wiki

Music, now lyrics

If you're never exactly sure which words a singer screams, mumbles, or sighs throughout a song's stanza, a brand-new add-on released this week was meant for you. TuneWiki (review), a free plug-in for Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows Media Player, can stream lyrics in time to songs you play from your local library. You'll also be able to spool lyrics for the YouTube music videos you initiate within TuneWiki, watching them appear in a pane below the player.

The heart of the application is TuneWiki's lyrics Wiki, an online database whose contents are driven by community contributions, … Read more

Webware 100 winner: WikiHow

Site: Wikihow.com Category: Search & Reference

WikiHow is a crowd-sourced how-to guide, powered by MediaWiki, the service that powers Wikipedia. Users put together steps, tips, and warnings on any topic, and other users can make additions or edits to those articles.

The service has more than 50,000 how-to articles, which are constantly being updated and edited. They're usually found in the results from major search engines, which has led to a steady month-by-month growth since the service launched in early 2005.

iPhone app Lyrics is great when you turn filter off

Updated, 8:15 p.m.: I heard back from Kluivers, and without going into details, he was concerned that Apple was taking a long time to approve Lyrics--he submitted it in January, but didn't get it approved until earlier this month. Consequently, the explicit filter was made very protective, to avoid any chance of offending the App Store gatekeepers. Jelle Krins, who co-developed the app, told me of an Easter Egg that lets you turn off the filter: just scroll all the way to the bottom of the "About" screen three times, and a filter on/off … Read more

Apple gets its due in BluWiki DMCA spat

Apple has benefited heavily from open-source software over the years, and it has earned a warm spot in the hearts of open-source advocates, despite its heavily proprietary stance.

With BluWiki, however, Apple appears to have gone too far.

In November 2008, as CNET's Tom Krazit wrote on Monday, Apple wrote to the BluWiki administrators to have iPodHash, an open-source program that attempts to enable iPods and iPhones to sync with music software other than Apple's iTunes, removed from the Web site. Apple argues that iPodHash violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by actively seeking to circumvent Apple's … Read more

An outline of patent problems--and solutions

Patents have become a minefield that inhibit software innovation, a fact recently highlighted for me in a conversation with Rob Tiller, Red Hat's vice president of Intellectual Property and assistant general counsel.

Many software patents are of poor quality and are difficult to interpret, Tiller explains, made worse by the fact that patent boundaries are often vague: a patent can even cover an invention the patent holder never conceived.

Compounding this morass, it's difficult to impossible to know if code you have written could be covered by a patent, as search methods are unreliable (and damages are structured … Read more

Gagapost offers easy collaborative blogging

PALM DESERT, Calif.--How can friends and family best share their experiences of things or events they did together?

A Taiwanese company called Qubes took the stage at Demo 09 Tuesday morning to offer its answer: Gagapost.

This is essentially collaborative blogging, in which multiple users can all share ownership and authorship of the blog they've created. In many ways, this is very much like a wiki, but with a simpler front end and cross-Web commenting tools that anyone can use, regardless of whether they're one of the blog's owners.

The company presented an example of co-workers … Read more

Widgetbox introduces integration with Confluence

Widgetbox is making its widgets compatible with Confluence, a business wiki product from Atlassian.

Widgetbox widgets "componentize" applications and Web sites, making them portable and transferable across any Web site. To date, the focus has been on consumers, but the integration with a clear enterprise business product like Confluence is a good step behind the firewall. The company also recently introduced Blidgets, which take any feed and turn it into a widget.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Confluence wiki and Atlassian's bug-tracking tool, Jira, they provide free versions to open-source projects and … Read more

Medpedia makes medical information easily accessible

The Medpedia Project, a joint effort on the part of Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, and other global health organizations, announced Tuesday that it has launched the beta version of its new site which it calls a new model "of how the world will assemble, maintain, critique and access medical knowledge."

The site features a repository of up-to-date medical information, contributed and maintained by health professionals from around the world. The site also boasts a Professional Network and Directory for visitors to find health professionals and organizations, a Communities of Interest … Read more

TuneWiki readies streaming Internet radio...with (legal) lyrics

Updated 2/11/09 at 6:50 P.M. PT to add more context to the licensing debate and to correct Amnon Sarig's title.

Back in October, we took a look at close look at TuneWiki, a media enhancement application for Google Android that scrolls through a song's lyrics as you play a song or YouTube music video. The company announced this week an update to its free Android application that will let you also stream Internet radio on your phone. The update, which will be submitted to the Android Market this Saturday, will give streaming songs TuneWiki'… Read more