Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"After traveling the world, I wanted to share my photos with others. Flickr and other photo sites give you exposure for only a brief window in time, and adding photos to wikipedia proved too complicated for the average user. This sparked the idea for a ‘wikipedia of photos’ - that combines the permanence and community collaboration of wikipedia with the ease of use of consumer desktop applications."

Fotopedia has just launched, offering a site that looks to combine the ideas of Wikipedia, Flickr and Digg. Imagine a community managed Wikipedia that provides an easier to use interface that allows people to upload relevant photos to an article. The photos are then rated by the community on inclusion with that article. The result is an information resource that is far more vibrant than the text heavy Wikipedia. After checking out some random articles, the information is a bit on the light side, much like if I were reading the Simple English Wikipedia, but fortunately, they also provide links to Wikipedia for those who want to know more. The photos themselves look stunning and really help put some context to statistics and facts. In essence, imagine Fotopedia to be a compliment to Wikipedia for those who learn and experience things through pictures, instead of words.

"Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) will discontinue both its MSN Encarta reference Web sites as well as its Encarta software, which have both been surpassed by rising competitors, like Wikipedia. In a message posted on the MSN Encarta Web site, Microsoft says, "Encarta has been a popular product around the world for many years. However, the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed. People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.""

This doesn't come as a big surprise, but I do think it's unfortunate - as much as I enjoy Wikipedia, for research purposes I think it's always important to have more than one source of information. I don't have the paranoia that some people do about inaccurate information on Wikipedia, but having content written by professionals can never be a bad thing as a secondary source of information to fact-check the primary source. Goodbye Encarta; even though I haven't used you in years, I'll still miss you...