Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment. Wikipedia.org

Florence Devouard the chairwoman of Wikimedia, the foundation behind Wikipedia spoke about “Wikipedia: a social innovation ?” at LIFT07 on February 8, 2007 she covered the basic facts of wikipedia worldwide and the comparisons between the other encyclopedia and wikipedia model, she also mentions wikipedia upcoming solutions such as delivery wikipedia entries in other formats for the countries not having access online such as freely licensed text-books that will make another revolution education in future.

Wikipedia.org invites everyone to take a part online and create articles they opened the gate for online citizens, to contribute on the website of entire humanity, letting people to create articles and make them responsible for the content they create.

But what remains the biggest challenge for Wikipedia is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) since many users today are using the biased sources from text-books who are also biased on their way as a reference to create articles. This brings controversy among many online activists who try to create articles based on facts as a primary source.

An example can be Kosovo article in Wikipedia which is still stub and closed for editing cause of vandalism by contributors, if you monitor this page u can see the history of editing is much frequented and never the truth appears on the Kosovo article. So there is a lot to do in NPOV

Apart from the Florence discussion, there was a simple mistaken discussion about that Wikipedia has money for another three months which got exploded in Blogosphere the next day after her speech and this is what makes blogging attractive. The video explains it all on what Florence Devouard and Laurent Haug really discussed.

Language is major issue on wikipedia which seems to be very English-centered way of creating articles. On wikipedia stats regarding the languages I took these facts about wikipedia articless in languages around in balkans, where Romanian language leads in there.

Romanian: 58 496 articles
Slovenian: 45 900 articles
Serbian: 43 824 articles
Bulgarian: 37 533 articles
Croatian: 29 414 articles
Bosnian: 17 259 articles
Albanian: 14 279 articles
Macedonian: 9 348 articles

Enjoy the Wikipedia story on LIFT07

I’m republishing LIFT07 Conference videos every weekend with notes I took on each presentations I attended to let my readers enjoy these fabulous videos offered by LIFT07 organizers.
LIFT is a conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society hold on 7-8-9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland

Mike Arrington called me two days ago on my private cell phone in relation to my previous post regarding the Technology Usage in SEE. Following our phone conversation he invited to give me a free ticket for Web 2.0, I checked the dates and on that time I will be out of country going to a private vacation, so i rejected the offer. Mike also asked me if i have any idea about what he should do with this ticket and I recommended him to let people write about the negative side of TechCrunch.com

Now the post came up and I got angry because Mike Arrington again stole MY IDEA as he stole many ideas from other people around the blogosphere. TechCrunch is about gossips and attacks and Michael Arrington stealing ideas, TechCrunch is about Web 2.0 and Michael Arrington stealing ideas, TechCrunch is about Innovation and again Mike Arrington stealing ideas. TechCrunch is about entrepreneurship and Mike Arrington stealing ideas.

So what is TechCrunch about?

This is what just everyone would like to have in their houses.

I did a small research on the The Networked Readiness Index Rankings to see where does south east European countries are indexed on using technology. The report was delivered lately by World Economic Forum judging countries who integrated technology into business and helped developed an infrastructure on their countries, usage of technology in innovation, culture and leadership.

The Networked Readiness Index 2006–2007 rankings
Here is the 2006-2007 top-10 technology countries: (2005 ranking)
1: Denmark (3)
2: Sweden (8)
3: Singapore (2)
4: Finland (5)
5: Switzerland (9)
6: Netherlands (12)
7: US (1)
8: Iceland (4)
9: UK (10)
10: Norway (13)

——-
South East European Countries:
30. Slovenia (35)
46. Croatia (57)
55. Romania (58)
72. Bulgaria (64)
74. Serbia and Montenegro (80)
81. Macedonia (81)
89. Bosnia and Herzegovina (97)
92. Moldova (94)
107. Albania (106)
*Kosovo is not included separately in the statistics

CNN covered the story of recent blog death threats including both protagonists Kathy Sierra and Chris Locke. Robert Scoble as a first degree observer of this issue was not included in a footage even was filmed.

During March 2007 group of entrepreneurs, researchers, developers and designers helped me and worked hard to put the site back on its form with many new features on it.

Now this blog will mainly cover stories about web 2.0, technology, mobile, new media, entrepreneurship and education on south east europe region focusing countries: Kosovo, Macedonia and Albania.

On this occasion I would like to thank Kushtrim Sogojeva, Alban Gerguri, Hajre Hyseni, Mentor Pacarada, Kushtrim Dragusha and all others who helped during this process.

Happy Relaunch

I came back from LIFT Conference 2007, Geneva 7-9 February 2007. I had an opportunity to meet new people, new idea, new challenges and new technologies. Wasn’t it what is LIFT about? Yes.

I will post some more lift notes in following days, also i have to copy paste stories from Berlin and Copenhagen this year.

CORDIS, the EU’s official information service on research, technological development and innovation, has launched a new service supporting information and communication technologies (ICT) research under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/