Links for December 28-29, 2006

• Politicians parading into social media
  From Shel Isreal, co-author of Naked Conversations: “My hope is that government and elected officials will come en masse to the blogosphere. I'm sure they will come in awkwardly at first, using much of the same rhetoric they use everywhere else. But over time, some of them might learn the real power of social media is not just talking, but listening. In fact, blogging and social media, may be the most blatantly democratic format we've seen come along since the New England-style town meeting.”
  
• Founder of Wikipedia plans search engine to rival Google
  "Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, is set to launch an internet search engine with amazon.com that he hopes will become a rival to Google and Yahoo! 'Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’,' Mr Wales said. 'Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.'"
  
• Social Media is No Mo
  Micropersuation’s Steve Rubel opines that there is no longer a need to distinguish “social” media from all other media: “In 2006 all media went social. Pretty much every newspaper, TV network and publication has wholeheartedly embraced these technologies. Newspapers have comments, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and other forms of two-way communications… The changes in communications go deeper, however. The media formerly called mainstream also communicates in a far more conversational tone that it did before -- one we use. Meanwhile, the barriers to becoming a member of the fourth estate have been obliterated by these very same technologies.”