Technology News: Internet

Google's Strange and Shiny New OS
November 20, 2009

Google just keeps invading new territories, and its latest target is your computer's operating system. It's officially released the open source code for its Chrome OS, an operating system that will turn up in third-party vendors' netbooks. Those devices should start selling next year. With Chrome, Google takes a very different approach than major OSes like Windows, Mac OS, or even most Linux distributions.

Playboy's Bunny Couldn't Make the Hop to the Web
November 20, 2009

What the hell happened to the sort of man who reads Playboy? How could he let the Internet develop into the world's strip club -- and worse -- without taking Hugh Hefner's company along for the ride? There's no long tail for the Playboy bunny, judging from the rumored impending sale of Hefner's company for around $300 million to Iconix, collector of apparel brands like Candies and Joe Boxer.

Salesforce.com Pumps Up Volume of Workplace Chatter
November 19, 2009

Salesforce.com is marrying its cloud computing bona fides with its growing expertise in collaboration in Salesforce Chatter, a new application and development platform. The company introduced the product at its Dreamforce tradeshow and conference under way in San Francisco.

Breaking Out of the Pink Ghetto
November 19, 2009

The Pink Ghetto is a largely invisible, often unmentioned and unacknowledged place littered with impediments to womens' upward mobility in the workplace. Women in the Pink Ghetto do not get equal pay for equal work, are not offered the same opportunities as their male coworkers, are not promoted as quickly as men -- or promoted at all.

FOSS and the Google Question
November 19, 2009

Devices based on Google's Linux-based Android operating system may be dominating headlines in the mobile world, but does the search giant *really* love FOSS? Google's introduction of the open Go programming language, for instance, has attracted considerable notice in the blogosphere, inviting widespread speculation as to how it will compare with competitors.

Bill Aims to Plug P2P Leaks of Government Data
November 18, 2009

Congress moved Tuesday to prohibit federal employees from using the same type of Internet file-sharing software blamed for the disclosure. The Secure Federal File Sharing Act, introduced in the House, would bar government employees and contractors from downloading, installing or using so-called peer-to-peer file sharing software.

YouTube Gives More News Reporting Power to the People
November 17, 2009

News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch is threatening to divorce Google over the issue of unpaid news content. However, Google's YouTube division still wants the marriage of technology and traditional journalism to work; hence the Tuesday launch of YouTube Direct, a tool designed to bring together media organizations and citizen journalists.

Adobe Makes Video Power Grab With Flash, Air Betas
November 17, 2009

Adobe on Tuesday announced pre-release betas of Flash Player 10.1 and Air 2. The technologies have been enhanced to enable access to online video on any platform, including smartphones. They will also help provide a single, unified application development platform for online apps. Flash Player 10.1 will support PCs, netbooks, smartbooks, smartphones and other mobile devices.

Microsoft's Patently Absurd 'Sudo Patent'
November 16, 2009

There's just never a dull moment here in the world of FOSS. One minute, we're busy exclaiming our disbelief at the notion of a Microsoft version of Linux. The next minute -- on *Friday the 13th*, no less -- we learn that Redmond has acquired Teamprise, and will soon be shipping the company's Linux tools as part of its upcoming Visual Studio 2010 release.

Text Analysis and the Next Generation of BI
November 15, 2009

Text-based content and information from across the Web are growing in importance to businesses. The need to analyze Web-based text in real-time is rising to where structured data was in importance just several years ago. Indeed, for businesses looking to do even more commerce and community building across the Web, text access and analytics forms a new mother lode of valuable insights to mine.

Flu Fear Goes Viral on the Web
November 13, 2009

There's a very good reason why we call Internet memes and themes "viral." Good and bad information spreads on the Web in much the same way those nasty bundles of nucleic acid and proteins do when they attack your body's cells and make you sick. Some of the Internet news items I've seen related to the H1N1 swine flu virus are making me feel a little ill.

Bing Buddies Up With Wolfram Alpha
November 12, 2009

On Wednesday, Microsoft announced it's teaming up with answer engine Wolfram Alpha to beef up its Bing search engine. This will give Bing users access to Wolfram Alpha's algorithms and curated data. The team-up marks yet another step in Microsoft's battle with Google in the Web search market.

Clicker Charts the Seas for Online TV Surfers
November 12, 2009

Clicker Media on Thursday publicly launched Clicker.com, its programming guide to Internet television. This comes less than a year after the company began building what it describes as the "ultimate programming guide for Internet television." Clicker catalogs the broadcast-quality movies, music videos and Web videos available online on more than 1,200 networks.

Finding Out What They're Saying About You Is Worth Every Penny
November 12, 2009

Social media monitoring is a new business endeavor, with relatively few companies able to boast a significant track record of achievement. In fact, according to the new Aberdeen benchmark report, "The ROI on Social Media Monitoring," only 27 percent of Best-in-Class companies have engaged in social media monitoring activities for more than two years.

W3C Validation: It's Not Just About Rankings
November 12, 2009

In the SEO world, a perennial argument is whether Google's ranking factors look for clean code in a Web site. The W3C has developed two popular tools that check Web sites for errors: The W3C validation tool looks at HTML code, while the CSS validation tool checks the CSS Style Sheet. These free tools scan all of a site's code to make sure it is compliant with current Web standards.

FOSS' Sunny Place in the Cloud
November 12, 2009

Richard Stallman's now-famous warnings about cloud computing (his verdict in a nutshell: It's "marketing hype") sparked a fresh round of debate in the blogosphere this week, along with some outbursts of incredulity. Stallman "is a few bubbles off of plumb and gets weirder every year," Slashdot blogger hairyfeet told LinuxInsider.