Students, teachers, and researchers around the globe have used Wikipedia to extend their understanding on just about every subject of general interest known to humans. It isn’t just the academic types. Most people refer to Wikipedia on a regular basis to answer questions, in large part due to the fact that Google loves the site more than any other on the internet. It gets presented as the top result to more queries than anything else, even Google itself. Just how big is it? Today, it has over 25 million articles. Try to fit that into an encyclopedia. This and dozens of other amazing facts are available…

Social networking, file sharing, and open source software production are all a result of the internet. The width and depth of global communication has never been larger or as easy to achieve. But how has the internet really changed society? Has it at all? There are many who would argue that internet merely gave society a new way to express behavior that has been present from the beginning. It is not the order of society that the internet has changed, merely the mode. At its simplest, society is founded on communicating knowledge. That is why language and writing were invented. The internet is just…

In the not-too-distant past, Macs were a relative rarity in the laptop bags of those attending open source conferences. Not so anymore. I recently had the chance to go through some download data from SourceForge for an article on the site’s blog and talk to Community Hacker Rich Bowen about what the data meant. Windows downloads led the pack by far, and Mac and Linux download levels swapped positions over the past couple of years. Bowen told me out he saw people whipping out MacBooks at ApacheCon and other places he never would have seen them a few years back, anecdotally supporting the overall trend…

Every IT person, developer, and programmer has an opinion when it comes to the various open source content management systems out there. It often comes down to functionality and ease of use, but even then the lines are often blurred and there is rarely a clear-cut victor. Wordpress vs Drupal vs Joomla – which is really the king of open source CMS? Our friends at Devious Media tackled the question and did a comprehensive breakdown, putting each CMS under a microscope to answer the most important questions to help people make a choice. For us, the choice is clear, but blogging is not the only thing important…

In a sign that the creativity of people is truly unbound, a guy named BÃ¥rd has designed, printed, and played a guitar that he created entirely on his own. He also is giving away the design for free. And you know what? It looks pretty sweet. Unfortunately, it won’t help anyone play the guitar better. He named this whole project Zoybar Tor, and it looks like nothing more than a slab of material with strings attached, but it is a genuine guitar in the sense of it being, well, a guitar. In the video, BÃ¥rd is clearly rocking the hell out of this thing, and it sounds pretty good to me. Did we mention he open sourced…

It may not be quite as pretty or compact as the iPad, but open source hardware company Liquidware is selling kits for a $400 build-it-yourself tablet utilizing the Texas Instruments single-board computer BeagleBoard. It all snaps together with relative ease, and the end result, while decidedly Frankensteinian, is sure to turn more heads than Johnny iPad down the street. To be fair, though, this isn’t exactly targeted at the average consumer – instead, Liquidware hopes to entice the hacker-tinkerer-developer crowd. Says Liquidware’s Justin Huynh: “With the iPad, you would have a hard…

Google has released 18 free fonts for the web in an attempt to leave the boring old fonts behind and move into the future of downloadable text-styles. In a Google I/O conference on Wednesday, the company released 18 freely usable fonts and an open-source tool, Google Font API, designed to smooth over browser issues in displaying these downloaded fonts. “With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers,” said Ralph Levien and David Kuettel of the Google Font API team in a blog…