds that you can share with others), and google offers those rss items on a public page as this one, Thiru’s shared items (sorry, you are not supposed to monetize those feeds, ok?

Google can build a social network around such shared RSS feeds by us and they can put together a Digg like site. They have not done it yet. Here’s where Feedrer is coming in.

Feedrer is a social network where you can add friends, and see what others are reading currently. Now, you can get a list of mini-feeds that your friends have subscribed. If you like a friend’s feed then, you can subscribe to them with a click.

Feedrer is a start-up and they are working on the site to add more features. What they can do is to add a front page showing, “most liked feeds”, “most read feeds” to use the wisdom of the crowd to bring the best feeds on top.

What are the benefits of joining Feedrer?
If you are looking to publicize your blog’s RSS feed, or find new readers for your blog then, these tips are for you.

1) If you have a blog, then you can get a RSS feed at the free Feedburner service (Google’s) and register it with feedrer. Make friends at feedrer, generously subscribe to their feeds. Since the people in the community are already loving RSS feeds, they would subscribe to your RSS feeds. The feeds are mini-feeds, so, readers need to visit your blog (more page visits) to read them. So, you win all the way.

2) One of my SEO friend at gridpro tipped me that every links from feedrer is considered by search engines as Google /Yahoo as one way, inbound web links. So, if you have 10 friends subscribing to your blog’s feed, you are going to get 10 links. When you pubish 10 posts , the links are going to be 10 by 10 = 100. Can’t get my head around this, I have to confirm this myself.

Update: To gain access to Feedrer (currenty in beta), you need to enter an invitation code “INVITEME” at the registration form (Thanks Anand, for pointing me). Enjoy!

There you go, another start up, social network, web 2.0.

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