Shelby Bonnie left the company he co-founded with Halsey Minor, CNET, just about one year ago. This morning he launches his next startup, PoliticalBase.

The site, which focuses on local, state and national elections and other political matters, is timed perfectly to take advantage of the 2008 presidential elections and the estimated $4.5 billion that will be spent on advertising to promote candidates and issues.

PoliticalBase is a structured Wiki that encourages research and debate. Users can edit most of the text but can't change the underlying database structure. That allows the site to slice and dice data for comparison purposes (something that can't be done with the free-for-all Wikipedia) but still gives the site's community the ability to create and edit content.

The site is broken down into interconnected categories, including money, people, issues, elections, etc. Clicking on, say Rudy Giuliani shows information on that presidential candidate, including the amount of money raised to date, his religion and party affiliation and biographical information. At the bottom of the page his position on key issues is also shown (for fun, register for the site and click that you do not support him - see how his picture changes).

Martha Stewart, the paragon of expertise as content, is adopting the style of social media for her next website -- to be called "Marthapedia." But Ms. Stewart, who didn't get where she is by suggesting that the hoi polloi know more than she does, made clear that Marthapedia will not be so freewheeling as, say, Wikipedia. Editors at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will check to see if the public's ideas are better than their own, she said.

The site initially will be seeded with existing content from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, such as Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook, but will open for information and suggestions from the public, Ms. Stewart told an Advertising Week audience this morning. "It will be a very interesting site," she said.

Do you think Wikipedia is a better source of information than going to the library?

Farmbrough: In some ways. The question only makes sense if you state who is looking for what, and which library is involved. For example, if you have a university library available to you, you will get more and better information on most subjects, except, perhaps, popular culture. If you only have a small-town library, you can probably find out as much or more from Wikipedia on many subjects, but it will be "chunked" differently -- it might not be easy to learn calculus, certainly not Linux or Anglo-Saxon from Wikipedia (although, there are sister wikis which address these types of needs). The Wikipedia community has a strong belief in maintaining the goal of building an encyclopedia, rather than a how-to resource, a dictionary (though there is also Wiktionary) or "an indiscriminate collection of information."

It launched with approximately 800 internally created articles and 5000 articles that were ported over from the previous version. As you click-thru the site you will quickly realize just how empty it is and how many fact & category tags have not been filled in yet. Try playing with the random article functionality to take a spin through the site. The article pages are very nicely crafted. The tags are on the left. The article text and images take up the majority of the page.

If you do post or otherwise submit questions, answers feedback, or any other content, and unless we indicate otherwise, you grant amapedia and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media.

your favorite products; only you can tell us which ones they are

product information that comes from you, so that it might be more impartial and authoritative

product facts that actually matter to you (like shutter lag for cameras and fan noise for notebooks), not those supplied by manufacturers or sellers.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer - Rick Jelliffe, who is chief technical officer of Sydney computing company Topologi, based in Pyrmont - and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an "open document format" and a rival put forward by Microsoft.

Doug Mahugh, a technical expert for the Microsoft format, Office Open XML, has identified himself as the Microsoft employee who contacted Jelliffe requesting his services.

In a comment posted on the popular Slashdot technology website, Mahugh published what he said was an excerpt from an email to Jelliffe, detailing "what I asked Rick to do".

"Wikipedia has an entry on Open XML that has a lot of slanted language, and we'd like for them to make it more objective but we feel that it would be best if a non-Microsoft person were the source of any corrections," reads the email Mahugh apparently wrote to Jelliffe.

"Would you have any interest or availability to do some of this kind of work? Your reputation as a leading voice in the XML community would carry a lot of credibility, so your name came up in a discussion of the Wikipedia situation today."

The email also encouraged Jelliffe to disclose his deal with Microsoft in his blog at oreillynet.com, and reassured Jelliffe that Microsoft did not have to approve any of his Wikipedia edits before they were made.

At Jimbo Wales' directive, all external links within the English language Wikipedia are now coded "nofollow" -- this should help cut spamming immensely once word gets out in the SEO community.

The sources cited in Wikipedia, many of which are original sources, will no longer get credit for their appearance there, which should cause at least a little downward pressure in their own search rankings (hence providing a little more upward pressure, relatively speaking, for Wikipedia's articles). Although the no-follow move is certainly understandable from a spam-fighting perspective, it turns Wikipedia into something of a black hole on the Net. It sucks up vast quantities of link energy but never releases any.

THE internet could become even more difficult for governments to regulate with a new website, Wikileaks, promising to provide a safe haven for whistleblowers to upload confidential documents.

Australians are among the volunteers behind the site. "Your country's support for the underdog and for a fair go is showing through," a spokeswoman said.

Comparing themselves with the leaker of the Pentagon papers that damaged the Nixon administration and eroded US public confidence in the Vietnam War, Wikileaks' creators say they will uncover unethical behaviour by developing "an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis".

Wikileaks was founded by Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and startup company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Our advisory board, which is still forming, includes representatives from expatriate Russian and Tibetan refugee communities, reporters, a former US intelligence analyst and cryptographers.

There are currently 22 people directly involved in the project and counting.

WikiSeek is a search engine that has indexed only Wikipedia sites, plus sites that are linked to from Wikipedia. It serves two purposes. First, it is a much better Wikipedia search engine than the one on Wikipedia (and has been built with Wikipedia’s assistance and permission). Second, the fact that it also indexes sites that are linked to from Wikipedia means that, presumably, it will return only very high quality results and very little spam. It won’t show every relevant result to a query, but it will certainly give a good overview of a subject without all the mess.

The search results also include a tag cloud which contains Wikipedia categories containing the search term. Results can be quickly filtered by clicking on one of those categories (see screen shot, click for larger view). The first three results of a query are always Wikipedia content (unless there are not three results) and are shaded blue. The remaining results are below the shaded area.

1. Web 2.0 -- 206
2. Steve Irvin -- 161
3. Mark Foley Scandal -- 142
4. Blog -- 147
5. Ajax -- 133
6. World War II -- 143
7. Snakes on a Plane -- 126
8. Meme -- 132
9. Wiki -- 129
10. RSS -- 122
11. Podcasting -- 127
12. George Bush -- 129
13. Podcast -- 111
14. Net Neutrality -- 100

It is not clear how much traction Wikia company has gained. The company says more than two thousand wiki sites have been created on its platform, edited by 30,00 registered users. Wikia wants to users do everything outside of Wikipedia's collaborative encyclopedia process.

It enables "groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions." Wikis are useful, because they let fans - Nascar fans, for example - find information and express themselves. But they are tricky to manage, and Wikia's format isn't exactly elegant. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, the founder Wikipedia, which is one of the rare wiki success stories so far. Part of Wikia's round (amount undisclosed) includes the purchase of the sports community site, ArmchairGM for more than $2 million, underscoring how Wikia is having to reach out to acquire talent and technology. Wikia says it will use the ArmChairGM technology to help it incorporate user-generated news and voting into future Wikia fan sites. With Amazon behind it, Wikia could presumably be used to form wikis around various Amazon product lines. Wikia says it will look for more acquisitions.

A wiki is a website designed for collaboration. In a wiki everyone can edit, update and append pages with new information, all without knowing HTML. Wikis can be either publicly accessible or privately secure.

JotSpot Chief Executive Joe Kraus said JotSpot would be able to tap into the Internet search leader's large user base and robust data centers capable of handling any growth.

"Our vision has always been to take wikis out of the land of the nerds and bring it to the largest possible audience," Kraus said in an interview. "There's no larger audience that you can reach than one you can reach through Google."

Wiki tools, popularized by the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, let users to create, modify and even delete information on what others in a group have worked.

In July, JotSpot released a new version that aims to make shared pages similar to spreadsheets, photo albums and other software people already use. In the past, Wiki tools have generally mimicked basic Web pages or word-processing documents -- photographs, for instance, might appear as a list of attachments, with no thumbnails previewing the image before downloading.

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a "citizens' compendium of everything," will be an experimental new wiki project that combines public participation with gentle expert guidance. It will begin life as a "progressive fork" of Wikipedia. But we expect it to take on a life of its own and, perhaps, to become the flagship of a new set of responsibly-managed free knowledge projects. We will avoid calling it an "encyclopedia," because there will probably always be articles in the resource that have not been vouched for in any sense.

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability--including the use of real names--is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

"I'm no fan of reality, and I'm no fan of encyclopedias," Colbert opined. "I've said it before: Who is [Encyclopaedia] Britannica to tell me George Washington had slaves? If I want to say George Washington didn't have slaves, that's my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it's also a fact."

While he was speaking, Colbert was also typing away on a laptop computer, apparently editing the Wikipedia entry on George Washington to read, "In conclusion, George Washington did not own slaves."

He also apparently edited the Wiki entry on his own program, replacing a lengthy section on his reference to Oregon as both "the Canada of California" and "Washington's Mexico" with "Oregon is Idaho's Portugal" — an example, he said, of Wikiality.

"[On Wikipedia], any user can change any entry," he said. "Now 'Oregon is Idaho's Portugal' is the opinion I have always held. You can look it up."

At 10:09 a.m., it said "no further details have been officially released" about the death.

Two minutes later, it said: "The guilt of ruining so many lives finally led him to his suicide."

At 10:12 a.m., this was replaced by: "According to Lay's pastor the cause was a 'massive coronary' heart attack."

By 10:39 a.m., Lay's entry said: "Speculation as to the cause of the heart attack lead many people to believe it was due to the amount of stress put on him by the Enron trial." This statement was later dropped.

Influential, top blog authors are embedding Wikipedia links in their blog postings, exposing the site to wider audiences. A half-percent of all blog posts at BlogPulse.com, in fact, now typically cite Wikipedia.

Major news events, especially July's London subway bombings and Hurricane Katrina in August-September, boosted Wikipedia's use as a source of immediate and thorough background. As a result, Wikipedia has emerged as more reliable and timely than other encyclopedias or knowledge databases.

The rise of Consumer-Generated Media. Because Wikipedia involves thousands of collaborative authors and contributors, many of them are passionate about accuracy and focused, thoughtful usage, increasing the level of trust among users.

International appeal. Of the growing number of foreign-language Wikipedias (French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Dutch & Swedish), blog citations to the German-language Wikipedia increased the most, nearly doubling in the past six months.

Blog references to Wikipedia have tripled, in fact, since Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast in late August. More than twice as many bloggers now refer to the term "Wikipedia" as they do to the traditional "encyclopedia," and bloggers mention Wikipedia six times more frequently than they mention Encyclopedia Britannica's web site.