Much relief for the relatives and friends of BBC Journalist Alan Johnson as a video of him speaking, apparently in good health, has appeared on the Internet.
Many sites are now carrying it, like the BBC itself and The Telegraph, but in typical media fashion they have chosen to edit the video. We’ve embedding the video below.
Just about every time you turn on the gogglebox these days there’s invariably a pair of inanely grinning monkeys gushing over some home improvement project or another, so we weren’t surprised to hear that the creators of Lastminute.com were launching a new site targeting the massive DIY market.
Continue reading Lastminute.com Founders To Launch DIY Site
Just when Microsoft was developing as bit of a confident man-about-town swagger about its rising search engine performance, a new report from Nielsen/NetRatings delivers a humbling slapdown in the goolies.
The figures, released yesterday, show that after gaining ground for a couple months, Microsoft lost a chunk of their search market share in April, while rivals Google and Yahoo enjoyed lengthy back-slapping sessions as traffic rose.
Continue reading Google Rampant: Microsoft Search Slips Up
A new study by Telephia and comScore compares mobile and PC-based Internet usage and shows a huge rise in people accessing the web from mobile devices.
In January 2007, 5.7 million Brits accessed the web using a mobile device, compared to the 30 million people age 15 or older who used a work or home PC to get online.
Continue reading Mobile Web Users Make Up A Fifth Of UK PC-Based Audience
Over a tenth of all websites are pornographic, a quarter of search engine requests are for naughty things and when it comes to hosting smut, the US leads the world by miles.
The figures, delivered in a clever seductive video (below) by Good Magazine reveals just how much pr0n dominates the web, with 12% of all websites containing top shelf material and 25% of all web searches being for porno.
Continue reading Porn: Over A Third Of All Internet Downloads
Online buying has become so commonplace in America that sales of everyday items like clothing and shoes have outstripped the more traditional ‘techie’ big sellers like computers and software.
A report by Shop.org (part of the National Retail Federation) estimated online clothing sales at around $18.3bn in 2006, ahead of the $17.2bn spent on computers in the same year.
Continue reading US Online Sales Continue To Soar
Since the launch of the Wii there’s been a beta version of the Opera Web browser available for the surprise success active console.
That all changes today when the full version becomes available for download through the Wii Shop Channel – the area on the console where additional applications and services are accessed.
Nintendo are really pushing the Family Web browsing feature of the new setup – wisely in our view. Multiple controllers can be used during a Browsing session, letting many members of the family point out areas of interest
The release version adds features such being able to set the resolution of the browsing to the size of your monitor; having no margins when browsing; two types of zooming when browsing (continual zooming is now included); fonts now remain anti-aliased no matter how deep the zoom; searching Google and Yahoo is offered by default; scrolling using the up-down-left-right control pad. The comprehensive list of these and their description are available at the bottom of this article.
What’s it like to use?
Travelling to and through the Internet Channel is remarkably easy on the Wii. Given its built in Wi-Fi connectivity and simple menuing, getting it running is simple.
This is added to by navigating the Web pages being a doddle using the position-sensing pointer device known as the Wii-mote. In fact, we found it makes you wish you always had something that simple available when you have to navigate your computer from a sofa.
If you’ve not used the Wii (we recommend that you do, if you haven’t), take a look at the video that Opera has created to show the experience
Strangely the download is only free until 30 June this year, but once downloaded will remain free for “the lifetime of the system.”
Checkout the feature at the Opera site
New Internet Channel features
Search – A search button has been added to the start page and to the browser toolbar. Choose between Yahoo! Search and Google as preselected search engines. Your selection can be changed at any time, or a different search engine can be used by typing the address of the search engine you wish to use.
.B Button + Left Arrow = Search
.B Button + Right Arrow = Enter web address
.B Button + Up Arrow = Reload
.B Button + Down Arrow = Favorites
.B Button + (+) key = Page forward
.B Button + (-) key = Page backward
Google is bringing User Generated Content to the Google Maps, by extending it to let users add their own comments, photos and video.
Google Maps has wowed people ever since it moved to the Web from the standalone Google Earth application, letting anyone with a Web browser take a look at both the maps and satellite images of anywhere in the world.
Adding content to online maps, or geographic locations isn’t a new idea. It’s been around for ages and it’s commonly called geotagging, or less frequently Geocoding.
Google Maps has been possible for a while using a combination of Google Maps API and XML, but it wasn’t for the faint-hearted, requiring quite a lot of know-how and skill to add items. It uses an XML schema called KML, Keyhole Markup Language.
Their new version, currently available in ten counties, gets away from this by extending Google Maps to include a simple drag and drop interface.
We’ve given it a go and found it a breeze.
When people create their own MyMaps they are able to define if they are to be shared with the world – coming up in Google search results – or define if they are the remain private.
Adding placemarks is a breeze. Simply select the placemark icon and click on the map area that you want it to appear on. These can be titled and a description added, be that plain text, rich text, or HTML
There are further tools to allow lines and shapes to be draw onto the maps. Once set, these can then have their colours and attributes changed.
Adding photo and video
Photos and video can be added to the maps, as long as they’re hosted somewhere online.
Adding them requires the smallest amount of HTML skill, as they have to be added to the placemarks using HTML code. (pointers)
Once you’ve created you mapping master pieces, you can take the data from Google Maps, out via KML, to Google Earth.
Current competition
Yahoo has offered the ability to attach photographs to maps via their Flickr service for quite a while now (Bestival example) and Microsoft have also had a similar tool Via their Maps Live service.
Software company Smaato and mobile media types Handmark have pressed the flesh, slapped some backs and delivered mutual high-fives as the two companies announce a strategic partnership to distribute Smaato News.
Smaato News is a RSS reader for smartphones that lets users read RSS feeds of their favourite Websites and blogs and get other information on the move.
Currently available for Palm OS, Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Symbian S60 devices, the program comes with a collection of re-defined RSS feeds to get users started, and there’s the option to add custom feeds.
The program can also provide various services like weather forecasts and allows users to share their feeds with friends via SMS or email.
Feeds can be synchronised via a desktop connection (Palm OS and Windows Mobile only) or over the air via a mobile Internet connection.
Although the application is free, the program is supported by adverts which appear on the top section of the screen (“if you see something interesting, don’t hesitate to click,” implores their manual, rather optimistically).
The program can be downloaded from Smaato’s Website, although users may baulk at the amount of space the application takes up: a beefy 640k for the Palm and a positive pie-scoffing 1.80 meg for Windows Mobile.
We couldn’t find an option to save the downloaded RSS feeds to the memory card, so this isn’t a machine for users running smartphones that are already stuffed full of programs.
Funnily enough, we were half way through writing a review of some Palm OS RSS readers and without giving too much away, we’d suggest you wait for our review to go up before installing the Smaato app.
Availability:
Palm OS Smartphones (e.g. Treo 650)
Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition (e.g. Treo 750; O2 XDA)
Symbian S60 (e.g. Nokia N70)
Readers in London may have noticed in the past couple of weeks, posters on the tube and elsewhere advocating an ‘Information Revolution’, in response to the fact that one company allegedly controls 80% of the information on the Web. No more information is given, but the ad suggests a visit to information-revolution.org to find out more.
Sitting on the tube, opposite such an ad, I figured that there were only two possible companies which could be accused of controlling 80% of information on the Web; it could plausibly refer to either Internet Explorer’s market share (and would therefore be an advert for Firefox) or Google’s market share. Since I knew Mozilla wasn’t planning any advert like this, I assumed that it was a competitor to Google, and concluded it was probably Ask (since neither Yahoo or Microsoft would manage to think outside the box to such an extent). However, I dismissed that idea instantly as it seemed so unlikely that a well respected company would attempt such a pathetic campaign, and that therefore it must be some new search engine with far too much venture capital. By that point I had lost interest, and began examining the ventilation panel.
I didn’t think any more about it until a storm erupted on the blogosphere a few days later. Ask guilty of astroturfing! screamed the headlines. The search engine had launched a deceptive marketing campaign (astroturfing because of the attempt to impersonate grass roots activity – get it) without disclosing that they were behind it. Finally getting round to looking at the campaign Website, I discovered a blog, including a post on why the ‘revolution’ had been forced to ‘go underground’:
The regime supporters are telling us to “advertise” the features we have, rather than wage an underground revolution. If only we had a choice! Everyone knows that: A) you have to try a feature to really understand it, and most people have been brainwashed that they don’t need to try another search engine’s features and B) advertising doesn’t work anymore!! That’s why we had to go underground.
Not to mention the factually inaccurate statement that the Internet is 15 years old – the world wide web is 15 years old. The Internet, as we all know, was born well before that. But we can’t blame them for the mistake, because, apparently ‘The Red Bull ran out at 1am on Saturday, so this post may not make much sense!’
My encounter with this revolution, which will inevitably result in a world changed forever in about a week’s time, was last Saturday evening, when a nice man from Ask offered me a free badge and a T-shirt in Covent Garden, from a peculiar-shaped trailer. I declined the gift, although I was very tempted to make my evening out more exciting by making use of their free Internet access inside the trailer. I was interested to see, however, that they had responded to the blogosphere by plastering an Ask logo on the trailer. Maybe the revolution felt that it was gaining enough momentum to come out into the open.
I didn’t tell the nice man from Ask this, but I have a suggestion to the revolution which I will tentatively put forward here (although those nasty spies from Google might also pick it up); build a better product. The route to market domination is not through silly campaigns where no-one can work out what is being advertised, but through making a product which is such an improvement over the existing market leader that people are prepared to switch. A departing thought; if Ask does manage to build a better product, and become the new monopoly, I wonder whether they will continue to advocate using search engines other than the most popular?