i-Travel is a project co-funded by the European Commission and a consortium of industry and research organizations which aims to deliver key innovations to the travel and mobility market. It is planned to be a personal travel assistant service for anyone planning and making a journey – whether a short, regular trip or a longer business or leisure trip. The application delivering the service comprises a number of innovative elements, including a user front-end that adapts to a user’s fixed or mobile access terminal, a context-aware intelligent agent to manage a user’s requests and deliver appropriate services, and an e-marketplace back-end where a community of service and information providers can publish, negotiate and supply their services.

The traveler will access his trusted Travel Agent through an intuitive interface, and via any available access point, ranging from simple mobile phone to complex devices such smart phones and personal computers.

Travel services offered according to a traveler’s expressed preferences will include:

• journey planning,
• route guidance,
• traffic and transport real time information,
• parking services,
• ticket booking and payment,
  
• immediate news of any problems and the adaptation of a traveler’s itinerary.

“Floating traveler data collection”, or anonymous monitoring of individual travelers in order to deduce demand status, detect incidents and to monitor the status of public transport services in real time and over entire networks.

Unprecedented usability for the traveler, with a personalized service agent able to anticipate a traveler’s needs from knowledge of his current context, and delivery of “push” services as needed when the traveler arrives at milestones, or when disruptive events occur along the itinerary.

Payments can be made automatically and securely from the traveler’s handheld terminal, and the terminal will replace the need for printed tickets as the mobile device can become the ticket.

The eMarketplace will use the latest e-commerce and internet technologies to allow transport and travel services to be exposed, requested and consumed in real time, while offering content and service providers access for the first time to virtually all travelers. The eMarketplace concept is not a centralized infrastructure, but rather a set of technologies, services, interfaces, procedures and good practice collectively endorsed by the community and operating in a framework based on open standards.

The use of state-of-the-art Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies and open standards will remove the technical barriers for connecting any service provider to any other service provider/travel agent. This will allow the take up of a global competitive and vibrant market for travel information and services giving a chance also to small companies dedicated to specialized local contents.

This wide community of content and service providers connects to customers through a common technical approach to serve new markets of travelers needing instant delivery of content and trip support. This technical approach is being developed and validated by the i-Travel project that is integrating e-commerce and internet technologies to create the first B2B e-Marketplace in the traffic and travel information service sector.

Content providers, content aggregators, service providers, service aggregators, system integrators and software houses, telco operators and public authorities are clearly concerned with i-Travel developments. But the e-Marketplace is also open to key actors of any related industry. There are many reasons for joining the e-Marketplace:

• to receive early and first-hand information on developments within i-Travel;
• to help steer i-Travel by early feedback at key stages;
• to meet the concerned actors and establish future business relations.
  

Read more at the official i-Travel site.

Big Stage is a media company whose breakthrough technology was shown at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Las Vegas, where Intel demonstrated future Internet computing applications, such as Big Stage.

Big Stage, still a private beta application, allows users to easily create and integrate a life-like 3D avatar of themselves into everything from famous movie scenes, TV shows and video games, to music videos, short video clips, virtual worlds, still images, user-generated content, instant messages, emails, social networks and more - instantly. Big Stage will launch to consumers in the second quarter of 2008.

Jonathan Strietzel, Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Big Stage, introduced their service together with Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, and Steve Harwell, former vocalist of Smash Mouth and Radio Angel:

“Big Stage is all about the personal Internet. The personal Internet is a place where you're going to be able to create the digital version of you. And that version of you will be ported into all sorts of new and exciting entertainment experiences. Now all this is totally capable, using a standard digital camera right here. We're going to create an avatar, Steve, by taking three simple pictures. …we're going to take these three pictures and we're going to bring them right over here to this PC. … we're going to build a digital Steve now. So get ready. It will be around 30 seconds to a minute or so … Now what do you do with that avatar once all of you guys have created a digital version of yourself? The digital avatar can then be ported into two forms of content, a still image or a video. And you can take those still images and videos and share them over the amazing social networking technologies we've seen evolve in the past years."



I am waiting impatiently to try their service! Do you think it will be a big deal?

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Starting with the January to March (1st quarter) 2008 time period, Akamai* will be publishing a quarterly “State of the Internet” report. This report will include data gathered across Akamai’s global server network about attack traffic and broadband adoption, as well as trends seen in this data over time. It will also aggregate publicly available news and information about notable events seen throughout the quarter, including Denial of Service attacks, Web site hacks, and network events.

Attack Traffic, Top Originating Countries (Click to enlarge.)

During the first quarter, Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 125 unique countries around the world. China and the United States were the two largest attack traffic sources, accounting for some 30% of this traffic in total. Akamai observed attack traffic targeted at 23 unique network ports. Many of the ports that saw the highest levels of attack traffic were targeted by worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the Internet several years ago.

Attack Traffic, Top Target Ports (Click to enlarge.)

A number of major network “events” occurred during the first quarter that impacted millions of Internet users. Cable cuts in the Mediterranean Sea severed Internet connectivity between the Middle East and Europe, drastically slowing communications. Cogent’s de-peering of Telia impacted Internet communications for selected Internet users in the United States and Europe for a two-week period. A routing change by Pakistan Telecom that spread across the Internet essentially took YouTube, a popular Internet video sharing site, offline for several hours.

Akamai observed that from a global perspective, South Korea had the highest measured levels of “high broadband” (>5 Mbps) connectivity. In the United States, Delaware topped the list, with over 60% of connections to Akamai occurring at 5 Mbps or greater. At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, Rwanda and the Solomon Islands topped the list of slowest countries, with 95% or more of the connections to Akamai from both countries occurring at below 256 Kbps. In the United States, Washington State and Virginia turned in the highest percentages of sub-256 Kbps connections. However, in contrast to the international measurements, these states only saw 21% and 18% of connections below 256 Kbps respectively.

High Broadband Connectivity: Fastest International Countries (Click to enlarge.)

Narrowband Connectivity: Slowest International Countries (Click to enlarge.)

* Akamai: handles tens of billions of daily Web interactions for companies like Adobe, Audi, CBC, Fox Interactive, Fujitsu, Logitech, MySpace, NBC, Verizon Wireless, and organizations like the U.S. Department of Defense and NASDAQ. Akamai provides market-leading managed services for powering rich media, dynamic transactions, and enterprise applications online. Having pioneered the content delivery market one decade ago, Akamai's services have been adopted by the world's most recognized brands across diverse industries.

You can download their report after a free registration.

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Some great ideas pop up every now and then in Menlo Park, California: Google was founded here in 1998, it is adjacent to Stanford University, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is situated here… and GroupCard (previously called SquidNote), the collaborative greetings Web site also operates in Menlo Park.

Yesterday they announced the launch of GroupCard Gifts, a feature that allows individuals to go online to collectively send a gift from the whole group along with their GroupCard. GroupCard Gifts are redeemable for an Amazon.com Gift Card, which can be used to purchase millions of items available on Amazon.com. GroupCards can be circulated online via email or Facebook, making them a fast and easy way for contributors to sign the card from anywhere in the world. With graduation and Father’s Day coming up, GroupCard is an easy way for families and friends to come together to acknowledge the special grads and dads in their lives.

According to the Federal Reserve, the gift card industry is estimated at more than $46 Billion.
GroupCard takes the familiar real-world experience of sending a group card or gift card and puts it online, making it the first and most popular collaborative gift card service.

“We are excited to team up with GroupCard” said Marcell King, Senior Manager of Amazon corporate gift cards. “This is a great example of how embedding Amazon.com Gift Cards into a gifting program can bring additional value to customers and clients.”

Starting a GroupCard is free, and it’s easy for everyone to use:

1. One person (the creator) initiates the card on the GroupCard.com website, choosing from hundreds of designs.
2. The card is then circulated via email and other web alerts (such as Facebook). Each contributor is invited to sign by adding a personalized message with unique fonts and pictures.
3. Each card signer may optionally contribute to the GroupCard Gift. Gifts can be of almost any amount, and individual contributions are kept anonymous. Each payment is quickly and securely transacted online via credit card or PayPal.
4. On a pre-set delivery time, the GroupCard is delivered to the recipient, who may then redeem the GroupCard Gift for an Amazon.com Gift Card. The recipient may then also send a thank you note to all the contributors via the GroupCard.com Web site.

GroupCard launched in late 2007 and has delivered more than 50,000 GroupCards in 2008. The company has grown virally via word of mouth and email across offices, homes, and college campuses around the world. The service now boasts hundreds of card designs with themes from birthday to babies to get well, that allows groups like families, friends, or coworkers to send a group greeting for just about any important personal event.

There are nine semantic web related projects among the numerous development projects aiming to shape the future of the Internet, which are listed in a study issued yesterday by the Commission of the European, titled “The Future of the Internet, A Compendium of European Projects on ICT Research Supported by the EU 7th Framework Programme for RTD”.

SENSEI – Integrating the Physical with the Digital World of the Network of the Future
This is an Integrated Project in the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme, in the ICT Thematic Priority of Challenge: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures. One of the awaited results of this project is an open service interface and corresponding semantic specifications to unify the access to context information and actuation services offered by the system for services and applications. The duration of the project is January 2008- December 2010. Total costs are EUR 24m, of which EC contribution is EUR 15m.


MOMENT – Monitoring and Measurement in the Next generation Technologies
The main objective of the project is to design and implement a mediator architecture offering a unified interface for monitoring and measurement services, able to use all data and functionalities from the existing and future measurement infrastructures. The project consortium has partners from Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Greece, Italy, Spain and Israel. The MOMENT platform will provide a middleware or mediation engine that serves not only to provide a common unified interface to monitoring applications, but also to provide taxonomy of such monitoring services, and semantic based querying capabilities. One of the key issues of the project is the protocol that serves for the applications to perform semantic queries to the mediation engine through the query interface using web services. The duration of the project is January 2008- December 2010. Total costs are EUR 3.907,689 m, of which EC contribution is EUR 2.800,363 m.


SOA4All – Service Oriented Architectures for All
Computer science is entering a new generation. The emerging generation starts by abstracting from soft ware and sees all resources as services in a service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA4All will help to realize a Web of billions of services, a world where billions of parties are exposing and consuming services via advanced Web technology. The outcome of the project will be a comprehensive framework and infrastructure that integrates four complimentary and revolutionary technical advances into a coherent and domain independent service delivery platform of which one is Semantic Web technology, a means to abstract from syntax to semantics as required for meaningful service discovery. Duration of this project is 36 months, starting from 2008-03-01. Total costs are: EUR 13.648.488,19


SERVFACE – Service Annotations for User Interface Composition
The project ServFace will extend service-oriented architecture concepts with an integrated approach of user interface description and development by introducing the notion of a correspondent user interface for services. Objective 4 of this project: Runtime platform and Web service technology standard extensions. The technological basis of ServFace will be web service standards which we see as the base for service-oriented approaches. Advances in web service technologies will be achieved regarding to the semantic description of service functionality, service operations and operation parameters, and the integration of user interface descriptions in existing standards. An appropriate runtime platform will be developed and implemented supporting the technological extensions for interactive and adaptive services. The duration of this project: 30 month (02/2008 – 08/2010). Total cost: EUR 4.078.175.


SHAPE - Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous service Architecture and Platforms Engineering
The objective of the SHAPE project is to provide a powerful environment and standard for service modeling, to support the specification and realization of enterprise systems based on a Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous service Architecture (SHA). SHAPE will provide an open source implementation of the UPMS service modeling standard from OMG, with extensions for SHA. SHA extends SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) with semantics and support for heterogeneous architectural styles, including Web Services, Agents, SESA (Semantically enabled Service Architectures), ERP services, P2P, Grid and Components, under a unified service-oriented approach, to form a new and better basis for meeting the business requirements of enterprise wide systems.

Th e SHAPE project will provide MDE tools and –platform for SHA systems, based on UPMS (UML Profile and Metamodel for Services) and the UPMSHA (UML Profile and Metamodel for Semantically-enabled Heterogeneous service Architectures) that will be extended from that. An initial focus on web services and JEE will be extended with support for semantic web services, based on WSMO (Web Services Modelling Ontology) and the concept of SESA – (Semantically-enabled Service Architectures) – that also will be related to the other metamodels and technologies. Duration of this project: 30 months from 1.12.07. Total cost: EUR 5.7m.


SERVICE Web 3.0
Even after four decades of rapid advances, computing is currently subject to revolutionary changes at all levels, including hardware, middleware, network infrastructure, but more importantly intelligent applications. Emerging technologies such as the Semantic Web or Web services transform the Internet from a network of information to a network of knowledge and services. The number of services which will be offered on the Internet is expected to rise dramatically in the next few years. Semantic we related focuses of Service Web 3.0 will be:

• to support standardization activities for semantic service descriptions;
• to organize different types of events ranging from scientific conferences to industry-oriented tutorials on topics related to semantic computing;
• to provide information material such as white papers, feasibility studies, showcases and promotional movies to disseminate semantic technologies to the industry. This will introduce new business models and systematically facilitate Semantic Web services and Semantic Web technology adoption, in particular for SMEs;
• to set-up dedicated cross-project clusters focusing on Semantic Web services and semantically-enabled Service oriented Architectures, and exploit synergies.

Thematically, activities within the project Service Web 3.0 are focused around the integration of three mainstream technologies: Web, Service-oriented Architectures and Web 2.0, and their extension into semantics as a means to achieve interoperability and scalability.
Duration: 24 months: January 2008 to December 2010. Total cost: EUR 721,273


VICTORY - Audio-Visual Content search and retrieval in a distributed P2P repository
In light of three dimensional object retrieval evolving from text annotation to content-based and from standalone applications to web-based search engines, the creation of a search engine for 3D and multimedia distributed content into P2P and mobile P2P networks, is proposed. Driven by the very successful concept of Wikipedia, the first goal of the proposed project is to create the first distributed Visual Object Repository in which any peer can contribute to.

The main differences between VICTORY and any known knowledge repository, is that, firstly, any visual information will be described as MultiPedia object (3D object along with its accompanied information - 2D views, text, audio, video), and secondly, the distributed nature of the repository. VICTORY’s main objective is to create a MultiPedia search engine based on the 3D objects. The user will be able to use as input any Multipedia object or a combination of them. The retrieved content will contain 3D objects and their accompanied mixed-media and it will be accessible from both mobile devices and standard PCs. The search engine will be based on a combination of novel algorithms able to extract 3D low- level geometric features and high-level semantic features using relevance feedback and annotation techniques which are expected to improve significantly the retrieved results.

Furthermore, the search engine will be enriched by multimodal personalized interfaces so as to take into account the users’ interests and to offer capabilities of matching between 2D/3D objects, sketches and text. In conclusion, the VICTORY project aims at developing: Distributed 3D content and context-based search engine, P2P and Mobile P2P collaborative network, Unified distributed access, Community neighbourhood identification, 3D visualization on handheld devices, Multimodal interfaces (text, 2D images, sketches, 3D), Copyright protection. Execution of the project is 01/01/2007 – 30/06/2009. Total cost: EUR 3.87m of which EC contribution is EUR 2.20m.


COIN - Enterprise Collaboration & Interoperability
The mission of the COIN IP is to study, design and develop an open, self-adaptive, generic ICT integrated solution to support the above 2020 vision, starting from notable existing research results in the field of Enterprise Interoperability and Enterprise Collaboration. COIN will develop services for semantic, web-enabled business documents interoperability; for Knowledge interoperability and for Business models and policies harmonization and combination. Duration of this project is 48 months. Total cost: EUR 14.38m.


iSURF - An Interoperability Framework for Collaborative Planning
This project will develop knowledge-oriented inter-enterprise collaboration tools for European SMEs to enable them to be more agile, self-sustainable and responsive to the changes in the supply chain. An open smart product infrastructure will be developed to collect supply chain visibility information and an interoperability service utility will be provided for seamless exchange of planning documents.

iSURF project will provide a Semantic Interoperability Service Utility for achieving the semantic reconciliation of the planning and forecasting business documents exchanged between the companies according to different standards. This component will be based on UN/CEFACT Core Component Technical Specification. iSURF project proposes to use a Service Oriented Architecture: semantically enriched Web services will be used to interact with the underlying business processes and to wrap the existing legacy applications to solve the interoperability problem. Duration: 30 months. Total cost: EUR 3.13m.

One out of ten mashups listed on programmableweb.com, the biggest repository of mashups, is related to flickr, one of the most visited picture sharing social medium on the net. Today they have 338 flickr related mashups.

Big Huge Labs: this site is up since 2005 and it currently has 78,000 registered users, 173,000 linked Flickr accounts, and 913,000 unique visitors in the past 30 days who’ve created millions and millions of picture related things. You can browse in flickr, automatically create a harmonious color palette from a photograph, create and print a pocket-sized photo album, turn your favorite photograph into a customized photo jigsaw puzzle, Create a movie poster from your digital photographs, and dozens of other picture related free services!

jiffr: “get a date without words”. Use a set of flickr photos and show who you are, choose the one you want to meet. You have to create a new own jiffr profile to be a part of the jiffr community. After uploading your pictures to flickr you can chose a set of up to 9 images which should represent your personality as good as possible to make other jiffr users interested in you. Select your favorite pictures and give them the right order for the final picture set. To find a nice girl or guy you can browse through the gallery and search for pleasant profiles. After finding a good one you can jiffr that person. If you jiffr someone you show your interests in this girl or guy. And if this person jiffrs you too you are going to get a so-called "match". Every Thursday the new matches will be announced and you'll receive an email with a link to the match site. There you can accept or decline the date.

Tag galaxy: a great visualization of flickr pictures! Choose from popular flickr tags or use a tag you prefer by entering a tag in the search box, then see how your tag builds up a galaxy of relating tags. Then choose a “tag-planet” by clicking on it and start looking at the relating photos.

colr.org: get a random flickr image or your own uploaded one and play with the picture’s color schemes or edit the colors yourself. You can even give and URL and fetch colors from a website. Or choose from the different colors provided by a tag given by you or given by the latest, random or favorite tags.

earth album: it is a simpler, slicker flickr-Google mash-up that allows you to explore some of the most stunning photos in the world. To begin your journey, just click somewhere on the map, e.g. "India". Note: since the top flickr images are used, the images change every few weeks.

Bookr: you can create and share your photo book using flickr images: search, add text and publish.

Bubblr: this is a tool to create comic strips using photos from flickr. Search images, add bubbles to them and make your comic.

Colr Pickr: Great way to find Flickr photos by color. Select colors diretly or use the slider to adjust lightness and darkness.

Geowalk: Worldwide travel guide in English, French and German with embedded data from Wikipedia, Flickr and Google News. Double-click anywhere on the map for details on that location: information, hotels, photos.

mapdango: flickr + Google Maps + WeatherBug + Wikipedia + Eventful + Gruvr + Google News + Books on Amazon. This mashup is great e.g. if you plan your holiday and would like to find out the most important information about a location. They won 1st place at Mashup Camp 6 this March in Silicon Valley.

A 162 page study was released by the European Commission today on the future of the Internet titled: ”The Future of the Internet, A Compendium of European Projects on ICT Research Supported by the EU 7th Framework Programme for RTD”.

Here is a summary of the preface by Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media:

“The European Commission will contribute to the 5 priorities identified by the Internet Governance Forum: openness, security, access, diversity and critical Internet resources. The use of the Internet in public policies will considerably grow in areas such as education, culture, health and e-government. These topics will be at the core of our contribution to the OECD Seoul Summit in June.

In the longer term, we have to prepare the future Internet, including for example, a 3D-Internet. This has already been pioneered through virtual environments such as “Second Life”.

Turnover in online gaming has grown threefold over the past 5 years, and are estimated to attract more than 60 million users worldwide. In addition to the new technological requirements placed on the underlying network infrastructure, a virtual worlds“3D Internet” will raise many new challenges, such as the management of multiple identities, monetization of virtual assets and applicable rules, or privacy of “digital avatars”.

Such graphic and rich environments require high speed and high quality applications. But today’s Internet was not designed with 100 Megabit-per-second data rates in mind. Moreover, the fact that we approach 4 billion mobile users worldwide has profound implications on the design of the future Internet, an Internet on the move. We also see growing machine-to-machine communications - RFID is just the first example. Again, new technology means new applications which need to comply with the users’ rights to privacy and confidentiality.”

So far some 300 million Euro of our ICT budget have been dedicated to this issue. We now have a golden opportunity to shape the future of the Internet.”

The contents of the study:

• Area 1 “Future Networks”
• Area 2 “Services Architectures”
• Area 3 “Networked Media Systems”
• Area 4 “Internet of Things”
• Area 5 “Security”
• Area 6 “Experimental Test Facilities”

Download the study (free)!

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19/05/2008 – Monday

• TechCrunch: Microsoft and Yahoo are back at the table: In a press statement, the company says: “in light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties. There of course can be no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.”

• NewsOK: News Corp. is pooling some of its Web sites, including the newly acquired Wall Street Journal properties, to better sell financial ads targeting Latin America. The new "Worthnet.Fox" network, will be anchored by News Corp.'s Fox International Channels. Participants include Web sites for The Wall Street Journal, Barron's and MarketWatch, all of which News Corp. acquired through its December acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. Ads sold through the network will target online consumers of financial news and investment advice, with a focus on audiences in Latin America.

• ZDNet: When Google announced its ‘Friend Connect’ product to deliver social networking features to the ‘long tail’ of the Web, Facebook’s response was to blocks Google access claiming privacy concerns, while the search giant says it’s done nothing wrong as users have to explicitly opt-in by being re-directed to Facebook’s own log-in screen, and can unlink their Google Friend Connect and Facebook accounts at any time. Facebook said that it’s willing to sit down with Google to explore a way forward. Talking at a news conference in Tokyo to launch a local language version of the site, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “We want to talk to Google about this and see if there’s a way we can make it work”.

• Reuters: Google unveiled Google Health, a long-anticipated health information service that combines the leading Web company's classic search services with a user's personal health records online. The password-protected service, which can be found at www.google.com/health/, provides a personalized profile for Google users of their basic medical history and gathers relevant information connected to a user's health conditions.
  

20/05/2008 – Tuesday

• Reuters: Russian biggest internet firm Yandex plans to raise between $1.5 billion and $2.0 billion in a New-York initial public offering in autumn this year, a source close to the offering told Reuters on Tuesday.
  

21/05/2008 – Wednesday

• BBC: Microsoft is offering "cold, hard cash" to persuade users to shop online using its Live Search engine and help the company catch up to rival Google. The savings range between 2% and 30% on products sold by select retailers through its so-called cashback service. "2008 is the year that search got competitive," said Bill Gates, speaking at the company's annual digital ad conference in Redmond.

• Gigaom: Twitter reached an agreement with investors to raise $15 million in funding at around $80 million pre-money valuation. A new investor is leading the round with existing investor Union Square Ventures also participating. With this round, the company will have raised a little over $20 million in VC backing thus far. This comes at an interesting time for the site, which has spent the past few days in a constant struggle to stay up and running.
  

22/05/2008 – Thursday

• Google: A few months ago Google launched Google Sites exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now Google have made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information - team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it - in one place, for a few people, a group or the world. You can securely host your own website at http://sites.google.com/[your-website] and add as many pages as you like for free.
  

• Reuters: Time Warner Inc's AOL Internet division launched versions of its video service in Canada, India and Taiwan as part of an aggressive global expansion. By autumn, it will also introduce versions of its video portal, AOL Video (video.aol.com), in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, AOL Video senior vice president Fred McIntyre said in an interview.

23/05/2008 – Friday

• TechCrunch: Activity stream aggregator FriendFeed launched a new feature called FriendFeed Rooms this afternoon, which are effectively topic-based accounts that anyone can create or join (depending on privacy settings). Users can then add links and messages to relevant content. The main difference between Rooms and a normal FriendFeed account is the fact that multiple users can author it, and that you can’t pull third party feeds into the service.

• Microsoft: Microsoft is ending its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into their Search results, but not through separate indexes.

24/05/2008 – Saturday

• Mashable: Facebook Platform turns one year young. An entire economy has emerged in the months since the launch, complete with virtually all of the ups and downs that come with development and management of a startup marketplace. Many third parties have benefited considerably from activity on the network. Disputes have arisen over a myriad of things - openness and user data security and portability being perhaps the most consistently topical of all.

Weezer, a band founded in Los Angeles in 1992, launched their "Pork And Beans" video on YouTube using a group of well known “YouTube celebs”. Their video was launched only on May 23, 2008 but it has been already viewed 2,051,610 times generating 1,007 video responses and 15,122 text comments, plus more than 600 blog posts, according to Viral Video Chart. Great viral marketing using YouTube celebrities!



Almost 140 million downloads were made on YouTube for the nine videos mentioned in South Park’s also famous video, “Meet the Internet Stars”. The nine video is only 33,2 megabytes together but the total amount of downloaded information is around 586 terabytes! To have a comparison: As of May 2007, the US Library of Congress has collected more than 70 terabytes of data, which means that more than 8 times of bytes were downloaded in the form of just these videos from YouTube than the entire information stored in the Library of Congress. All together more than 600 thousand comments and more than 400 video comments were sent commenting these videos.


Just a little statistics on internet video consumption: Internet users in the US watched 11.5 billion online videos in March 2008, up 13% over February 2008 and 64% over March 2007, according to comScore Video Metrix. On average each Internet users in the US watched 83 videos during March.

Will video downloading and P2P file sharing “kill the web” if new data transmission technologies will not arise in the forthcoming years? Some experts are rather skeptic:
"The web infrastructure - and even Google's - doesn't scale," said Vincent Dureau, Google's head of TV technology in an article of the Guardian. "It's not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect."


Meet the Internet Stars - South Park




Hahaha


49,779,343 views / Video Responses: 212 / Text Comments: 64,344


"Chocolate Rain" Original Song by Tay Zonday


22,351,878 views / Video Responses: 1,422 / Text Comments: 176,042


Chris Crocker - LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!


20,121,580 views / Video Responses: 2,271 / Text Comments: 287,699


Sneezing Panda


14,914,996 views / Video Responses: 104 / Text Comments: 15,745


Numa Numa


13,957,523 views / Video Responses: 0 Text Comments: 265


Star Wars Kid


7,240,952 views / Video Responses: 0 / Text Comments: 35,339


Dramatic Look


6,867,796 views / Video Responses: 7 / Text Comments: 8,764


afro ninja


2,841,287 views / Video Responses: 0 / Text Comments: 6,412


Tron Guy


1,245,827 views / Video Responses: 0 / Text Comments: 5,465

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Twitter Answers
This is a Q&A mashup using Twitter and Mosio, a mobile community enabling you to text any question from your phone and have it answered by real people (other Mosio members). It enables you to ask any question using Twitter and have it answered by real people like yourself. If you are familiar with how Twitter works, after signing up with Mosio and Twitter both, you simply follow QNA (twitter.com/qna) and when you want to ask a question, you send a direct message to QNA. Example: d qna How much does the earth weigh? "d" starts the direct message, "qna" is the username, and your question goes at the end. Your question will be posted on the Mosio Twitter Answers page for people to answer. If you'd like to help answer questions, make sure QNA is set up in your notifications (we recommend using instant messenger) and you'll be notified when a question has been posted.

twittearth
This is a Twitter timeline visualizer with fun icons and a clean interface. Tweets are accompanied by small, goofy icons that remain static on the map, eventually providing an interesting representation of usage distribution. Users can login to the application and send their own messages, but it’s far more fun to zone out and watch tweets pop up around the globe. They have a screensaver version as well. It is developed by developers of Digitas, the leading interactive marketing agency of France.

twistori
It is a “A Microblogging Microscope” as described in Wired. You can see emotions scrolling on your screen what people on Twitter write about of their six emotions: love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish. This mashup was inspired by wefeelfine and drawing data from summize, hand-crafted by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs.

Summize
Their mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations. Summize currently features realtime conversations on Twitter since Twitter is a fascinating new source of realtime recommendations, opinions, and buzz. They index Twitter's public timeline in realtime, thread together associated tweets, and give you the search tools to dig in. Craft your queries using our many advanced search operators. You can also use the advanced search page to easily incorporate search operators in your queries.

twitt(url)y
It is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about on Twitter. On digg, and twitturly, people "vote" for an item. The more votes it gets the better it ranks. If it does well enough, it gets promoted to the home page and as the votes increase it gets displayed higher up the home page. Twitturly is different than digg because instead of voting on our site, you vote by participating on twitter. Each time that you send a link to your followers on twitter, twitturly takes a note of it and applies your vote to that URL. To keep things fresh and the quality high, twitturly only shows the 100 most popular URLs over the last 24 hours. The 24 hours are constantly sliding and we have an advanced algorithm in place so you always see what people are currently talking about.

Tweetburner
This mashup allows you to keep track of what happens to the links in tweets shared with you, by you, by your friends and every other twitterer. With it’s shorturl service twurl.nl we provide a shorturl for your links and content. Share it with your friends and let Tweetburner do it’s work. See how link information is generated and put into statistics so you can analyse what happened. Not only will this work for your links, all your tweets will be indexed and analysed. Tweetburner will let you know when you’ve created a hype. Just log in with your Twitter-account to check your personal statistics. They even have an iPhone version. This service is provided by Michiel Sikkes (Welo webservices) and Bob Jansen (Firmhouse) from the Netherlands.

TweetVolume
Enter up to 5 words or phrases and see how often they appear on Twitter. TweetVolume is mashing up data coming from Twitter and Google and it is developed by Wowza, a company in Minneapolis which is into word of mouth marketing, viral marketing, brand blogging, ….

Twitbuzz
This is a new content filtering service that tracks and follows the latest popular links, conversations and people on Twitter. It is the world's first complete Twitter News Aggregator. Read my my deatailed review on it.

Twitbuzz is a new content filtering service that tracks and follows the latest popular links, conversations and people on Twitter. It is the world's first complete Twitter News Aggregator.

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of Twitter but I find this service quite interesting! Twitbuzz addresses the desperate need for management of twitters vastly expanding social frenzy and organizes information appropriately and effectively based on a proprietary scoring algorithm. Twitbuzz prides itself on having high information relevancy and is competitive with other services in the space.

Twitbuzz is part of the recently formed Viral Motion Ltd; a new online social media company in Jersey, United Kingdom, that focuses on helping mainstream and online businesses effectively join the social networking revolution whilst harnessing the power of viral promotion on the Internet. Twitbuzz is also demonstration of Viral Motion’s technical capacity and focus on social media and exploring social trends.

Viral Motion is an online social media company that focuses on helping mainstream and online businesses effectively join the social-networking revolution whilst harnessing the power of viral promotion on the Internet.


Two other services of Viral Motion are:
Viral Platfrom: allows businesses to deploy their products and servers on social networks. A structured, unified platform will ensure that no time is lost grabbling for clarify amongst a sea of APIs. Viral Platform takes care of all the unwanted fuss, allowing you to deploy applications and social experiences modularly and promptly.

Rateicons: provides an interactive "emotial" rating system for content. Allow users to emotionally interact with clients websites to improve their traction and enhance their user experience through the rateicons widgets. Rateicons supports integration with all major blog platforms, including Blogger, TypePad and Wordpress.

Visit Twitbuzz.com!

Steven Pemberton*, co-chair of the XHTML2 Working Group and activity lead of the W3C HTML and Forms Activities, gave a presentation, “Why you should have a Website”, at the XTech 2008 conference which was held in Dublin, Ireland this May.

Here is the extract ...
“The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis postulates a link between thought and language: if you haven’t got a word for a concept, you can’t think about it; if you don’t think about it, you won’t invent a word for it. The term “Web 2.0” is a case in point. It was invented by a book publisher as a term to build a series of conferences around, and conceptualises the idea of Web sites that gain value by their users adding data to them. But the concept existed before the term: Ebay was already Web 2.0 in the era of Web 1.0. But now we have the term we can talk about it, and it becomes a structure in our minds, and in this case a movement has built up around it.

There are inherent dangers for users of Web 2.0. For a start, by putting a lot of work into a Web site, you commit yourself to it, and lock yourself into their data formats. This is similar to data lock-in when you use a proprietary program. You commit yourself and lock yourself in. Moving comes at great cost. This was one of the justifications for creating the eXtended Markup Language (XML): it reduces the possibility of data lock-in – having a standard representation for data helps using the same data in different ways too.

As an example, if you commit to a particular photo-sharing Web site, you upload thousands of photos, tagging extensively, and then a better site comes along. What do you do? How about if the site you have chosen closes down (as has happened with some Web 2.0 music sites): all your work is lost. How do you decide which social networking site to join? Do you join several and repeat the work? How about geneology sites, and school-friend sites? These are all examples of Metcalf’s law, which postulates that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes in the network. Simple maths shows that if you split a network into two, its value is halved. This is why it is good that there is a single email network, and bad that there are many instant messenger networks. It is why it is good that there is only one World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 partitions the Web into a number of topical sub-Webs, and locks you in, thereby reducing the value of the network as a whole.

So does this mean that user contributed content is a Bad Thing? Not at all, it is the method of delivery and storage that is wrong. The future lies in better aggregators.”

... and the video:


You can also read a version of his presentation on his homepage.

* Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the CWI, The Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, a nationally-funded research centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the first non-military Internet site in Europe. Steven’s research is in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can support the user. At the end of the 80’s he built a style-sheet based hypertext system called Views. Steven has been involved with the World Wide Web since the beginning. He organised two workshops at the first World Wide Web Conference in 1994, chaired the first W3C Style Sheets workshop, and the first W3C Internationalisation workshop. He was a member of the CSS Working Group from its start, and is was long-time member and chair of the HTML Working Group. He is now co-chair of the XHTML2 Working Group and activity lead of the W3C HTML and Forms Activities. He is co-author of (amongst other things) HTML 4, CSS, XHTML and XForms. Steven was also Editor-in-Chief of ACM/interactions.

A report on the internet related usage of mobile phones by Opera Software, which has more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide, “State of the Mobile Web: First Quarter, 2008” shows that almost 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic.

Opera Mini users viewed more than 2.4 billion pages in March. In the first three months of 2008, the number of pages viewed through Opera Mini grew almost 57% over the last quarter of 2007. In March, each person using Opera Mini viewed 202 pages on average.

The main usage patterns:

• Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.

• Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.

• Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.

• Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

In their report, Opera Software provides Snapshot of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini (ranked by usage):

• Russian Opera Mini users consume more entertainment content than users in all countries except for Ukraine. Traffic to entertainment, leisure and sports sites comprise almost 40% of Web traffic to mobile phones.

• With 63% of traffic going to social networks, Indonesia is tied with the United States as the number one country for social networking on the mobile Web.

• Web portal content and search engine access is extremely popular in China, accounting for nearly 55% of the traffic. E-commerce and e-mail are not yet as popular in China as in other parts of the world. Together, these two categories combine to create less than 2% of overall Opera Mini traffic in China.

• More than 63% of U.S. Web traffic on mobile phones is to social networks, tying it with Indonesia for the number one spot.

• India favors social networking, with nearly half (48.9%) of all traffic going to social networks.

• A very high 61% of traffic in South Africa is to social networks. South Africa has the second-highest penetration of e-mail access on mobile devices (more than 4% of the traffic).

• Opera Mini users in the Ukraine enjoy their entertainment and sports. More than 61% of traffic is in this category. Mobile-optimized content remains popular in the Ukraine--more than 43% of Opera Mini traffic in the Ukraine is directed towards WAP sites.

• The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

• Compared to users in other countries, German users shop the most on Opera Mini. E-commerce accounts for more than 7% of German Opera Mini traffic. German users of Opera Mini enjoy entertainment and sports content on their mobile phones. More than 28% of traffic heads to entertainment and other leisure sites.

• In Poland, people using Opera Mini prefer to access the full Web from their mobile phones--only 4% of the traffic is to WAP or .mobi sites.

Read the report!

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The Internet’s unprecedented global reach and scope combined with the difficulty in monitoring and tracing communications make the Internet a prime tool for extremists and terrorists. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has been monitoring these developments for nearly two decades through their Digital Terrorism and Hate Project.

According to “iReport Online Terror + Hate: The First Decade”, a new report of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in April 1995, the first extremist website went online. Today, the report identifies some 8,000 problematic hate and terrorist websites and other internet postings. This represents a 30% increase over last year.

Every aspect of the Internet is being used by extremists of every ilk to repackage old hatred, demean the ‘Enemy’, to raise funds, and since 9/11, recruit and train Jihadist terrorists. Of special concern is the use of the Internet used by the Iranian regime to justify terrorism and spread its influence throughout South America.

Extremists are leveraging 2.0 technologies to dynamically target young people through digital games, Second Life scenarios, blogs, and even Youtube and Facebook style videos depicting racist violence and terrorism.

The Wiesenthal Center’s iReport presents a 10-point action plan to help the family and online community to become more pro-active in identifying and curbing Internet Hate and Terror.

1. Hate is never cool. That means it’s never OK to download racist music or play online hate games —no matter who the target.

2. Help teach your child to learn to verify online postings. Go to websites that claim to teach people about various religions – but instead demonize its followers; show a page that claims to present new perspectives on slavery but actually seeks to whitewash a historic evil. Discuss a site that claims to teach about Martin Luther King Jr.’s achievements but actually seeks to tarnish his legacy.

3. Provide tools – on and offline that will help your child develop critical thinking. Make sure your child’s school is also addressing these issues.

What to do about a hate site:
4. First, make sure your child understands the difference between legitimate criticism or analysis and hate that seeks to rewrite history.

5. If you agree that “the line was crossed”, make the effort to contact the ISP. Urge them to abide by the Terms of Service and remove the posting and take action against the online bigotry. Involve your child in this process. Teach them words have consequences; so should actions. Push the ISP to respond beyond a generic email response.

6. If the web posting constitutes a quantifiable threat contact your local hate crimes unit and

7. Email iReport@wiesenthal.com with the link to the problematic posting.

What about Digital Terror?
8. Zero Tolerance for any websites promoting illegal acts. Any web postings teaching how to act as a terrorist should be immediately reported. Not sure who should be notified? Forward link to ireport@wiesenthal.com.

9. Since 9/11, the Internet has emerged as a critical component of terrorists and their enablers for recruitment, command, control and propaganda. Among its 39 Principles, Al Qaeda lists ‘Electronic Jihad’. Young people are key targets of this effort, on blogs, in newsgroups and with the new 2.0 technologies. They need to let you know immediately when they come across any postings, videos, etc from Islamist extremists or neo-Nazi killers.

10. Go on the offensive. The Internet community, NGOs and governments need to invest in best practices, including multilingual leveraging of Internet technologies, in order to thwart the terrorists and racists campaigns to win over young recruits to their culture of hate and death.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center urges governments, Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), educational institutions and other concerned groups to launch multilingual sites to counter Al Qaeda‚s and other extremist groups‚ ongoing, Electronic Jihad.

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Clay Shirky, author of the just released "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" spoke at Harvard Law School's Austin Hall on Feb. 28,2008 hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, about the effects of Internet had, has and will have on the society. This is a short resume of the 42 minute video.

The effects of the Internet are now becoming broadly social enough that there is a general awareness that Internet isn’t a decoration on the contemporary society; it’s a challenge to it.

Our historical generation is living through the largest increase in human expressive capability in history. There are only four revolutions that could compete with that:

• The printing press and moveable type,
• Telegraph and the telephone,
• Recorded media of all types (images, sound, moving images),
• Broadcasting.

Internet isn’t just a fifth revolution, it holds the contents of the previous revolutions. The big deal: group action got much more easier.

What we are seeing now – says Shirky – is a set of tools that makes links between members of even large groups very easy. As a result we start to get larger and more effective groups: this is called ridiculously easy group forming. What really made e-mail take-off was “Reply all”… that was THE first social feature in Internet.

Shirky built a ladder in his book of ways in which group effect adds up in something more than just aggregated individuals: sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action.

Sharing: e.g. del.icio.us – three main units: URLs, users, tags. Users are mainly acting out of personal utility (“Me first collaboration”), but the social effects are being aggregated out of the large mass of links. It reverses the old order of sharing: you don’t aggregate and then share, but with tagging system you can share and the aggregate.

Sharing + Conversation: e.g. flickr – “every URL is a latent community”: in addition to the value of having an individual being exposed to a resource that is available on the internet, there is additional value to be gotten by introducing those users to one another.

Conversation: e.g. Bronze beta.
Collaboration: e.g. Aegisub.

The future is collective action. This has the fewest examples, because it is the hardest to get going, and because the social support required to sustain it is still being worked out.
Example: Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights: “We are committed to solutions for promoting airline passenger policies that forward first and foremost the safety of all passengers while not imposing unrealistic economic burdens that adversely affect airline profitability or create exorbitant ticket price increases.”

What this collaboration shows is that publishing is for acting: when you get a whole group of people you can actually synchronize them to do something. This is when media becomes a place where groups can come together and achieve some kind of shared goal rather than just being a source of information. Clay Shirky thinks this is going to become widespread.
Another example for collective action which can be effectively organized via the Internet is flash mob, which is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, and then quickly disperse.

In a high freedom environment, new communication tools tend to be used mainly for entertainment, but in low freedom environment these tools are also used to organize some kind of a collective action.

This form of communication on internet will be the most radical for society.

The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced that the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2008, adjusted for seasonal variation, but not for price changes, was $33.8 billion, an increase of 0.8 percent (±1.0%)* from the fourth quarter of 2007. Total retail sales for the first quarter of 2008 were estimated at $1,024.2 billion, an increase of 0.1 percent (±0.2%)* from the fourth quarter of 2007. The first quarter 2008 e-commerce estimate increased 13.6 percent (±1.2%) from the first quarter of 2007 while total retail sales increased 2.8 percent (±0.2%) in the same period. E-commerce sales in the first quarter of 2008 accounted for 3.3 percent of total sales.

On a not adjusted basis, the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2008 totaled $32.4 billion, a decrease of 16.9 percent (±1.0%) from the fourth quarter of 2007. The first quarter 2008 e-commerce estimate increased 13.4 percent (±1.2%) from the first quarter of 2007 while total retail sales increased 3.7 percent (±0.2%) in the same period. E-commerce sales in the first quarter of 2008 accounted for 3.4 percent of total sales.

That was the lowest quarterly growth since the third quarter of 2001 (-0.5%).

This is another proof that Internet is not recession proof. Not only e-commerce is slowing but internet ad prices are also dropping endangering online ad revenues. eMarketer has also revised its US social network ad spending projections, estimating that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion to place ads on online social networks this year, down from the previous projection of $1.6 billion.

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next08, the conference for the future and relevance of the web, took place on May 15, 2008 at the Prototyp museum in Hamburg, Germany.

The main theme was “get realtime”. They wanted to take care of the challenge that customers are communicating in real-time but companies do not. What does it take to implement, how can brands solve this challenge?

The conference covered four main topics:

• _ Enterprise 2.0: How corporations deal with the real-time challenge.
• _ Marketing 2.0: How brands and consumers interact in real-time.
• _ Mobile 2.0: How the real-time web gets mobile.
• _ Media 2.0: How media work in real-time.

Among the speakers were: Joel Berger (DE), Managing Director of MySpace; Matt Cohler (US), Product Manager at Facebook; Stefan Glänzer (UK), First Investor and former Executive Chairman of last.fm; Mike Jennings (US) from Google; Luis Suarez Rodriguez (US), Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist at IBM; Jeremy Ruston (UK), Head of Open Source Innovation Activities of British Telecom; Lisa Sounio (FIN), CEO of Dopplr; Werner Vogels (US),Vice President und CTO of Amazon.com; and Geraldine Wilson (DE), Vice President of Connected Life Europe of Yahoo!.

Some of the slides are on SlideShare (some slides are in German - in italics):

• Kennst du deine Community? / Andreas Stephan

• Next08: Enterprise 2.0 - Der Wert von Vernetzung? Unbezahlbar! / Sören Stamer

• The Social Web: Why The New Web Matters / Stowe Boyd

• Kununu.com Projekverstellung
  

• Telewebber – gemeinsam besser fernsehen

• Thinking Out Of The Inbox - More Collaboration Through Less E-Mail / Luis Suarez / IBM

• Real Time Design / Leisa Reichelt & Matt Balara

• What makes TV really entertaining and comfortable?

• Playing business, ein neues web 2.0 geschäftsmodell / knipz

• Amazee.com presentation

• Travello.com / Ralf Eggert

• Jupidi.com

• Foodorder.de

• I’m streaming, come and chat / Tina Pickhardt, Markus Angermeier

The next08 conference is also on YouTube!


Visit the conference site!

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TouchGraph was founded in 2001 with the creation of the original visual browser for Google. Today they also have a service for Amazon and Facebook. They developed these visualization tools because they believe that existing data sets can reveal new insights when visualized effectively. They believe that traditional search engines provide a way to sift through this data, but the greatest insights can be achieved not by sifting, but by looking at the big picture to see how items are connected.

What can you do with it? Discover patterns, refine result, analyze and create reports:

• See the big picture within thousands of search results. Discover clusters and interrelations within your data, and zoom in on whatever catches your interest.
  

• Follow the data by expanding your search around specific topics, or making the search broader when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for.
  

• Access a variety of information sources – TouchGraph can connect to local or remote databases and can read data from XML files, Excel sheets, and many other formats.
  

• Visual cues such as size, shape, and color indicate items' categories, relationships, and relative importance.

• Proprietary layout techniques produce aesthetic arrangements that reveal the patterns hidden within your data.

• Get a new perspective by "grabbing" and moving items of interest. The graph responds to your actions instantly, arranging itself into new, meaningful orientations.

• Control what is displayed in the graph using a wide range of well-organized filters and settings.
  

• Show or hide nodes based on their type and attribute thresholds.
  

• Navigate by moving a local field of view within the larger graph.
  

• See numerical analysis in tables that reflect the graph. Interaction with the tables is mirrored in the graph, and vice versa.
  

• Analyze your results with a range of algorithms, including cluster detection and centrality ranking.
  

• Create reports by exporting the tables and graph to Excel sheets, images, and other public formats.

An example of a TouchGraph Amazon search using search phrase “semantic web”:



Visit their site!

In the annals of online campaigning, senator John McCain, the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, has rarely blazed new paths. But a recent initiative to hold conference call briefings with left-wing (!) and issue-based bloggers could be a presidential campaign first. According to Wired.com, the McCain campaign has recently started to hold bi-weekly conference calls with left-wing blogs and blogs focusing on single issues, such as the environment and health care.

Politicians who hold blogger calls usually reach out to writers on the same team, trusting that those writers and party activists will amplify their message. The Democratic National Committee announced Wednesday, for example, that it is credentialing a cadre of 55 state bloggers to cover its proceedings from the coveted spot of the convention floor. The bloggers will be seated along with their state's delegates.

The last McCain blogger conference call was held Thursday. It included Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central, Kate Sheppard, a political reporter for the environmental web site Grist.org and Joanne Bamberger of PunditMom as well as Erin Kotecki Vest, who blogs at BlogHer.com, The Huffington Post and Momocrats.com. A previous blogger conference call of McCain focused on health care, and it included 10-12 bloggers from specialty blogs such as Chronic Dose and Med Gadget. In all, about 50 bloggers participated.

Asked why he was was bothering to foster a relationship with people who were likely to take pot-shots, Patrick Hynes, one of McCain's online communications consultants, says: "The one thing that I will say about John McCain is that he loves the rough and tumble of politics."

Source: Wired article

12/05/2008 – Monday

• Google announced Google Friend Connect. This new service, announced as a preview release which lets non-technical site owners sprinkle social features throughout their websites, so visitors will easily be able to join with their AOL, Google, OpenID, and Yahoo! credentials. You'll be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web like Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, LinkedIn, orkut, Plaxo, and others.

• Microsoft Corp has launched Messenger TV, a new online service in 20 countries which will allow users to watch video clips at the same time as a network of friends and chat via Windows Live Messenger. The new service will offer a range of clips on MSN Video including MTV shows and music clips from providers such as Sony BMG. The firm hopes the ability to watch clips with friends on different computers will create a new social experience and attract users who already spend hours on social networks.

• Microsoft Corp. launched its WorldWide Telescope, bringing the free Web-based program for zooming around the universe to a broad audience. WorldWide Telescope, developed by Microsoft's research arm, knits together images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and others. Computer users can browse through the galaxy on their own or take guided tours of different outer-space destinations developed by astronomers and academics. The site lets users choose from a number of different telescopes and switch between different light wavelengths.

• Zuckerberg’s (CEO of Facebook) last remaining peers and a high school classmate, Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s Chief Technical Officer, is leaving the company. It is said that according to sources close to the company, D’Angelo felt his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests. He was working at Facebook since 2004.

• Facebook has taken out $100 million in debt financing and plans to use the funds entirely for new computers and data centers. Since October, Facebook has received $375 million in financing, valuing the firm at $15 billion, according to a source close to the company. Microsoft Corp invested $240 million, Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing put in $120 million and smaller investors contributed another $15 million.
  

13/05/2008 – Tuesday

• Apple Inc. has teamed up Time Warner Inc.'s HBO to feed television shows to its online iTunes store, reeling in one of the last holdouts among major channels and agreeing to a rare pricing concession to land hit shows like "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City" and "The Wire." The Cupertino, California-based company said HBO programming began appearing on iTunes Tuesday and the shows cost either $1.99 or $2.99 per episode, making HBO the only channel allowed to charge above the standard $1.99 for their episodes on iTunes.

• According to comScore, in April Yahoo! Buzz for the first time did more traffic than dig: Buzz got nearly 7 million U.S. unique visitors in April, a 74% growth over March. What's more, about 51% of Yahoo! Buzz users are women, compared to just 39% women for digg.
  

14/05/2008 – Wednesday

• "Spam King" and his partner now owe MySpace about $230 million in damages after a federal judge awarded the popular online hangout what is believed to be the largest anti-spam judgment ever. The judgment is a big victory for MySpace, although service providers often have a tough time collecting such awards. But even if the News Corp.-owned site never collects, it hopes the judgment deters other spammers.

15/05/2008 – Thursday

• Television company CBS has agreed to buy technology news and entertainment website CNET for about $1.75bn. CBS said that the purchase of CNET, which owns sites such as ZDNet and Gamespot, would help to boost its online presence. CBS has offered $11.50 a share in cash, which is 45% more than CNET's closing price on Wednesday.

• Amazon on Thursday launched a widget that bloggers and Web-site owners can use to make money by showcasing and playing song samples from the online retailer's catalog of 5 million tunes. The MP3 Clips Widget lets users pick the song and albums they want to display or select the latest bestsellers or new releases within a specific genre. The mini-application, which is embedded in a blog or Web page, can also be set up to play a 30-second sample of song.

• Animoto, a web application for creating videos out of photos and music has received funding from Amazon. The amount of money invested was not disclosed. The service uses Amazon Web Services (S3 in particular) to scale its application which quickly gained tremendous popularity. For instance, the Facebook version of Animoto is one of the most popular applications on Facebook platform, with over 750,000 users.

• Yahoo’s developer tool, SearchMonkey is open to all. Developers can build two types of applications using SearchMonkey: Enhanced Results and Infobars. Enhanced Results replace the current standard results with a richer display. All the links in the Enhanced Results must point to the site to which the result refers. Infobars are appended below search results and can include metadata about the result, related links or content, or links for user actions (such as adding a movie to a Netflix queue).
  

16/05/2008 – Friday

• As Google’s freshly announced Friend Connect supposedly shares user data in a way that circumvents total disclosure to all users involved, Facebook has stated that Friend Connect does not comply with its standards for collecting user data and redistributing it across the web. Facebook suspended Friend Connect’s access to its users.

17/05/2008 – Saturday

• YouTube added some new features to improve searching for videos, messaging and managing your contacts on YouTube.
  

• Spanish police have arrested five people suspected of hacking into or outright disabling thousands of Internet pages, some of them run by government agencies in the U.S., Latin America and Asia, authorities said Saturday. The National Police said the suspects belonged to one of the most active hacker groups on the Internet and said two of the suspects are 16 years old. The others are 19 or 20. On the Internet, the group calls itself D.O.M Team, police said. One of the group's techniques was to infiltrate Web sites and insert a page of its own, police said. The group attacked some 21,000 Web (NASA, Venezuelan national telephone company, Spanish telephone operator Jazztel, …) pages over the last two years, police said in a statement. The five were arrested this week in Barcelona, Burgos, Malaga and Valencia.

According to Gartner Inc., the world's leading information technology research and advisory company, although 90% of business entering into virtual worlds fail within 18 months, the impact of virtual worlds on organizations could be as big as that of the internet.

According to Steve Prentice, vice president and fellow at Gartner, businesses “need to realize that virtual worlds mark the transition from web pages to web places and a successful virtual presence starts with people, not physics. Realistic graphics and physical behavior count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience.” Further reasons for the high failure rate include starting projects for the ‘cool’ factor or because competitors are doing it. Many were closed down or abandoned by a lack of clear objectives and a limited understanding of the demographics, attitudes and expectations of virtual-world communities.

A benefit of virtual worlds is the rich collaboration experience they offer by adding a real-time visual dimension via avatars, so interactions can include emotional information in the "conversations" between individuals, setting them apart from simpler networking applications.

Virtual world presence is not to replace the “2D world” but to supplement it.

Gartner estimates that by 2012 70% of organizations will have established their own private virtual worlds and predicts that these internal worlds will have greater success due to lower expectations, clearer objectives and better constraints.

Among the successful virtual worlds are Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin and BarbieGirls which focus on their audience, understand their needs and deliver content which is appropriate to their audience.

Organizations could start using virtual worlds in role-based scenario-driven training exercises or complex situational simulation. They could be used in training emergency services (such as medical, fire and police) and military/law enforcement services to simulate real-world scenarios, including public order control and medical emergencies. The second phase could involve extended virtual-world deployment to support collaboration and employee interaction to provide a secure, persistent and interactive virtual workspace to allow individuals to interact and improve collaboration. It could then progress to enhance socialization both within and external to the organization and ultimately extend to a broader community that includes supply chain partners and customers.

Prentice advises organizations to experiment with virtual world projects on a small, internal scale initially and pace their development to enhance the chances of success and minimize costs.

Source: Gartner’s press release

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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is celebrating its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development.

On one of their page they provide a great history of digital community by Global Voices co-founder and Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman. It is actually a video from May 12, 2006 in which Zuckerman prefaces a Beyond Broadcast panel on the community dimension of media. Reaching back to the mid-60s and ARPANET, Zuckerman makes a propulsive case for the foundational role of communications between people - email, chat, MUDs, MySpace, more - in the development of the Net. More than a quarter century after ARPANET, why do we care? Take a few minutes to find out how Ethan answers.

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The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web's infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities. Not long ago it announced the winners in nearly 70 categories of which 3 related to blogs.


Best business blog

Financial Times’s blog, FT Alphaville, headed by Paul Murphy, an award-winning financial journalist, is a free daily news and commentary service giving financial market professionals the information they need, when they need it. Focusing on M&A activity, fund raising and the core financial sector, including the private equity and hedge fund industries, Alphaville has three components:

• The 6.00 AM Cut, a morning briefing note published right at the beginning of the working day in the UK and Europe. Designed primarily for our readers on the move, this email service provides a quick and accessible digest of key financial news and analysis from the FT and other publications.
  

• Rolling news and commentary through the UK and European trading day posted at FT.com/alphaville. From 7.30am in London, readers get quick alerts on important breaking news, guidance on where to go for quality comment and analysis, and timely notification of crucial FT.com content. The service includes a report on activity in the rapidly evolving Credit Default Swap market, which appears on the site each day at noon, along with our daily People column, detailing key appointments each day in the financial sector.
  

• Markets Live, a real-time markets commentary service using modern messaging technology to provide near-instant views on which assets are moving, and why. This service begins daily at 11am, London time.
  

• Live prices for major stock indices, currency pairs and commodities, using data supplied by City Index, the spread-betting company. (Unfortunately, due to legal constraints, this service is not available in the US.)
  

• An innovative Index Cloud, highlighting key names in the news. Readers can click on any name to bring up a short index of relevant content.
  

• Full RSS service, compatible with all major RSS readers.
  

• Dedicated search function for Alphaville, along with the full FT.com search and quotes service.

The best cultural/personal blog

PostSecret is ranked 23rd blog at Technorati, the “official” blog ranking site. Frank Warren started the site in 2005. It is an ongoing community art project in which people mail their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. The simple concept of the project was that completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they had never previously revealed. Since Frank Warren created the website on January 1, 2005, PostSecret has collected and displayed upwards of 2,500 original pieces of art from people across the United States and around the world.

It has several international versions: a French version of PostSecret was launched in October of 2007 under the name PostSecretFrance and in February 2008, a German version was started as PostSecret auf Deutsch. There is also one in Spanish called Los Secretos Dominicales.

Today, its visitor counter stands at 142,930,584 which marks that it is really a greatly visited site (actually in 2007 Blogger suddenly and mistakenly shut down PostSecret, as Blogger thought the blog was a 'spam blog').

Also visit http://www.postsecretcommunity.com/.


The best political blog

The Huffington Post is a privately held online newspaper, “the internet newspaper” as it is stated in their logo, was launched on May 9, 2005 as a news and commentary outlet. It is ranked one of the most linked-to blog by Technorati (actually it is number one today) and one of the most visited news weblog by Alexa.com.

According to eMarketer’s new report, The Blogosphere: A Mass Movement from Grass Roots, the number of people creating blogs in the US will reach over 35 million by 2012—roughly 16% of the Internet population. By 2012, more than 145 million people—67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once a month, an increase up from a readership of 94 million in 2007, or 50% of Internet users.


All this attention is turning blogs into a business: US blog advertising will reach $746 million in 2012, up from $283 million in 2007.


Read their article or buy their report!

Bloggers Unite is an initiative designed to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By challenging bloggers to blog about a particular social cause on a single day, a single voice can be joined with thousands of others to help make a real positive difference; from raising awareness for cancer, to an effort to better education systems or support 3rd world countries. The initiative’s site is hosted on blogcatalog’s site: http://unite.blogcatalog.com/



The latest event is just running today, 15 May 2008. Bloggers are challenged to participate in Amnesty International’s* selected initiatives:

• Urge your U.S. representative to press the Chinese government to release Shi Tao and others who were jailed simply for their legitimate use of the Internet: ask Yahoo Not to Violate Human Rights. Here is the template letter you can send to Yahoo:

"I am writing to you to express my deep concern over recent allegations that your company has assisted authorities in China in events which led to the imprisonment of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist. On April 27, 2005, Shi Tao received a ten-year prison term for sending information about a Communist Party decision through his Yahoo email account to a website based in the United States. Amnesty International considers him a Prisoner of Conscience, as he was imprisoned for peacefully exercising his right to freedom of expression and opinion.

I am alarmed that in the pursuit of new and lucrative markets, your company is contributing to human rights violations. Yahoo should urgently give consideration to the human rights implications of its business operations. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls upon every organ of society, which includes companies, to respect human rights.

Yahoo's conduct in Shi Tao's case has exposed your company to the risk of being complicit in human rights violations.

You have publicly described your commitment to develop a global code of conduct for operating in repressive countries around the world, including China. But since that time you have signed yet another pledge to voluntarily censor in China and you reportedly misled Congress about how much you knew about Shi Tao. Yahoo must take concrete steps to ensure that the company ends its collusion with repressive regimes like the Chinese Government to restrict access to information, and never again assists in the imprisonment of a peaceful internet dissident.

I therefore call upon Yahoo to:

• Use its influence to secure Shi Tao's release.

• Exhaust all judicial remedies and appeals in China and internationally before complying with State directives where these have human rights implications.

• Develop an explicit human rights policy, that states the company support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and complies with the principles articulated in the UN Norms for Business, and ensure that all parent companies, subsidiaries and partners do the same. In this light, make clear to the Chinese authorities, as well as to the global community, that Yahoo is not willing to assist governments in implementing their systems of internet censorship, nor providing information directed at restricting freedom of expression.
  

Thank you for your consideration of these concerns.”

• Illegal Detentions at Guantanamo Bay: since first detainees arrived on January 11, 2002, the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become a global symbol of U.S. human rights violations. Infractions have included: illegal detention, denial of fundamental legal rights, and torture. The only proper recourse is to close the detention facility. Amnesty International calls for detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, other U.S. facilities, and secret CIA sites to be charged and given fair trial before independent and impartial tribunals such as U.S. federal courts. Tearitdown.org is Amnesty International’s global initiative to end illegal US detentions. Sign the tearitdown.org pledge:
  

"I sign up to Amnesty International’s framework for ending US illegal detention, the first step of which is closing Guantánamo in a way that respects the rights of detainees.
The US government must also end the practice of enforced disappearance, secret transfer of detainees to locations where they may face torture and other ill-treatment and indefinite detention without charge."(130,033 people were protesting before me!)

• The third ongoing initiative is “Crisis in Darfur”: one of the worst atrocities and abuses of human rights in the world today is taking place in Darfur, Sudan. The conflict in this country has led to the worst human rights abuses imaginable — the systematic and widespread murder, rape, abduction, and displacement of peaceful citizens. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in deliberate and indiscriminate attacks by both sides of the warring factions. Today, more than 2.5 million civilians have been displaced in the Sudan. Write about the human rights abuses taking place in Drafur and ask your readers to take action for the people of Darfur. They have no voice so the world has to their voice for them.

*Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of more than 2.2 million people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights.

Visit Bloggers Unite site and raise your voice!

Forbes.com gave an overview on the different aspects of the increasingly occurring problem in cyber space concerning cyber security. Here is an overview of some of the more than 20 articles they provide to have a profound outline of this question.

Criminal, terrorist and nation-state cyber attacks against banks, technology companies, online merchants, individuals and government agencies cost the U.S. economy $400 billion annually, according to a 2007 Congressional report. These attacks are most often designed to steal information, such as business and military secrets, and personal data. Often they succeed in installing hidden malware that will "phone home" with updates, or enable a denial of service in the future. " Cyberspace has emerged as a war-fighting domain," said Gen. James E. Cartwright, head of the U.S. Strategic Command.

In “Why Web Privacy Is Impossible” Andy Greenberg writes about how hard it is to keep from strangers data as basic as a phone number or an address.

An article by Greenberg, “In Pictures: Companies That Profit From Your Data”, shows Acxiom, ChiocePoint and Reed Elsevier, three data aggregation businesses which collect data and sell it to marketers; Intelius, US Search, two companies which collect publicly available data and package it up to power many of the Web's people-focused search engines; Google and Microsoft, which have the ability to track users beyond their initial search, including much of their behavior on any site hosting their ads; Facebook, which has unique insight around how users are socially connected--hence its recently launched Beacon advertising program, designed to exploit those connections by broadcasting users' purchases to their friends as endorsements.

Another article of Greenberg “How Your Cellphone Can Stop Cybercrime” is about finding new ways to block digital thieves: Banks and security researchers are working to use physical gadgets to block cyber crime, like Bank of America's SafePass, RSA's Wi-Fi Prototype, RSA and Entrust Tokens, Sandisk's SecurID USB Drive, BlackBerries with SecurID, Eikon's Biometric SecurID USB Fingerprint Reader, and Authentify.

Wendy Tanaka’s article, “Making Social Sites Safer” is about how new ways social sites (or their owners) like MySpace, Facebook, Google and Microsoft are finding to make social networks safer places for kids.

Greenberg’s other article, “Canning The Real Spam Kings” is about how the US federal cybercrime cops are trying to cope with increasing cyber crime. This March, Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle was pleaded guilty to charges of mail and e-mail fraud that together carry a sentence of up to 26 years in federal prison. A related article “The Year's Biggest Cybercrime Convictions” gives an insight to special cases of phishing spam, pornographic spam, stock spam, service attacks, insider sabotage, insider data theft, P2P identity theft, spying and intimidation,

There is a separate section for the business community where Andy Greenberg and Scott Louis Weber write about the main cyber crime related issues concerning the companies:

• In “Where The Web Is Weak” Greenberg selected a bunch of hacker tricks that make it possible to infiltrate millions of Web pages. Connecting to this article, “In Pictures: Eight Ways To Hack The Web” describes what is cross-site request forgery, a form of Google hacking, forced browsing, timing attacks, captcha breaking, distributed denial of service,

• In “How To Protect A Company's Data” Greenberg writes about security companies which are trying forgoing firewalls and embedding security into information itself to prevent data breaches.

• “Virtualization's Dark Side” is about the warning of security researchers that the latest IT trend, virtualization has hidden vulnerabilities.

• In “Commercial Espionage: Travelers Beware” Greenberg is writing about another security risky IT trend, increasing wi-fi usage which is also a dreamland of the cyber spies.

• “Cloud Computing's Stormy Side” is an article about the possible security risks of another IT trend.

Another section deals with issues concerning state security:

• “When Cyber Terrorism Becomes State Censorship” is about a wide scale attack against Estonia's data networks, knocking government, media and banking Web sites offline one year ago. Local officials were quick to point fingers at the Russian government, declaring its country the first victim of cyber warfare. Now, a year of analysis has shown that it was nothing so straightforward but the difference between government-sponsored attacks and grassroots cyber terrorism is growing increasingly fuzzy…
  

• In “Broadband Big Brothers”, Greenberg writes about the World's most net-repressive regimes and how they try to filter the internet usage of their natives or on the contrary, using online surveillance to silently track dissident activity.

Three expert commentators also add their views on this topic:

• Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute in Washington, D.C. writes about “The Cost Of Privacy”: the cost of trying to clean up the mess in federal cybersecurity now has a price tag: $40 billion in new funding over the next six years.
  

• In “Federal Security: Welcome But Too Secret”, James X. Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit working to develop pragmatic policy solutions that will keep the Internet open, innovative and free, writes about whether the federal government can keep its own systems secure.
  

• Bruce McConnell, a former White House IT policy chief, in his commentary, “How To Make Security And Privacy Fit Together”, states: “There are myriad causes of this largely invisible crisis, but much can be explained by the relative immaturity of the information systems industry. While historical analogies are dangerous, I am often reminded of the evolution of the automobile industry, from craft-based production serving thousands of casual drivers and amateur mechanics, to a highly regulated engine of economic growth, critical to every aspect of modern life.”

Visit the “The State of Cyber-Security” pages of Forbes.com!

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A Dutch startup, Scoutle has launched its beta service, where users create personal webbots (Scouts) that walk through the Internet, while meeting other Scouts and connect to each other. Scoutle offers users a unique way of promoting their blog or website and finding other interesting users without having to do anything. By continuously ranking all submitted websites, the Guide offers a real-time overview of which website is most relevant at that moment within a certain discipline, field of interest or (friends) network.



Using statistics, Scoutle is able to rate registered websites automatically and at any time. This means websites that are valuable are not only noticed quickly but also given the attention and recognition they deserve, even when they may not have many visitors.

Scoutle aims at making a valuable contribution to the Internet and tries to give owners of websites and blogs the appreciation they deserve for all the time, efforts and expertise that in most of the cases are offered free of charge. On the other hand, it answers to problems faced in social networking where these days it is only about the number of friends you have, not the quality. Are you more interesting when you have thousands of friends you met once in your life than when you have 60 dear friends you know all about? With Scoutle, it is about the quality, not quantity.

You can see everything your Scout does on the Scoutle website. So visit the websites he found for you, they have been selected for you! If you find a website you like and find interesting, you can start a Connection.

To start a Connection, both of users will have to approve. Once a Connection between two Scouts has been accepted, you can also see the other Connections of the Scout. But why would you make a Connection?

The system gives your Scout points. These points are calculated using the number of visitors your website has and the number of Connections your Scout has. The more points you have, the higher your place in the Guide and the more likely you can expect more visitors to your website.

Visit their site!

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When Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) chief strategy officer, Shane Robison, visited BusinessWeek recently, they asked him to define cloud computing, one of the hot terms in IT. He laughed and politely refused. They asked again. He offered some general thoughts, but again avoided a precise definition. Robison's reaction shows how difficult it is to get clarity about cloud computing these days.

One of the latest major happening in this emerging field was that IBM and Google announced that they plan to exploit their common technological world view and considerable talent to build a worldwide network, or cloud, of servers from which consumers and businesses will tap everything from online soccer schedules to advanced engineering applications. According to Informationweek.com this could mean that together, Google and IBM could conceivably supply computer users in the business and consumer markets with hosted offerings that range from basic productivity software like word processing and calendaring (such as Google Docs and IBM's Lotus Symphony suite) to sophisticated security and management tools (through IBM's Tivoli products and Google's Postini unit).

According to Gartner, "Cloud" will be a grand buzzword unifier in IT for the next 12 months. Utility computing, grid computing, software as a service, and many other scalable remote computing models will get linked to cloud computing.

Some of the major players of this market, according to Forrester, one of the most dominant independent technology and market research company:


Some of the definitions

IBM – Source: a Press release
Cloud computing is an information technology (IT) infrastructure in which dynamically shared computing resources are virtualized and accessed as a service. Cloud computing replaces the traditional data center model in which companies own and manage their own stand alone hardware and software systems. Cloud computing is an attractive proposition for small to large-sized companies. It also is a green technology model that reduces energy consumption by improving IT resource utilization, therefore requiring fewer servers to handle equivalent workloads.

Dell – Source: Blog post by Jimmy Pike (Director, System Architecture)
Packaging of computing resources in a manner that will provide lower acquisition cost of hardware, packaged in a way that provides a set optimized services to the end user via the Internet in the most cost-effective, operationally efficient means possible.

Google – Interview with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) on Wired.com
There's an architectural shift going on. These occur every 10 or 20 years. The previous architecture was a proprietary network with PC clients called client-server computing. With this new architecture you're always online; every device can see every application; and the applications are stored in the cloud. It means that your servers are professionally managed, so you can actually have a weekend and not spend all your time trying to manage your servers. It's like having banks manage your money rather than you managing your money. And the networks have become secure, and the computers have become fast enough that this is mechanically possible - it actually works.

Forrester - Article on News.com with James Staten (IT operations and infrastructure analyst)
Cloud computing looks very much like the instantiation of many vendors' visions of the data center of the future; it's an abstracted, fabric-based infrastructure that enables dynamic movement, growth, and protection of services that is billed like a utility. It also has all the earmarks of a disruptive innovation: It is enterprise technology packaged to best fit the needs of small businesses and start-ups--not the enterprise


Gartner – according to a blog post on ZDNet
A style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers.

What is not cloud computing – according to Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company – is shown in the list of myths concerning this term:

1. Cloud computing is an architecture or an infrastructure.
2. Every vendor will have a different cloud.
3. Saas is the cloud.
4. Cloud computing is a brand new evolution.
5. All remote computing is cloud computing.
6. The Internet and the Web are the cloud.
7. Everything will be in the cloud.
8. The cloud eliminates private networks.

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Nielsen Mobile*, a service of The Nielsen Company, revealed yesterday how UK mobile phone subscribers are taking online social networking beyond the home and office:

• Almost half (44%) of UK mobile phone subscribers belong to an online social network. Of this group, one in four (25%) use their mobile phone for social networking-related activities;
  

• Around 812,000 Britons each month, or 1.7% of all UK mobile subscribers, visited a social networking website using their mobile during the first quarter of 2008;
  

• Facebook is the most popular site for mobile social networking, being visited by over half a million Britons (557,000) from their mobiles, or 9% of all UK Mobile Internet subscribers;

The main activities of mobile social networking in the UK:
Messages/mail sending = 55% / Reading messages/mail = 47% / Viewing pictures = 33% / Uploading photos = 29% / Adding friends = 21% / Receiving text alerts = 19% / Viewing profiles = 19% / Profile creating or updating = 12% / Uploading videos = 7% / Participating in chat rooms = 6%.

* The Nielsen Mobile unit of The Nielsen Company is the world's largest independent provider of syndicated consumer research to the telecom and mobile media markets.

Read their PDF file!

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eMarketer has revised its US social network ad spending projections, estimating that advertisers will spend $1.4 billion to place ads on online social networks this year, down from the previous projection of $1.6 billion.


Combined, MySpace and Facebook are expected to account for 72% of the total US social network ad spending pie this year.


At $1.4 billion, social network advertising will make up 5.5% of total US online ad spending this year.


The revised US forecast also changes eMarketer's worldwide social network ad spending estimates. eMarketer now projects that advertisers will spend $2 billion on social networks worldwide in 2008, rising to $3.8 billion in 2011.


Read the article at eMarketer.com!

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In April 25, 2008 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) issued the Research Report of China Youth Internet Behaviors. Data shows that till the end of 2007, the number of young web users (under the age of 25) has reached 107 million, which is about half of the overall size of Chinese Internet users.

The numbers show that, non-students among young netizens have 20.8 hours per week of surfing time which is much higher than the average level of 16.2 hours per week for overall web users. The utilization rate of instant messaging, online games, Internet television, network news, search engines, and other Internet services are higher than 50 % in the groups of young web users. In addition, 33% of young internet users refreshed their blog space within six months, which is higher than the average level of 23.5 %.

In the last six months, more than 30 % of the young people have used their mobile phones to surf the internet which is higher than the national ratio of mobile internet users, moreover, the college students occupied the largest proportion of internet users: 40 % use mobile phone to surf the Internet.

73.7 % of Chinese minor web users (under the age of 18 years) played online games within six months. The developed countries are far from such high rate of online games.

In addition, nearly 30 % of young web users have tendency of network addiction and they believe "They feel a lack of something if they can’t surf on the internet".

The young netizens are mainly urban residents: nearly 70 %.

Read the press release in English!

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05/05/2008 – Monday

• The Associated Press debuted its Mobile News Network, a multimedia news portal targeted at wireless users who want access anytime and anywhere to international, national and local news content from the cooperative and its members. The web application has been optimized for use on iPhones and can be accessed directly at apnews.com or via iPhone web application pages at www.iphone.com/webapps. With more than 100 news publishers in the network at launch, covering 16 of the top 20 DMAs, the network provides the widest coverage available of breaking news, sports, entertainment, and business developments for consumers on the go. Future versions of the Mobile News Network will include additional content from more newspapers and broadcasters and will be optimized for additional next generation mobile phones.
  

• Microsoft said late Monday it will now sell TV shows, including popular NBC series, on the Zune Marketplace, a move that brings its selection of content for the digital media player a step closer to what Apple Inc.'s iTunes offers for Apple's much more popular iPod. Microsoft ventured into downloadable video sales for Zunes last October when it released its second-generation players and software, but the content was limited to music videos. Starting Tuesday, Microsoft will sell episodes of TV shows including Comedy Central's ''South Park'' and Sci-Fi Channel's ''Battlestar Galactica'' for $1.99 each. The software maker still has a lot of work to do to catch Apple. Since the first Zune went on sale in November 2006, the software maker has sold ''just north of 2 million'' of the devices, Reindorp said. Apple sold 10.6 million iPods in the first three months of 2008 alone. But the Zune offers some capabilities the iPod doesn't. One Microsoft is betting on is its Zune Pass subscription service, which gives users access to every song in the catalog for $14.99 per month.

06/05/2008 – Tuesday

• Yahoo Inc. and McAfee Inc. are joining to offer alerts about potentially dangerous Web sites alongside search results generated at Yahoo.com. With the new security feature - slated to take effect Tuesday - people who search the Internet using Yahoo will see a red exclamation point and a warning next to links McAfee has identified as serving dangerous downloads or using visitors' e-mail addresses to send out spam. Dangerous downloads can include "adware," which shows unwanted advertisements; "spyware," which secretly tracks users' keystrokes and other actions; and other malicious programs that can give criminals control over users' computers. After Google, Yahoo operates the second most popular search engine among U.S. users, with 21 percent market share compared to Google's nearly 60 percent, according to data for March, the latest available, from comScore Inc.
  

• Rich Green, Sun's software chief introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. Sun is hoping to tap into 2.2 billion mobile devices and the vast majority of desktop PCs that are Java-enabled. JavaFX was shown running on Google's Android mobile platform. Green noted that 85 percent of cell phones, 91 percent of desktops, and 100 percent of all Blu-ray Disc players will run JavaFX. Sun also plans to deliver JavaFX from the cloud and to gather instrumented user action data via JavaFX that goes back to developers. It could be used for advertising or to provide information to customers, Green said. Sun plans to deliver the first version of JavaFX Desktop and browsers in the fall. The mobile version is slated for the spring of 2009. Developers can get early access to the JavaFX runtime.

07/05/2008 – Wednesday

• YouTube is launched in India. YouTube India is the 20th country-localized version of YouTube to appear. Google keeps to its strategy of launching localized versions of their video sharing site with mixed results; the Korean version of YouTube, for example, hasn’t managed to beat the local copmetition. We’ll see how they fare in India, which, according to some reports, currently contributes nearly 1% of total YouTube traffic, while YouTube is already the 5th most popular site in India according to Alexa.
  

• Google released its first English to Hindi translation service. Type in your language easily on their Indic Transliteration Labs page. Add the transliteration gadget to your iGoogle page. Express your views and create more content on Blogger. Scrap your friends in your language on orkut. Find information: Google Suggest in your language. You can also try out thir brand new English to Hindi translation service, and the translated search feature that lets you query in Hindi, obtain search results for the translated query in English, and then see the Hindi translations of these results.

08/05/2008 – Thursday

• Facebook is to add a slew of new safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyber bullies. At the heart of the changes are efforts to ban convicted sex offenders from the site and finding better ways to verify users' ages and identities. The agreement was announced by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal in a deal along with other attorneys general around America.
  

• Microsoft Corp., under pressure to craft a strategy for competing online that doesn't involve Yahoo Inc., informally approached social-networking Web site Facebook Inc. to gauge its interest in selling itself to Microsoft, says a person familiar with the situation.
  

• Google Inc.'s top executives expressed hope Thursday that the Internet search leader will be able to form a potentially lucrative advertising partnership with Yahoo Inc. - a deal which would lower the odds of Microsoft Corp. renewing its attempts to buy Yahoo. "We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them," Google co-founder Sergey Brin told reporters before the company's annual shareholders meeting. "We share a lot of values with them."
  

• MySpace said Thursday it will soon enable users to quickly share profile data with Web sites operated by Yahoo Inc., eBay Inc. and others. MySpace aims to save its users keystrokes and allow them to export their photos, videos and lists of friends. "There's this concept that social networks are walled gardens," said Amit Kapur, MySpace's chief operating officer. "We're taking those walls down." Other sites that can receive the MySpace data include Twitter and Photobucket. Like MySpace, the photo-sharing site Photobucket is a unit of News Corp.

09/05/2008 – Friday

• Facebook Inc. is loosening its grip on millions of personal profiles to allow inhabitants of its popular Internet hangout to transplant the information and applications to other Web sites. With the changes announced Friday, Facebook joins a growing movement to make it easier for people to share their favorite pictures, information and applications with family and friends anywhere on the Internet. Facebook, which has about 70 million users worldwide, unveiled its plans the day after its bigger rival, News Corp.'s MySpace, made a similar commitment. Unlike MySpace, which has about 200 million users worldwide, Palo Alto-based Facebook plans to allow users to take their personal profiles to any Web site that wants to host them. For starters, MySpace is opening user profiles only to a select group of sites, including leading destinations owned by Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc. Both Facebook and MySpace say several weeks remain before their users' data becomes portable.
  

• Yahoo India has rolled out “Glue,” a test of a new search product that combines news, images, videos, and other content from around the Web (and other Yahoo properties) along with traditional search results that link to web pages.
  

• Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced that they plan to launch their WorldWide Telescope project, Redmond's answer to Google Sky, by the end of May. "This is taking data that's very complex, gathered over many years from many telescopes, and making it accessible," said Gates, during a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, according to PC World.
  

• Having raised $360 million in the span of seven months, Facebook has borrowed another $100 million and will buy more servers to support its growth in users and applications. Facebook does not disclose the number of servers it operates. But research firm Data Center Knowledge puts the tally at about 10,000. The slug of cash will help Facebook buy approximately 50,000 more servers, giving the company "the kind of headroom they need in the next year or two," estimates Frank Gillett, a vice-president at Forrester Research.

On May 10, 2008 — Pangea Day — sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro were linked live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music. The program was broadcasted live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones. The full program was subtitled in Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future. In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that — to help people see themselves in others — through the power of film. Pangea is the name of the original super-continent which contained all the world's land mass before the continents started splitting apart 250 million years ago. Pangea Day was launched with the vision that the people of the world can begin to overcome their divisions, and that the power of film can help make it possible.



Of course, movies alone can't change the world. But the people who watch them can. You can watch the best films selected by Pangea Day's international competition from over 2,500 submissions from over 100 countries at the official Pangea site’s film section. And a one hour video of the highlight of the event with the introductory of Archbishop Desmond Tutu can also be seen at the site.

In between the films of Pangea Day, some astonishing speakers talked about our world in surprising ways, like Christiane Amanpour, a chief international correspondent for CNN, anthropologist Donald Brown, Rwandan singer-songwriter Jean Paul Samputu, Scholar and writer Karen Armstrong.

Musicians also participated in the event: Malian singer Rokia Traore; Iranian underground indie rockers Hypernova; Gilberto Gil, a singer, guitarist, songwriter, and the current Brazilian Minister of Culture; Dave Stewart, the singer-songwriter for Eurythmics.

The idea of this event came to life in 2006 when Egyptian American documentary film director Jehane Noujaim won the TED Prize, an annual award granted at the TED Conference. She was granted $100,000, and more important, a wish to change the world. Her wish was to create a day in which the world came together through film. Pangea Day grew out of that wish.

Visit the official Pangea day site or the official YouTube group set up by Pangea Day has for you to share your thoughts about the videos on the homepage.

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Dipity, launched in December 2007, claims to be is the easiest way to make and share interactive timelines about the people and things you care about. If you are a blogger, for example, you can create a timeline of your blog, visualizing your posts in a unique way, which visualization you can even embed in your blog.

More than 20 thousand timelines were set up at Dipity. You can search them or you can look through 23 different categories, like Actors, Music, People & Blogs, Literature, History, Personal, Business, Films, etc.

TimeTube is a new mashup of Dipity, actually it is YouTube+Dipity Timeline, which results in a unique Youtube visualization. With TimeTube, released on the 8th of May 2008, you can visualize a timeline made up of videos of the biggest internet video repository, YouTube. Just type the name of your favorite writer, musician, or whatever you want and you will get an adjustable timeline of the search results. It is adjustable since you can set the timeframe of your timeline from 100 years to a single day.


You can also set the type of visualization you prefer: the timeline setting is the default setting, but you can chose a listed view, a so called “Flipbook” view, or a “Map view” if the given timeline is tagged with locations.


Visit Dipity and Timetube!

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Yesterday eMarketer announced its forecast that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.

According to a press release released also yesterday by Nielsen Mobile, a service of The Nielsen Company, the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking on a percentage basis, with the U.S. boasting comparable numbers.
In the UK, approximately 810,000 mobile subscribers, or 1.7 percent of all mobile subscribers in the country, visited social networking websites on their mobile phones in the first quarter of 2008. That reach percentage was twice as high as it was in other major European markets—though similar to the US, where 1.6 percent of all mobile subscribers (4.1 million in all) accessed social networks via their phones in December 2007.

Leading PC Social Networking Sites are Also Tops Over Phones
In the U.S., MySpace.com, the leading social networking site among PC users is also the most popular mobile Internet social networking site. The site logged 2.8 million unique mobile users in December 2007. Also in December, Facebook, which has the second largest audience among social networking sites, had 1.8 million unique mobile users. In contrast, Facebook led mobile social networking sites in the U.K. with 557,000 unique mobile users per month in Q1 2008, while MySpace followed with 211,000 unique mobile users. While Facebook and MySpace.com were also among the top social networking sites in other European countries during the first quarter of 2008, MSN’s Windows Live Spaces led in Italy (154,000 unique mobile users per month) and France (106,000), and ranked second in Germany (45,000) behind MySpace, which boasted 52,000 unique mobile users per month.

Read their press release!

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Back in March I wrote about Sorce Intranet, an Intranet sowtware company from the UK, which won Intranet Journal's Product of the Year Best Design Suite award in 2008. Sorce has big names in its client list like, Virgin Media, Manchester United FC, the Rugby Football Union, and the Youth Hostel Association.

They provide the following core system applications:

• Document Management / Users can check-in and check-out documents via a database managed vault and perform tasks such as check-out for read, check-out for edit, check-in new version, check-in overwrite and add/remove documents from their favourites category.
• Event and Resource Management / The event and resource diary allows you to book and schedule events in your corporate calendar. Resources can include rooms, audio/visual equipment, refreshments and other requirements.
• Image Library / Stores images and files for use in presentation or proposals. Images can be downloaded, saved and opened in preview mode and images can be easily adapted to fit the space available for them on the Intranet page.
• Global search / Enables users to search across all applications and documents within the intranet and view the results for information they have the authority to see. Users can personalise which area they search across and save these searches for future use.

Some of their business ready applications (they have over 70):

• Alerts / Notify your intranet users to important information, documents and events that need to be actioned throughout your intranet with the alerts application.
• H&SE - Accident Book / An on-line accident reporting and monitoring application that complies with all the requirements of the Health & Safety Executive (H&SE).
• Bulletin boards / Users can create unlimited bulletin boards to publish company news, product bulletins, company events and other information for broadcast to the intranet community.
• Classifieds / Enables users to buy/sell/barter items via a classified advertisements application on the Intranet.
• Contact management / Contacts can be grouped by company, department etc and users can administer, search and edit contacts as well as maintaining a contact history.
• Company and department home pages / Enables users to create lively, dynamic and topical front pages and populate them with news articles, discussions, bulletins and free text information.
• Discussion forums / Threaded discussion forums can be created and modified by any user with the correct access rights. Group-specific forums (open or private) can be set up at any time.
• Document publishing / Enables users to share documents, files and other content related to the topic or issue securely. Authorised users have secure access to important files at any time, from anywhere.
• FAQs / Enables users to create and manage FAQ's by subject or category. You can search through questions and answers to common problems and information requests.
• Feedback / Collects feedback on an issue and routes it to the relevant person in your organisation.
• Help / HTML ‘context’ sensitive help files are standard within SORCE. This enables users to search the intranet by subject or free text.
• Helpdesk / Users log support calls or ‘issues’ via the intranet and set up actions and answers to problems.
• Holiday Booking / Enable employees to book holidays through your intranet. Holiday time is requested which is forwarded to line managers for approval before being scheduled.
• Internal vacancies / Enables users to post internal vacancies online and allow people to upload their CV and apply for jobs.
• Inventory / Enables users to manage inventories of an organisation’s assets on-line. Typical inventory management includes company cars, personal computers, audio-visual equipment etc. Additional asset types, fields, etc. may be added by any of the devolved administrators.
• Key performance indicators / Organisations can track key performance indicators for management reporting and produce real-time reports via a secure area of the intranet.
• Location maps / Users can search for locations using any postcode via SORCE’s direct link to multimap for location finding.
• Messaging application / Enables messages to be sent to individual’s home pages via the intranet-based messages application.
• News feed / Enables you to identify relevant news stories from external sources and publish them to your intranet.
• News publisher / Enables news items to created and published to either the entire intranet community or to selected departmental pages.
• Organisation and project charts / Organisation and project charts can be created with dynamic links for updating and with a choice of formats for end-user choice.
• Packages / Enables formal notification of receipt and dispatch of packages.
• Polls / Create and manage polls to get user feedback and opinions on key issues with the ability to set start and stop dates, private voting and e-mail results to participants.
• Risk Management / Manage the risk within your organisation with the risk management application.
• Self Certification for Sickness / Cut down on processing time with the self certification application. Enables your employees to self certify themselves after being off sick.
• Site Analysis / Provides a constant view of the performance of the intranet/extranet site and what users are viewing and for how long.
• SMS messaging / Enables users to select a mobile number from Contacts and it generates an SMS form that can be completed and sent via your SMS provider.
• Software library / Enables you to store approved software on the Intranet for download by users.
• Starters and Leavers / Effectively track the process of your new starters and current leavers with the starters and leavers application.
• Taxi booker / Enables users to book taxis via the intranet or assign the task to others.

Source: SORCE Intranet and Extranet Applications

Relating articles on my blog:
2008 Intranet Product of the Year Winners / Sorce Intranet Wins Best Design Suite

Jeremiah Owyang, a senior researcher at one of the market leader research institutes, Forrester Research, started a series on his blog (Web Strategy by Jeremiah) about social media. It is more than worth to read these posts if you are interested in this topic, especially if you are working in company which is pondering on the question to be or not to be active on the social media scene. “I’m putting them here on my blog is a great place to help everyone quickly get educated, convince their boss, or be able to help their clients get over these hurdles, pass them around.”

Social Media FAQ #1: What if they leave negative comments on my site/blog/forum?
“First, understand the fear of most marketing and corp comm teams, they want to show the company in it’s best light, having a mar on it’s brand is a nasty blemish that don’t want to see, in the past, a counter press release or sweeping the issue under the carpet was an option, but no more with the rise of social media. So how can you help these folks?”

Social Media FAQ #2: What does it mean to be Authentic, Transparent, or Human?
“First, understand the fear of most companies ‘hide’ behind their brand. This means that the collective of all employee contrabiutions are often behind the shield, crest, or banner of a symbol. This is nothing new and goes back to the most primitive of cultures where bands and fiefdoms would form –in nearly every culture. Things are different now, the internet allows for real people to connect with other real people and have discussions about anything that interests them –void of any shield, crest, or banner. Well to be specific, some people start creating their own individual brands (we see this on many blogs), but it’s at the core individual level.”

Social Media FAQ #3: How Do I Measure ROI?
“This question often creeps up at the end of a webinar or presentation that I give. While we often sing the goodness of social media tools, (and challenges) a web strategist will have to return to the workplace, and demonstrate to their management the value of any program –especially if it’s new.”

Social Media FAQ #4: How Do I Launch My Social Media Program?
“Most companies are used to announcing products or initiatives using press releases, advertising, media influence, and even analyst influence. While many companies are toe dipping in the social media waters (The majority still have not, I’ve seen some adoption data from work) so there’s still many questions on what to do once you launch your blog, community site, podcast, etc.”

Social Media FAQ #5: How Do I Talk to my Executives about Social Media?
Main topics of this post: Start with Technographics, Ascertain if this is right for your company, Focus on value, not technology, Learn how to talk to immigrants about natives, Be prepared for the business questions

Visit Jeremiah Owyang’s blog!

eMarketer forecasts that mobile social networking will grow from 82 million users in 2007 to over 800 million worldwide by 2012.
MySpace recorded over 7 million unique visitors to MySpace Mobile in the US in the six months since launch. "It wasn't until we rolled out m.myspace.com that we got a sense of how powerful demand was for MySpace on cell phones," Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development for MySpace, told eMarketer.

Facebook claimed 4 million unique registrations. Mobile-only social networking players such as airG, Mocospace, myGamma and itsmy.com all reported several million users soon after launch.

Read the article!

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Timeline of Web browsers, WikipediaAn empirical long-term client-side Web usage study to discuss various implications for the interface design of browsers and Web sites and to compares the user behavior with previous long-term browser usage studies was conducted by Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Matthias Mayer from the University of Hamburg and Eelco Herder from the University of Hannover.

Although internet is widely and regularly used tool in our everyday life, an important factor is omitted when content, structure and experience are designed and evaluated on the Web. We know surprisingly little about the way people interact with their browsers during their daily use of the Web, or about ways in which they revisit pages after a longer period. While user navigation on single Web sites is commonly logged and used for subsequent analysis of user behavior, the exact nature of the users’ interaction with the browser and cross-site browsing patterns remain inaccessible, as they can only be observed on client side. Studies analyzing personal use of the Web over a long term are surprisingly scarce.

The most recently reported client-side long-term studies are more than 7 years old – and thus represent the 1990s, a time in which the World Wide Web was still in its incipiency, when the user population was dominated by researchers, most documents had static content and the focus lay on information delivery. With the increasing commercialization and the growing number of people accessing the Web using home connections, its user population became more and more diverse and new requirements emerged. New Web applications and services have gained popularity providing functionality which used to reside on desktops or did not exist in the early years of the Internet, (email, chat and bulletin boards to complex services such as travel agencies, libraries, and shops, social sites, etc.).

This development of the Internet was hardly predictable when the first Web browsers were developed. Yet, current browser interfaces and their navigation tools still closely resemble those of the browsers from the early Web days, mainly focusing on information retrieval and hypertext navigation. This mismatch illustrates the need for updating and extending findings on how users interact with the Web and what problems they encounter today.

The first long-term client usage study was described by Catledge and Pitkow in 1994. In 1995, Tauscher and Greenberg focused on history support and analyzed the revisitation behavior of their participants. Weinreich, Obendorf, Mayer and Herder in their paper compared their findings with these previous research findings:


The role of the Web browser has moved from a hypertext viewer to a universal client for online services. Furthermore, several new browser features were introduced, like tabbed browsing and the back button’s popup menu. But also personal workstations have evolved, Web access has become quicker and screen sizes have increased. Link following continues to be the most common navigation action, accounting for about 45% of all page transitions. ‘Direct access’ to pages – via the bookmark menu, bookmark toolbar, home page button, or the address bar – has remained stable at about 10% as well. The most significant changes are the increased number of pages opened in new browser windows, the raised importance of form submissions, and a decrease in back button usage.

Several of their participants regularly opened new windows or tabs to display a new Web page. In the mid-nineties, such events accounted for less than 1% of all navigation actions, compared to over 10% nowadays.

Accounting for over 15% of all navigation actions, form submission has become a key feature of user navigation. By contrast, the share of back button actions has dropped from over 30% in the mid-nineties to less than 15% in their study. This number includes backtracking multiple steps via the back button’s pull-down menu, which contributed only 3% to all backtracking actions and has therefore negligible influence on the decreased rate.

Common browser interfaces lack several functions for service oriented sites, although these sites play an increasingly dominant role in contemporary Web use. Weinreich, Obendorf, Mayer and Herder think that one major challenge for the next generation of Web browsers is to reconcile the two different Web usage contexts – hypermedia navigation and interaction with Web-based services.

Participants stayed only for a short period on most pages. 25% of all documents were displayed for less than 4 seconds, and 52% of all visits were shorter than 10 seconds (median: 9.4s). However, nearly 10% of the page visits were longer than two minutes. The participants often did not take the time to completely read the page, but they regularly just seemed to glimpse over most of the information offered, before they perform their next navigation action. They expect an increase of the average page stay times with the emergent use of AJAX-enriched Web applications – as they allow system interaction without leaving a Web page – however, such techniques will hardly decrease the overall interaction speed with the browser.

Based on the findings the paper suggests that sites should consider that people have different preferences using their desktop system and resizing their windows. If sites do not want to displease their visitors by forcing them to maximize their browser window or scroll horizontally, designers should not count on having exclusive rights to the screen real estate: flexible layouts leaving at least 15% of the screen width obtainable should instead be applied.

Another advice is that reasoning only on the average values of quantitative Web usage studies is often not advisable as it may lead to an overly simplified model of user interaction with the Web; rather than designing for the average, browser and Web site designers should take the different requirements into account and provide adaptable systems and alternative interaction possibilities.

The many personal differences and user habits indicate the need for future browsers to become even more adaptable. An extension concept as offered by the open-source browser Firefox does already provide a high degree of flexibility. It seems that an overall concept for browser development is missing, especially for the interaction with Web applications and dynamic, transient pages. Browsers need to become more flexible and should be able to adapt to the type of Web site, the habits of the users, and their tasks.

You can read the entire research paper (31 pages) after a free registration at the ACL Digital Library. ACL is the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, which delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession.

Media and entertainment companies are in broad agreement on the way the digital market is evolving, where the opportunities lie and what will drive revenues over the next five years, according to findings of an Accenture* survey released on May 7, 2008. Accenture surveyed more than 100 senior executives in the media and entertainment industry to finds out their growth strategies.

Key findings of the survey:

• The Web 2.0 phenomenon is here to stay. Two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents said there is no likelihood of the Web 2.0 “bubble” bursting during the next 24 months, and 71 percent said they do not see any risk in allowing their brands to be associated with social media.
  

• Social media and user-generated content are high-growth opportunities. Two-thirds (68 percent) of respondents identified social media and user-generated content as a high-growth opportunity, and more than half (56 percent) said they are already involved in social media in some capacity.

• Uncertainty as to when the mobile market will take off. When asked when they believe the nascent mobile market will become a mass market, respondents were split, with slightly more than half (55 percent) saying within three years, while slightly less than half (45 percent) said they believe it will take longer.
  

• There are several barriers to the mobile market. Consumer readiness continues to be singled out as a barrier to the mass uptake of the mobile market, cited by half (51 percent) of the executives surveyed. Respondents also cited other barriers, including companies’ ability -- or lack thereof -- to provide a consistent user experience (cited by 42 percent of respondents), as well as a lack of readiness among both content owners and mobile operators/networks (cited by 37 percent).

• Advertising. When asked to identify what they believe will be the number one business model in five years, nearly two-thirds (62) percent of respondents selected advertising-supported business models, compared with 25 percent who cited subscription-based services and 11 percent who cited pay-per-play services.
  

• Digital advertising will drive a large portion of future revenues. Almost every media company is trying to adapt to the reality of digital advertising as a major source of revenue. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they see digital advertising eclipsing traditional advertising within five years, and 62 percent said they believe that content will be supported by a variety of digital advertising methods, including branded content, search, sponsorships, performance and a mix of all of these within the next five years.
  

• Multi-platform distribution. When asked to identify the largest drivers of revenue growth over the next five years, two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents cited new platforms or new ways of delivering content — significantly more than the number who cited new content types (24 percent) or new geographies (10 percent). And nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of respondents said they will pursue a “multi-screen” distribution strategy, which includes television, online and mobile delivery.
  

• Short-form video. When asked which content type will generate the greatest growth, the greatest number of respondents — 38 percent —cited short-form video, with online portal/publishing second (23 percent) and video games third (18 percent).
  

* Accenture is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company with 178,000 people in 49 countries. It generated net revenues of US$19.70 billion for the fiscal year ended Aug. 31, 2007.

Read their press release!

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web's infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a 550-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities, like musicians Beck and David Bowie, Internet inventor Vint Cerf, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening. Members also include writers and editors from publications such as The New York Times, Wired, Details, Fast Company, Elle, The Los Angeles Times, Vibe, and WallPaper.

Among the nearly 70 categories here are some award winners:

• Activism: loveisrespect.org
  
• Art: Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years
• Automotive: Toyota - FJ Cruiser
  
• Banking, bill paying: Lending Club
  
• Beauty and cosmetics: The Lynx Effect
  
• Best copy/writing: Wired.com
  
• Best navigation/structure + Podcasts: TED.com
  
• Best practices + Community: Flickr
  
• Best use of photography: Your Shot - National Geographic Magazin
  
• Best use of typography: Type City
  
• Best use of video or moving image: Apple
  
• Blog – business: FT.com Alphaville
  
• Blog – Culture/Personal + Netart: PostSecret
  
• Blog – Political: The Huffington Post
  
• Broadband: ABC.com Full Episode Player
• Celebrity/fan: Annie Lennox Official Website
  
• Charitable organizations nonprofit: Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster
  
• Corporate communications: UPM Forest Life
  
• Cultural institutions: Design for the Other 90%
  
• Education: The Earth Institute at Columbia University
  
• Family/parenting: KidsHealth
  
• Fashion: Louis Vuitton Core Values
  
• Financial Services: zopa.com
  
• Games: Kongregate
  
• Health: Try Drugs
  
• Humor: The Onion
  
• IT hardware/software: CSG
  
• Law: OUT-LAW.COM
  
• Lifestyle: CinCHouse.com
  
• Magazine: National Geographic Magazine Online
  
• Movie and film: Simpsons Movie
  
• Music: BBC Radio 1 Meet the DJs
  
• News: NYTimes.com
  
• Personal web site: The Whale Hunt
  
• Politics: FactCheck.org
  
• Radio: BBC World Service channel site
  
• Real estate: Zillow.com
  
• Restaurant: Me and My Bod
  
• Retail: Ikea Mattress
  
• School: The Los Angeles Recording School
  
• Science: nature.com
  
• Social networking: Flock The Social Web Browser
  
• Sports: Yahoo! Sports
  
• Television: HBO Voyeur
  
• Tourism: Furuviksparken (Swedish)
  
• Travel: Farecast
  
• Weird: Passive-Aggressive Notes
  
• Youth: Scholastic Site Redesign
  

Source: The Webby Awards site

The first years of a child’s life are full of excitement. They grow, develop, and discover the world around them - milestones every parent wants to remember. Kidmondo, founded by a couple in New York city, offers a fast and easy way to record their first smile, first step and their everyday adventures. Kidmondo is a comprehensive online baby journal that allows parents and caregivers to chronicle their child’s life and share it with friends and family in a safe environment.

Kidmondo has an array of services: online diary, photo and video gallery, growth charts, medical and food journals, interactive timeline of you child.

Online Diary: you can add a milestone with a click or describe every detail of your child’s first birthday. Add photos and videos to the posts and your baby memories will come alive.

Photo and video gallery: you can upload and store your child pictures and organize them in virtual photo albums. You can upload them from your computer or import them directly from Flickr, tie them to the diary posts, and share them with your friends and family. Importing videos is just as easy and they will truly make your child’s journal come alive. You can even easily publish to multiple journals at the same time.

Growth charts: while the journal fills up with their everyday achievements and adventures, you can track their physical growth on their Kidmondo charts. In these private pages, follow their height and weight to see how they compare to the world. Check out the dental chart to remember when their first teeth showed up.

Medical and food journals: the medical journal will help keep track of your child’s health, doctor’s visits, immunizations, and medical treatments. They offer a separate food journal for the child’s first foods in case your child develops any food sensitivities, or just to help remember those messy first meals.

Interactive timeline: the timeline shows your child’s life in a glimpse. Scroll through their amazing achievements and be proud!

Your Kidmondo journals are secure which means they are not public, but you can invite your friends and family to be part of your child’s life. Link up with your Kidmondo buddies and see what’s up with your friend’s kids. Kidmondo can even provide your guests an RSS feed or send email updates if they’d like to stay informed. No more complaints about not emailing the latest photos. Grandparents are going to love this!

You can customize the journal name and web address, colors and themes, to become their own personal website. Each child gets their own ‘about page’ which changes and grows along with them. Unfortunately only the basic service is free for which you get all of the above mentioned utilities but you will have ads (for me it is no problem), you can only “manage” 3 children and the storage is limited to 25 MB (which is not to much if you want to upload photos and especially videos). For a monthly fee of USD 5 you can manage up to 5 children and you will have a 100 MB storage, without ads. For 10 bucks per month you will be able to manage unlimited number of your children on their service and you will have a 500 MB storage.

Visit Kidmondo!

According to Focalyst, long dismissed as not being tech-savvy and "not on the net," over a third of the Mature population (born 1945 or earlier, aged at least 62) are connected and spend an average of 44 minutes per day on the Internet. Online penetration is even greater among those aged 71 and under – according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, over half of Americans 62-71 are online. Focalyst pioneered the largest, most comprehensive study ever conducted about Boomers and Matures.

Commercially this segment is attractive, since compared with those aged 62+ who are not on the net, Connected Matures are better educated (75% vs 42%), have around twice as big yearly incomes (USD 55,000 vs USD 27,000), are more likely to be married (70% vs 48%) and still working (26% vs 13%), and most of all, spend more (USD 1745/month vs USD 1059/month).

When connected, they are doing a lot more than emailing and passing pictures of the grandchildren. This information-hungry group is using search engines (59%), gathering health-related information (38%), making travel plans (41%), handling their finances (24%) and paying bills (23%). One in five is even gaming (21%).

Another interesting finding is that acconding to Dynamic Logic MarketNorms® data, Boomers (born 1946-1962) and younger people (born 1963 or after) are more likely to notice Web advertising, but when it comes to the bottom line, there is no difference across the age groups regarding purchase intent. Matures are just as likely to be motivated by an Internet ad as younger consumers. There is even greater purchase intent by Matures when looking at some specific categories of online advertising, for example, pharmaceutical advertising and insurance, where they are more engaged in the market than younger consumers. But also in some other categories, such as consumer packaged goods, travel, and entertainment, which includes movies, television shows and games.

"Matures are the fastest growing population but perhaps the least understood, especially in terms of Internet use," according to Ken Mallon, Vice President of Custom Solutions and Ad Effectiveness Consulting for Dynamic Logic.

For those who still believe that older consumers are not online: by 2011, it is projected that the number of online users ages 62+ will grow 51% - swelled by more Matures becoming connected and also by already-connected Boomers who will continue to be online.

Source: Focalyst report

28/04/2008 – Monday

• MySpace Karaoke launched today. Parent company of MySpace, Fox Interactive Media acquired kSolo, an online karaoke service back in April 2006. It took them two years to rebrand and relaunch it.
  

30/04/2008 – Wednesday

• AOL’s VoIP utility, AIM Call Out, may be getting some third-party loving real soon. The company today introduced some nuggets for developers, labeled Open Voice APIs, that provide the creators of SIP-enabled hardware and/or softphones the ability to integrate AIM Call Out into their offerings. Given the user base that AIM has built and retained over the many years in which it has flourished as perhaps the most popular social invention in the AOL arsenal, the new APIs are likely to draw a good amount of attention.

• Xiaonei, the company that likes to call itself the “Facebook of China” has raised a whopping $430 million from financial backers, VentureBeat has learned from the company’s investors. Xiaonei.com’s features include multiplayer gaming and wireless services for mobile users. In the college market, Xiaonei.com claims a dominant market share, it claims 22 million registered users and 12.7 million daily users by March, Xiaonei had 280 million page views in March.

• Meebo have raised a $25 million third round of financing from Jafco Ventures, Time Warner Investments and KTB Ventures. Previous investors Sequoia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated. Meebo was looking for a buyer through their investment bank, Montgomery & Co., but moved to a fundraising round earlier this month when there were no takers at the price they wanted. The rumored valuation on the financing was $200 million.

• Google Inc's top priority this year is to make money off its YouTube video-sharing site, CEO Eric Schmidt said in a TV interview that sent Google's shares up 4.7 percent. "I don't think we've quite figured out the perfect solution of how to make money, and we're working on that. That's our highest priority this year," Schmidt said in the transcript of an interview airing on CNBC on Wednesday. Long term, Google is focused on automating "the trillion-dollar industry that is advertising" and he said its push into the business software market would help it forge relationships with big corporate customers that last "20 or 30 or 40 years" and "will ultimately be very, very lucrative."
  

01/05/2008 – Thursday

• Yahoo Buzz, a more elementary competitor to Digg and other vote-based link aggregation and promotion engines of similar ilk, has showed be quite popular in the months following its February debut. Today the company is adding to the functions of Yahoo Buzz, introducing a widget-generation utility which website publishers can use to embed on pages to showcase stories listed on Buzz, whether they be general items or specific to categories, like sports, business, or science and technology. Yahoo has also established RSS feeds for top stories as well as individual categories.
  

02/05/2008 – Friday

• Nokia, the world's top mobile phone maker, signed a deal with Germany's T-Mobile for Internet services for European customers, Nokia said on Friday. "T-Mobile and Nokia will be able to offer their European customers faster and easier access to all of T-Mobile's web'n'walk Internet services as well as to Nokia's Ovi Internet services," Nokia said in a statement. It said the firms will try to make social networking sites more mobile and added Nokia's Ovi services will be available on a wide range of Nokia phones for T-Mobile users. Nokia, which made about 40 percent of all cellphones sold in the first quarter, is the first handset maker to move strongly into the content space. Millions of users have downloaded songs, video clips, programmes and documents since the company launched the Nokia music store and Mosh, a file sharing site, last year. The handset maker has also struck deals with top record label Universal and Sony BMG to distribute their music with deals allowing users unlimited downloads in a 12-month period.
  

03/05/2008 – Saturday

• Microsoft said Saturday that it was abandoning its blockbuster bid to acquire Yahoo after it raised its offer by $5 billion but Yahoo rejected it as still too low.

I found these interesting slides at slideshare.com about the history of internet and how social media evolved. They are written by Trebor Scholz who grew up in East Berlin but currently based in New York.

Scholz has written on media art, networks, education and participatory cultures for many periodicals such as Art Journal, FibreCulture Journal, Afterimage, and C-Theory. He has contributed essays to several books and co-edited "Free Cooperation: The Art of (Online) Collaboration" forthcoming with Autonomedia. Scholz has taught media art, history, and theory at Pacific NW College of Art (Portland), The University of Arizona (Tucson), and Bauhaus University (Weimar) and is currently professor and researcher in the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends report from last month takes a big turn from previous reports - the focus is nearly 100% on social applications and how they are taking over the Internet:

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A mashup is originally referred to the practice in pop music (notably hip-hop) of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing pieces. In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.

One of the first web mashups to gain widespread popularity in the press, the ChicagoCrime.org (now a part of EveryBlock.com) is a great example of what's called a mapping mashup. This website mashes crime data from the Chicago Police Department's online database with cartography from Google Maps. Users can interact with the mashup site, such as instructing it to graphically display a map containing pushpins that reveal the details of all recent burglary crimes in South Chicago. The concept and the presentation are simple, and the composition of crime and map data is visually powerful.

Mashup types

• Mapping mashups. One of the big catalysts for the advent of mashups was Google's introduction of its Google Maps API. This opened the floodgates, allowing Web developers to mash all sorts of data (everything from nuclear disasters to Boston's CowParade cows) onto maps. Not to be left out, APIs from Microsoft (Virtual Earth), Yahoo (Yahoo Maps), and AOL (MapQuest) shortly followed.

• Video and photo mashups. The emergence of photo hosting and social networking sites like Flickr with APIs that expose photo sharing has led to a variety of interesting mashups. Because these content providers have metadata associated with the images they host (such as who took the picture, what it is a picture of, where and when it was taken, and more), mashup designers can mash photos with other information that can be associated with the metadata. For example, a mashup might analyze song or poetry lyrics and create a mosaic or collage of relevant photos, or display social networking graphs based upon common photo metadata (subject, timestamp, and other metadata.). Yet another example might take as input a Web site (such as a news site like CNN) and render the text in photos by matching tagged photos to words from the news.

• Search and Shopping mashups. Before the days of Web APIs, comparative shopping tools such as BizRate, PriceGrabber, MySimon, and Google's Froogle used combinations of business-to-business (b2b) technologies or screen-scraping to aggregate comparative price data. To facilitate mashups and other interesting Web applications, consumer marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon have released APIs for programmatically accessing their content.

• News mashups. News sources such as the New York Times, the BBC, or Reuters have used syndication technologies like RSS and Atom (described in the next section) since 2002 to disseminate news feeds related to various topics. Syndication feed mashups can aggregate a user's feeds and present them over the Web, creating a personalized newspaper that caters to the reader's particular interests. An example is Diggdot.us, which combines feeds from the techie-oriented news sources Digg.com, Slashdot.org, and Del.icio.us.

Architecture of a mashup

A mashup application is architecturally comprised of three different participants that are logically and physically disjoint (they are likely separated by both network and organizational boundaries): API/content providers, the mashup site, and the client's Web browser.

• The API/content providers. These are the (sometimes unwitting) providers of the content being mashed. In the ChicagoCrime.org mashup example, the providers are Google and the Chicago Police Department. To facilitate data retrieval, providers often expose their content through Web-protocols such as REST, Web Services, and RSS/Atom (described below). However, many interesting potential data-sources do not (yet) conveniently expose APIs. Mashups that extract content from sites like Wikipedia, TV Guide, and virtually all government and public domain Web sites do so by a technique known as screen scraping. In this context, screen scraping connotes the process by which a tool attempts to extract information from the content provider by attempting to parse the provider's Web pages, which were originally intended for human consumption.

• The mashup site. This is where the mashup is hosted. Interestingly enough, just because this is where the mashup logic resides, it is not necessarily where it is executed. On one hand, mashups can be implemented similarly to traditional Web applications using server-side dynamic content generation technologies like Java servlets, CGI, PHP or ASP. Alternatively, mashed content can be generated directly within the client's browser through client-side scripting (that is, JavaScript) or applets. This client-side logic is often the combination of code directly embedded in the mashup's Web pages as well as scripting API libraries or applets (furnished by the content providers) referenced by these Web pages. Mashups using this approach can be termed rich internet applications (RIAs), meaning that they are very oriented towards the interactive user-experience. (Rich internet applications are one hallmark of what's now being termed "Web 2.0", the next generation of services available on the World Wide Web.) The benefits of client-side mashing include less overhead on behalf of the mashup server (data can be retrieved directly from the content provider) and a more seamless user-experience (pages can request updates for portions of their content without having to refresh the entire page). The Google Maps API is intended for access through browser-side JavaScript, and is an example of client-side technology. Often mashups use a combination of both server and client-side logic to achieve their data aggregation. Many mashup applications use data that is supplied directly to them by their user base, making (at least) one of the data sets local. Additionally, performing complex queries on multiple-sourced data (such as "Show me the average purchase price for real estate bought by actors who have co-starred in movies with Kevin Bacon") requires computation that would be infeasible to perform within the client's Web browser.

• The client's Web browser. This is where the application is rendered graphically and where user interaction takes place. As described above, mashups often use client-side logic to assemble and compose the mashed content.

Mashup editors make it easier to develop mashups: Yahoo! Pipes, Intel Mash Maker, Dapper, IBM QEDWiki are among the most popular.

According to programmableweb.com (which lists more than 3000 mashups) the top mashup tags are: 39% mapping, 10% photos, 9% shopping, 8% search, 7% video, 6% travel, 4-4% news, sports and real-estate, 3% messaging.

Currently the mashup of the month (May 2008) at mashupawards.com, also a repository of mashups, is Twistori, A social experiment inspired by We Feel Fine that aggregates updates from Twitter containing specific keywords: I love, I hate, I think, I believe, I feel and I wish.

Sources:
Mashups: The new breed of Web app (IBM) / What is a mashup? – ZDNet Video on YouTube / Programmableweb.com / Mashupawards.com / The 10 Best Mashups on the Web (About.com)

Relared articles on this site:
Rich Internet application (RIA) usage on the desktop / Adobe AIR – Rich Internet apps to the desktop / Rich applications meet or exceed companies’ goals

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Personal details of Facebook users could potentially be stolen, the BBC technology programme Click has found.

Facebook is the darling of the moment, allowing friends to stay in touch, post photos, and share fun little games and quizzes. And it also lets you keep your details private from the rest of the world. Or at least that is the implication.

BBC discovered a way to steal the personal details of you and all your Facebook friends without you knowing. They made up the fictitious profile of Bob Smith, who keeps most of his details on his profile private from non-friends. They could not get all details, but they did get his name, hometown, school, interests and photograph.

BBC does not know of any specific application which abuses user information, apart from theirs, but the ease with they created their application is worrisome. If it is being used you would not even have to use the application we created to become a victim, you would just have to be a friend of someone who has.

The only way BBC sees of completely protecting yourself from applications skimming information about you and your friends is to erase all the applications on your profile and opt to not use any applications in the future.

BBC asked Paul Docherty, who is the Technical Director of Portcullis Security, which advises several governments on IT security matters including British government about this security problem. He told them he believed that Facebook's terms and conditions stated on the site meant that Facebook had legally covered itself from any liability, but he added: "Morally, Facebook has acted naively. Facebook needs to change its default settings and tighten up security." He also believes it would be difficult to secure the current system because so many third party applications are now in circulation.

Read the whole story!

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Searchme, founded by Randy Adams and John Holland in 2005 and entered beta in March, lets you see what you are searching for. Start typing a search word or phrase and see how categories appear relating to your query. You will see the picture of the websites that relate to your search. Scrolling among the search result you can visually decide if you want to pick the given result or search (scroll) further on.

Searchme is using a dynamic ontology to create their “categories” feature:

• First, they define their own ontology. This means they can easily adapt it to better match how users search the Web, as well as match what works best from a categorization standpoint. If a category doesn’t work, they can change the rules of the game by picking a slightly different definition – one that would have fewer errors.
• Second, they use complex models for classification (non-linear SVMs), as well as more complex features (not limited to bag of words). This richer set of features reduces the chance that a document with a few golf terms will be considered “golf”. A simple linear model assigns a fixed weight to the word “eagle”, independent of the context, which increases misclassifications over a non-linear model. However, using non-linear classifiers enables them to learn subtler concepts, such as “eagle” and “flying” makes “eagle” negative with respect to golf, but “eagle” and “birdie” make “eagle” positive for golf.
• Third, they have incorporated technologies for rapid training. These technologies reduce the amount of data and human effort required to train a classifier, keeping it at a manageable level without sacrificing final accuracy.

All of these factors are integrated into their core production system, which they designed from the ground up with the future of search in mind. Using the ideas of dynamic ontologies, they can be agile when new categories are needed or definitions change, and with their rapid training capabilities, they can adjust in weeks or months as opposed to years.

What is an ontology, and what does it have to do with web search?
An ontology is “a systematic arrangement of all of the important categories of objects or concepts which exist in some field of discourse, showing the relations between them.” (Wordnet.) Or to simplify, an advanced “topic hierarchy”. Many web sites use an ontology. For example, dating sites let you select by gender, age and location. Shopping sites let you search by color, style, price or inventory. In each case, the site uses a “domain-specific” ontology – all the content on the site is described by and fits into its ontology.

An ontology needs two things to be effective: It needs to make sense for the site, and the content it references must meaningfully map onto it. So, when it comes to large-scale, general-purpose web search, you can see the problem:

• First, because a search engine is general-purpose and users can query for anything, there doesn’t exist a small set of “topics” that will cover every query.
• Second, because the Web is a collection of tens of billions of pages of varying quality, all created by a variety of “users”, it’s difficult for a company to accurately map what’s out there onto any ontology.

It’s easy enough to make up a bunch of categories, but it’s hard to make ones that will stand the test of time. Furthermore, if you do make ones that last, odds are that you will have a shallow ontology; we don’t know who the president will be in 2020, or who’ll be the biggest movie star in 2015. In addition, what if the definition of a category changes – what if the European Union gets a new country? The previous “EU” category becomes obsolete.

Their vision on the furure of web search:

"Imagine the Internet five years from now: As you begin to type a word into a search engine, it seems to know you personally. It naturally gravitates towards your unique interests and preferences. Rarely do you need to type more than one or two words before it shows you exactly what you’re looking for. On the occasional instance when it doesn’t correctly guess your intention, it’s easy to correct and quickly get to what you want.

For example, a student doing research for a school science project sees only science web sites that are appropriate for someone his age. A few hours later, he searches for information on his favorite video game, and he’s able to easily re-focus the engine on reviews and downloadable expansion packs.

By no means am I the first to postulate this future vision where your search engine seems to know you personally. But despite nearly ten years of artificial intelligence (AI) research in this area, we’re still not there. Why?

How do we get from here – a world where most people view search engines as big bookmark replacements – to there – a world where search engines are even more useful for real research and seem to know us personally, demonstrating the flexibility we all dream about? Are we moving in the right direction? Is it possible? Does anyone even care?

At Searchme, we are working to move toward this future and prove that it is possible by demonstrating some of the initial steps to get there. It’s extremely challenging, rewarding and exciting. Over the next few posts, I will go into detail on the real challenges to creating better search, what has already been done, and how we are starting to move into this future."

Visit their site!

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iFoods was created by three guys with a vision of the future of cooking. Their belief is that they can save people a lot of kitchen space by helping them ditch their cookbooks, in the recycling bin of course, for their own 24/7 online chef. iFoods is the new web 2.0 way of interacting with other food lovers worldwide. You can upload your own recipe videos, develop your profile and prove your culinary genius to everyone and you also have the option of learning a few things from their professionally produced video cooking tutorials. Their recipe videos have been developed by two top class chefs who have travelled the world, cooking for the rich and famous and picking up many varieties of cooking styles.

The video recipes are divided in 17 categories like Asian Cuisine, Baby Food, BBQ, Breads, Breakfast Anyone?, Desserts and Sweets, Fish and Shell Fish, iFoods Specials, Kitchen Basics, Little Italy, Meat and Poultry, Mexican Dishes, Salads, Sandwiches, Seasonal Videos
Soups, Vegetarian. Plus, you can sort by popularity and

Apart from the video recipes you have dozens of text recipes as well. You can filter your search by course, by cooking time and by almost 20 categories.

Niall Harbison started his career as a chef in Ireland's premier restaurant, Peacock Alley, under the guidance of Michelin Star Chef Conrad Gallagher. Niall became the youngest Head Chef in Ireland of a fine dining establishment in 2001 when he took the reigns at Lloyd's Brasserie (aged 20) where he cooked for the likes of Victoria Beckham and Robbie Williams. Since then Niall has continued to cater to the rich & famous as a private chef on super yachts and in their mansions worldwide cooking for the likes of Bill Gates, at his 50th Birthday party, U2, Lance Armstrong and Mariah Carey.

Pieter Plaetinck has been a chef for 27 years and has a Bachelor's Degree in Culinary arts. His list of clients is too long to go through but he has cooked for the likes of Sylvester Stallone, the Sultan of Brunei, and many other "rich and famous people of the years". Thanks to his vast array of skills (he is also a professional chocolate maker and started life as a baker) he has circumnavigated the world many times over, cooking and absorbing knowledge like a sponge wherever he goes! He has worked for over 3 months developing the iFoods recipes and making sure everything is measured to perfection, right down to the last grain of sugar, ensuring that you guys will end up with a fantastic result every time!

Throughout the year they run competitions which will hopefully lead to a few stars being borne. They introduced the "Brownie point" system, where you can collect "Brownie points by doing the following things: 10-10 points for every uploaded video recipe and for every person you invite by email to join the iFoods video recipe website; 2 points for every uploaded food photo; 1-1 points for every accepted friend; for every 300 people who will view your profile; you can also receive 1 point from other members.

You can browse the members by their names, nationalities, their motto, interests, star sign, cooking level, their favorite food, quote, ingredients, etc.

Build your profile, post your recipe videos, watch cooking tutorials, become a celebrity chef via iFoods!! And most of all... enjoy.

And if you wish, you can vote for their site at the startup 2.0 competition of European web 2.0 sites at http://www.startup2.eu/.

Visit their site!