LAST week, we held our dry run in using Twitter for our Tales of the Nomad blog, with our multimedia reporter Izah Morales and online videographer Janie Christine Octia twittering their journey to Lucban, Quezon and the actual Pahiyas festival itself, and multimedia specialist Erika Tapalla giving updates on the AsiaPay event at Mag:net Cafe at Bonifacio High Street.

Check out the Tales of the Nomad Twitter page at twitter.com/talesofthenomad. The updates are also available via the Twitter badge at our Tales of the Nomad blog.

Oh, and yup, I’ve also decided to give in to Twitter, heh, I know, I know, better late than never So if you have time, check out twitter.com/joeyatplay

Cheers!

HAVE you already tried Wikia Search, the new search engine from the people behind Wikipedia? This project has been one year in the making, but the alpha version is now open to the public. (By the way, as I previously blogged, Google interestingly enough has announced a Wikipedia-like service called Knol.)

I’m trying it out but as you can expect at this early stage, there’s no way I’d choose this over Google. Wikia Search is pretty up front about the quality of its search results at this stage:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

[Read the rest of this entry »]

WATCH out, Wikipedia: Google is now invading your turf with the announcement of its own Wikipedia-like free service.

Dubbed as “knol,” the service is currently by-invitation only to a select group of — dare I say it? — knol-edge workers heh

Here’s a screenshot of a test knol — real author and info, but of course, the ratings, comments and other meta-data aren’t ‘coz it hasn’t been unveiled yet to ordinary Internet users like us. Check out the Official Google Blog entry for more info.

This is great news, because while I personally believe that we should empower more people with digital tools and allow all voices to be heard, we also have to make sure that these services will be used responsibly.

The goal, after all, is not just to come up with more user-generated content, but better user-generated content.

I’VE been so busy today that it’s a good thing Erwin Oliva reminded me that Hulu, the ambitious online video site which is a joint venture between network giants NBC Universal and News Corp., is now open for private beta testing. So if you haven’t received an invite yet, go to the site and sign up.

It’s interesting to see how this will all play out as the TV networks attempt to chart their own online destiny, and how this will affect the future of sites such as YouTube. NBC pulled out its clips from YouTube and closed down its YouTube promotional channel prior in preparation for the launch of Hulu.

Here’s an excerpt from today’s post on the Hulu blog.

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BINTAN, Indonesia–”LIVECASTING is to TV what blogging was to journalism.”

This was declared by Steve Ng, founder of The Digital Movement, in his presentation for the Web 2.0 session of Kickstart Asia 2007.

Ng pointed out that livecasting is revolutionizing broadcasting by allowing ordinary people to become their own TV networks. In particular, Ng cited Ustream.tv.

“Ustream.tv allows people to livecast events using just a webcam,” Ng said. [Read the rest of this entry »]