Archive for August, 2007

Seedcamp Finalists Are Now Public

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at August 30, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 2 Comments

20 European web startups that are competing for 5 rewards of 50.000 Euros each over at Seedcamp are now public. The full list is as follows: ArtFlock, Avenue7, Buildersite, Content Syndicate, Debatewise, Facecontact, KillSushi, Krogos, Kublax, Maple and Leek, OpenEra, Picolex, Price Delivered, Project PlayFair, RentMineOnline, The School of Everything, Tablefinder, Tickex, Wall Street Docs and Zemanta.

Most of the startups are UK-based but I’m glad to see some outsiders there, like Krogos from Romania and Zemanta from Slovenia. There’s a couple more details about each of them over at Financial Times.

Reddit Is Down

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Stan Schroeder

at August 28, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 2 Comments

Social content site Reddit seems to be down at the moment. While I don’t usually report on server outages this one seems interesting because the site is not even returning the standard “Reddit is broken” sign. Instead, it returns a 500 Internal server error or nothing at all. With all the recent botnet ddos attacks, it makes me wonder if Reddit is on the receiving end of something similar?

*update: and, it’s back. Although the site was down for 3 hours, there aren’t any visible new features on the site or explanations on the official blog.

Digg Gets a Redesign

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Stan Schroeder

at August 27, 2007 in Web and Web 2.0. 0 Comments

Not that long after the last overhaul, social content site Digg gets another redesign, this time bringing only minor tweaks and optimizations. The most important change is the “All” view, which lets you see both videos and news stories on the front page, with videos being represented by thumbnails. Also, you can now bury stories with one click, without choosing the reason why you did it (although you still can choose a reason - it’s just optional now).

The navigation bar now has some more info, for example you can see your friends’ activity right there; also, menus are now visible in both dropdown and breadcrumb style.

All in all, the changes are welcome, albeit none of them is really crucial, perhaps the consolidated news/videos view.

Quick news: Bloglines beta, FotoFlexer

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Stan Schroeder

at August 27, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 0 Comments

Bloglines, one of the most popular online RSS readers, has received a much-needed overhaul in the form of a beta version. Your old Bloglines account will work with the new beta, so go try it out. Read an in-depth review of all the new features over at Read/Write Web. I’ve tried it out and I think it’s a great improvement over the old Bloglines; however, I’m so used to reading RSS feeds in Netvibes that I’m probably very subjective.

In other news, Mashable writes about FotoFlexer, yet another online photo editor, that’s going to integrate with Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa and Yahoo soon. For a detailed review of 6 other online photo editors, go here.

A Huge List of Web Operating Systems

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Stan Schroeder

at August 23, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 1 Comment

Mashable has compiled a list of over 45 Web Operating Systems, WebOSs, or WebTops - however you like to call them. The descriptions are short; if you want an indepth look, you’d best check out our reviews of 10 WebOS and another 10 WebOS-style applications.

However, for a comprehensive list, go bookmark the Mashable article.

Reddit’s Unofficial Image Section

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Stan Schroeder

at August 22, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 3 Comments

Users at crowd-driven content web sites Reddit and Digg have been asking for an image section for a long time, to no avail. The reason is simple: a lot of the popular content on both websites actually consists only of images. Users have been marking this content with prefixes like [IMG] or [PIC] - check out the Reddit homepage at any time and you’ll surely find a lot of those. But, for some reason admins at both Digg and Reddit have so far declined to introduce an image section.

Well, there’s some good news for Redditers now: there’s an unofficial Reddit media website over at redditmedia.com which is autogenerated out of Reddit content, and displays only images and videos posted on Reddit with small thumbnails for easier navigation. Neat. If this site turns out to be popular, it might be a trigger for Reddit or even Digg to finally do an image section of their own.

Reddit Media

Forget Earth, Check Out Google Sky

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Stan Schroeder

at August 21, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and News. 2 Comments

The latest version of Google Earth has a very interesting new feature: Sky. With it, you can see the sky as you would from any point on the Earth. To be able to make this work, Google put together over one million photos of the sky from various sources, which means that it’s, um, pretty detailed, and that you can zoom in to see those 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies.

To try out Sky, simply download the latest Google Earth.

I can’t wait to see the mashups people are going to build with this thing.

*Update: it’s activated by opening Google Earth, and clicking on View - Switch to Sky. Screenshots below.

[via NYT]

Google Sky

Google Sky constellations

Do You Trust Web 2.0?

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Stan Schroeder

at August 20, 2007 in Web, Web 2.0 and Features. 4 Comments

A big part of the success of web 2.0 is trust. Sites that fall into this category (if we may call it so) have little ads, and exercise an honest, straightforward approach in the vein of: “we won’t give away your e-mail. No, we really won’t.”

But is it true?

Before my summer vacation (I’m back, thanks for asking), I’ve been doing some research on a topic and I’ve registered on a number of training/fat loss/dieting/exercise related websites, most of which could be defined as “Web 2.0″. All of them, of course, claim that they will not under any circumstances send me spam or give my e-mail address to anyone.

And yet, hundreds of dieting-related spam messages - the kind I haven’t been receiving earlier - now sit in my Inbox. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Before you ask, I have a special e-mail account for these type of use. Spam won’t hurt me much there. It’s not a big deal.

But still, shouldn’t I be able to trust these sites? It sounded so simple: they’re cool guys/girls; they care; they won’t give away my e-mail; they won’t send me crap; they’ll take care of my privacy.

I guess when you grow there’s bills to pay, and when simple advertising doesn’t cut it, you have to resort to other methods. Just another piece of proof that the age of Web 2.0 innocence is long gone.

5 Things Every Geek Must Do Before Going to a Vacation

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Stan Schroeder

at August 13, 2007 in Tips and Features. 6 Comments

It’s the same every time: you think that you’ve got everything you need on your laptop and that you can do everything online, but once you get separated from your trusty desktop (presumably with an annoyingly slow wireless connection), you realize that you’ve forgotten to prepare some essentials that you can’t really work without.

Being on vacation right now, I’ve had plenty of time to reminisce about things I should have done and haven’t; the least I can do is share them with you. For the purposes of this article I’ve presumed that you usually work on a desktop, like me, and you’ve taken your laptop (with some sort of internet connectivity) with you on a trip somewhere.

1. Forward all your email accounts to a new Gmail account

If you’re anything like me, you have several email accounts - couple of Gmail ones, corporate ones, and some old ones which don’t even have (decent) web access. The best thing you can do is create a new Gmail account and forward all your other e-mail accounts to it. In fact, this is a good backup option even if you aren’t planning a vacation.

2. Load all essential apps to a USB flash drive

You’re used to fast Internet, and then you get stuck somewhere with GPRS-type speeds (10 K/s if you’re lucky), and suddenly downloading Winamp is a tedious task. Besides, all these “small” apps you’re using on everyday basis have gotten really fat since the last time you’ve cared about file size. It’s best to always have a USB stick with some essential applications ready.

3. Write *all* the passwords you need into one file and take it with you

You think you know all your passwords by heart? You don’t. You think you can access them all online? You can’t. Usually, at least 20% of the passwords you use are default passwords you’ve been given and you’ve never bothered to change them. Trust me, there’s only one way to be sure you’ll be able to access your stuff - write down all your essential passwords into one file and take it with you.

4. Transfer all your current bookmarks to your laptop

If you’re anything like me, chances are your bookmark count increases by the dozen every day, or at least every week. And, if - like me - you were lazy to install some sort of bookmark synchronization plugin, like the great Foxmarks, make sure you transfer your bookmarks to your laptop, or otherwise you’ll be banging your head against the wall trying to remember various web addresses all vacation.

5. For God’s sake, triple-check you’ve taken all the necessary chargers

Yeah, I know these are the basics. Somehow I always manage to screw up on this one, though.

Quick news: Dabble Do, Google Street View, Wikinvest

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at August 8, 2007 in News. 0 Comments

Not having much time to dive into deep analysis (still enjoying the sun and the sea, thank you), here are a couple of interesting tidbits from the blogosphere:

Dabble Do is a new Facebook-based to-do list (aren’t there thousands of those, already? My favorite is Remember the Milk), and according to several bloggers, it’s good. (via RWW).

Wikinvest is a Wiki-based community for people who are into stock trading. Read more at Mashable.

Finally, Google LatLong reports that Google Street View has added four more cities, which means that you can have a phototour through streets of 9 major US cities and spot people without underwear or whatever rings your bell.

Slashdot’s Firehose is Public (and Mostly Useless)

Published by

Stan Schroeder

at August 3, 2007 in News. 2 Comments

Slashdot’s Digg-like (although they claim it has nothing to do with Digg) voting system - Firehose - seemed to be a logical step for the community-driven news giant, but I’ve been using it since it was introduced as a beta and I must admit that I don’t see the point of it. You vote for stories, but, it has absolutely nothing to do with what ends up on Slashdot’s front page. Furthermore, while Digg’s upcoming section is a great place to find fresh news, Slashdot’s Firehose is nowhere as eventful, easy to use or interesting. The only feature worth mentioning is Firehose’s filter, which lets you filter out news with bad score (e.i. lots of negative votes).

Don’t get me wrong: Firehose is a nice addition to Slashdot. But a revolution, or even a step forward to giving more power over content to Slashdot’s community, it is not.