Well, that was fun. More traffic than this blog has ever seen, and lots of very nice comments from people, which always gives a fuzzy glow.
- Rather than the expected Cease and Desist, I was invited to go and present to present to News Online! It was interesting; it's not every day that one gets to go and have a moan at the people who built the site you use every day. The audience seemed split exactly 50/50 between people who liked the idea, and those who thought I was the devil's latest physical manifestation. Nevertheless, I predict there will be some very, very exciting developments from News in the near future.
- I should emphasize again: I was not advocating that the News Online should do either of the specific things that the wikiproxy does, but I do believe that the BBC should be more adventurous and open in its relations with the rest of the web; I'm sure they can come up with much better ideas - these were the tools that I had to hand. (although that said, I think the in-text links make their stories MUCH more useful).
- People generally HATED the wikipediarise-everthing-plugin idea, drawing a comparison (that hadn't occured to me) with Microsoft's atrocious and doomed Smart Tags. There is a major difference: the plugin would be user controlled and have an toggle in the toolbar to switch on and off rather than being foisted on you by the evil empire, and the links sold to the highest bidder.
- The Lazyweb kicked in: Gina Trapani wrote a much more generic API version that will wikipediarise, well pretty much anything. Much nicer code, too
- Tim wrote a couple of nice bookmarklets: javascript:void(location.href='http://www.whitelabel.org/wp/wikiproxy.php?url='+location.href)
[use the whole line]
I was trying to make a clickable bookmarklet link with javascript that could be saved via a right click, but the either the comment thingy wouldn't let me do it or I just couldn't figure out how to do it.
Here's another bookmarklet to do a Wikipedia lookup on a word or phrase, such as a proper name:
javascript:Qr=document.getSelection();if(!Qr){De='';void(Qr=prompt('select or enter word, name, or phrase'+De+'\n(case sensitive, no quotes)',''))};if(Qr){Qr2=Qr.split(' ').join('_');location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'+escape(Qr2)}
[use the whole thing with a single space between the text from each line instead of a line break]
It replaces embedded spaces with an underscore (this also works with the All Music Guide). You just highlight what you want to try to look up and click the bookmarklet or click it without highlighting and then enter whatever you want to look up in the box that javascript pops up - note that Wikipedia is case sensitive.