Mashpedia

I've been playing around with the Mashpedia this morning. It styles itself as, and I quote:

"Mashpedia is an effective medium to find and explore online content about almost any topic, providing a didactic and intuitive way of learning. In every article you get a basic definition, the latest related news, videos, images, twitter messages and relevant links, thus providing a quick, practical outlook of the topic. Since real-time contents are ranked with the most recent coming first, Mashpedia can give you new information each day - even if you are looking at the same article. Every article can also be commented, providing a space for people to share additional information or relevant links."

It's a fun little tool, and I enjoyed using it - it's what Cpedia should have been if it had been any good. Mashpedia is clear to point out that it's not a search engine, and lists a variety of searches are that better done on traditional engines; coldplay lyrics and apartments in chicago for example. Bearing that in mind I did a few searches - Volcanic ash being the first, as that's in the news right now.

Mashpedia pulls up data from Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, News sources, digg, blogs, book search engines and web pages, fitting it all neatly together. It works reasonably well, as long as you can clearly define what you're interested in. A search for 'Everton' comes up blank in the Wikipedia section, since it's not clear which Everton you're interested in, but amending the search to Everton FC works well. The sections are not always as up to date as I'd like - some of the digg references for example were several years old. I'd be happy to use it on a regular basis for news stories, and using it in conjunction with Silobreaker I think I'd be getting a nicely rounded view of a subject.