For those ofyou interested, there may be some election blogging here later on (especially if Blogger goes down) but I’ve also set up a chat room for anyone interested. It’s #UKBloggers on the nightstar.net IRC network (if you have mIRC, it’s one of the regular networks on the list and if not, you should be able to access it here.
Tag Archives: Websites
Living in Viewropa.
Living in Europe is getting competition. “Viewropa” is a community blog started by members of MetaFilter who are “attempting an experiment in multi-lingual, collaborative and Euro-focused blogging”. And it’s a good looking experiment, too.
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Google Does It Again
Google yesterday released free software that lets you simultaneously search the Web and your PC hard drive for information. You can download here. This time it will be Microsoft and Yahoo who will be fuming in the back office.
What all this new Google stuff does seem to be exciting is some controversy about the privacy issues. Any thoughts anyone?
Google Book Search
Whilst speculation abounds in the weblog world that Google is about to launch its own browser tchnology, more traditional media seem to be enthusing about the possibility of Google book search:
Google, beset by a growing number of competitors in the internet search business, will shortly unveil a number of new features to its own search engine, according to one of the company’s directors.
It has also started testing a service that lets users read book excerpts online, echoing the popular ?Search Inside the Book? service created by Amazon.com.
The book excerpt service, called Google Print, aims to give users links to relevant books among the other search results they receive. Clicking on the link will then lead to the book excerpt, where users can read two pages forward or back from the relevant page and also click on another link to an online store to buy the book.
Source: Financial Times
Obviously the internet war is hotting up. Meantime I’m having fun playing round with Amazon’s A9.
WorldChanging
The WorldChanging bloggers, who I should start reading, are celebrating their first anniversary. They’re running a bunch of guest posts to mark the occcasion.
Skype, or Simply Hype?
Well, no, it looks as if it’s for real, and for once it’s European. But whatever it is, or isn’t, Skype (the most popular of the Voice Over Internet – VOIP – applications) is certainly getting a lot of press coverage at the moment. James Fallows of the NYT has been kind enough to test it out for everyone:
While running, Skype sits in a little window, like an instant-messenger program, and lets you talk with other users in two ways. If the other person has Skype installed, you can talk as long as you want, free, and with sound quality that is startlingly better than that of a normal phone connection…..
You can also reach people who don’t use Skype, through a new service called SkypeOut. This allows you to dial nearly any cellular or land-line telephone number in any country and talk. Though it isn’t free, it’s cheap. Skype’s prices are in euros – its founders are Scandinavian, the main programmers are Estonian and its headquarters are in Luxembourg – and they average two or three cents a minute, at any time of day.
Meanwhile back in London Ofcom (the UK telecom industry regulator) have decided to establish the prefix “056”, which will allow phone users to switch from the existing 11-digit telephone numbers to a new Internet broadband 11-digit phone number. Stephen Carter, Ofcom’s chief executive is quoted by Reuters as saying that “”Broadband voice services are a new and emerging market. Our first task as regulator is to keep out of the way.” Good for him.
Of course in one sense Skype is the ultimate in social software, facilitating the development of a young interconnected broadband elite. Simple economics should indicate that as the marginal cost of communication drops rapidly towards zero the quantity should increase. Indeed could we be witnessing the simultaneous rise of two phenomena: densely clustered local networks supported via mobile phones, and more sparsely clustered, but economically highly interesting, global nets facilitated through a platform of broadband connectivity?
So with references to Google and E-Bay abounding the only remaining question seems to be whether Skype will become the latest in the line of new economy, increasing returns, monopolies. Their website claim that they have already provided over 21 million downloads suggests they may be. Will you be the next?
Blogging as Substitute?
Dr. Bernd Marcus, Prof. Dr. Astrid Sch?tz und Dipl.-Psych. Franz Machilek are psychology scholars at the Technical University Chemnitz and probably know everything you always wanted to know about bloggers yet never dared to ask. Or so. Well, actually, I don’t know if bloggers were a particularly important part of their study given the saddening size of the German blogosphere.
Based on 266 questionnaires which the psychologists gathered online they assessed intentions and personality traits of people who own a homepage to answer the question whether “owners of personal websites” are “self-presenters, or people like you and me”. So the question of what exactly differentiates a “personal website” from a blog – as well as the entire “social software” discussion – might be spiced up a little from a psychological point of view.
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Living in Europe
If you like us, you’ll probably like our partner site Living in Europe.
Digitally Scared.
No doubt about it – revolutions are truly scary. Whether you think of the French one, the ones that freed Eastern Europe, or the digital revolution that is currently changing much of the transactional structure of our economies, and in particular the music industry. But contrary to most people, I do pity major label executives who never even stood a chance of understanding just what happened to them. After all, this is an industry where the average person?s desk had not seen a computer in 1996, as some insider once said.
There’s something about Laetitia
I’ve noticed that, after the front page, the consistently most hit posting on AFOE is this one. Somehow, I doubt that my shining prose is the reason.
Also, we get quite a lot of traffic from people looking for sexy weman. Well, this is certainly the right place. :^)
What lessons should we be taking from this? Do we need more T&A at AFOE?