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Have you played with Everything or Everything 2; how do you feel they compare to the h2g2.com effort to create a real-world Guide?
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http://www.h2g2.com/

How flattered are you by the appearance of tribute versions of the guide?

http://www.h2g2.com/ - H2G2
http://www.galactic-guide.com - Project Galactic Guide

Would you like to see the next generation of mobile phones have easy access to a (slightly) frivolous version of the more serious travel guides we are sure to see?

In this context we should mention h2g2.com - which aims to be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "Earth Edition".
Personally, I don't think it's too good. People are desperately trying to be funny (even though they're specifically told not to).

When I first read about h2g2, I did a little happy dance. Finally the Guide would become reality! Then I actually went to the site.

It seems to me that H2G2 is less a place for information and commentary, and more a very complicated chat site. What happened?

What direction do you see The Guide taking online?

What are your plans for the future? Write another book? If yes, then scifi or something else like the deeper meaning of liff? Or something completely different?

Greg

With the advent of items like the wireless PalmPilot and projects like H2G2, do you forsee a time when Lonely Planet will manufacture a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Planet, or does it seem more likely that the frontier of personal gadgetry will end in a suffusion of yellow?

I'm not familiar with the wiretap archive that started this topic. However, on a similar theme, Douglas Adams has started a site to create an "Earth Edition" of his Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy http://www.h2g2.com/. I found the information there to be fairly informative and usually amusing :)

Hmm...I personally associate "Digital Village" with Douglas Adams, and the company that put out Starship Titanic.

HHGTTG went to 5 parts if I remember.

I like the idea of making the online book public domain. You want to encourage as many people as possible to contribute, but you don't want to assure them their contributions will remain in the final product.

For example, the copyright statement at www.h2g2.com says that all contributions may be later sold at a profit and the copyright held by Douglas Adams. I'm not sure but that such a notice would discourage some from contributing. Also, anonymous contributors should be allowed.

Note that under current U.S. law the default for new creative expressions is copyright, not the public domain. So a notice needs to be placed at the beginning that the work is explicitly placed into the public domain and all contributors must agree to that. If parts of the work are covered by some license such as the Perl Artistic License, then that needs to be stated too up front.

What does copyright give you that the public domain doesn't? Isn't it silly to imagine that somebody would copy the work from the web, slap a copyright statement on it, and prevent you from offering it for free? Their copyright claim would not stand a chance--you wouldn't have to sue them, they would have to sue you and pay for your attorneys when they lose.

You want to be able to modify and edit the work freely online. When it comes to the print work, though, you don't want the publisher to have unfair competition from others who put it out more cheaply--see the O'Reilly site for discussion on that point. The print publisher ought to have some rights and have the forked work protected by copyright, and get a profit as well as recoup the costs of printing.

The original question also asked about databases. Databases under current U.S. law are not protected by copyright--they are in the public domain, no matter how much work was done to create them. Likely within the next few years Congress will pass a law to change that--unless we get involved to fight it.

C++

1.Not quite as good as getting a B-
2.Control language for submarines

C++ /C'-pluhs-pluhs/ n.

Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT&T Bell Labs as a successor to C. Now one of the languages of choice, although many hackers still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on generation), and a prime example of second-system effect. Almost anything that can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a language lawyer to know what is and what is not legal-- the design is almost too large to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the cruft results from C++'s attempt to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his retrospective book "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." [Many hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called Java" --ESR]
(Internal links omited. The complete entry is here.)

I don't know if this is on-topic, but the mention of "open source writing" made me think of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Not the book, the web site. It is basically a collaboration of everyone who feels like contributing. It seems to me to be the embodyment of "open source writing."

Resumes should be submitted to H2G2 publishing (www.h2g2.com. No ex-Sirius Cybernetics or Encyclopaedia Galactica employees need apply.

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Quick intro - I work at TDV and I'm one of the people behind h2g2.com and douglasadams.com. (My h2g2 homepage is here) I've just spent most of the evening frantically running around with one of my colleagues trying to optimise bits of the site in the face of the Slashdot onslaught (and it's not just Slashdot... PR put out a press release earlier and we weren't adequately prepared for the results... several lessons learnt there...)

Anyway, time for some response to many of the points raised:

• Most of you seem to really like Douglas's stuff and h2g2 too. We're very glad - the Slashdot crowd are legendarily hard to please!
• Whilst there are lots of similarities between h2g2 and Everything, they're very different in many ways too. I like Everything a lot (I've got quite a few entries in there myself) and I like the way it's based on a single neat idea that's just expanded over a whole database. Everything is designed to be *without* editorial control - it's based entirely on user voting, so it looks and feels pretty random and organic, which is not a criticism - that's how it's meant to be. h2g2 has an editorial direction - to move it in that direction, it has a dedicated editorial team (most of whom are, like Slashdot's moderators, unpaid users). Another difference is that h2g2 has a whole load of community functionality much more akin to Slashdot than to Everything, along with quite unique features such as the user journals. (They're similar to the current fashion of "weblogs" like scripting.com and robotwisdom.com) And we're adding new features all the time - new ways of creating documents, new ways of using forums, and other entirely new sections.
• Some of you are complaining that most h2g2 entries aren't very funny - a valid complaint, but we have good reason for it. Firstly, as most of you are saying, the Guide should primarily be useful and secondarily entertaining. Secondly, we've had to go out of our way to tell people not to try and be funny, simply because so many users were trying to write like Douglas and failing miserably. Writing like Douglas Adams is hard. (That's why it takes him so bloody long to get a book out.) Also, humour is a much more subjective quality than usefulness, and we want the Guide to be as universal as possible. We're not saying that we don't want entries that are funny, just that it shouldn't be a researcher's primary focus. (It should be noted, though, that there's nothing stopping you sticking up loads of random, funny nonsense up on h2g2 - it'll be visible to everyone, just won't be part of the core Guide)
• As for the usefulness of the Guide's current content, we're working on that. The first problem we're tackling is streamlining the editorial process to get more of the huge submissions backlog into the Guide. Then there's a much bigger problem to tackle, which is how to classify all the information in such a way that it can be searched, linked and delivered intelligently. This is such a massive doozy of a problem that I'm not going to say much more, save to say that I can see information scientists featuring much more prominently in the web's future once the major sites have the simple problems of content management sorted out. But anyway: no, we don't have much content yet, but h2g2 is a young and rapidly expanding project with a universal subject domain. It'll take time and effort.
• As for the gadget itself, we can't say that much because a) of lots of secret behind-the-scenes stuff with potential hardware partners and b) we're concentrating much more on the design of the information services (i.e. h2g2.com) than the platform it's delivered to. Ideally, we shouldn't have to do much platform design at all, as it'll be open, existing standards most of the way, which is (as I'm sure you'd agree) the most sensible way of doing it. But, yeah, we like shiny toys and want one with our name on it soon as poss.
• h2g2 needs you. After all, don't say you never dreamed about being a Field Researcher for The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Now you can. Cool, huh?

Douglas Adams was a keynote speaker during the JavaOne conference last June. He addressed the web site version of the Guide during the course of his speach. It was interesting to find that he was spearheading this collaborative effort to gather information, and it is very exciting to learn that we are likely only a couple of years away from a usable Guide. Very cool.

Anyone may register and submit information for the database. The information is screened by a panel of editors before it is added to the Earth Edition of the Guide. The details regarding what qualifies as a "good" submission can be found at http://www.h2g2.com/A53209. cheers.

I'm assuming that the content is going to come from http://www.h2g2.com/.

In fact, I seem to recall at some point being told that's why h2g2 was set up in the first place, to collect info for an actual Hitchhiker's Guide.

Plus, that's where the article says it's going to come from.

But I'm confused by the line "Later versions could include GSM devices allowing the device to offer its user detailed information related to his location at that moment."
Am I incorrect in thinking that GSM is a cell phone standard, and they actually meant GPS instead of GSM? I suppose you could get locality information from GSM, but that leaves out about the 98% of the planet not covered by GSM compatible phone systems. I can see GSM being useful to download updates, though, assuming you have GSM compatible provider in your area.

Now I'm just rambling.

After poking around h2g2.com for a bit, I came across a great interview with Dougals Adams here at ZineZone.com. It is complete with images, audio clips from the interview and more. I would highly recommend stopping by there to take a look. Insite and more into the life of DNA.

Not to sound like a advocate of any particular OS or anything.. But www.h2g2.com is having some serious connectivity problems.. It is going SUPER slow.A netcraft query would most likely explain this.. HMMN.. Netcraft Query... Heh!

Doesn't h2g2 already do this? (http://www.h2g2.com) - It seems to me that the next generation handheld (visor? palm viii?) with web access would be just as good. Of course, we don't know what sort of content is going to be on the real-life hhgttg. It would be interesting if they just snarfed h2g2's content - Douglas Adams has approved of h2g2 in the past...

These days I get most of my web reading from links on weblogs of one kind or another - I'd personally count Slashdot as a weblog. I read Ars Technica, Scripting News, Robot Wisdom and Tomalak's Realm, and I'm on Haddock which has several great links every day.

NTK is often listed as a weblog, innaccurately - it's a weekly mag. But it's completely brilliant. Subscribe.

Also, h2g2.com (The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, online) has, amongst its many fab features, the ability for users to create their own weblogs on their homepages, with forums hanging off each entry. Worth a look, and I'm not just saying that 'cos I work there.

Grab your flash plugin and drop on by the Ford Prefect section and watch the hilarities! Kudos to Adams. May the fun continue.