Learnist builds on Grockit’s social teaching concept while adding another element that company founder Farb Nivi claims is crucial: The visual element.

Think of Learnist as something of a mashup between Pinterest and Wikipedia. Users find content from across the Web — videos, news stories, music, Soundcloud links and what have you — and post it to a personal board that other users can follow. It’s ideal, Nivi says, for teachers who want to curate multimedia lessons for students to follow, though without the feel of a stodgy, traditional lesson plan.

Grockit has already garnered a following, attracting more than a million users through its test prep service product alone. But the user pool for online test prep is only so large. With Grockit’s wiki-like Learnist product, the company hopes to spread its reach far beyond the cramming crowd. Facebook integration, which the product indeed has, will only help to further the cause.

Naturally, iPad and iPhone apps are in the works, to be expected in the coming weeks.

Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice. Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica.

– From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s keynote address at the Internet Society’s INET convention in Geneva

Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.

– Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., which has stopped printing physical books after 244 years, and will stop selling them when current inventory runs out

On Tuesday, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. said it would stop printing its namesake books, a sign of how readers in recent years have abandoned printed reference volumes for websites such as Wikipedia and Google.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The activity of skiing goes back a long way in human history. Wikipedia tells me that there are cave drawings dating back to about 5,000 B.C., depicting people on skis. And pieces of wood, thought to have been primitive skis used for transportation and to help hunt wild game, have been found in Greenland dating as far back as the 10th or 11th century.

I didn’t know any of that before I took my first skiing lesson a few days ago. To make a long story short, I fell three times, didn’t break any bones, and had a fantastic time on the slopes in Beaver Creek, Colo.

I also know that I skied a total of 2,830 vertical feet.

What tells me so precise a number is a Web service called EpicMix created by Vail Resorts, of which Beaver Creek is a part. The service tracked my skiing activity and awarded me a set of different badges, in a manner reminiscent of Foursquare. Since it was my first time, I earned a “First Run” and a “Toe Dipper” badge, both for first timers, plus one for having visited Beaver Creek itself. It also tracked how many times I rode up the various lifts.

Central to it are ski pass cards that are enabled with RFID tags. When you get on a lift, your tag gets scanned, making your movements trackable. That might strike some as creepy, but it also makes it easy to track your stats throughout the season and over time.

So, if you want to brag about having skied some advanced black diamond-level run, there’s no disputing it. You can just point your doubters to EpicMix. It’s also really social: You can share your stats on Facebook and Twitter, and friends from both networks can easily be added to your list of friends on EpicMix.

There are also pictures. Professional photographers are stationed around the resort snapping photos of skiers in action or between runs. As long as the photographers get a scan of your pass, your photos show up in your EpicMix account, and you can buy a high-quality download for $20. They only caught me once after my lesson was over for a group shot with my patient and mellow instructor Tom Newman and fellow first-time skier, Claire from London, who took the class with me. As you can see from our faces, it’s probably not the last time we’ll be seen with long, flat things attached to our feet.

Okay, okay, we get it: Morgan Stanley got the coveted left-hand lead position on Facebook’s blockbuster IPO filing. Goldman Sachs is there, too, but in the third-place, always-a-bridesmaid spo,t and is crying big salty tears about the injustice of it all.

It’s hard to feel badly for overpaid investment bankers, and focusing on them is kind of like endlessly discussing the lawyers who processed your mortgage, when the focus should be on the house you’re buying.

Does anyone except a few Richie Rich ZIP Codes in Manhattan care about this one deet of the initial public offering of the social networking giant?

Nope, but there is so little real news ahead of the IPO filing expected today that this is what we are chomping on this morning, as everyone awaits the big doc drop at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sources said it is likely to come this afternoon rather than this morning, though. And, perish the thought, all that dotting of I’s and crossing of T’s could delay it to tomorrow, even (unlikely, but mebbe!).

Sigh.

Tidbit: Facebook was actually founded the first Wednesday in February of 2004 in an undergraduate dorm room at Harvard University, like today but eight years later.

Thus, here’s a boring Facebook history timeline chart to look at:

Okay, that was really dull.

What up? The board met, the spinmeisters are at the ready and, most of all, Silicon Valley is stoked to make some more arrogant badillionaires.

Now, hopefully, we’ll get the real news about Facebook.

Namely, who’s getting the big dough in this much-anticipated Web 2.0 gambit? Co-founder and CEO and Hoodie Commander Mark Zuckerberg fer sure, but who else?

Plus all the juicy financials from Facebook, along with stats in usage, growth and just how much the company sticks it to its gaming serf — oops, partner — Zynga and others for the privilege of being on its all-powerful platform.

Me? I pay nada, like other Facebook users, for being able to show off pictures of my vacations and decline friendships from PR people I like, but still … well, you know.

Here is another Facebook financial chart that will not knock your socks off unless you are an accountant:

I am now so comatose waiting for the show to begin that I briefly began a liveblog of my activities this morning.

It went like this:

4:45 am PT: Done with AOL Q4 earnings, which were meh, but better meh than expected. AOL, if you recall, used to be Facebook and now is, um, not.

Note to Zuckerberg: Be nice to people on your way up, since you’ll meet them again on the way down.

4:46 am PT: I check the SEC site and get zip. Click, click, clickety-click over to find out the latest on Demi Moore and her fake-pot debacle.

Who knew there was synthetic cannabis and it is called K2 or Spice? Not me! According to Wikipedia: “It seems likely that synthetic cannabis can precipitate psychosis and in some cases it is prolonged.”

I decide to blame Ashton Kutcher and then wonder if he is an investor in Facebook via BFF-to-errant-celebrities-who-like-tech Ron Conway, also a Facebook investor.

Note to self: Call Ashton! That dude plays village idiots all the time, but I am not fooled by Mr. Pretty Face.

4:47 am PT: I consider email bombing Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, who is probably not so busy right now, and asking him what he thinks about the Demi Moore crisis and also Facebook’s IPO.

Remember when Yahoo was king of Silicon Valley and Yang posed in that purple VW on the cover of that magazine? Better still, remember when Yahoo was going to buy Facebook for just over $1 billion and then borked it?

Just sayin’, Mark — so, keep it reals!

4:48 am PT: I consider going out for doughnuts — and not because of any real weed need. I just would like me some glazed and sprinkled sugar treats right about now. Then, I could post the pictures of them on my Facebook page.

Sweet.

But you-know-who would file right when I left the house on the munchie run. Click, click, clickety-click over to the SEC site and I come up peanuts.

Time to check in on the Kardashians.

You get the idea — so, Facebook IPO, take me away!

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Orange said it plans to roll out the free service over the course of 2012 to customers in 20 countries, with access in the first countries launching early this year. The service will be available on any phone with an Orange SIM card and the ability to view the mobile Web, with no data plan required.

“In countries where access to information is not always readily available, we are making it simple and easy for our customers to use the world’s most comprehensive online encyclopedia,” Orange Executive VP Marc Rennard said in a statement. “It is the first partnership of this kind in the world where we are enabling customers to access Wikipedia without incurring any data charges.”

Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said the partnership with Orange will give Wikipedia access to millions who have not had it.

“Wikipedia is an important service, a public good, and so we want people to be able to access it for free, regardless of what device they’re using,” Gardner said.

Oh, just peruse it:

One thing that was particularly fantastic from the protests over the two bills in Congress that most of the Internet was protesting over yesterday, was the plethora of creative videos that were released.

Here are two that I liked a lot — a comic one from Jest, called “Wikipedia/SOPA Survival Kit”; and a very cogent argument against the legislation, from Clay Shirky on the TED Web site, titled “Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)”:

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Facebook:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.):

The Internet has become an integral part of everyday life precisely because it has been an open-to-all land of opportunity where entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators are free to try, fail and then try again. The Internet has changed the way we communicate with each other, the way we learn about the world and the way we conduct business. It has done this by eliminating the tollgates, middle men, and other barriers to entry that have so often predetermined winners and losers in the marketplace. It has created a world where ideas, products and creative expression have an opportunity regardless of who offers them or where they originate.

Protect IP (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are a step towards a different kind of Internet. They are a step towards an Internet in which those with money and lawyers and access to power have a greater voice than those who don’t. They are a step towards an Internet in which online innovators need lawyers as much or more than they need good ideas. And they are a step towards a world in which Americans have less of a voice to argue for a free and open Internet around the world.

Legal Team, Red Hat Software:

In a single generation, the Internet has transformed our world to such an extent that it is easy to forget its miraculous properties and take it for granted. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that our future economic growth depends on our ability to use the Internet to share new ideas and technology. Measures that block the freedom and openness of the Internet also hinder innovation. That poses a threat to the future success of Red Hat and other innovative companies.

The sponsors of SOPA and PIPA claim that the bills are intended to thwart web piracy. Yet, the bills overreach, and could put a website out of business after a single complaint. Web sites would vanish, and have little recourse, if they were suspected of infringing copyrights or trademarks.

The good news is that there is growing opposition from many quarters to these bills. Just this past weekend, the White House expressed serious concerns, opposing legislation — like SOPA and PIPA — that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.

Lanham Napier, CEO, Rackspace:

In my last blog post on SOPA and PIPA, I explained why Rackspace — along with much of the Internet community — opposes these bills in their current form. They are well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.

Since then, I and other Rackers have been working with key lawmakers to fix the bills so that they will (a) actually be effective in fighting online piracy, and (b) avoid disrupting the Internet or imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers.

We at Rackspace are on the front lines of the battle against copyright infringers and other online criminals. We employ dedicated teams that take enforcement actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as our own strict Acceptable Use Policy every day. We agree that better tools are needed for this fight but SOPA and PIPA do not fit the bill.

Gary Shapiro, President and CEO, Consumer Electronics Association:

“It is increasingly clear that bills causing collateral damage to innovation in the guise of fighting piracy are not politically viable. Now that unreasonable solutions to piracy have been shown not to work, it is time to explore reasonable ones. We urge policymakers to join CEA in support of the OPEN Act — a bicameral, bipartisan and narrowly targeted approach to fighting foreign “rogue websites.”

Paul Hortenstine, Motion Picture Association of America, which supports the bills:

The legislation targets criminals: foreign thieves who profit from pirated content and counterfeit goods. These foreign rogue websites are operating freely today while legitimate American businesses are opposing legislation that would block these criminal websites from the American market.

The Pirate Bay, a site that links visitors to pirated content and would arguably fit someone’s definition of “foreign rogue Web site”:

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really.

To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

Ben Greenman, Contributor, The New Yorker:

Dear Spanish speakers, I was only joking when I said you think we’re all protesting soup. Geez: People are so touchy on blackout days

January 18, 2012 8:44 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@bengreenman

Ben Greenman

Many Internet companies and boldfaced names in tech have in recent weeks been vociferously opposing the passage of the bills, saying the provisions that would thwart piracy would also create an environment of censorship and unfairly target certain sites as being compliant in piracy. Supporters of the bills, meanwhile, say that the laws are necessary to clamp down on sites that circulate copyrighted content outside the U.S.

For those protesting the bills, some Web sites and developers have created options to help other Web users who want to black out all or portions of their sites.

SopaStrike.com is offering “blackout code” for Web users to copy and paste into the theme section of Web sites to protest SOPA/PIPA. The site says the code will only be available today.

The site encourages visitors to join the strike, sign up online and send letters to Congress. It also has a full list of confirmed participants in the strike.

CloudFlare is offering a “Stop Censorship” app that blacks out intermittent words on your site (you have to have a CloudFlare account to access the app). Visitors to your site will see the black bars only the first time they visit; after that, they’ll see a black “censored” label in the upper left corner of the site. CloudFlare also says it won’t block links, and is taking an SEO-friendly approach to blacking out words.

For users who don’t have a CloudFlare account, there’s a plugin available on GitHub, created by CloudFlare coder Mike Sofaer.

Some Webmasters might be concerned about the short-term impact of blacking out their sites, even if it is in solidarity with the national protest. WebMonkey points to a Google+ post from Google’s Pierre Far on how to black out sites the “right” way. He also notes, interestingly, that Google’s crawl team has configured Googlebot to crawl at a much lower rate for today only, so that the Google search results of Web sites involved in the strike are less likely to be affected today.

Around midnight last night, Google put up a blackout banner in front of its homepage logo; Wikipedia, BoingBoing and other sites also went dark. As AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl writes, sites like Google could find themselves in legal hot water under SOPA and PIPA just for linking to pirated content in search results.

Still confused about what the SOPA protests are all about? AllThingsD has been covering the story, so here’s the latest, along with a growing list of participating Web sites. And the Guardian has a video explainer here.

That’s the phrase that has been greeting visitors to the English-language sections of Wikipedia since midnight Eastern Time. Other sites, like BoingBoing, began their protest just minutes ago as I’m writing this at 8 am ET. BoingBoing displayed a “503: Service Unavailable” message against a black background, saying it was “because the U.S. Senate is considering legislation that would certainly kill us forever.”

They were just two examples of the coordinated Web-wide protest taking place against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and a companion bill, PIPA. Numerous other major sites were also taking part, according to SOPAStrike.com, a site boosting the protest. Mozilla and WordPress.org were taking part by blacking out their sites and directing visitors to take-action pages. The Internet Archive was to go dark for 12 hours today, beginning at 6 am PT. Google covered most of its colorful logo in a black banner and placed a link to a take-action page on its home page.

Many Internet companies are railing against the bills because, they argue, the provisions included amount to censorship and don’t properly protect sites accused unfairly of enabling piracy. In a post on its company blog, Google chief legal officer David Drummond wrote that the bills “provide incentives for American companies to shut down, block access to and stop servicing U.S. and foreign websites that copyright and trademark owners allege are illegal without any due process or ability of a wrongfully targeted website to seek restitution.” Under SOPA and PIPA, sites like Google could find themselves in legal hot water just for linking to pirated content in search results. “We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world,” Drummond wrote.

Supporters of the two bills argue that the laws are necessary to clamp down on sites that operate outside the U.S., enabling the circulation of pirated films, TV shows and other copyrighted content.

Chris Dodd, the former senator who is now President of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a blog post that the protests on the Web are “stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.”

The White House had announced over the weekend that President Obama doesn’t support either SOPA or PIPA in their current forms.

Update: A few folks have pointed out to me that Wikipedia is still technically available via smart phones and mobile devices. Also if you disable Javascript in your computer’s browser it circumvents the blackout. There’s more on that in this FAQ on Wikipedia’s blackout and also in this technical FAQ.

@digiphile @jayrosen_nyu that’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.

– Dick Costolo, via Twitter, in response to a tweet by Alex Howard wondering whether Twitter would participate in Wikipedia’s Jan. 18 SOPA blackout

iStockphoto | oblachko

The plan is simple: Sites participating in the protest will go dark for the day or take some other action. Wikipedia, for example, will black out the English-language portions of its site for 24 hours. The move will likely shut out some 10 million users during the course of the day.

Politico pegs the estimated number of sites that will be affected in some way by the protest at 7,000.

Among the sites participating:

• Google will post a link on its home page to a document explaining its opposition to the bill.
• Mozilla.com, home of the popular Web browser Firefox, will go dark will do two things, see the update below.
• Reddit, the social news site owned by Advance Publications, will go dark.
• WordPress.org will go dark.
• TwitPic, the popular site where Twitter users share photographs, will go dark.
• MoveOn.org, the liberal-leaning political site, will go dark.
• The Cheezburger network, including sites like The Daily What and Fail Blog, will be dark.
• BoingBoing.net will be dark.
• Several gaming companies, including Minecraft.net, Riot Games, Epic Games, 38 Studios and Red 5 Studios, will be dark.

Update: Mozilla just sent a statement outlining what it will do for the protest: It will redirect traffic from the main Mozilla.org and Mozilla.com English websites to an action page for 12 hours on Wednesday, January 18th from 8 AM to 8 PM Eastern Time. It will also make the default Firefox start page black so that the tens of millions of Firefox users will see a black page with a call to action message rather than the traditional white page with the Firefox logo.

Since the list is in flux, Irish bookmakers saw a chance to get into the act by accepting bets concerning which sites will go down for the day and which ones won’t.

Wikileaks was the favorite at 5-to-1 odds that it would join the protest. Myspace, the once mighty social network, was running a close second at 7 to 1, while Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo sharing site, was at 8 to 1. Here’s a list of additional bets that Paddy Power was accepting:

14/1 YouTube
40/1 Amazon
50/1 Yahoo!
66/1 Facebook
66/1 TMZ
66/1 IMDb
80/1 LinkedIn
80/1 EMI
100/1 Twitter
100/1 eBay
100/1 AOL
100/1 iTunes
100/1 HBO
100/1 MSN
200/1 Sony
200/1 Universal Studios
200/1 Bing
200/1 Ask
250/1 BBC
250/1 Disney
500/1 Google
500/1 Fox

And while it was something of a publicity stunt to put a sophisticated and specialized IBM computer in people’s living rooms, the fact remains that Watson is, well, a pretty sophisticated and specialized computer.

Since schooling humanity at “Jeopardy” — which was the subject of a book — Watson went on to get a real job working for the health insurance company Wellpoint.

Now IBM has decided it is ready to tackle something a little more involved. Watson is about to go to medical school, and will even study a specialty: Oncology. Sometime this year, after studying and even taking exams to prove what it has learned, Watson will be assigned to assist human physicians in the treatment of breast, lung and colon cancer.

If this seems like kind of a big deal, it is. Watson won’t be the first computer to serve as a reference tool, helping doctors do their jobs. But then there has never been a computer quite like Watson, which can learn so readily from natural language — and play TV game shows and win.

Last week, I talked with Manoj Saxena, general manager of the Watson program at IBM, to talk about what Watson will — and won’t — be doing in helping doctors treat humans with cancer, and what that might mean for the future of medicine.

My first question was about what Watson has been doing since its big win:

AllThingsD: So, Manoj, last I knew, Watson had been working for Wellpoint, which is a large health insurer. What exactly has it been doing?

Saxena: Let me bring you up to speed. In August, we announced the first commercial relationship of Watson with Wellpoint, one of the nation’s largest health insurers. They have 35 million customers in 14 different states. One out of nine Americans are covered by them. The first area was around utilization or approval. Let’s say you or I call up a clinic or hospital saying we have flu-like symptoms. Where Watson would come in is on the approval process, saying we’re covered. Then Watson looks at the history that the hospital has in its records. It might say that it’s early December, and I come in at this time every year saying the same thing; and the last two times it was a ragweed allergy, not the flu. And the medical journals say there’s a connection between ragweed and fever that looks like the flu. And by the way, the newspaper says there was an outbreak of ragweed in Central Texas. And then, in addition to treating for flu, also look for allergies. So Watson is considering the medical record; the patient history that the insurance company has; and third, the medical journal and news information about what may be causing a certain thing. So that’s what it’s doing with Wellpoint so far.

How then do you make the pivot to working with cancer?

We’ve installed another adviser — these solutions are called Watson Advisers. This one is called Watson Oncology Adviser, and this is a big one. As you may remember, medical information is doubling every five years. Doctors tell us that they are spending only five hours per month going through new information in medical literature. On one hand, you have all this medical information coming out. We’ve decided to focus first on breast, lung and colon cancers as the three to apply Watson to. And Cedars-Sinai has partnered with Wellpoint to help come up with the right cancer solutions. And the point is to build the expertise within Watson to help treat cancer.

So Watson won’t be directly involved with the treatment, but rather to build up its own knowledge base?

Watson doesn’t make the decisions. It’s a physician’s assistant. But before it becomes that, it has a lot to learn. Out of the box, Watson has the knowledge of a first-year medical resident. That is where it’s at today. With Cedars-Sinai and Wellpoint, we’re going to teach it all about cancer during the next six months. We’re going to show it actual cases that were solved in the past. And over time, we’ll tweak and teach it, using things we already know.

Is there a human analog to this process?

A good human analog is how we learn. As children, our teachers and parents sit with us and ask questions to understand how well we learned from what we read. And then, later, we learn by doing. This will address the first two phases. Watson will read on its own, and then oncologists are going to ask questions of Watson to understand how well he has learned and then understood. And then once we feel comfortable that it has learned enough, then we will let it begin working as a physician’s assistant, and then it will go from there.

Since, in the end, there are humans being treated, do you have to get any kind of regulatory approval to do this?

No. It’s very similar to how doctors refer to medical journals. Doctors might turn to Google or something like that to look up info from their medical journals. That doesn’t require any approvals. Someone else asked me what happens if Watson suggests a particular treatment, the doctor accepts it, and the patient dies. Or what happens when Watson suggests something and the doctor doesn’t take his advice. Our view is that it’s the same as looking up textbooks and information. The physician is the one who makes the final decision.

And that will always be the case?

That will always be the case, yes. We are far, far away from computers doing medical treatments. I don’t even see it in the forseeable future.

How do you actually go about feeding information to Watson? How does it learn?

It’s a good question. There are four different types of information that’s fed into Watson. At the base of the pyramid, it’s general information like Wikipedia and Google and general information like that. And a lot of that is general knowledge; and a lot of that is already in place, because we needed that to play Jeopardy! Then the second layer is the medical textbooks and medical journals and vocabularies, and those are fed in as natural-language information. It can be any scanned information or text information because Watson understands natural language. So that information is the second part. It can process text and tables, but it can’t process pictures and videos, but we’re working on that. And then there’s the actual test cases, the information on people with 30 years of cancer treatment history. We feed that into what are called “answer keys.” The fourth layer are new domain-specific information models that are specific protocols and procedures that the health insurance companies will want to feed into Watson.

Where do you draw the line? There is an accepted mainstream body of knowledge and accepted treatments for different cancers, and then there are newer things that may be controversial for some reason.

The way we approach it is in two parts. One is the body of knowledge that is already known. But it does not get applied and in context, and often doctors don’t have access to it in context. There are things like cancer treatment guidelines and well-understood things about radiation and effects on different cancers. Call them the known treatment pathways. The second are the emerging treatment pathways, particularly in the area of genomics. That is the one that can get added on. It’s the one our partners are looking at. In about a decade, most cancer treatments are going to shift to genomics-based treatments, rather than chemotherapy-based treatments. There’s a deluge of information about converting the knowledge about DNA into biological knowledge, and then converting that into treatment knowledge. That is the second part of what we’ll be doing.

Do you have other diseases that you think Watson can help treat in the future?

Yes. Diabetes and cardiology, heart problems are next on the horizon. We’ll also be applying Watson in financial services.

The end of the pledge drive also means the end of those fundraising banners on every page that highlighted editors who contributed to the site.

Against the site’s normal black-and-white page design and absence of ads, the contributors’ color photos popped from the page and certainly fulfilled the goal of pulling readers up to the plea.

And while their absence won’t exactly be mourned by readers, it will deprive us of some entertaining juxtapositions, such as the one at right, with the visage of an earnest volunteer looking like an illustration accompanying the Wikipedia entry for a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring Justin Timberlake called “Dick in a Box.”

Wikimedia said it will use the funds to buy hardware, develop new features on the site, expand mobile services, provide legal defense for the projects and support volunteers.

The site now employs 97 people and plans to spend $28.3 million this year on expenses.

The remainder of funds will trickle in throughout the year in the form of grants and other donations, such as ones from Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki’s Brin Wojcicki Foundation, which gave $500,000 as part of the campaign in November.

In a letter thanking donors, Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner wrote: “We’re the #5 most-popular site in the world — we operate on a tiny fraction of the resources of any other top site. We will use your money carefully and well, I promise you.”

Remember when Fortune magazine wrote in September that Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had reportedly bagged a bison as part of a “personal challenge” to eat only what he had killed?

Well, proof of that is hard to miss, now that the ginormous mounted head of said dead bison has been hung on the wall of a Facebook conference room used by the social networking site’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Zuckerberg placed it there recently as a prank, to surprise his top exec with the installation of the very hairy bison when she was away from Facebook’s Silicon Valley HQ.

And surprised she was when she got back and was faced with the creature, which pretty much takes up the whole room, as you can see above and below.

(And, let me just say on a personal level, like a digital version of the “Murder She Wrote” lady, solving the mystery of this geek-on-bison killing is a whole lot more satisfying than getting a pile of internal Yahoo memos.)

The bison has now been nicknamed Billy and also sports a Facebook-branded baseball cap and occasional hoodie — natch! (My suggestion if you want to use a dead beast metaphor most effectively here would be to clad it all in Google swag.)

While he never confirmed it, Zuckerberg had teased the crowd about the possibility of his hunting prowess at the f8 developers conference this fall in his keynote speech, displaying his Facebook page that had a picture of what he had tagged “Bison Burgers.”

In fact, it’s been quite a lot of bison for the famous entrepreneur since he felled the majestic beast. According to Wikipedia, bison usually weigh 700 to 2,200 pounds, but can be as much as 3,800 pounds. That’s a lot of burgers!

To get them, Zuckerberg learned the most humane approach and then shot the beast in California, after obtaining a hunting license and, presumably, a very big gun.

Clearly, he was serious when he told Fortune in May that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” Among the early victims, which grew in size, were a lobster, a chicken, a pig and a goat.

At this time, the Winklevii are still roaming the plains — and it would be illegal and just plain mean on Zuckerberg’s part to frag them any more than he already has.

So, he went for the bison, the next biggest beast in his cross-hairs.

Its head will be moved to Facebook’s new headquarters today along with the rest of the company, who will now work in spacious new digs.

Which, I am told, could easily fit a herd of elephants — but let’s not go there.

On Wednesday, the first day of this year’s campaign, Wikimedia pulled in $1.2 million, the most it’s ever raised in a day, from 61,000 individual donors, the most it’s ever had in a single day.

The foundation’s annual budget is $28.3 million, and it tries to raise most of that from small donors.  Last year’s drive drew more than 500,000 donors, most of whom gave $25 to $30, said Wikimedia spokesman Jay Walsh.

We really look for reliable sources — we’ll say, for example, that just because someone wrote something in a blog somewhere, that doesn’t mean it’s a reliable source. We need to get sources, you know, that are quite old-fashioned about it.

– Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, to Foreign Policy’s Blake Hounshell

In the month of September, Yelp said it registered 8.5 million visitors on its mobile Web site and iPhone, Android and Blackberry applications.

It said nearly 60 percent of that traffic was coming through its apps, but the remainder was from visits to its mobile Web site. To help those users, Yelp is updating its site today with a better design.

However, Yelp’s mobile visits are likely to spike in the coming months due to a new partnership with Apple.

Earlier this month, Apple announced it was integrating sites, like Yelp and Wikipedia, into its voice-activated service, called Siri.

In his recent review of the phone, Walt Mossberg had this to say about it:

Siri can find information in Wikipedia, Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. It successfully answered when I asked it, “Who’s the president of Iran?” (though it misunderstood me the first time) and “Who stars in ‘Boardwalk Empire?’” When I asked for a “French restaurant in Bethesda, Maryland,” it instantly returned a list from Yelp, ranked by user reviews.

Yelp will still have a long way to go, however, before a majority of its visits come from mobile.

Compared to the 8.5 million mobile visits in September, 54.5 million visits were made to its traditional PC site.

The latest entry into the list of companies with a “spine” is tiny Sonic.net Inc., a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based Internet provider with about 36,000 customers. Sonic not only fought a secret court order for information from WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum, but also spoke out about it.

So, who are these Sonic guys?

Sonic was founded in 1994 by Dane Jasper and Scott Doty when they were computer science students at Santa Rosa Junior College. They had been running the campus student e-mail service, and eventually decided to drop out of college to try to build a business offering Internet access accounts for $2 a month, according to the company’s corporate history.

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Mobile apps often don’t deliver the full experience of social and user-generated Web sites, given how much content they need to deliver, the constraints of the small screen and the different expectations for mobile participation. For instance, the Wikipedia iPhone app is read-only; Yelp doesn’t allow users to write full reviews from its apps; and Facebook doesn’t fully support some more complicated features, like photo tagging, from mobile devices.

Development of the Quora iPhone app was focused on delivering speed and supporting content consumption, and on inspiring lots more local questions and answers, said Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever in an interview this week. (See the map view with local questions pictured below.)

The normally quiet Quora considers the iPhone app its biggest new launch since its Web site, which went live to the public about a year ago and has been incrementally improved since.

Quora execs wouldn’t share anything terrifically informative about their progress, like traffic or user numbers, but noted that on the topic of local content, their largest userbase by location is now New York City. That’s important because Quora is often dinged for its Silicon Valley-centricity, a criticism people at the company said is becoming less valid.

Cheever said that he expects Quora’s next mobile effort will be an Android app.