September 16th, 2008
Powerset studies student use of Wikipedia... and faculty resistance
Earlier this month, Microsoft-owned Semantic Web startup Powerset released figures from a small survey of student use of Wikipedia.
As I explore here, the results certainly do suggest that Wikipedia is popular with the cohort surveyed in this study. The trick for Powerset, presumably, is to convert those Wikipedia users into Powerset users… and to find ways to counter the faculty resistance that these students report.
With parent company Microsoft having canned perhaps the most obvious integration point between the unmediated horrors of Wikipedia and the authoritative content procured by Universities for their students, it’s unclear how they might set about doing this.
If it’s true that Bill Gates is taking a personal interest in this space, then perhaps he can work it out… if he can tear himself away from buying shoes;
“‘Bill [Gates] has definitely not retired for us,’ said Scott Prevost, Powerset’s general manager and product director, referring to Chairman Bill Gates’ move to part-time work at Microsoft. Prevost also spoke during the meeting with reporters.
Powerset figures prominently in Microsoft’s search work. The start-up’s technology only made it as far as indexing and searching Wikipedia, but results, even from that relatively narrow domain, will be used to augment Microsoft’s search results.”
Paul Miller provides consultancy and analysis services at the interface between the worlds of Cloud Computing and the Semantic Web. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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