My favorite things as a kid were the Encyclopedia Britannica and an antique world globe that mom found at the flea market. The globe had detailed maps of continents and countries with etchings for mountain ridges, deserts and ocean floors; even water currents, fault lines and latitude and longitude coordinates were marked. I'd spend hours spinning and stopping the globe trying to memorize names of places that I couldn't quite pronounce. Then I'd dig through encyclopedias to find photos and historical information on the places. Fast forward twenty years and I'm still digging around for information, albeit on the internet instead of in encyclopedias. Which is why I love the Wikipedia and am looking forward to the future of Qwiki - which was the winner at last year's TechCrunch Disrupt. Qwiki's goal is to improve the way people experience web information by delivering a format that's quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search or reading. It's not quite like watching the Discovery Channel's Blue Planet series but it's more engaging than reading a wiki page. Qwiki already has a product that's in alpha, so finding a "movie" about any subject in the world sounds not as distant future as it once did.
