Have you ever been annoyed by the fact that Wikipedia has a wealth of textual information but no videos and hardly any pictures? Take the Wikipedia article for Sony’s Rolly, for example, where the device is depicted as “an egg-shaped digital robotic music player.” If you have never seen a Rolly before, this cryptic description won’t help much. After reading about it in Wikipedia, you’ll then need to look it up on YouTube or Google Image Search to see what it actually looks like.
This is where a new service called Navify comes in. Launched in public beta today, Navify intends to enrich Wikipedia by adding pictures, videos and user comments to each article. And it actually works pretty well. Look up “Sony Rolly” using Navify and you not only get the original Wikipedia text but also hundreds of related pictures and videos (pulled in from Flickr and YouTube) by clicking on the tabs Navify puts on top of each article. Look up “Pulp Fiction” and the service retrieves the Wikipedia article itself plus screenshots, covers, posters and trailers from the movie. You get the picture.
The site is built upon Wikipedia’s platform with the idea of being a complementary media and discussion layer, similar to the way Friendfeed enables discussions about tweets originating from Twitter. Like Wikipedia, edits are anonymous; anyone can edit the images and videos associated with an article without registering an account. Navify CEO Alan Rutledge says what triggered development was the thought: “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?”
What really sets Navify apart is the threaded comment system that allows visitors to discuss the nearly 3 million articles in the English database. Each article is a community waiting to happen- Barack Obama on Wikipedia received 770,000 visitors in the last month alone.
Just like Wikipedia, Navify appeals to a very broad target audience, but it looks like just the right online source for people like bloggers, journalists, scientists, students etc. who need to have various kinds of information and data related to a certain subject in one single place.
Seems similar to what Yauba is doing in terms of bringing a consolidated view on a topic.
The text on the site seems a bit off though … seems a bit jagged, I am not sure why.
shrunk image?
club images and vids together as media. even google image search and video search should be merged.
So Navify is basically a cobbling together of wikipedia + flickr + youtube?
holy lightbulbs you cracked it
This tool is also useful in downloading videos and flash based games.
http://teentech...ce-audio-files/
Navify should be renamed Nullify as it doesn’t work:
“A Database Error Occurred
Unable to connect to your database server using the provided settings.”
Note to startups: Over-over-invest in your server before your launch … you can always scale back down afterwards, but you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
Not many companies get front page mention in Techncrunch …. really a tragic waste for this company.
Seems like you have to search perfectly for it to work. For example, try searching for “Rolly” and it fails, try searching for “Rolly (Sony)” and it works. Lame…
Yeah, seems down!
I assume this is just a temporary problem. You should check back later – the site definitely works.
Go Alan!
I tried the Rolly link in the article, looks cool. Then I searched for something, “Bacon”, and 2 minutes of loading culminated in an error.
Nice work, Alan!
this is brilliant!
Dude I dont like ANYTHING Wiki. Wiki is lopsided and run by fascists.
RT
http://www.priv...tools.echoz.com
“After reading about it in Wikipedia, you’ll then need to look it up on YouTube or Google Image Search to see what it actually looks like.”
Yeah, or just go to one of the source pages. In that article (the sony rolly thing), the first link has a pic. This service seems useless.
you could have achieved the same result by not actually building the product, making some mockups with photoshop, then linking back from a techcrunch article to a dead page…
congrads to Alan and the team!
site appears to be working fine now… congrats alan & rest of Navify team
Are they adding any editorial value? Ie choosing which images and videos go with which Wikipedia page? Or is it just a straight search via the Flickr and YouTube apis?
If it’s just a straight search, then it would be far better to have done it as a Greasemonkey script for the Wikipedia site, which automatically grabs images and videos and adds them to the Wikipedia page. There’s no need for a separate site for this (that I can see).
Oh wait, they need a separate site so they can make some revenue (at least until someone develops that Greasemonkey script).
Hang on, I uploaded a whole bunch of pics to Wikipedia and Commons using CC-BY-SA so WHERES MY BLOODY ATTRIBUTION GONE. This site doesn’t follow any of the rules associated with re-using image content. Everything seems to be covered by the ‘Content is licensed under the GFDL’ statement at the bottom. Give me my attribution you thieving gits.