social networking

In Europe and Asia, where mobile phones have higher penetration than in the United States, social networking has been quickly moving toward mobile phones. This is happening both through social networking platforms like MySpace and Bebo making agreements with mobile operators and through mobile-phone-based start-ups such as Jaiku, which is based in Finland.Unlike community sites like MySpace, which are largely confined to personal computers, these new phone-oriented services are bringing the burgeoning culture of exhibitionism to more exotic and more personal locations

yoName

There is a new search engine called yoName that helps consumers find individuals using popular social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, Digg and Xanga by name, username or e-mail address. The rise in popularity of social networking Web sites, with individuals often using more than one, has driven the need for yoName. yoName developers said the search engine “turns your computer into a private detective,” which may not be well-received by those that believe the Internet and related tools help stalkers and other undesirables locate people. The site’s terms and conditions section includes a disclaimer saying that it doesn’t endorse stalking in any way, shape or form.

ElHood

ElHood is sort of a bilingual MySpace promoting the latest in Latin music, and for Miami-based Monterrosa, it has become a personal and professional lifeline. It is also the latest in a wave of Hispanic social-networking sites building links across the U.S., Latin America and Spain, all hoping to capture coveted advertising dollars.

my space

MySpace has launched a news service that lets members of the popular social-networking website decide which stories bouncing about the Internet are most deserving of attention. The MySpace News service scouts the Internet for news ranging from gossip in online journals known as blogs to stories from media conglomerates such as News Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch headed company that owns MySpace.Placement of items on MySpace News web pages will be dictated by feedback from members, who get to rank stories on a scaled of “loved it to hated it.

my space

MySpace has launched a news service that lets members of the popular social-networking website decide which stories bouncing about the Internet are most deserving of attention. The MySpace News service scouts the Internet for news ranging from gossip in online journals known as blogs to stories from media conglomerates such as News Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch headed company that owns MySpace.Placement of items on MySpace News web pages will be dictated by feedback from members, who get to rank stories on a scaled of “loved it to hated it.

BBC

The BBC is to open up its vast archive of video and audio in an on-demand trial involving more than 20,000 people in the UK.Broadcasters around the world are grappling with the shift to on-demand media, with many firms now offering content online or via mobile devices.The archive trial will make available 1,000 hours of content drawn from a mix of genres to a closed number of people. About 50 hours - of both TV and radio programmes - will be available in an open environment for general access.People who are interested in participating in the trial should register at bbc.co.uk/archive.

Google Inc.

Google Inc. plans to launch software similar to Microsoft Corp.'s popular PowerPoint program as the two companies vie to dominate the online experience.it would pay $3.1 billion (euro2.29 billion) to acquire ad-management technology company DoubleClick Inc. Almost as soon as Google announced the cash acquisition, Microsoft and AT&T executives said the deal could violate antitrust legislation _ and result in a dangerous concentration of Internet users' personal data at Mountain View-based Google.The two companies already offer e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet programs, and other tools. Google's new presentation software will compete against Microsoft's ubiquitous PowerPoint software that is part of its popular Office suite.

web 2.0

Web 2.0, a catchphrase for the latest generation of Web sites where users contribute their own text, pictures and video content, is far less participatory than commonly assumed. A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google's top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others o watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise. Similarly, only two-tenths of one percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo Inc., are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found. Wikipedia, the anyone-can-edit online encyclopaedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 percent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.

Face Book

Facebook.com is getting a facelift designed to make the popular Web site's social networking features easier to find and use.Besides adopting a new look, Facebook is introducing tools that will enable its users to learn more about their social networks and more easily conduct electronic conversations among multiple people simultaneously.The Palo Alto-based Web site is the second largest social networking site behind MySpace.com, which was sold to News Corp. in 2005 for $580 million.Facebook last year spurned a $1 billion takeover offer from Yahoo Inc. and could attract even more tantalizing bids if Zuckerberg realizes his goal of doubling the site's audience during the next six months. Facebook currently has about 19 million active users, a number that has been rising by an average of 3 percent each week.Despite Facebook's success, Zuckerberg said he and his team are constantly looking for ways to make it simpler to navigate around the site. "There's always room for improvement," said Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard University in 2004 to focus on building Facebook.

Technorati

Blog search engine Technorati Inc.announced that is has acquired Personal Bee Inc., which operates a Web site that customizes news and entertainment content submitted by users for communities of interest around the topics. Terms of the deal, which is the first acquisition for five-year-old Technorati, were not disclosed. acquisition will help the company in its effort to improve user understanding of the "real- time Web," or content that is constantly built by millions of people interacting with blogs, videos, podcasts and photos.The Personal Bee site allows users to publish or manage sites around topical areas; it lets users create collections of stories from the Web, publish them and build communities of interest around them.Technorati tracks more than 72 million blogs and 230 million tagged objects in real time from across the Web, the company said.The combination of the two companies will make it easier for Technorati's clients to market their products and brands by creating new forms of conversational advertising with consumers and building interactive advertisements that can invite feedback from customers.Ted Shelton, founder and CEO of Personal Bee, has joined Technorati as vice president of business development and will lead the effort to integrate the Personal Bee tools into Technorati's products.

you tube

A week after it blocked access to YouTube, the Thai government ordered one of the country’s most popular chat sites to shut its political forum because of postings deemed insulting to the monarch. The political chat room of www.pantip.com was closed Sunday after authorities ordered its creators to pull the forum off-line temporarily, Vissanu Meeyoo, a spokesman for the ministry of information and technology, said. The chat room carried frequent postings that criticised the leaders of a September coup and the current military-backed government. The government also asked operators of another two websites to block comments that could be deemed harmful to national security or insulting to King Bhumibol Adulyadej

mapping

Search engine Google and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum launched an online mapping project to provide what the museum said was evidence of atrocities committed in Sudan's western Darfur region.More than 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur since 2003 and some of this carnage -- which the United States calls the first genocide of this century -- has been detailed by Google Earth, the search engine's mapping service (http://earth.google.com).Using high-resolution imagery, users can zoom into Darfur to view more than 1,600 damaged or destroyed villages, providing what the Holocaust Museum says is evidence of the genocide. Sudan's government denies that genocide is taking place.In addition, the remnants of more than 100,000 homes, schools, mosques and other structures destroyed by janjaweed militia in Darfur, Sudanese forces and others are visible.

blogger

The support for a blogger hounded by death threats has intensified with some high profile web experts calling for a code of conduct in the blogosphere.
The female blogger at the centre of the row has been shocked to discover that hers is not an isolated incident. It has led her and others to question some of the unwritten rules of blogging. It could force a re-examination of the way the tight-knit blogging community behaves. Among those calling for a bloggers' code of conduct is Tim O'Reilly - one of the web's most influential thinkers

judgment

A division bench of Allahabad High Court stayed a single judge’s controversial judgment denying minority status to Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, which had set off a political storm on the eve of the UP Assembly elections. Amid wide-ranging political and constitutional ramifications of the high court judge, Mr Justice SN Srivastava’s verdict, which ruled that Muslims ceased to be a minority community in UP, the Mulayam SinghYadav government swiftly swung into action, moving an urgent application before a division bench to challenge the single bench’s judgment.
The division bench comprising Justice SR Alam and Justice Krishna Murari gave the stay order after preliminary hearing of the state government’s review petition.

online maps

Internet search engine Google is calling on its millions of users to chart a new direction for its online maps.As part of an initiative being launched today, Google will provide free tools designed to make it easy for people to share their knowledge about their neighbourhoods and other favourite places by creating customised maps that can assemble information from a variety of sources.

AJAX

Researchers at Fortify Software have uncovered what they say is the first vulnerability to specifically affect Web 2.0 and AJAX applications.Developers in the past used Javascript for simple features like image rollovers and Web forms. But in the Web 2.0 world, Javascript is increasingly being used to transport data, and that's opening the door to security issues, said Brian Chess, chief scientist at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Fortify, which makes source-code analysis software.

virtual health community

TauMed.com (www.TauMed.com), a free virtual health community presently in beta, unveiled an expanded set of personalization and real time community tools with an exciting slate of new features. My Health Space and My Health Share provide strong resources founded in an online community, combined with the power of TauMed’s superior, advanced healthcare topic search.