Just when I thought I didn’t have enough work to do over at Penton Media, I’m working with a couple of New Media (I hate that term btw) experts on the definitive eMedia Wiki. This project is going to take up many hours, so I expect to be burning the midnight oil for at least, uh, the next 2 nights. Check out the New Media, sorry, eMedia Wiki. In fact, why don’t you check it out and contribute? Isn’t that the Web 2.0 way?

Search Wikia, from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to launch today and will try to upset MSN, Yahoo!, Ask and Dogpile and steal at least second place in the Search war. Jimmy W is hoping to develop in a similar fashion to Wikipedia, using an army of volunteer collaborators to build it and expand upon it organically.

“Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It’s a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it’s in its very early days,” Wales said. “I don’t know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I’d say at least two years,” he said.

Volunteer
People interested in volunteering will find a variety of options at Search Wikia, including working with the software to improve and extend it, as well as suggesting pages for the index and evaluating and rating search results. Those who register to participate in the project will join a social networking environment where they can have a list of friends, upload photos, build profiles and be notified of friends’ actions.

Users of the search engine will be presented with what Wales calls a “mini article” at the top of the results list. This can be a photo, a text definition, an external link or whatever else has been determined is the best answer to that particular query.

Below the “mini article” will be the list of results, picked from the Search Wikia index, which on Monday will have anywhere between 50 million and 100 million Web pages. Wales concedes that number is small, but said it will continue to grow over time. Users will be able to rank the quality of individual search results, and Search Wikia will factor in that feedback when solving future queries. “That way, people will be able to influence the algorithmic search results,” he said.

Same interweb stuff, different year should be this years mantra. MC Hammer, sorry, he’s just known as “Hammer” now-a-days is probably sick of the big-pants comments and wants to be known as a serious bithnessman. “There is no high-tech lingo or business strategy that you can talk that is above my head. I breath this stuff.” he told the AP whilst announcing DanceJam, the latest effort to topple YouTube and become a dominant player in the online video scene.

Despite earning an estimated $33 million, Stanley Burrell aka Hammer- quickly spent all of his earnings and more (he declared bankrupt a couple of years back owing more than $7 million), on an opulent lifestyle of private jets, luxury cars and a gold-drenched Californian mansion.

Some media analysts say he will have a hard time drawing young people away from YouTube, which last month listed more than 1,700,000 dance videos. “When people are looking for any video, whether it be about skateboarding, dancing or a science project, they don’t stop to think about where’s the best place to find it,” said James McQuivey of Forrester Research.

While I agree with the Forrester dude, he’s slightly wrong, most people do a Google search - they don’t neccessarily go to YouTube or MSN’s Soapbox or iFilm…

BTW, here’s the MC, uh, dropping the Hammer….

Stop! Hammer Time!

Amazon is about 3 years behind apple when it comes to selling online music. In order to catch up (quickly), Amazon is changing the game a little by offering users unrestricted DRM (that means no security stuff) MP3 tunes from Universal, EMI and now Warner Music. Whilst this is great news for Amazon people, I’m not sure it’s enough to make iTune users make the jump. I love iTunes store, podcasts and the look n feel of the software, however, I hate the $9.99 movies, $.99 ringtones for my iPhone and crappy music management across my mostly Windows based network…..

Sony BMG is now the only major recording group not signed up with Amazon.

“By removing a barrier to the sale and enjoyment of audio downloads, we bring an energy-sapping debate to a close,” Warner Music chief executive Edgar Bronfman said in an e-mail to Warner employees.

I’m very happy to report the demise of Commodore has been over exagerated. Renamed Commodore Gaming, they aim to make a big splash at the 2008 CES conference in Vegas. You won’t find any PETs, C64 or Vic20’s… No way jose, this year Jack Tramiels new boys will be showing off the finest in gaming PC systems - they look pretty slick and seem to have the hardware to compete with the big boys.

Cliff Notes History of Commodore
Founded: ages ago
1977 Launched the PET computer targetting businesses
1981 Launched the VIC20 - with a solid 4k of RAM - killing the ZX80
1982 Launched the C64 - destroying the Sinclair Spectrum and Atari 800
1985 Launched the Amiga
1990 Launched Commodore Branded PC’s (IBM Compat)
Sometime after that - Commodore Imploded

But boy oh boy, did they change the home computer world. I can’t wait to get my hands on one of their Gaming PC’s - dubbed the G, GS, GX and XX models. The specs include Quad Processores running at 2.4 - 2.8 Ghz, upto 4GB 8500 Ram, Dual Nvidia 8800’s and a hard-drive large enough to store every video on YouTube - maybe.