.com has always been the most highly valued and the most used generic top-level domain, with others such as .net, .org, .info and .biz being valued at much less. In an attempt to create some buzz around .biz, the registry’s administrator, NeuStar, has announced that it will be auctioning off one-character .biz domain names on Sedo. This will be the first time that a registry allows all of its one-character domain names to be registered.

The domain begins on 23 September 2009 at 9AM PDT (12PM EDT) and ends on 30 September 2009 at 9PM PDT (12AM EDT).

Beginning this autumn, Wikipedia will be using the WikiTrust extension to highlight text based on its trustworthiness, reports Wired. WikiTrust was developed by Wiki Labs at University of California, Santa Cruz to help users decide which text they should see as most likely reliable and which text they should view very skeptically on a wiki page.

When the extension is enabled, all text on a page is highlighted based on the trustworthiness WikiTrust awards it. Text that is a bright orange is very questionable, while text highlighted a lighter shade means that it has been written by a more trustworthy user. As the text is edited by more trusted users, it turns from orange to white. WikiTrust automatically gives users a reputation score between zero and nine, depending on how many of their past contributions were removed and reverted soon after they were made. By default the extension will be disabled and users will have to click on a tab labeled “trust info” to enable it.

The extension is not flawless, because as one of its developers, de Alfaro, says

“If 20 people are all biased in one way, our tool does not know it…Our tool can simply measure consensus.”

Text that is not highlighted, which means that it is very highly trusted, shows that there is a consensus by highly ranked contributors, it does not, however, mean that the text is factually correct. While WikiTrust cannot solve all of Wikipedia’s trustworthiness problems, it will assist well-meaning users that are looking to improve the quality of articles to quickly identify suspect text.

If you’ve always wanted your own unique font, you can’t get much more unique than your own handwriting. FontCapture does just that, it makes your handwriting into a font. All you need is a printer and a scanner.

The site requires no registration and takes you through the steps to create your font. You download and print out a PDF document where you write all of your letters, or at least the ones that you want to incorporate into your font (you may not have a use for the letters with accents), and then scan the page and upload it to their website. Your font is then generated and you can install it by putting it into your %windir%\fonts folder if you’re using Windows or by clicking on it if you’re using Mac OS X.

In the top-right corner of this post you can see an example of a custom font created using the service and admire my great penmanship.

[Source: Lifehacker.com]