Conservapedia – http://www.conservpedia.com/Main_Page
Recently New Media profiled the popular Wikipedia. This week we bring you Conservapedia.
Conservapedia is yet another wiki (a website that allows visitors to add, remove, and otherwise edit and change content, typically without the need for registration) which is surprisingly quite popular with over 1,600,000 page views already, and over 17,100 page edits.
This site has 3,800 of what Conservapedia calls educational, clean and concise entries on historical, scientific, legal, and economic topics. Conservapedia on its main page describes itself as “a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian ‘C.E.’ instead of ‘A.D.’, which Conservapedia uses.”
Briefly, Conservapedia’s gripes against Wikipedia include (but are not restricted to): strong anti-American and anti-capitalist bias, along with the foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. They also believe Wikipedia distorts the fact of Benjamin Franklin’s youthful acceptance of deism by never acknowledging that he later abandoned it.
It gets even better when they point out that gossip is pervasive on Wikipedia, with many entries reading like the National Enquirer.
The most predictable criticism they have is with evolution: they claim that edits to include fact against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored. On Conservapedia, contributions that meet simple rules are respected to the maximum extent possible. Finally, they comment on Wikipedia’s popularity with the assertion that “Wikipedia claims that it has 1.5 million articles, but what it does not say is that a large number of those articles have zero educational value. For example, Wikipedia has 1075 separate articles about ‘Moby’ and ‘song’.”
The problem with pointing this out is that Wikipedia’s amount of detail is a very valuable resource – you will find out about everything you want to know about any subject, and unfortunately Conservapedia’s database has yet to catch up.
Internet Movie Database – www.imdb.com
With all the news about the Oscars over the last week and Martin Scorsese’s long-time-coming win, you might be wanting to read up more about great films and directors. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is the quintessential website to check out when you want to know when movies came out and who wrote, starred in, and produced them. It’s not just limited to good cinema, as there is even substantial info on all the lemons. IMDb has a handy rating-system for its registered users, where you can make a comment on the films and rate them out of ten. Every film listed has the user-rating at the top right-hand corner with ten possible stars. IMDb’s top user rated film The Godfather (1971) has 9.1 stars, with ‘Crossover’ (2006) bottoming out on 1.3 stars.
American Film Institute’s Best Film of All Time, as voted by the Institute’s members in 1998: Citizen Kane (1941) received 8.6 stars. Or TIME Magazine’s Top All Time 100 list, as chosen by TIME’s movie critics Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel. I tested my long-time favourite Star Wars, which received 8.7 stars.
IMDb is not just finding out about every film you could think of, or checking out their user-ratings. There are other good features like Tops At The Box Office, Opening This Week, Coming Soon, New DVDs This Week, Upcoming DVDs, Movie TV/News and Message Boards. Given globalisation, a lot of these features may be America-centric, but are easily applicable and can be useful for Kiwi movie buffs.
YouTube X – www.youtubex.com
Don’t you hate it when you’re on YouTube and you can’t down- load your favourite videos and watch them offline? Instead you eat up bandwidth, which in turn burns a hole in your pocket.
Well now there’s a handy solution for your YouTube addiction. You can use www.youtubex.com (not to be confused with the x-rated www.xtube.com), which allows you to download videos directly from YouTube. When you visit you get easy-to-follow instructions with a small address bar in the middle of the screen to copy and paste the YouTube video feeds into.
This involves copying the video information from the address bar on your browser when you visit www.youtube.com (for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFbEBVuVHZc) and pasting it into an address bar in the centre of the screen at youtubex.
Then it is a simple process of clicking on a download button that will come up. What happens next is that the video information from www.youtube.com is captured as a flv (Flash Video) file and downloaded so you can watch it offline with a flash player (these are available on the site as are flash video converters to convert the flv files to other common video formats like MPEG and AVI).
YouTube Video Of The Week: Hamster Dance
This is shit but this video gives you an idea about what Youtube is all about… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFbEBVuVHZc