Blend of blogging and Wikipedia

Not sure if you folks have already heard of this news portal OhMyNews.com, a Korean startup thats based on citizen journalism providing a different twist to the Wikipedia concept.

This lets commoners like us compile and submit stories about international events and opinions on current events. OhMyNews provides a very professional view of the news content, for a little while I was not sure if this was based on citizen journalism or professional journalism.

One of the things that struck me it has an high adoption in major hubs of civilzation and certain not-so hubs such as Lhasa and Tehran. (Later I realized this is highly influenced by local media and reigning political climate). Also there is absolutely no significant representation from the world's biggest democracy. http://www.buzztracker.org/

So if some of you are itching to write or want to write about India, it might help (however small) the imbalance that Kabul is third on the top ten news locations in the world :)

* New York (10%)
* Washington (06%)
* Kabul (05%)
* Khartoum (05%)
* Tehran (04%)
* Hong Kong (04%)
* Toronto (04%)
* Chicago (03%)
* London (02%)
* Baghdad (02%)

Source: Buzztracker.org

i am searching for a shoe that looks like this....

if you have a question such as this, what would you do? where would you start?
online, if you know the make/model of the product.

what if you do not know more details and only have a visual image of how it should or does look like? you would not think of searching for it online, nah, you rather ask your friends. hopefully not for long.

i had come across a internet service a few months back which when i saw blew my mind.
riya.com led by Munjal Shah, would let you upload pictures to their website, like snapfish or anyone else. no biggie. the difference however was that they would recognize the people and objects in the pictures automatically (you had to train the tool and assign names to your friends initially). this in my mind was mind-blowing. how can you recognize a pattern of pixels and know who that person is? now riya.com is taken it to the next level.

behold riya 2.0 and the visual search. the features of new portal are fantastic. yet another amazing idea and hopefully they execute it well.

here is a link to the ceo's blog, explaining a lot about the new features.
http://munjal.typepad.com/recognizing_deven/2006/07/riya_20_roadmap.html

the most impressive/radical part of their strategy of disclosing all about their new product, well before its out. quoting the ceo, "We just believe inclusiveness and transparency beat paranoia and fear everytime".