Navify= Wiki+Flickr+Youtube?
So it seems as if Wikipedia has been the same since the beginning of time with its bland UI. Ok, maybe not bland, but the use of images has been minimum and sadly there are no videos. In comes Navify to the rescue. There’s no pretense here. They know their role. They aren’t here to add content to the Wikipedia entry, that comes from the original Wiki itself, they’re here to enhance the user experience by providing you with images and videos and even a commenting system that complements the wiki entry. So instead of going to Google image search or Youtube, you get a multimedia aggregator on one portal itself.
When asked Navify CEO Alan Rutledge what started it all, he says “If people around the world can help each other by building a free collaborative encyclopedia, couldn’t we make it more useful for everyone by illustrating it together?”
A caveat: Some of the images recommended have absolutely no relation to the topic being selected, which tells me that there is no editorial supervision on Navify, in which case there is a huge likely hood of a lot of unnecessary stuff being included (since the images are auto-generated using tags). At the same time a lot of people seem to be having issues with Navify regarding attribution.
Also, what I observed was that unlike videos, the direct images can’t be added by people (although the tag says edited by people like you). These images are possibly taken directly from Wikipedia.
But Navify is working hard to improve all these glitches. Personally, I think it’s a great concept. It surely saves up on a lot of time and makes Wiki-ing a much better experience especially for people who spend a lot of time on the encyclopedia. Also, the commenting feature (which thankfully uses Disqus) will possibly help bring in more traffic and turn each page into an active discussion forum. In its best case scenario, with Navify, every wikipedia page should become a community in itself, with discussions from journalists, bloggers, enthusiasts etc.
Navify was recently selected for the fb Fund REV, Facebook’s new incubator.
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You better check out http://tagbulb.com , it does far more thing than what navify does