FourSquare iPhone app arrives in London

Well, Foursquare lets you see little comments and tips that people have left pegged to locations in London. You too can leave these tips reader, call them geo-tagged tweets if you will. Like some kind of game, you get rewarded for leaving more tips by being given badges. You set up a minimal profile, and add friends and can also contact your friends over the service.

Encyclopaedia Britannica admits defeat – allows users to add content

encyclopediae.jpg

Encyclopaedia Britannica has for years resisted pressure to join Wikipedia in allowing just anyone to submit content – relying instead on 100 full-time editors and 4,000 ‘expert contributors’. As a result, it’s slow to react to events and studies have shown that it’s comparably error-ridden .

In the next 24 hours, however, the Encyclopaedia’s website will begin accepting user-generated content. However, it still won’t be as free as Wikipedia – any changes or additions will have to be vetted by the site’s “experts”, and any would-be editors will have to register their real name and address(!) before being allowed to contribute.

Still, any changes made will eventually appear in the printed version of the Encylopaedia, which only gets reprinted every two years. I’ll stick with editing Wikipedia, thanks, and take my chances with the spammer police, endless bureaucracy and edit wars.

Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Sydney Morning Herald)

Rubbish user generated content is killing the internet – and the rest of the media world

gary%20and%20sonic%20200.JPGI’m bored of simpletons videoing their mates on mobile phones, uploading it somewhere, and expecting me to somehow be impressed by this.

It’s just rubbish. The whole web – and print and TV and every other kind of media – is falling over itself to involve the audience and get them submitting stuff to pad out their sites, publications and shows for free…