First Impressions
Brilliant! The spiffy box arrived at my house just a few days before Christmas. On opening the box, I was greeted by another brown cardboard box, this one more tightly sealed. Inside lay a bubble wrap bag containing two CD pouches with the installation discs inside. A users guide and ‘Quick Reference’ book were also included, along with a wired headset. So far, so good! In goes the disc. Okay, okay… I got through the installation process till the ‘Select a drive to install your copy of Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 on’, or something like that. I had lots of trouble installing the software, as it was claiming I had insufficient space on my main hard drive. Infact, I had “22.6 GB of free space” on my computer, and I finally got it up and running, after repeatedly retrying to install the software. The installation itself time took a reasonable amount of time and I quickly registered my product with Nuance. (Nuisance! Ahem...)

Training
I did about 30 minutes of training no problem. I was told to read the sentences that appeared on the screen so that the software could ‘calibrate’ my voice pattern. Thinking that everything will be fine, I opened up Dragon’s special dictation software, ‘Dragon Pad’. In the English language, there are a couple of things that are considered ‘standard sentences’.

The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Hen.
You want to see what Dragon Pad thought I was saying? No, you really don’t… But for the purpose of providing an honest review, I have to post the results. ‘My thick round ox jumped over my daisy’s pen.’ Hmph... All in all, I can type a lot quicker and more accurately than that anyway. Since I was delivered the software, I’ve used it over 20 times. I must have done the training that many times too. The software crashes every single time I use it. I’m kind of fed up now, after many unsuccessful attempts. Okay, my PC isn’t state of the art, but it’s only a year old, and has twice the recommended amount of RAM, and a 3.3Ghz P4 processor, far more than needed to run a program like this.

Overall Impressions
I’m sure that the software really is a good product, and I know it’s had outstanding reviews from many top-class websites, but for me, it’s just not worked out. I’ve had heap loads of problems, and only a few sentences of garbled text and a new Skype headset to show for it. Maybe next time I’ll have better luck...

The world of Wikis sits in utter confusion after this past weeks weird developments at Wiki.com . Let's start right from the beginning though.

Bought by John Gotts in 2006, Wiki.com went for an incredible $2.86 Million. The world of feed flares, XML divas, and XHTML validation is hip and cool. After purchasing the domain, Gotts contacted, and eventually partnered with Wiki vendor, MindTouch. The domain name came with a humongous price tag, but Gotts was convinced that over time, his investment would pay off, as the domain simply drew direct hits, and was a natural collector of mainstream traffic.

"With its easily identifiable name, thousands of people are visiting the site daily without the aid of a search tool, signaling increasing interest in the technology and the value of a domain that drives natural traffic."

All was fine, till earlier this week, when a public relations representative from Wikia contacted Read/Write Web, regarding a rumour that had been circulating the blogosphere recently. According to the un-named PR person from Wikia, "all wikis on wiki.com will be removed", and that Wikia had it's own plans to salvage "those wiki.com customers". Wikia, is the orignally Florida based startup, co-founded by Wikipedia main-man, Jimmy Wales.

Up on the Wikia website, they have a wiki going, claiming that MindTouch, will be closing down for good, on or before the 25th January, this year. In a MindTouch statement, they said that:

"Wiki.com is not affiliated in any way with Wikia.com. Wikia has no control or ownership of the domain wiki.com. This rescued wiki was created following rumors that wiki.com was closing down. At the time, there was no indication whether wiki.com wikis would disappear or not, so Wikia made plans to migrate these sites to Wikia. Since then, MindTouch have said that they have begun migrating the wiki.com wikis to new servers and that the content of these sites will be made available on a new domain in future."

As if there weren't enough twists in the tale already, it seems that the website Wiki.com, is now redirecting to Wikia! RWW rightly asks how this is even possible, if like Wikia claim, they have no control over the domain wiki.com!

If anyone feels like helping me out here, or clearing a few things up, please go ahead… It seems that nobody quite knows where anyone stands on this issue. No news on John Gotts yet either.

My take? My opinion? The world of Wikis is going through a tough time, that will inevitabely shape it's future form. There's no doubt that Wikipedia will stand firm and strong, but what will happen to all of it's competiting Wikis? Will they run out of steam, as so many great ideas and projects have done before, and give up to the monopolising site in the industry? Or will these smaller sites stand firm, building their own, more closely knit communities, working together?

Personally, I'm a big fan of the smaller Wikis out there, but also like Wikipedia, because I know I'm almost guaranteed to find the information I want on anything, from the average number of spots on a ladybird, to the theory of relativity.

Sourced from RWW.