Today is the day that WikiLeaks—despite reportedly being under a distributed denial of service attack—sprang its biggest leak ever, releasing hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and airing global diplomatic laundry for all to see. The Guardian has an interactive map of countries whose secrets have come out, and browsing it produces some interesting stories. But the most interesting thing to me is not the contents of those stories, which enough other people are going to be covering today, but what the WikiLeaks organization represents for journalism in the era of the Internet—or, rather, how the Internet makes...

I’ve mentioned that Wikipedia entries can be collected into bound books, thanks to Wikipedia’s partnership with a print-on-demand publisher. However, Read Write Web reports that boutique publisher James Bridle (whom we’ve mentioned a few times before for other reasons) has gone this idea one better: he has collected five years of the edit history of a Wikipedia entry into a rather handsome twelve volume set of hardcover books. The entry in question is “Iraq War”, and the reason Bridle did it was to point out that historiography is important. Because of Wikipedia’s change-tracking, he notes, we are able to...

John Scalzi has pointed out a problem with Barnes & Noble’s site search feature brought on by fly-by-night self-publishing firms. When you type “Scalzi” into the Barnes & Noble website search box, the first page of results is cluttered with what appear to be illicit republications of Scalzi’s works, but are actually something arguably worse. They are 32-page compilations of Wikipedia articles about Scalzi’s work, bundled by self-publishing firm “Books LLC” and sold for $12.72. (If you should for some reason want a printed compilation of Wikipedia articles about Scalzi’s works, you can get it a lot cheaper...

The iPad is so popular these days that everything is coming out with special interfaces for it. There was Pulse, which turns a selection of favorite RSS feeds into something similar to a magazine. Then there was Flipboard, which does the same for links posted to social networks. Now here are a couple more web media joining the party. Cooliris, a company known for its browser and iPhone photo apps, has created an app for the iPad called Discover that imports content from Wikipedia and reformats it into an iPad-magazine-style interface. Cooliris hopes eventually to bring the same reformatting technique...

Many long-time Internet veterans know that one of the most effective ways for pooling and sharing information online is a wiki. Starting with Wikipedia, then branching off into dozens or hundreds of wikis devoted to niche topics or fandoms, the wiki has pretty much conquered the “encyclopedia-in-the-cloud” idea space. A few years ago, the government found this out, too. Ars Technica is running an interesting piece on the creation of Diplopedia, a State Department internal wiki that is used to collect and share the kind of diplomatic knowledge that could in the past be easily lost when a...