Heather Hopkins from Hitwise UK reports an interesting phenomena on Google’s book search. The company may have started to offer PDF versions of out-of-print books, a very encouraging move to be sure. But a significant proportion of users go from directly from book search to book shops. Heather reports: “Last week, 15.93% of downstream visits [...]
August 30, 2006
News has emerged about a new music download service, SpiralFrog, due to launch in December. This story has been extensively covered on boingboing and Techcrunch. However, if you’ve missed it, the gist is that the service will offer the Vivendi Universal Music Group catalogue for free download. Talks are underway with EMI and other labels. [...]
August 30, 2006
Children’s safety may not always be at peril when they go online. In fact, the latest developments are hopefully a move in the opposite direction. I received news yesterday about a new attempt to tackle bullying through roleplay in a virtual world. The scheme is being developed by a consortium of nine European universities. Professor Ruth [...]
August 29, 2006
More blog entries on this subject than any other yesterday, with 1811 posts and counting, according to Technorati. Back in reality, here’s what alexaholic has to say about four of the best-known hosted office products versus one RSS aggregator service. Bear in mind that only 9% of US employees even know what RSS is. alexa website [...]
August 29, 2006
Well, it isn’t. But we’ve stretched this handy little tool a bit further than it was ever supposed to go. Think about some of the most successful Web 2.0 businesses in the context of broken email and a connection starts to form. Ed Yourdon visited eight Bay area Web 2.0 companies last week and drew together [...]
August 27, 2006
Personally, I can’t abide text chat. Not enough time for me to think (email) and no real-life presence (phone). However, my new series, This-Guy-Emailed-Me-About-His-New-Product (as in this and this), continues apace. Charles Landemaine contacted me about Interaction, a text chat application that can be inserted into any web page. This AJAX product comes in three flavours. [...]
August 27, 2006
[Update: some of the links that were cited below are now dead and so I have removed them] Melissa Whitworth explains what happened here. It seems that her editors at the Telegraph made an error. You may recall my post on Friday about the dire fate faced by traditional newspapers, and the pressure they’re coming under to [...]
August 26, 2006
A cornucopia of double-entendre and thinking so you don’t have to: Friday’s ZeFrank.
August 26, 2006
My first attempts to understand digg, the news-voting site, were a bit of a shambles, to be honest. I tried to work out the order and content of the front page and ended up in a tangle of half-remembered Maths lessons. Owen Byrne, senior software engineer at the service, put me out of my misery [...]
August 25, 2006
Lunch today with John Davies, who’s in charge of next-web research for BT. It was quite a long, or rather intense, discussion, so I’ll only tackle the basics here. I’ve been trying to nail this semantic web issue for some time, but every time I start reading an academic paper, my attention seems to wander [...]
August 25, 2006
Douglas Fisher, who has helped set up the online community newspaper Hartsville Today over the last year, has published a 75-page guide (PDF File) to citizen journalism and running a community paper online. It’s well worth a read. Perhaps of especial interest is what he says about training for these new journalists: Other sites have done more [...]
August 25, 2006
The Economist has a special report about the dire troubles print newspapers are getting into thanks to competition from online sources. Even when papers try to compensate for this by producing the entire content from the print edition on the internet, online readers are still worth less than purchasers of the print edition because (a) [...]
August 31, 2006