Thank you!

Plus iWise has one of the most annoying home pages I have ever seen. Pop-up videos, Twitter-like message streams, rotating banners — scary. I also hate how it sends a tweet (without your permission) telling all your followers that you signed up for the site. Uncool.

It also seems like the content of the site is somewhat suspect. The article above says they pull some of their content from Wikiquote, which is notoriously inaccurate. There doesn’t seem to be any attribution given for the quotations on iWise either, which is the main problem with most quotation sites out there.

For example, the Mark Twain feed includes the quote, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” Mark Twain never wrote or said that, but iWise is perpetuating the misinformation that he did.

Or take Arthur C. Clarke’s quote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” iWise lists 3 or 4 variations of this quote, all attributed to Clarke, like, “Any sufficiently retarded magic is indistinguishable from technology.” But those variations were said by other people, in response to Clarke. iWise pulled them from the “Commentary about…” section of Clarke’s Wikiquote page and attributed them all to Clarke.

Having said all that, iWise’s technology is impressive, as is the quantity of information on the site. It is definitely a strong achievement. But I think I’ll wait until they clean up their database a bit before using it much.

Edo’s thinking has always been light years ahead of everybody.

True creative mind.

Best,

R