reference

Google Maps is starting to roll out a beta of walking directions in addition to driving directions, the Google Operating System fan blog noticed on Monday.

It looks like it's available to select users in select locations for the time being, and indeed, I can't access it from my Google account yet. It's also unclear whether this will get expanded to the mobile version of Google Maps, where the availability of walking directions would certainly help.

This sort of feature can be very useful in cities with lots of one-way streets, like New York, or with parks … Read more

Microsoft may be interested in acquiring Yell Group, the British-based parent company of directories like the U.K.'s Yellow Pages and the United States' Yellow Book, Reuters reported Tuesday. Yell isn't commenting, but shares of the company stock rose up to 5.4 percent amid the speculation.

Yell's properties do not include the U.S.-based Yellow Pages, which is operated by AT&T. Yell came to fruition with the debut of the British Yellow Pages in 1966, and expanded to the U.S. when it acquired Yellow Book USA for $665 million.

Yelp, the business reviews site famed for a vociferous user base willing to be brutally honest about the quality of their local restaurants, bars, bookstores, dog groomers, adult gift shops, and what-have-you, has launched a new service for those business owners to interact with the site's users.

Called "Yelp for Business Owners," the section of the site lets business owners register for special Yelp accounts, which they then need to verify by phone. Once registered, they have access to some analytics (namely to see how many people have been viewing their business page), receive e-mail alerts when … Read more

Wikipedia might not take too kindly to pranks any other day of the year, but the anyone-can-edit encyclopedia sure had some fun with April Fools' Day.

The site revamped its "On This Day" section with events that actually did happen on April 1, but with the wording cleverly tweaked to make them sound ridiculous. "(In 1969) The British-born model Hawker Siddeley Harrier was introduced at a Royal Air Force event, becoming the only one in the 1960s to successfully perform on a short runway," Wikipedia's front page read. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier is actually an … Read more

Time Warner unit AOL announced early Monday morning that it has acquired Yedda, a question-and-answer start-up that was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2006. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition, according to a release from AOL, was all about Yedda's code: the patent-pending semantic technology "automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question." Yedda-powered features are set to begin appearing on AOL's sites over the next few months.

AOL makes plenty of acquisitions, but most of the recent ones have … Read more

Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, has made plans to acquire HowStuffWorks, which calls itself "the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works."

The news was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal, which named a price of $250 million.

Atlanta-based HowStuffWorks, which was founded in 1998 by North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain (yes, that's his real name), pulls in about 3.8 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to ComScore. Instead of issuing a press release to announce the … Read more

The bookmarking and reference service I use most is adding a show-and-tell slideshow feature. Diigo lets you mark up Web pages, then share and export your notes. Its new WebSlides, in closed beta testing, will enable you to create narrated presentations of Web pages that you've saved and annotated.

Diigo is meant to be more practical than something like StumbleUpon, a fun way to discover new sites. Diigo Vice President Maggie Tsai touted Diigo WebSlides at the Office 2.0 conference today as an ideal tool for teachers. Her demo showed off handy-looking recording and playback controls for making … Read more

Answers, the creator of Answers.com, plans to purchase Lexico Publishing Group, the parent of Dictionary.com.

Through the deal, Answers will inherit a collection of Web properties that "generate approximately three times the total page views of Answers.com," according to an Answers statement.

In addition to Dictionary.com, Lexico also owns Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.

Lexico Web sites had a total of 11.5 million unique users in June, Answers Chairman and CEO Robert S. Rosenschein said in a Tuesday Webcast.

"The combined properties (of Answers and Lexico) would have reached a total of … Read more

Many an audio purist will insist that you need large tower speakers for a truly "weighty" sound in your home theater. Meanwhile, the other 90 percent of the population can't abide their living room being taken over by giant, black sonic monoliths--thus the ever-growing market for fashion-friendly "lifestyle" speakers. Canada's Paradigm already offered a variety of smaller speakers (such as the Cinema 110CT 5.1), but the company's upped the design ante with the just-announced Reference Millenia 20 Trio. The $1,000 unit combines the three front channels of a surround system--left, center, … Read more