castledoom.com

[JuntaJoe]

So I cancel and sign up again.

My sister has been doing this for a couple years now.

[JuntaJoe]

Companies Unveil Online Data Storage Item


A first-of-a-kind online data storage product seeks to ease the way consumers share their digital photos, music, video and documents.

For example, one can e-mail friends a link to new vacation photos, and the recipient can simply click on it without having to download additional software or register for an account — a common practice with existing online photo-sharing services.

Currently code-named Project Fusion, the offering from hard drive maker Maxtor Corp. and startup Fabrik Inc. will give consumers a large-capacity hard drive appliance that acts as a personal server. It comes with software to let owners access the files on that device over the Internet. And users can create links for others to access those files.

Many services already exist for sharing photos, video and other files, and other hardware companies offer so-called networked-attached storage devices. But those machines have so far been geared for businesses or technically savvy home users who know how to set up their own computer networks.

The difference with Project Fusion, analysts say, is how it incorporates many of those elements and services into a single product designed more for the everyday consumer.

"I think it's the foundation of something really big," said analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group. "But there will be a problem in trying to find a way in describing this without all the technical jargon. I call it a personal media portal."

Indeed, Fabrik and Maxtor officials say they don't yet have a name chosen for the product, which will be available late in the second quarter. Prices are not yet determined, but Maxtor says it will cost as much as $799 for a 500-gigabyte model.

Maxtor will also offer versions of its One Touch external hard drives for as low as $199, bundling them with a service package that lets users send their files to be stored on Fabrik's servers. The service fees will start roughly at $50 a year for about 10 gigabytes of data — enough for about 8,000 photos at a 3-megapixel resolution.

The companies describe their offering as an easy way to store and manage the massive amounts of media-rich content that people are gathering in their personal lives.

"What we're allowing is access anywhere, anytime, that can be unique to the user and flexible enough to meet different people's characteristics," said Mike Williams, a general manager at Maxtor. "And this is a whole new level of sharing."

Under the system, users can organize their photos, video or documents as they wish, using applications and formats of their own choice. Using the software created by Fabrik, they also can easily search for the data and tailor it before sharing with others.

For wedding photos, for instance, users could quickly create separate albums for the groom's family and one for the bride's family, and send them accordingly.

Files embedded with copy protections, such as songs purchased from online music stores, would still carry their original restrictions, however, so users would not be able to distribute the movies or songs en masse to others via the Internet.

Leading Internet portals such as Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) and Microsoft Corp. already allow users to upload and store photos on their servers. And many analysts expect the deep-pocketed companies, along with Google Inc., to expand their online storage offerings, competing with Maxtor and Fabrik's Project Fusion.

"They're the first ones out there with an integrated approach to sharing content," said Charlene Li, an industry analyst at market researcher Forrester Research. "But there will be fast followers."

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

[JuntaJoe]

Google to introduce spreadsheet program


Google Inc. will introduce a spreadsheet program Tuesday, continuing the Internet search leader's expansion into territory long dominated by Microsoft Corp.

Although it's still considered a work in progress, Google's online spreadsheet will offer consumers and businesses a free alternative to Microsoft's Excel application — a product typically sold as part of the Office software suite that has been a steady moneymaker for years.

To avoid swamping the company's computers, Google's spreadsheet initially will be distributed to a limited audience. Google also wants more time to smooth out any possible kinks and develop more features, said Jonathan Rochelle, the product manager of the new application.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company planned to begin accepting sign-ups for the spreadsheet at 9 a.m. EDT Tuesday through the "labs" section of its Web site. Rochelle wouldn't specify how many people will be granted access to the spreadsheet application.

Google's spreadsheet isn't as sophisticated as Excel. For instance, the Google spreadsheet won't create charts or provide a menu of controls that can be summoned by clicking on a computer mouse's right-hand button.

Rochelle said the program's main goal is to make it easier for family, friends or co-workers to gain access to the same spreadsheet from different computers at different times, enabling a group of authorized users to add and edit data without having to e-mail attachments back and forth.

"We are totally focused on the sharing aspect," he said.

Although distributing software over the Internet gives more people greater access to programs, the approach requires trusting a custodian like Google to save and protect the information from unauthorized users.

That's a leap many security-conscious companies are unwilling to make and something consumers may be reluctant to do amid rising concerns of government snooping.

The spreadsheet represents Google's latest software application to be tethered to an Internet connection instead of a single computer's hard drive. Google acquired an online word processing application called Writely in March and rolled out a calendar service a few weeks later.

All of those free programs pose a possible threat to Microsoft, which established itself as the world's largest software maker by selling its Windows operating system and complementary applications that run on the platform.

As Google invades its turf, Microsoft has been mounting its own attack by investing heavily in Internet search.

Microsoft's assault hasn't hurt Google yet, but some industry analysts believe the competitive landscape could shift early next year with the release of Vista — the long-delayed upgrade to the Windows operating system.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

[JuntaJoe]

TechEd 2006 Opinion: Ray Ozzie's little disruption

By Scott M. Fulton, III


Boston (MA) - You don't have to go to a technology conference. Instead, spend one hour alone at mid-afternoon in a restaurant, an airport, a subway car, or any public place with 100 or more people. Shut off the iPod and the BlackBerry, and stow your earbuds. Listen to the conversations of the people around you. If you're as attentive as I've been in recent years, you might notice at least one conversation in six involves information technology - more specifically, people trying to make sense of it, so they can put their businesses back together.

It isn't as though everyone wants to be information technology specialists, or that they necessarily feel they're cut out for the role. On paper, these people are nurses, paralegals, police officers, agricultural technicians, travel agents. Whether they made a conscious decision about their destinies or were drafted into the role, they have become IT specialists. For years, even decades, we who started out in technology have been searching for our place in the mainstream, like salmon maniacally swimming up a river. The search may be over at last; the mainstream has found us.

When we talked with and listened to attendees at Microsoft's TechEd 2006 conference in Boston last week, we learned that a growing number of them were there less out of desire than necessity. This isn't really Microsoft's fault; unlike E3, whose purpose is to generate buzz, TechEd's explicit purpose is to educate. And as Windows evolves - as it swims upstream from its own swamp of problems and inconsistencies - its subject matter grows ever more perplexing. Sure, I'm interested in Group Policy Objects, SHA-2 encryption, BitLocker, firewalls, PowerShell. But a growing number of my peers don't want to care about the technology they're struggling with; right now, what they care about most is making their business work, and feeding their families. New acronyms don't satisfy these folks the way a new expansion pack satisfies a gamer.

An occurrence of one kind or another:

The first rule of public speaking, I learned long ago, is to know your audience. When Ray Ozzie took the stage for TechEd's opening keynote speech, standing in the spot normally reserved for Bill Gates, he probably knew he was on his way to ascending a throne, perhaps within the next four days. Almost eight minutes of Ozzie's speech were devoted to the story of his rise to power - his days with Bricklin and Frankston with VisiCalc, his development of Lotus Notes, his creation of Groove services. It was a big buildup, and we could all see it was leading to something. Perhaps an earlier draft of his speech may have mentioned he was capturing the coveted Chief Software Architect seat that Gates was vacating, but that may have been edited out for fear it would be perceived by analysts as a palace coup.

So instead, Ozzie's message to his audience was left as something of a cliffhanger, though without much of a cliff. The world, he said, is due for an "era of services disruption," the likes of which could not be equaled by the advent of the Internet.

"In many ways change and disruption are synonymous with our industry," Ozzie said, "and this is really no accident. It's because the fundamental, low-level, enabling technologies that we build our stuff on continue improvement with a steady march of progress, building and building, and every five to ten years something just snaps. A wave forms, and it crests, and a fundamental transformation of one kind or another occurs."

The specific source of the wave to which Ozzie referred was never mentioned, at least during the speech, though Microsoft presenters made allusions to it throughout the week. But the thousands of bewildered attendees - I know they were bewildered because I listened to them as they exited the keynote - spent at least some, perhaps most, of their time that week struggling to figure out what they were all alluding to. Thursday afternoon came, and it made a little more sense. It's the era of Ozzie's promotion - that's the disruption, there's the rub. Sorry to have been so confused there, Ray, but we're cleared up now.

Perhaps the heads of companies spend too little time interacting with their customers or their audiences or the people seated about them in restaurants. If you spend time there, you actually learn something about these executives, if only second-hand: They transpose their ideas upon their employees, their own history becomes the chronicle of world events, the milestones of their lives become the raison d'être for human existence. Their mid-life crises become the Dark Ages of Civilization. Their promotions become the Era of Services Disruption.

For some companies, depending upon the relative charisma of their leaders, this transposition can be particularly effective. If Steve Jobs were to retire tomorrow, time would stand still for millions. Jobs gives hope to executives everywhere that not only can one man make a difference, but that within their own lifetimes - the only noteworthy events outside of which are the Big Bang and the End of Time - they themselves can justify the wiping out of the dinosaurs.

But for the rest of the world, for whom lunchtime rushes by too quickly and the Big Bang was the first in a series of services disruptions, it's way too difficult to conjure the time or energy to want to be interested, much less enthusiastic, by all of this. They don't want another disruption, thank you very much. They just want the world to make sense again. They would appreciate being able to reclaim those lost moments with their families, to witness more of the intervals between childhood and adolescence, before they leave home to take on jobs as IT specialists. They would appreciate it if their CEO or CxO or C-something-O would get a life.

"If there's a lesson to be learned," said Ozzie toward the close, "it's that those who survive and thrive are the ones who understand the trends, and make intentional decisions about their own destiny at the right time."

If Ray Ozzie knew his audience, if he had truly come to TechEd "people ready," he would have known the Internet wasn't something that just occurred like a spark or a sneeze to the 11,000 or so people out there in the audience who devote every ounce of their energy, and even a chunk of their souls. For these people, the Internet, the computer, the electron are not phenomena, any more than the Panama Canal and the Transcontinental Railroad just happened to the people who lived - and died - constructing them. These people are information technology, not the consumers of it. They are the mainstream, the source of Ozzie's wave. For them, progress is way too slow a thing. Ozzie's own destiny is more the product of their intentional decisions than he may realize.

Time to redefine "coolness":

We who cover technology for a living often work under the assumption that the rest of the world - our audience - is as excited about technology as we are. Perhaps we don't spend enough time outside our heavily wired home offices. We see another half-gigabyte being heaped on top of a graphics card, or another way for us to plug to more monitors into our clusters of four, and we project another era of services disruption. Decisions about destinies await our readers, we conclude, and the measure of these technologies' value in their lives is coolness.

Yet we try to write to what we believe to be the mainstream audience, paying heed to that first rule of public speaking. Well, please forgive my paraphrase, but I've been to the mainstream this week, and what I've seen is not yet the promised land. There were tens of thousands of people in that convention center this week, searching for the type of answer we haven't been giving in awhile. "My team supports sales," I recall one questioner asking during a TechEd session. "My company spent a lot of money sending our executives to a summit, only for them to come back with a mantra that says we should be closer to our customers. And everything I've seen here would put us further and further apart."

Microsoft deserves enormous credit for having the wisdom to assemble large conferences throughout the year worldwide, where its architects and its customers can exchange ideas, concepts, methodologies, and news from the field. A tremendous amount of information is exchanged there, nearly all of it priceless. Few corporations on the planet, and certainly no governments I know, are as receptive to input or as willing to expose its own ideas to public scrutiny.

Yet for a corporation that advertises itself as "people ready," you would think its leaders at the top would be as willing to communicate with those customers, to know its audience, as its people in the middle. If Microsoft or any organization is to effectively address these people in the mainstream we've just now discovered ourselves among, then there's something about them we need to understand: Coolness for them is measured by a different yardstick, having something to do with the ability to go home at the end of the day - a day which actually does have an end - to a warm and loving family, without the lingering guilt of having left undone so much of the work ahead of them.

So congratulations on your promotion, Mr. Ozzie, and thank you for stepping up to help run a company that may yet come to comprehend its customers. But please, on behalf of the mainstream, no more disruptions. Just start talking sense. We'll listen.

© 2006 Tom's Guide Publishing.

[JuntaJoe]

This sounds interesting.

Tool generates fake searches for privacy

A new tool seeks to make your searches more private by hiding them in plain sight.

TrackMeNot periodically sends fake, innocuous queries to search engines, making it harder for someone to glean your actual search habits by reviewing the companies' logs that contain your queries.

The tool comes as AOL revealed it had released the search histories of more than 650,000 subscribers. Although user names were not included, the company admitted that the search terms themselves could contain sensitive information. Two AOL employees were fired and a third resigned over the disclosure.

The tool, developed by two researchers at New York University, sends random searches, such as "boston clock" and "croissant," to the four largest search engines — Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and AOL. A fake search is made, on average, every 12 seconds under default configurations; the tool can generate millions of unique queries from its list, and users can add their own.

TrackMeNot, however, works only with the Firefox browser, which has less than 10 percent market share, according to WebSideStory.

It's also not foolproof. Someone knowing the list of terms TrackMeNot uses can simply strip those records out of the databases. Developers say they are working on expanding the list.

TrackMeNot is available at: http://mrl.nyu.edu/dhowe/TrackMeNot

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

[TriBeCa]

I love it. Once they expand the list of search terms to be more useful i just may start using it.

[Brf]

What they should do is cache the "previous user's" search and put it on your name too :twisted:

[TriBeCa]

That link is wrong, by the way -- it missed a tilde.

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/trackmenot/

[Robbo]

Windows Live OneCare Free Scanner

Windows Live OneCare safety scanner is a free service designed to help ensure the health of your PC.

Check for and remove viruses
Get rid of junk on your hard disk
Improve your PC's performance


You can run a full system can or individual scans for specific areas.

Safety.Live.com

And if you enjoy the functionality, you can purchase the application version which will cost you $50 a year, for up to 3 PC's. (There is a 90 day trial available).


Introducing Windows Live OneCare, the new all-in-one, always-on PC care service from Microsoft. It works quietly in the background on your computer, so you don't have to worry about nasty interruptions from viruses, spyware, hackers, and other unwanted intruders. It also goes beyond security, regularly backing up all your important files and cleaning up and tuning up your PC to help keep it running at top speed. Because you have better things to do with your computer.

Windows Live OneCare Product Information

[JuntaJoe]

So is it free or $50 :?:

[Robbo]

The web version is free because it only scans when you go to the site - its role is to demo the scans and make you buy the application. The application costs $50 because its an running all the time on your PC.

[JuntaJoe]

So it's just a "Norton knockoff" so MS can grab a bit of marketshare.

Hmmmm, this is really a proper topic for the web thread, so I'm moving it tonight.

[crispybacon]

Here's a thread I feel the need to Lazarus.

Take a look at this: www.jajah.com

This allows you to call two people, have them pick up and start a conversation. I'm sure the applications of this technology are fairly obvious...
________
HONDA CT50 MOTRA SPECIFICATIONS

[Brf]

Without looking at the site, what is so new about that? I could do that with my home phone for years...

[crispybacon]

But this allows you to do so with any number. Not necessarily your own...
________
Suzuki landy

[Brf]

crispybacon wrote: But this allows you to do so with any number. Not necessarily your own...

So I can steal your phone number and use it to connect two of my buddies?

[crispybacon]

So you can put in one person's phone number (say someone you don't particularly like) and connect them with another person (say a suicide prevention hotline in California). Best of all, both parties think that the other party started the call. And if you sign up for the full version (only requires an email account) you can start party line calls for a small fee-perfect for listening in!
________
AMBER TRICHOMES

[Brf]

Oh. Well, like I said, that technology has been around for decades.

Back when I turned 35, one of my buddies hooked my phone up to a Sex-and-the-Senior-Citizen info tape.

[JuntaJoe]

Microsoft hopes its AURA aids shoppers

Technologists have long dreamed of using the Internet to send data about consumer products to shoppers in real time, wherever they happen to be. Researchers at Microsoft Corp. claim they're getting closer to making that happen.

Beginning this week, people who have phones and other portable devices that run the company's Windows Mobile operating system can download a free Microsoft application known as AURA. It stands for Advanced User Resource Annotation and is designed to connect shoppers on the go to a world of information about products.

People with an AURA-enabled device would use its digital camera to snap the bar code on a product. AURA then would deliver several links and search results about the item to the handheld computer. A consumer might learn whether the same product is available for a lower price elsewhere, for example, or whether the item was manufactured in a country with controversial labor practices.

Microsoft hopes everyday users would eventually augment the information AURA delivers by using AURA's Web site to post reviews and other details about things they own.

Marc Smith, a researcher in Microsoft's community technologies group, acknowledges that "history is littered with efforts in this regard. This is not really a brand new idea at all."

He cites, for example, failed devices such as the CueCat, which could read bar codes in newspapers and magazines and send their users' PCs directly to affiliated Web pages.

But Smith argues that previous consumer-information applications have failed because until now, people weren't regularly carrying portable devices with the processing power, wireless connectivity and cameras to make such a service feasible and easy.

"Now we have to ask ourselves, what's the social application, what's going to happen when millions of people have these devices?" Smith said. While AURA is still an early-phase research project, he believes it's "a little taste of what the future be like when you can walk up to any device and interrogate it and annotate it."

___

On the Net:

http://aura.research.microsoft.com

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

[JuntaJoe]

Wikipedia co-founder seeks to start over

In just six years, Wikipedia has mushroomed into one of the Web's most astonishing successes, with 1.7 million articles in English alone. The downside is that the free encyclopedia has its share of errors and juvenile vandalism, and sometimes the writing is incomprehensibly arcane.

To Wikipedia fans, these blemishes are an unavoidable — and relatively small — price to pay for the dazzling breadth spawned by its "anyone can edit" open design.

But Larry Sanger doesn't buy it. To Sanger — who was present at the creation of Wikipedia (in fact, call him a co-founder, although that, like many things within Wikipedia, is disputed) — its charms seem to outweigh its warts simply because it has no competition.

And that's precisely what Sanger hopes to change.

This week, Sanger takes the wraps off a Wikipedia alternative, Citizendium. His goal is to capture Wikipedia's bustle but this time, avoid the vandalism and inconsistency that are its pitfalls.

Like Wikipedia, Citizendium will be nonprofit, devoid of ads and free to read and edit. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium's volunteer contributors will be expected to provide their real names. Experts in given fields will be asked to check articles for accuracy.

"If there's going to be a free encyclopedia, I'd like there to be a better free encyclopedia," says Sanger, 38, who has a doctorate in philosophy and speaks slowly, as if cautiously choosing every word. "It has bothered me that I helped to get a project started, Wikipedia, that people are misusing in this way, and yet the project itself has little chance of radically improving."

Citizendium is hardly the first Wikipedia alternative. But this is different — not only because of Sanger, but because of the questions at its core: Would Wikipedia be better if its contributors fully identified themselves? Would Wikipedia be better if it solicited guidance from academics and other specialists?

To be sure, Wikipedia's egalitarian mantra that "anyone can edit" is a huge draw, across cultures. Few are the people who have even heard of all the languages that now have a Wikipedia (Zazaki, Voro, Pangasinan, Udmurt and Shqip, to name a few).

However, critics contend the setup turns off many people with valuable expertise to share. They don't want to wade in with contributions that can be overwritten within minutes by anyone.

Stephen Ewen, an adult-education instructor in Jupiter, Fla., who gave up on contributing to Wikipedia and plans to work on Citizendium, believes the quality of Wikipedia entries often degrades over time because someone inevitably comes along to express a counterproductive viewpoint.

Contributors are free to hash out such changes on the discussion pages that accompany every article. But Ewen believes Wikipedia's anonymity reduces the accountability that stimulates healthy exchanges. To some dissidents, Wikipedia seems an inscrutable world unto itself — not unlike the devotion-inspiring virtual environs of role-playing games.

"When you put everybody in a system that is flat, where everybody can say yes or no, without any sense of authority, what you get is tribalism," Ewen says. "What has gone into the article creation is very often the result of this dysfunctional system. It presents itself with this aura of authority, whereas what goes on behind the scenes is anything but."

Whatever authority the system does have was punctured recently by the discovery that an active contributor with the pen name "Essjay" had been promoted to a high post even though he lacked the theology Ph.D. he claimed in Wikipedia editing debates.

Even when everything is in the open, the chatter isn't always collegial. It's a well-known problem: Shrouded online, people often write provocative things they'd never say to someone's face. "One more slap from you, and I'll slap back, honestly," one poster with a pen name wrote in the forum accompanying Wikipedia's article on the Sept. 11 attacks.

Sanger contends that this and other Wikipedia woes will all but vanish on Citizendium because real names will promote civility — and attract contributors turned off by Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's de facto leader, Jimmy Wales, counters that real names are overrated. Sure, he sighs just as heavily about "trolls" and other troublemakers. But he says most Wikipedians who adopt pseudonyms want to protect the reputation of those handles as much as they would with their names.

Plus, he says, an online identity — or none at all, since participants can opt to be tagged merely by their computers' numeric Internet addresses — frees contributors to leave their "real world" baggage behind and focus only on what matters: producing good content.

"I am unaware of any problems with the quality of discourse on the site," he says. "I don't know of any higher-quality discourse anywhere."

A more commonly cited peril of Wikipedia's anonymity is vandalism. In the most infamous incident, someone playing a bad joke wrote that journalist John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in both Kennedy assassinations. The entry lasted for four months of 2005.

Such abuse tends to get quickly swept away by the site's volunteers, especially if an article has been placed on a watch list by editors who are interested in the subject. Still, at any given point, Wikipedia visitors can't be sure of what they're getting. Look no further than the Seigenthaler entry: For 31 hours last September, the poor guy was said to have killed and eaten JFK.

Sanger doesn't expect Citizendium will eradicate the puerile urge to defile the product. He just will make it harder to do. Contributors must confirm their identities and submit a short biography. Sanger says he'll allow pseudonyms in special cases, like when a volunteer's employer prohibits outside writing. But the person's name would be known to Citizendium.

Wales and Sanger agree that no one should be using Wikipedia — or any other single source — as the final word on a subject, but rather as a starting point for other research. Still, if Wikipedia is going to be so big, it has a responsibility to do things right.

That's where these guys really diverge. Wales argues for self-improvement, with Wikipedians constantly tweaking the rules that guide them. Sanger is convinced that the only answer is to carve space for experts, specialists — anyone who could enhance the project's credibility.

He has given this a lot of thought since 2000. It was then, while finishing his Ph.D. at Ohio State University, that Sanger joined Bomis.com, a Web portal owned by Wales, a former options trader.

While Bomis might have been best known for its erotic photographs, Wales wanted to create a free Web encyclopedia, called Nupedia. Sanger was hired as editor-in-chief.

Nupedia aimed to form an online community of volunteers who would create content and perform expert review. But the system for soliciting and producing articles was cumbersome, and progress was slow. Eventually the group turned to free, open Wiki software ("Wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast") to make it easy for volunteers to submit content and even change each other's work.

Soon, the infectious qualities of Wikipedia made it subsume Nupedia. Sanger says he intended to keep nurturing Nupedia's expert-review idea as well, but he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, apparently because of cost-cutting in the dot-com bust.

After a brief return to academia, Sanger spent over a year with the privately financed Digital Universe project, which follows a more traditional encyclopedia model, albeit online.

But he still harbored unease about how Wikipedia was so open to abuse. When a shaken Seigenthaler called him to vent about the incident with his bio, Sanger decided it was time for a fork.

A fork, in software-development terms, is when everything about Project A gets copied by Project B, and from there they follow separate routes. A fork of Wikipedia is allowed under its "copyleft" license that lets anyone use its content as long as they are equally generous with their output.

In other words, Sanger could cut the vastness of Wikipedia and paste it into a new site, then put it through his own meat grinder, complete with rules about real names and expert review.

Last year, Sanger began organizing Citizendium as a fork of Wikipedia. He raised $35,000 from a foundation and a private donor. But he found it hard to motivate the volunteers he recruited online.

"I didn't see the kind of excitement I saw in the early days of Wikipedia," he says. "You get excited about something if you've taken responsibility for it, if you've created it yourself. By conceiving of ourselves as a big mop-up organization for Wikipedia, we essentially lock ourselves into being a version of Wikipedia. ... In order to have a robust, distinct identity, it's important, I think, that we start over."

Citizendium has been operating in a limited manner that ends with this week's official launch. Its volunteer base numbers roughly 900 authors and 200 editors. The site has 1,100 articles, with 11 "approved" by editors, meriting them a green check mark. Volunteers can revise any article, though already-approved entries are labeled as separate "drafts" while they're being rewritten again.

Because the sign-up and other steps are the antithesis of Wikipedia's brazen ease, it's hard to imagine Citizendium garnering 3 million member accounts, like Wikipedia has.

Then again, many of those accounts sit unused. Wikipedia's own statistics show that in September, the most recent month for such data, 43,000 people were considered "active" — they each contributed to more than five articles for the English site. The category of "very active Wikipedians" — those who worked on more than 100 items — numbered 4,330.

"Let's say we only have one-quarter of the contributors of Wikipedia," Sanger says. "Would we be able to create a credible competitor for Wikipedia within not too many years? Yes, I think."

But Sanger allows himself an even grander dream — that Citizendium's professionalism and civility end up attracting more people than the self-organizing hue and cry of Wikipedia. "I don't see why not," he says. "This kind of thing hasn't been tested."

Copyright © 2007 The Associated Press.