Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Google announced a few weeks ago that it has decided to take-on Wikipedia and at the same time give authors a share of the advertising revenue. They propose authors create knols, articles of expertise on a variety of subjects. This article on Wikipedia does a good job of summarizing the potential problems faced by Google's proposition.
   


2. Researchers in Israel have created the nano-Bible, engraving 300,000 words in Hebrew on a chip the size of a grain of sugar.


3. In the world of digital preservation: "Mike Wash, chief information officer at the Government Printing Office, expects GPO to have more than a petabyte of content available in five or 10 years." That's a lot of data to ensure long-term access to.


4. A story on CNET says that Microsoft's latest Office 2003 service pack blocks older file formats from being loaded. Microsoft did this supposedly for security reasons, but they didn't tell anyone until just recently. Hope you didn't have any old Word 6.0 and Word 97 files sitting around that you might need access to someday...
   


5. Life imitating art: Did you see The Office episode where Michael drove his car into a lake because the GPS told him to? Just a few days ago, a NY man drove his car onto a train track on the advice of his GPS. Thankfully he was able to escape from the trapped car before an on-coming train smashed into his car going 60 MPH.