We've covered a number of Web history tracking and organizing tools in the past, but Wikipedia Diver may be one of the most interesting, albeit niche. This Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.
Each visited page is presented as a small red globe that you can click on to advance the timeline. There's also a source list of every site you visited, that will take you right to the page.
Tiny red balls tell you how you got from looking at video game descriptions to the molecular makeup of precious metals.
(Credit: CNET)Like some other Web history trackers, Wikipedia Diver intelligently tracks when you hit the back button on your browser. Each time you leave whatever Wikipedia entry you're on to visit a link that's on that page, it simply attaches it to your history. In one entry I was looking at, I had clicked on seven different links that were on that page, and the extension kept track of how I had arrived at each of those pages. That in itself can be fun to look at--e.g. how I got from the Zoopraxiscope to the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen.
One thing it does not track are the reference links you click when exiting the site to view a source. I'd like to see this added as an option, but understandably that takes it into the realm of watching everything you do.
Also worth a mention is that all of this data is kept safe and secure on your local machine, and never sent to the cloud. Like any other extension that does this, this means that your information isn't being beamed elsewhere, although you can only access your history on that particular machine, and in that particular browser.
Wikipedia users will be getting new tools for uploading, editing, and viewing video very soon. According to a Beet.TV interview with Erik Moller, who is the deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation, we'll see all of these things shortly. However, what's more interesting is the Web encyclopedia's choice of video formats and how it fits into a fracas in the browser world.
Wikipedia has been working on video support for years, and is putting considerable effort into making it easier for users to upload video--specifically, to bridge a video format divide. Moller says that while Wikipedia is still planning to use Ogg Theora (an open-source video codec that can be played back natively inside the latest version of Firefox, and soon Chrome and Opera) there may be tools that will convert video shot in alternate formats so that no special software, or user effort is required.
In the meantime, Wikipedia's solution is for users to do that conversion on their end. Moller says that one solution is FireOgg, a Firefox-only browser plug-in which can transcode user videos to Ogg Theora on the user's hardware.
One issue that still lingers with Wikipedia's slow move to video is its choice of codec. Codecs are the software modules that encode and decode audio and video, shrinking it down into sizes that can be more easily transmitted through the Web. Wikipedia's a large and very popular site, meaning whatever video format it's using will have a big impact on the Web and its standards. Wikipedia's choice to go with Ogg Theora puts further stress on where browsers and site creators alike stand on HTML 5 video, which is emerging as a hotly-contended Web standard.
Unlike the H.264 codec, which has been promoted in both Google and Apple's products and services, Ogg Theora allows for downloading, remixing, and re-uploading without licensing fees. On the other hand, much of today's computing hardware (including newer mobile devices) comes equipped with on-board H.264 decoding, meaning less processing power is spent playing back the videos.
Microsoft, Apple, and Google have been less avid about promoting the Ogg Theora format in their browsers, and have put resources behind H.264 instead. Google's Chrome, in fact, supports it (along with H.264), however Google has gone on the record as saying its quality was not as good as it wanted. Google has also sunk considerable resources into re-encoding YouTube's entire library of videos into H.264, making the company less likely to switch camps.
Regardless, Web video has come a long way since earlier standards and competing formats. Pioneers like Macromedia (now Adobe) with its Flash format, and Apple and its streaming QuickTime standard have helped pave the way for a bevvy of start-ups that rely on the latest codecs to create new and salable parts of their businesses. The big question is whether open-sourced codecs like Ogg Theora will have that same kind of sticking power. Being the go-to format on one of the Web's most popular sites certainly won't hurt.
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