Videoblogging to TV Show

A great example on the possible spin-offs of blogging, and in this case, videoblogging. It’s not all about the Adsense revenues you know.

Girly (guys can read it too) gadget blog Shiny Shiny has some Youtube hosted video clips every now and then. That has landed Susi Weaser a job as a presenter in a show at BBC Two (that’s a British public TV channel for all our non-UK readers).

Wikipedia Now available in China or has it!

Online enyclopedia Wikipedia is now accessible again in China. On Thursday after being blocked for more than a year, a move hailed by free media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. The main page of the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) could be displayed and searches for apolitical terms turned up results, but searches for subjects taboo to China's Communist leadership, such as "June 4," remained blocked.

However, hours after writing this blog entry - news came in that China's nanny state has blocked Wikipedia both English and Chinese languages - AGAIN. Only took them a week and I thought Tony Blair's Government were bad!

iPods Make You Deaf and Even Kill You!

It's not entirely clear why everyone likes to pick on the iPod, but its popularity seems to attract all sorts of odd warnings about the evilness that is the iPod. In the past, there have been warnings about how iPods are a security risk and a beacon to muggers. The latest, though, is that audiologists are warning that the iPod will make you deaf.

Of course, while it sounds alarming, basically they're just saying that loud noises, directly in your ear are a risk. They always have been, from the days of the transistor radio with an earpiece to the walkman. However, how many stories are there of people who are now deaf for listening to their walkmans too loud?

But not everybody minds: the CEO of hearing-aid maker Phonak has forecast strong growth his company, saying that young people listening to their music players too loudly will create a "a hearing loss bubble in years to come". While the company may be rubbing its hands in expectation of a booming market, it had better hope that class-action lawyers, or overzealous politicians trying to protect the stupid, don't screw things up for it.

Furthermore, MP3 players could mean the difference between life and death when crossing the road, pedestrians are being warned during Road Safety Week. Deafness Research UK has teamed up with Specsavers Hearcare to encourage pedestrians to remove their headphones while crossing the road in a bid to reduce hearing-related road traffic accidents. So IPODs can kill you when crossing the road? Surely its the idiot listening to the IPOD that crosses the road without looking?

No More Wires - At Last!

The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past.

US researchers have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players without wires. The concept exploits century-old physics and could work over distances of many metres, the researchers said.

Check out the full article here

How many Blogs?

Every day 100,000 new blogs are created and 1.3 million posts are made, it found during its quarterly survey. Technorati is now tracking more than 57 million blogs, of which it believes around 55% are 'active' - updated at least every three months.

While the daily figure of 100,000 new weblogs is down on the 160,000 total from June 2006 it does not indicate a slowdown in growth rates. Furthermore, English and Japanese remain the two most popular languages in the blogosphere. Despite problems for bloggers in China, Chinese remains at number three.

Suing a Search Engine Because your Ranking Sucks?

Why is it that people have this weird expectation that having a high search engine ranking is some sort of legally guaranteed right? We've seen a bunch of lawsuits recently where companies sue search engines because they're not happy with their ranking.

However here's a twist. Threadwatch points us to the story of a search engine optimizer (SEO) who is being sued by a former client because that client's search engine rankings have dropped below those of another company, who later hired the same person. It sounds like the complaint from the company is that the SEO later worked for this same company and helped "optimize" their rankings so they beat out the former client. The SEO notes that the work he did for the original client was four years ago and they've done little to nothing to continue the process of optimizing their site. The guy also claims that his agreements with companies make it clear that he does not work exclusively with them, and you'd have to imagine that most SEO contracts do not promise specific results -- especially not ones that would last four years after a contract is complete. It sounds like yet another case of a company suing simply because they don't like something, not because they have any real legal claim.

Cash Back for Windows

A Sheffield chap has won a refund from Dell for not installing Microsoft's Windows XP on a laptop he bought from the PC giant. Freelance programmer Dave Mitchell ordered a Dell laptop on 21 October, and the machine was delivered a few days later. As Mr Mitchell was planning to run the Linux open source operating system on the machine, he had no need for the copy of Windows XP Home.

When he started it for the first time, he clicked the box that said "no" on the Windows licence agreement that asked him to agree to its terms. The text of this agreement states users can get a refund for the "unused products" on their new computer if they get in touch with the machine's manufacturer.

Mr Mitchell, who is an active member of the open source community, said he knew that other Linux fans had tried to get refunds in a similar fashion with varying degrees of success.

We told you...

We wrote an article regarding news about the new competitor to Wikipedia from Larry Sanger - It Sometimes pays to come Second. Obviously the Financial Times are reading our blog - as they took this and wrote an in-depth article on the subject, check it out Wikipedia Stand-Off.

One in 100 web pages are naked

The Naked Chasm Jumpers bringing you news about nakedness....

A US Department of Justice - ordered study into pornography on the internet has found that just over 1 per cent of web pages contain sexually explicit material.

While representing only a small proportion of all material on the internet, the findings still showed that hundreds of millions of freely available web pages contain adult material, experts said. That could add to pressure in the US for a fresh legal crackdown on online pornography, a move that has been blocked for years by free speech advocates.

Full article on FT.com