“ Owners of the iPhone and the iPod Touch can now access Wikipedia at any time. Independent of connectivity or wireless signal, nearly three million articles are being boasted to fit into Encyclopedia the mobile app.
July 5, 2009
July 2, 2009
“ Today Apple pulled an application from its iPhone App store that was reported to include a nude photo of a fifteen year old girl. Prohibited content is feared to be a major weakness in Apple’s App Store, and this incident has effectively placed that fear in the spotlight. The app is BeautyMeter from Braun Software, and users upload images of themselves and rate images of others with a five-star system in the categories of face, body and clothes. The screenshot in question has not been verified to have been taken by an underage girl, but the listing shows just such a caption, with nearly five thousand ratings, under a picture of a topless iPhone user partially nude below the waist.
“ Software company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) says it is in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay and file-sharing technology company Peerialism. GGF claims to have the biggest network of internet cafés and gaming centers in the world. The changeover of ownership is scheduled for August 2009, whereby GGF will take over the operation of the site. The company says that after it has completed the acquisition it will launch new business models so that copyright owners get paid, which is clearly a huge diversion from TPB’s previous modus operandi.
“ Facing strong resistance at home and abroad, China on Tuesday delayed enforcement of a new rule requiring manufacturers to install Internet filtering software on all new computers. The delay by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology was announced through Xinhua, the official news agency, one day before the July 1 deadline for the software to be installed on all computers sold in China. The software, called Green Dam-Youth Escort, has caused a torrent of protests from both Chinese computer users and global computer makers, including many in the United States, since the government order became public in early June.
“ Bing, launched on June 3 but available to some users a few days earlier, took 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81 percent for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April, said Internet data firm StatCounter. Google lost share slightly, dipping to 78.48 percent from 78.72 percent before Bing. Yahoo Inc, the perennial No. 2 in the market, rose to 11.04 percent from 10.99 percent.
June 29, 2009
“ Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers. CNN showed scores of videos submitted by Iranians, most of them presumably from protesters who took to the streets to oppose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election on June 12. The Web sites of The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Guardian newspaper in London and others published minute-by-minute blogs with a mix of unverified videos, anonymous Twitter messages and traditional accounts from Tehran. The blogs tend to run on a separate track with more traditional reporting from the news organizations, intersecting when user videos and information can be confirmed. The combination amounts to the biggest embrace yet of a collaborative new style of news gathering — one that combines the contributions of ordinary citizens with the reports and analysis of journalists. Many mainstream media sources, which have in the past been critical of the undifferentiated sources of information on the Web, had little choice but to throw open their doors in this case. As the protests against Mr. Ahmadinejad grew, the government sharply curtailed the foreign press. As visas expired, many journalists packed up, and the ones who stayed were barred from reporting on the streets. In a news vacuum, amateur videos and eyewitness accounts became the de facto source for information. In fact, the symbol of the protests, the image of a young woman named Neda bleeding to death on a Tehran street, was filmed by two people holding camera phones.
“ Steve Jobs is back at work at Apple Inc., returning to his job as chief executive officer as planned after taking medical leave in January. “Steve is back to work,” said Steve Dowling, a spokesman at the Cupertino, California-based company. Jobs is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the rest of the time, he said. “We are very glad to have him back.
“ In any debate on the importance of the free flow of accurate information, even in the face of resultant problems, you’d expect the New York Times and Wikipedia to line up on the same side, strongly pro flow. Now we have an idea of the circumstances required for them to make an exception.
June 28, 2009
“ Traditional search engine marketing seeks to draw the attention of people searching for particular terms in Google, Yahoo, or other search engines. And that’s going to continue to be useful for a long time. But the rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines - most of which, Facebook blocks - and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users. So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic.
“ The adoption cycle for Twitter is a bit strange. It goes something like this: Ever-increasing waves of hype, links, and attention bring in the newbies to Twitter.com where they get their first taste of Twitterdom. Some portion of those set up an account out of curiosity or a fear of being left behind. They try sending out a few Tweets, look around, get bored by the initial banality of the service and abandon it for other pursuits. But that is not the end of it. A lot of them come back, either because they keep getting links from friends or keep hearing about it on TV or whatever, and then they slowly start to see the usefulness—a funny Tweet from a friend, a link to breaking news, a way to keep an eye on the general zeitgeist. Twitter is the kind of thing that is easier to experience than it is to explain. But it is an acquired taste and often requires repeated exposure before people get hooked. Once they do get hooked, there is no going back.
“ Ask a question. Get an answer. This has been the promise of Google and countless other Web sites that have tried to turn computers into digital librarians, with limited success. Hunch.com, a Web site that opened its doors last week is taking a new approach. Visitors ask a question, and Hunch responds with a few of its own. The idea is to mimic interactions that happen in the real world when a person talks to a librarian or a salesperson, said co-founder Chris Dixon. Behind the scenes, computers crunch through a vast array of possible answers, following a path blazed by IBM’s Deep Blue, the chess-playing supercomputer that famously won a six-game match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. If, for example, someone is trying to decide whether to buy an iPhone, Hunch will begin by asking if the person needs “a new phone ASAP?” Hunch will then follow up: “Is 16 gigabytes of storage enough for you?” “How sure are you that you want an iPhone?” And “Do you have cellular service from a company that offers the iPhone?
“ MagicJack works by hooking a standard home phone up to an Internet calling service via a $40 USB jack, which sells via stores like Best Buy, RadioShack, and Walgreen’s. It lets you place and receive unlimited phone calls over the company’s Internet phone network for $20 a year. (First year free.)
“ Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.
“ The following is a timeline of how the news of the Prince of Pop’s death traveled across the internet.
[…]
From an internet marketer’s perspective, I found this story fascinating to watch unfold. I was impressed by the speed of information distribution and very surprised to see which site posted the news first. Wikipedia is still the fastest news aggregator. It was faster than Twitter and much faster than Google.
[…]
From an internet marketer’s perspective, I found this story fascinating to watch unfold. I was impressed by the speed of information distribution and very surprised to see which site posted the news first. Wikipedia is still the fastest news aggregator. It was faster than Twitter and much faster than Google.
June 25, 2009
“ For the first time, television series with the most viewers are commanding higher advertising rates at TV-viewing Web sites than they are on prime-time TV. Nielsen Co. ranks “The Simpsons” and “CSI” among the highest viewed shows online. Fox TV shows as well as content from NBC, ABC and elsewhere stream for free on Hulu and has popularized the genre of on-demand, long-format Web-based television.
