Wikipedia will soon be available on the iPad with the launch of new app, ‘Discover’, according to a report by cnet.com.

Discover is the first app from software company Cooliris, which already produces an iPhone app that enables its users to turn photo collections into “interactive 3D wall” art.

The new app uses content from Wikipedia and organises the data into sections which can be browsed in a magazine format instead of having to scroll down a long browser window.

The end result is a Wikipedia with larger text that can be read like an e-book and photos that can be thumbed through and scaled up to the iPad’s full resolution. The app also takes advantage of orientation to reposition, expand or consolidate the data it’s showing. Along the way, Cooliris serves up advertisements, which is where it can make some of its money given the app’s free price tag.

Discover has been submitted to the App Store and users are invited to sign up here to be notified of its availability.

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In keeping with the Twitter mishap theme, an unfortunate TV station billboard in the US, via Cnet News:

“The enterprising folks at WPMI TV in Mobile, Ala., decided that they should reach out on a real-time basis to their viewers. They erected a billboard, adorned it with an image of three of its most photogenic anchors, and added a live Twitter feed. The whole thing ran very smoothly, until a passing human took this photograph and sent it in to The Palmetto Scoop.”

‘A slightly unfortunate Twitter billboard’ at this link…

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CNET.com will now share data from its technology reviews, news and blog posts on using Thomson Reuters’ Open Calais platform, allowing other publishers to use the information.

According to this report, CNET will publish certain sets of editorial data and some commercial information, for example data on its software download services, using the semantic API.

Signing up to OpenCalais will also enable CNET to generate topic pages.

Full story at this link…

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“Google News was inaccessible for many on Thursday morning. But when it re-emerged, it sported newly prominent news videos hosted at YouTube,” reports Cnet.

Some of the news headlines now feature a small YouTube logo. “Clicking on it triggers an embedded YouTube player with a news video. Although the videos had been present before, Google is calling attention to them with the new logo as part of a facelift launched Thursday,” Cnet explains.

Full post at this link…

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Don Reisinger explains how Twitter has rendered RSS readers redundant as a means of tracking news.

Read the full post…

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CNET’s Josh Lowensohn reviews the news tracking features of seven blog aggregators to mark the launch of Google’s own revamped blog search.

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No, it’s not a typo – CNET has moved up the alphabet to introduce BNET, a new website featuring original and syndicated news, analysis and blogs on industry sectors including health care, energy and financial services.

BNET Australia and BNET UK have also been rolled out, Reuters reports.

“You look at a lot of the content that’s available, it still predominantly lives in trade journal articles. And then there’s a lot of content that’s sort of housed behind subscription firewalls. And so, consequently, it’s very fragmented,” Greg Mason, CNET’s senior vice president of the business media group, says in the Reuters report.

“There are good online newsletters that cover specific industries, but they’re sort of hit-or-miss.”

Will the new site be friend or foe to B2B publishers?

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