While the rest of the media frets about China and Chinese state-owned CNOOC Ltd.'s bid for oil company Unocal Corp., CNET News.com has moved on to look at India and it's ability to become a technology powerhouse.
The article is interesting, and India has certainly come much further than China in terms of having people who speak English and are well educated, but it also contains a feature I have not seen on CNET's news site before — a wiki. For those of you who are wondering what a wiki is, it's a collaborative research tool that is edited by a community of users. Popularized by Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that's continuously edited by users, a wiki was recently tried and discarded for the editorial pages of the LA Times. Now CNET's trying it, and already the wiki has some scathing comments about the story's "factual errors" on a map, some banal comments about India's progress and some real discussion about the lack of infrastructure in India perhaps slowing its growth.
So far, the wiki looks more like a discussion board, rather than a trove of reader submitted editorial content, but we'll just have to watch and see. Just like we'll have to watch and see where India and China emerge in the IT industry. —Stacey Higginbotham
Go to CNOOC story from The Deal
Go to story from CNET News.com
Go to CNET's wiki
Go to Joshua Jaffe's social media story from Tech Confidential
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