Your browser is the most important software on your computer—it’s your tool for accessing the Web, and these days more and more of what we do is being shifted onto the internet. So it’s surprising that so many people never consider which browser they should use. Many stick with Internet Explorer, despite its problems, because it’s the one that comes pre-installed with Windows. But most IT professionals are not very fond of Internet Explorer; Luke Appleby explains his objections to it. Basically, it’s a security risk, and it has its own quirky way of displaying web pages that drives web designers mad.

The good news is that the alternatives are all free to download, install easily, and can import all your bookmarks from Internet Explorer.

Firefox is the main competitor for Internet Explorer, and is approaching 25% of the browser market, according to Netmarketshare. It’s a descendent of one of the first web browsers, Netscape Navigator, whose code was taken over by the Mozilla Corporation (Mozilla also put out a free email programme, Thunderbird). The great advantage of Firefox is that it’s an open source project: the innards of the programme are available for all to see, which makes it easier for programmers to write add-on software. Firefox add-ons are free and easily installed, and range from minor enhancements (like a new way of showing the download status bar) to powerful tools (the web-based alternative to EndNote, Zotero, is a Firefox add-on). The only downside I’ve found with Firefox is that it can be a bit cumbersome, especially if loaded with extensions, and it’s sometimes prone to crashing.

The third-most-popular browser is Chrome, yet another effort from the Google stable. It has a more minimal interface, does not have all the add-ons available in Firefox, but is simple and speedy. It’s only a couple of years old, and is rapidly gaining in popularity. Like Firefox, it has optional extensions available.

If you’re using a Mac, Apple’s browser Safari is an obvious alternative to IE; it’s available as a free download for Windows too. Safari is fast and looks pretty, and also has a feature that can strip away all the ads and clutter from a page, showing you only a nice readable column of text. Again, it’s now able to load extensions, although it’s not an open-source project and so the add-on library is smaller.

In fact, why not install all three, and switch between them as needed? You might want to keep a browser just for reading RSS feeds, and another for viewing your Zotero library or your Delicious bookmarks. Experiment and see which combination works for you, and don’t be afraid to recommend to your friends and family that they try a different web browser than the one which came with their computer.

Wikipedia claims to be a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. And that’s exactly what it is. Its name comes from the Hawai‘ian wiki, or quick: a wiki is any collaborative, easily-edited web page. You hear people using Wiki as a nickname for Wikipedia, but that’s not really correct: the foundation that runs it also hosts its siblings Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wiktionary and so on.

Wikipedia was only set up in 2001, but now has over 3 million articles, all written by unpaid volunteers. It’s startlingly comprehensive, if not always well written. It reflects its geeky origins: 11,697 words on Gondor, compared with 6,751 on Ghana. And it seems to have dealt a death blow to the traditional printed encyclopedia. What might be the project, in its infancy today, that will have transformed the way we do research in another eight years?

A good introduction is the history of Wikipedia in the Sept 2006 Atlantic Monthly, which prompted a personal testimonial from Nicholson Baker, in which he reveals himself to be an ardent inclusionist. The inclusionist/deletionist split is a major philosophical conflict in Wikipedia, between those who demand that article subjects be “noteworthy” (which in practice means cited in the mainstream media) and others who believe there’s room in Wikipedia for almost anything; inclusionists like Baker scour the list of articles marked for deletion and add citations to try to save them.

People are always amazed that they or anyone else can click on a Wikipedia page and change the content, and I have to reassure them that it’s legal—indeed, encouraged. They always then ask why the pages aren’t full of digital graffiti and silliness. To see how Wikipedia protects itself, look at the History pages for a typical article: on Baldwin Street, the steepest street in Dunedin and likely the world. On July 20, 2009, an anonymous visitor clicked on Edit and cautiously added an ungrammatical The to the beginning of one section. They clicked save and were no doubt amazed to see their changes appear in the entry. Emboldened, they changed The to penis. Hilarity doubtless ensued. Until, less than a minute later, a piece of software called ClueBot sniffed out the offending word and politely reverted all their edits. Undeterred, the vandals typed in the word JOSH. A minute later, this was deleted by a human being, username Vicenarian (American, male, 24, Unitarian according to his user page). BEN ROX UR JOX typed the vandals. Vicenarian deleted it. The vandals responded with a half-hearted from ben & josh. This was deleted by user Snigbrook (from Lancashire, supports the Blackburn Rovers) a few seconds later. No response. Ban and Josh had no doubt quit in disgust. The entire episode lasted seven minutes.

That’s how vandalism is taken care of. Wikipedia sceptics are also suspicious of the accuracy of the content, though. How can we be sure the information is accurate? Well, as Professor Peter Murray-Rust puts it, “the bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct.” There are plenty of experts adding and editing content, and the sheer weight of numbers seems to make articles gradually converge on accuracy. Wikipedia’s great advantage is that it’s absolutely up to date, and errors can be easily corrected, neither of which are true of textbooks or encyclopedias. It’s possible for inaccuracies to sneak in, especially if people start editing their own page to minimise their alleged naughtiness, as Richard Worth did earlier this year. Sadly he did so under a fairly recognisable login name, and was shamed in the media for it.

• An interview with one of the early Wikipedians
• Students surveyed on how they used Wikipedia (YouTube video)
• The official Policies and Guidelines of Wikipedia, to counter any suspicion that anarchy prevails
• A list of fifty fascinating Wikipedia articles, and fifty more, to give you an idea of its scope
• A recent report suggests the explosive growth of Wikipedia is slowing, and editing of what’s already there is becoming more important: here’s a summary, and an older analysis of who actually writes Wikipedia.
• A nice short think piece by Cory Doctorow.

I’m teaching a Continuing Education course on Web 2.0, what it is, and why it matters.

The best summary I’ve seen of all the Web 2.0 buzzwords, and a reasonable mission statement for the course, is this pic from Wired. I’ll redraw it for the page when I get a moment.

Here’s the lecture schedule:

• Wikipedia and the notion of radical trust
• Blogs and the future of publishing
• The Google empire: Storing knowledge in the cloud
• Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook: The explosion of user-created content

Exploration of buzzwords will ensue, and I’ll be blogging each session as I run it.

If you or your workplace have a decent-sized book collection, you might have thought of organising or cataloguing it in some way. If so, I recommend you give LibraryThing a try. It’s free (or $20 for a lifetime membership), and has lots of amazing social features, where you can see who else has your books, read and post reviews, find other books you might like—and even books that LibraryThing thinks you won’t. LibraryThing also makes it possible to embed a little widget into your home page or blog that lists your recent acquisitions, if you want to tell the world what you’re reading.

If you need to catalogue hundreds of books, I recommend you get a USB-powered hand-held barcode scanner. You can point the scanner at the barcode on the cover, import the ISBN, and LibraryThing will look up the book in Amazon, your nearby public library catalogue, or any other library you use, and import all its information for you. You can blitz your book collection in just a couple of hours.

ProfHacker has a nice overview, and LibraryThing’s founder, Tim Spalding, gave a presentation at LIANZA 2009 which is an excellent introduction to all it can do, and food for thought for traditional librarians.