Ars Technica has an article about the overall failure of Citizendium, the attempted fork of Wikipedia by co-founder Larry Sanger that launched five years ago this month. (David Rothman covered Citizendium for TeleRead in September and October of 2006 when it launched.) Sanger was concerned that the freewheeling anyone-can-participate editorial style of Wikipedia could turn off actual experts in the fields they were editing about. He feared they would get fed up with having to defend their edits and stop contributing. So Sanger created Citizendium, which would be like Wikipedia (in fact, it forked its article database from Wikipedia...

The Nieman Journalism Lab has just announced Encyclo, an “encyclopedia of the future of news.” With 184 entries at launch, the encyclopedia provides background on the various entities and people who are driving innovation in news publishing and e-publishing. There are a few entries on e-book matters (most notably Apple and Amazon) as they touch on journalism, as well. Although Encyclo has forms for submitting feedback, it seems to be meant strictly as a curated resource, rather than fully contributor-sourced like a wiki. This is understandable in a resource that is intended to be of full professional quality....

In reference to my post a few days ago about free on-line writing possibly devaluing paid prose, an interesting post came my way from Mary Hamilton at her Metamedia blog in which she talks about unpaid work versus paid from a standpoint of social relationships. Hamilton cites a chapter from a book called Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, on the effect of market forces on social relationships. The chapter talks about an experiment studying how hard students would work on mindless tasks if paid nothing, fifty cents, or five dollars for their work. It turns...

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...

Rick Forgione of the Niagara Gazette has posted an editorial about the frequent claims that “the newspaper industry is dying”. Forgione points out that people are always going to need news, no matter whether they read it in newsprint or on-line. So how does print journalism co-exist with its Web site counterpart as we super speed into the future? Beats me, but I do know we try our best every day to put out informative and compelling content in both mediums, which will hopefully keep people reading (or clicking) for years to come. ...

Earlier this month, as a guest writer on Charlie Stross’s blog, Elizabeth Bear wrote an essay about “the future of web publishing,” centering around the “hyperfiction environment” called Shadow Unit in which she takes part. I couldn’t help but be amused by the subject of the post. You see, history repeats itself. Bear et al may very well be right about being part of the “future” of Internet publishing—but in the format in which they are writing, they have also stumbled squarely onto its past. To note, I do not mean this in any derogatory sense. Though I have not read...

When I was writing my series about “Paleo E-Books”, one of the sites I mentioned was Shifti.org, the wiki successor to the defunct Transfomation Stories Archive. In the course of writing about it, I came to read some of the stories there—and found I enjoyed them enough to contribute a few myself. While independent e-publishing sites such as Smashwords or unfiltered document hosts such as Scribd are what generally come to mind when you think of independent e-publishing, smaller themed fiction sites such as Shifti represent another way—one which does not tend to get as much media coverage....