In a very interesting post on Techdirt, Michael Masnick attacks the oft-(ab)used “Brain Surgery” argument used by Wikipedia-haters.

It goes something like this: “If you needed brain surgery, would you trust someone who was trained as a brain surgeon, or someone who learned brain surgery from Wikipedia?” An alternative version of the question is “would you allow a ‘crowd’ of people to perform brain surgery on you.”

Masnick takes this (in my view very short-sighted) argument apart piece by piece (and does that very well), but is also open an honest about Wikipedia’s role as the source for information:

This isn’t to say that Wikipedia is perfect. It’s not. It’s got plenty of problems. But the lesson that this professor should be teaching is that you can’t trust any source by itself, and you should double-check and confirm any information you find, whether it’s from Wikipedia, a supposed “professor” or anyone else. It’s not brain surgery to understand such a lesson.

Read the full article here.

Adam Darowski has a very interesting post up on his blog (link) on using the URL as a direct-access user interface. I completely agree with what he’s saying, I use the described way of URL hacking as well to see if I can access other parts of a website, but I’m often foiled by completely unreadable URLs or URLs that rely on code numbers or hashes. A quote:

If people use your site enough, they’ll want an even faster way to reach the content they want. They’re not browsing anymore. They are power users. They know what they want. Give them a nicely hackable URL to do this.

Read the full article here.

I’ve been using Bloglines for a long time, but as of yesterday I switched to Google Reader (thanks to a tip from my friend Moqub). Both are web-based RSS feed readers, and they do mainly the same thing, but still I like Google Reader better. Here’s a short comparison as to the why:

• Google Reader integrates with my Gmail account and other Google personalised settings
• I really like Google’s active “read” marking. As you scroll through a feed’s posts, the posts you “pass” are automatically marked as read (can be disabled)
• Adding, managing and sorting feeds is easier on Google (I always found Bloglines’ interface somewhat clunky)
• I like the overview page you get with Google Reader, showing you a selection of your new unread posts

Yeah. Google wins another one.