What do you think?  Is WALL•E jammin’ or what?

1. Always online and availabe to me.
2. Doesn’t take up space on my webserver.
3. The labeling system is fantastic.  I didn’t really know this until I really started using it.
4. Integrated nicely with Mail.app or other email applications like Thunderbird and Outlook.
5. I can send and receive email from multiple accounts via one Gmail account.
6. iPhone ready.
7. Email is up even if website is down.
8. Google has the best spam protection I’ve seen.

So how did I move years worth of email to Gmail?  

1 - The first thing I did was organize my inbox.  This step is optional, but it helped me to have things in order.

2 - You either need to setup a Gmail account or Google Apps for your domain.  I did the Google Apps part as I didn’t want an additional Gmail account and it was free.

If you are doing Google Apps for your domain, make sure to move all your email into local folders in your inbox.  This includes your inbox, drafts and sent if you want to keep them.  Get them off the server so you don’t loose them when the MX records are changed.  Then go ahead and follow Google’s instructions on getting things setup and work with your host to get the email records updated.  Once that’s in place, continue.

3 - Go into your Gmail account and enable the IMAP settings.  
Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Enable IMAP

4 - Follow Google’s configuration instructions on getting your account setup in your email client.

5 - Once that’s done, you should now have two separate email accounts in your email application.  One for your old email and one for Gmail. 

6 - Setup Gmail labels to match your folder structure that corresponds with your email.

7 - Copy all your email from your old account to your new Gmail account.  Since it’s setup via IMAP, all the email will be copied to Gmail and available online.  This step may take some time if you have a lot of email.  It isn’t hard, it’s just time consuming to upload all those emails.

Really that’s all there is to it.  It’s quite easy.  It took me some time to complete, but that was because of the large amount of email I had.  

This will work on Mac or Windows or Linux; Thunderbird, Mail.app or Outlook.  The only real requirements are a Gmail account and an email application capable of IMAP.

Since moving my email over to Gmail, I’ve moved over to using Gmail as my email application via Mailplane. Google’s labeling system is just so smart!

1. Coverflow - It’s a really sweet feature, but the album art seems to only match the song that was playing when Coverflow as activated.  It doesn’t seem to update when the song changes.  Why not?
2. Google Search - Google has a great iPhone friendly versions of Google Search, yet Safari’s built in search doesn’t use it on my iPod.  It sends you to the regular Google Search results instead, which are hard to read.
3. Background - Setting the background is great, however it’s not really the background now is it?  It’d be nice to actually set the background behind my home screen and not just on the unlock screen.  Granted, there may be a few readability issues, but I’d at least like to try.
4. Notes - In MacOSX, the notes application comes along with a to-do list.  Not on the iPod Touch though.  I’d LOVE a checklist application for shopping so I can just check things off as I get them.  Super Target doesn’t have Wi-Fi so a web application isn’t going to work.
5. Sideways - Why can’t everything go sideways?  Safari can do it, and so can music and YouTube, but not the calendar or emal or a few other applications.  When I first got my iPod, I kept turning everything only to be disappointed.  It’d be nice to at least have Mail.app work sideways as it’s much easier to type that way.
6. Shuffle - On my old iPod, I could set it to shuffle, then choose a playlist, and a song, and it’d start with that sone and shuffle everything else in the playlist; regardless of where I started.  Now, I can hit shuffle and it’ll shuffle everything in the playlist, however, if I pick a song, it will only play from that song to the end of the playlist.  No shuffling.
7. Help - There seems to be no help application on the iPod.  Yes, the iPod Touch/iPhone is extremely easy to use, but things did get moved around.  It took me weeks to figure out how to rate a song.  And double clicking on the home button is a great trick, once you figure it out.  What else am I missing?
8. Web Apps Site - Did you know that Apple has a great listing of web apps for the iPod Touch?  Did you also know that it comes automatically bookmarked on your iPod?  And that it’s not optimized for the iPod?!  Wouldn’t it be smart to create an optimized version for those trying to find new apps and browsing directly from the iPod/iPhone?

Have you checked out Dromaeo.com?  It’s a Mozilla owned site that runs a set of JavaScripts and test out how fast your browser is.  I tried it on my iMac, 1.83 Intel Core Duo with 1.5 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, and found Firefox 3 beta 5 to be the fastest browser.  Oddly enough, Firefox 2 was the slowest, even behind SeaMonkey!

Granted, this is no professional test.  Firefox 2 has the  most extensions on my computer and that could cause slowness.  There are always a lot of factors to take into consideration, but this is what my tests show.

Dromaeo JavaScript Testing

2173.00ms - Firefox 3b5
3499.60ms - Safari 1.3
8193.20 - Camino 1.5.5
10798.20 - SeaMonkey 1.1.8
10859.20 - Flock 1.1
12161.40ms - Firefox 2

Did you run your own tests?  What did you find?

That got me thinking, what would be even cooler? I work in a paperless office, so a paper holder isn’t exactly what I need. What about…

• iPod/iPhone Cradle - With charging capabilities of course.
• A cell phone holder.
• Pencil holder. Kinda lame, but I always loose my pen.
• Candy dispenser. Full of M&Ms for me please.
• Atomic clock with weather capabilities.
• A Timer
• Cord Organizer
• Light so that my iSight makes me look good when chatting or playing with PhotoBooth.
• Mini keyboard with only Expose and Spaces buttons.
• USB Hub
• Flower holder. You know, for the girls. They were really popular in VW Bugs.
• Microphone for those that do audio chat.
• A bigger, multi level shelf for post-it’s and knickknacks.
• A rear view mirror so people don’t sneak up on me.
• A whiteboard so I can write down all my cool ideas.
• Funny signs to warn people of my mood. Like “If it’s important, you’d have told me about it already.” or “I was having a good day, until I got to work.”
• Some sort of cool color changing orb.
• Trash can for my candy wrappers.
• Disco ball. Who doesn’t want a disco ball?!
• Memory stick dock.
• Picture frame. For my cats of course. LOL!
• A rolladex. These are coming back in style. I just know it.
• A piggy bank. Or maybe a swear jar.
• A cool glowing Apple.

Here are the top 5 reasons why I dropped Entourage 2008.

1. No Hyperlink Support - You can’t link a few words in emails. This was one that really gets me. I’m always linking phrases to tutorials or additional resources so that people know what I’m talking about.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: This function is not available.
2. No Table Support - Entourage 2008 can read tables, but as soon as you hit reply, the table disappears and you are left with a mess of text. I get a lot of messages with tables in them (copied from Excel and pasted into Outlook) and so I do need to keep the formatting.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Entourage can *display* complex HTML such as tables but it can not *compose* messages with HTML. That’s why when you reply the formatted is gone.
3. No Strikethrough support. - Another basic HTML item that is just not available. You can’t strikeout any text and Entourage can’t read it. When someone sends me a quick update to a webpage, if I can’t see what they want me to remove, I can’t do my job.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Neither bugs nor features. Entourage is simply working as it was designed to work. Its HTML capabilities are limited. Strike-through is not one of its supported text styles.
4. Calendar Syncing is OK - I often had conflicts when I had Entourage automatically syncing to iCal. I’d open up iCal and it’d ask me which even was right; the one in iCal or Entourage? Then, trying to update my Google calendar online was another issue in itself.
5. Not so friendly help. - There is a good community of Microsoft Mac MVPs (MVPs are not Microsoft Employees) over at the official Microsoft site (also syndicated via Google Groups) and their answers are sometimes not so friendly. It made me feel bad just to ask questions.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer:
   (on the subject of inserting links into emails)
   Plain text is the preferred method for emails by people who know the internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any mail client at the other end, doesn’t impose your font, size, style preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by spam filters.

   HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites that will do malicious things. For instance, a spammer can include a link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you’ve read the email and not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP with geolocation servers to assign a location code so that they can then sell your email address to other spammers along with your general location. If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone would block it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to escape spam filters because their messages would have to b simple and without tricks.

   HTML email is wasteful, dangerous, and rude, IMO. It’s just plain evil.

Overall, Entourage 2008 is a decent application. But it’s missing so many small items that eventually, I just got frustrated and moved back to Thunderbird.

Entourage was unable to perform in a business environment for me. If your company never sends, or receives, HTML in emails, than it might work out OK for you. However, I strongly suggest checking out Thunderbird. It is an excellent email application and I’m very happy to be using it again!

Things I love:

• Projects - Projects are cool in the fact that I can group emails together, file them away, yet have easy access to them. I need to dig into this more and use it.
• Full Calendar Support - No more Outlook meeting request issues or confusion. This was a big factor in changing to Entourage at work.
• Notes & Checklist built in. Handy.
• Mac look and feel. I do think it looks pretty.
• Little Growl like email and calendar notifications.
• The day planner window is nice. Kind of in the way, but you get use to it.
• It auto corrects some of my spelling mistakes. That’s quite handy.
• It saves folders as mbox files which makes easy import/export with Mail.app or Thunderbird. Moving everything over was slick. Moving back would be just as easy.
• It links emails replies to the orgional message so I don’t have to go search for them if I want to know what I said.

Things that make me go What the @+#!

• No ability to add clickable links on text to an email message. You can’t highlight any text and and a link to it. You can only drop in a URL and let the other email client automatically link it. This is really bugging me. See the heated discussion.
• When I get links in emails Entourage often picks up the next word in the sentence so I have to manually edit quite a few links I click on.
  Example: http://www.apple.comApple
• Calendar syncing to iCal works great, but Entourage’s calendar files contain information that iCal or Google Calendar doesn’t understand. They then cause issues if trying to export from iCal and import into anything else. Or, I get sync issues and end up loosing half my dates. If there are event sync issues, never fix all of them at once. Do it one by one.
• Syncing up with Google is another issue in itself.
• No way to delete people from the ‘collected address’. Entourage adds everyone you ever emailed, or got email from, to some ‘collected address’ address book and doesn’t allow you to delete them.
• If I have text selected when I hit reply, it only puts that selected text as the quoted message. Personally, I want the entire message every time. At least Apple Mail has a checkbox where I can enable that functionality.
• No grammar check. I really thought I’d have this as I thought Entourage an Word were like BFFs.
• When importing email, it auto accepted all my old meeting requests and then notified me. Not a huge deal I guess, but annoying none the less.

Overall, Entourage 2008 isn’t horrible, but it isn’t fantastic. It’s not Outlook for the Mac, but it’s closer than anything else. For every positive there is a flaw and if there were any other solution that worked flawlessly with Outlook calendar notifications, I’d consider switching away. Ok, I’ll admit, 10.5’s Mail.app is pretty good, but I don’t have 10.5 at work.

Background. This is my first experience with Entourage. I recently used Apple Mail and then Thunderbird 2. My computer is a MacBook Pro with 10.4.x on it.

I tried using Plaxo, but they sync to your main Google calendar and not any others. This may work well if you only have one Google calendar to sync with, but that wasn’t my case.

I thought about some of the tools like Spanning Sync and gSync but Spanning says it doesn’t work right with Entourage and gSync doesn’t say anything. You’d think that since Entourage syncs with iCal, that it wouldn’t be that hard.

So I’ve come up with two work arounds.

1. Update my Google Calendar manually with my Entourage 2008 events. Manual I know, but it works.
2. Use Sunbird and Provider to sync to the Google calendar to my desktop. Then, once a week or so, select all events in my Sunbird calendar, delete them and import the ics file I export from iCal. This is almost a good solution. Still a bit manual, but you can do multiple calendar events at the same time. The downside here is that Entourage creates items in the ics file that Google and Sunbird don’t understand which cause the import to fail. Google Calendar gives me a error and line number though so I just search for the issue in the ics file and manually fix it.

The conclusion? Nothing that I’ve found automatically syncs well.

I haven’t tried GCALDaemon yet though. It may be a solution. If you try it, let me know. If you find other solutions, I’m all ears!

There are a few reasons for my switch to Entourage 2008. The biggest one is the calendar notifications. I continue to get more and more Outlook invites and updates and, where as Thunderbird and Lightning do an OK job, they are not the best. With Thunderbird and Lightning I can accept calendar events, but I can’t send an acceptance email that records my response in Outlook. It also doesn’t currently support updated events. Instead of moving the event, it just adds a second one to my calendar. And then there is the formatting issue. You open the invite in Thunderbird and it’s one big block of text. Entourage 2008 works with calendar events much better and I hope that some day, Thunderbird can match that.

Another downside to Thunderbird is message fonts. If I were to select a font for my messages, it’d either look tiny in my Thunderbird or it’d look big to Outlook users. It also didn’t carry the font through bullets and links and it just wasn’t fun. I had a hard time using the default font settings in Thunderbird as I knew that all the recipients were seeing a font like Times New Roman. So not pretty.

And then there is the luster of one application to replace four others. Not only is Entourage my email application, but my calendar, todo list and notes application all in one. I know that Thunderbird can do these too, with addons, but it’s just not as polished and integrated. Not yet anyways.

I do have high hopes for Thunderbird and hope that it continues to grow and become a real Entourage/Outlook competitor. But, for business purposes, Entourage looks as if it may be a better fit.

As I work on the transition from Thunderbird to Entourage, I’ll post updates and info along the way. I’m excited to try Entourage as I’ve never really used the application before. Entourage 2008 looks like a well designed and integrated application and I hope this is a good move.

If you have any Entourage tips, addons (or whatever they are called in Entourage) or thoughts to share, please do.

The iPhone Facebook Sidebar extension opens Facebook’s iPhone page and allows you to keep tabs on your friends, update your status, message people and accept friend requests.

Features include:

• Seeing friend’s updates.
• Updating our status.
• Viewing Friends
• Writing on friends wall.
• Viewing inbox.
• Sending messages.
• Other miscellaneous Facebook fun.
• Works on Mac and Windows. Possibly Linux too.
• Works in Firefox 2.x and 3.0.

The iPhone Facebook Sidebar is accessible three different ways in Firefox.

1. Via an icon in the toolbar. Once the extension is installed, customize your toolbar to add the Facebook icon.
   
2. Via the ‘view menu’
   
3. Or by using the keyboard shortcut ‘Control Alt F ‘ on Mac and Windows.

This extension made possible by the great programmers at Facebook who coded the iPhone application to work with any browser. All features and design elements are created by Facebook and this extension is merely a way to make it easily and quickly accessible for Firefox users.

Install iPhone Facebook Sidebar v0.8

Firefox may pop up a message under your bookmarks bar or tabs bar that says “Firefox prevented this site (www.twistermc.com) from asking you to install software on your computer.” If this happens, click on the “Edit Options…” button and add www.twistermc.com to your allowed sites. Then click the install button again.

*If you can’t get the button above to work, right click this link and save the file to your desktop. Then open the addons window and drag in the xpi file to install.

Let me know what you think by leaving your feedback in the comments below.

Also, thanks to autodafe0728 for the Facebook icon used in this extension. It really looks nice.

Mac users, also check out the similar Facebook Dashboard widget.

New features include:

1. Email client. Fully functional email that’s amazing.
2. Weather app. I love the weather, so this is like candy to me.
3. Notes. I’ve been using address book for taking notes, not so much anymore. I wish I could do check boxes though too.
4. Stocks - Not my cup of tea, but I got it.
5. Google Maps - Not only do they look great, but I can get three types of maps (line, satellite, hybrid), traffic conditions, directions and I can search for business on the map. It’ll tell me where all Targets are for example. It even has the ability to figure out where I am based on my internet connection. Doesn’t work at home, but I’m going to try it everywhere.
6. Web clips. Creating a quick shortcut to Gmail on my iPod Touches home screen is simple as pie. It’s a great way to add even more ‘virtual’ applications.
7. Multiple home screens. Just like the weather, I can flip through home screen after home screen.
8. Customizable home screens. Press, hold and it all starts to wiggle. Then I can move icons around all I want. I’ve already done this a few times.

Here is my short iPod Touch Wiggle movie.*

I do have to say that I’m very impressed with the $20 upgrade. In my mind, it’s better than coming out with new features that are only available on new iPods. Lets just hope that Apple continues to let iPod Touch owners get more software updates like this in the future.

*If anyone has tips on getting better image/video captures from iSight, let me know.

It’s really simple. All you need is Safari 3 and a Mac. Here’s how to do it.

1. Go to iphone.facebook.com in Safari 3.
2. Make your browser window as small as you can horizontally and as short as you’d like vertically. Make adjustments based on your personal likes.
3. Click the ‘Open in Dashboard’ button and select the visible screen area. If your browser window doesn’t show the button, you can go to File and select ‘Open in Dashboard.’
4. Done! Enjoy!

Now, whenever you open Dashboard, it’ll refresh the news feed and tell you what all your friends are doing. Unfortunately scrolling it’s as great as it should be, but it works sometimes.  If you need more room vertically, try to re-create the widget.

The Facebook widget features include:

• Seeing friend’s updates.
• Updating our status.
• Viewing Friends
• Writing on friends wall.
• Viewing inbox.
• Sending messages.
• All sorts of Facebook fun.

It may work with other iPhone apps too like Netvibes, Weather Underground or many others. However, if there is a good Dashboard widget already, that’s probably your best bet.

Thanks to Apple’s web clips technology, this widget is extremely easy to make. Thanks to Facebook’s iPhone application, it’s quite useful too.

Now I know this is strange. I opened up Dashboard the other day and there was a missing key on the calculator widget. Where could it have gone? It can’t just pop off. Can it?

Maybe Steve will announce Calculator 2 at MacWorld tomorrow. No buttons, just answers.

When I wrote about Mozilla’s Prism project a while ago, I was very excited for the possibility of bring web applications to the desktop. Since then, a new project called Fluid has popped up. It’s the same ideas as Prism, however is Mac only.

Fluid is a small application that is used to create stand alone applications for web apps. Think of going into your applications folder and seeing Facebook or MySpace. In the end, they are individual web browsers that are created specifically for one website.

Fluid is moving a quite a fast pace and coming up with a lot of nice features. One cool feature that Prism lacks is custom dock icons. Fluid lets you choose an icon for your application, or, if you don’t have an icon to use, it’ll automatically pull the site’s favicon.

Fluid is also starting to tie directly into websites. Facebook, Gmail and Yahoo mail applications all come with un-read message count badges in the dock just like Apple’s mail.

The biggest downside to Fluid is that it only works on Mac OS 10.5. The main application, and mini applications it creates, don’t work under 10.4. This is the only area I see Prism winning. Neither project works under 10.3 either, even though Prism claims it does.

If you are on Windows or Linux, then Prism is a great project to watch grow. If you are on a Mac, Fluid is a great contender. It’s actively being built with new features and updates every week or so.

One thing to keep in mind here is that neither application is complete. Both are still under development and features will continue to change as they grow.

Check out the screen shot I took from wordpress.org. >

See how bold words are showing up in a weird font? I checked my appearance settings in Safari’s preferences and that looks OK. I’ve also used OnyX to run all maintenance scripts and that didn’t help either.

Firefox doesn’t have this issue and it doesn’t seem to happen on 10.4.x either. Wordpress.org isn’t the only site that I’ve seen the problem, yet it doesn’t happen on all sites.

Thoughts? Ideas? Help?

The plugin re-works Wordpress’ admin area to fit in with the iPhone and iPod Touch. Actually, this post has been written on my iPod Touch. *Well, up until this point.

Sure blogging on the iPod Touch/iPhone is cool, it takes a bit longer to write a post and the WYSIWYG controls are not available. However, with the Mobileadmin plugin, it makes easier to do and it works remarkably well.

It’s a must have for any blogger on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

This year for Christmas, my wife got me an iPod Touch! This little device is extremely cool and I’m completely addicted.

I now have an iPod that plays videos and Handbrake will become my new friend. It also has a calendar built in with two way syncing with iCal. Cool!

And lets not forget Safari. I sit at home on it and surf the net. I’ve already spend hours looking up iPod Touch (or iPhone) web apps. I just wish there was a way to download them and use them offline. I guess I’ll have to wait until February when Apple should start letting developers build offline apps for the iPod Touch.

I’ve also been looking for work arounds. I wanted a text application and found a great tip where I can create an address book entry and use that. So I now have A List in my address book and it just contains one notes field where I put my shopping list or whatever else I need.

I also tried jumping on other people/companies wireless networks. As my wife drove through town, I asked her to slow down when the iPod started picking up an open wireless network. I do have to say that many more people password protect their networks than I thought. I guess that’s a good thing though.

Christmas was very good to me this year and I’m extremely happy with all gifts. I hope yours was too.

Prism is basically a version of Firefox with no address bar, no icons, no bookmarks, nothing. It’s just a browser that loads one pre-defined bookmark at a time. It sounds a little weird, but it’s really useful.

When you start up Prism, it asks you for a URL, a name, a few options and where you want to save your shortcut. Then, when you open the shortcut, it loads the website in the Prism browser and you get a clutter free, simple, web application that runs off the power of Firefox.

Prism is cool because it creates a shortcut (or bookmark) that you can add to your applications folder. Then, when you open it, your web application just appears.

The beauty of this is how easy it is to create mini applications for those with less than great organizational skills.

Imagine this, you setup a Google Calendar account for you and your friends to share. However, they never remember how to get there, the login or what’s going on. So, just create a Prism shortcut for them and tell them to open the calendar application from their computer.

Maybe you created a cool ZoHo database application but someone always forgets the URL. Just create a Prism shortcut.

You can also setup a Prism shortcut to go straight to the admin area of a blog. That way a user never has to search for the login link again, they’ve just got to double click on the blog admin application on their computer.

Sure, you’d think that bookmarks in your browser do the same thing, but there are so many people that have no idea how to organize or search their bookmarks. They either don’t bookmark anything, or they bookmark everything and can’t find anything. However, they can always find their applications folder so putting a shortcut in there would be much easier for them.

I use it to keep my Google Accounts separate. I have one I use for Gmail, one I use for branded Google Docs and a third for a shared Google Analytics account. Firefox can’t keep all three accounts separate without logging in and out, but between Prism and Firefox, I have everything under control and easily accessible. Plus, with the shortcuts in my applications folder, my built in search (Quicksliver) pulls them up quickly.

There are a few downsides though. Like all Mozilla applications, it proves to be a bit large at 43.2 MB. I have a feeling that inside Prism is a bunch of theme files and a lot of other useless junk left over from Firefox.

Also, the shortcuts have less than desirable icons. The Prism application has a fantastic icon, but the shortcuts have the standard Mozilla globe. It’s not ugly, but doesn’t go with the Prism theme.

Prism is really pretty cool. Simple idea, but quite handy. Especially for non-techie folks who can’t keep their bookmarks organized. This proves to be a simple and effective way to ensure they have the right URL every time.

As a side note, Fluid just came out. It’s like Mozilla’s Prism but made just for Mac. It looks a bit nicer, but I’m just starting to try it out.

The Install DMG still doesn’t include an alias to the Mac Applications folder. Come on Mozilla, get this one working please.

Once installed, the new Mac theme doesn’t take effect. You actually have to go download it. But once installed, it looks very nice. (Not sure about the Windows one.)

Bookmarks are integrated better. Simply star a page and it’s added, click the star again to rename it, add tags, put it in a folder or delete it.

More robust bookmarks management that includes import, export and revert options.

New places feature shows up. This is like smart folders or saved searches.

Click on a Favicon in the address bar and you’ll get site information that is usually unknown from a few of my tests. I tested apple.com, techcrunch.com and nytimes.com and all ended up unknown.

There is a new applications area in the preferences to help control how other applications interact with Firefox 3.

As promised, full Aqua widgets for Mac users. And they do look really nice.

When Firefox asks you to save a username and password, a nice browser bar shows up and doesn’t prompt you with a pop-up window

New icon to represent Plugins.

Updated download window with search box and info icons.

Firefox 3 beta 1 is also slightly lighter than Firefox 2.0.x on the Mac. The application is 45Mb as compared to 47.8. Hopefully Mozilla can continue to make it smaller; much smaller.

I’m sure there are other features that I’ve yet to come across. However, Firefox 3 is on it’s way and it’s looking like a nice upgrade.

Have you taken Firefox 3 for a spin? What have you found?

In the latest version of MacOSX, Wikipedia has it’s own tab in the dictionary. It’ll connect up to the internet and do your Wikipedia search for you.

I kind of have mixed feelings on this. Wikipedia is a good source for information, but is it really worthy of beign added into the OS? We never added any other type of encyclopedia service in the past. On the other hand, Wikipedia is very nice for researching topics. They seem to have all the facts and a good community driven site. So I guess it’s not a bad thing.

Wikipedia just kind of showed up one day and has been building momentum ever since. Google backs it quite a bit by ranking most Wikipedia pages very well. But what’s the future for Wikipedia? Will it continue to grow and be a valuable resource? Or will it end up corrupt and pointless like the DMOZ?