NorthStarNerd.Org

WikiHow

This past August when I attended Wikimania, there were a number of other wiki organizations present and promoting their content. Two of the bigger wikis were:

• WikiHow
  and
• CongressPedia

I would thoroughly recommend one try out WikiHow. It is an excellent "how to do something" web service. Here are a couple of links ... some tongue and cheek:

• How to do nothing
• How to survive in the woods for three days
• How to fix a leaky faucet

With respect to the second wiki, CongressPedia ... it is really more of a political action group with liberal leanings. I reviewed the two senators from my state, Minnesota (Senator's Coleman and Dayton). As these two men are from different sides of the political spectrum, it was a good test of Congresspedia. Their entries are quite biased towards the "left". Thus, unfortunately, CongressPedia is not a very good source of information for the independent voter.

TEDTalks Webcasts or Podcasts

TEDTalks seems to be the West Coast equivalent of PopTech. It's own description claims: " Each year, TED hosts some of the world's most fascinating people:  Trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses." Given the speakers range from Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) to Ze Frank to Oxford University's "Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.", you will find some great content which you can either watch as a webcast, or download for a podcast.

• TEDTalks

On a final note ... one needs an invite to attend the TEDTalks conference in person. It's not enough to just pay the conference fee. You have to prove you are a "thought leader".

Is Google Book Search Playing Games?

Update on September 13th ... thank you to all my friends who ran queries from inside their corporate firewalls. Now I need to figure out what is going on behind the scenes.
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This is exceedingly odd. Over the last few weeks I had begun to notice that if I used Google Book Search at home my queries were successful, and I could review book contents. However, whenever I ran the same queries at work, my queries failed. Tonight I finally ran a full test. The first image is my results via my work VPN; the second image is via my home connection.
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In Memorium, Richard Fraser: September 11, 2001

Five years ago my cousin died in the World Trade Center attacks. His name, like mine, is Richard. On that morning, he became a true American hero. One of his co-workers was pregnant, and as she could not descend the stairs as fast as everyone else, he stayed behind in the stairwell to help her. The rest of his immediate department survived.

• Richard K. Fraser (AON Corporation)

Update on the 10th anniversary of 9-11: We still remember you, Richard.

WikiTexts ... in Downloadable PDF

Following up on my recent post, Free eBooks / Manuals, which reviewed very nice texts which could be downloaded from FreeLoadPress, you also need to visit WikiBooks. This wiki is still in its early stages, but their is starting to be some nice content, and an increasing number of books are available in downloadable pdf ... and like all thinks from the WikiMedia Foundation, they're free! Here are some nice examples:

• For faster access: Right Click and Save to Disk!
• Chess
• Chinese Mandarin
• European History
• FireFox
• French
• German
• Physics
• United Kingdom Constitution and Government
• US History

Here are some other good WikiBook links:

• Books in PDF: Link #1 | Link #2 (duplicative with some unique titles)
• Books of the month (as voted by Wikipedians)