Google has been testing an interesting new feature which lets users vote search results up or down. It’s a part of Google’s experimental program, and it’s not known when or whether it will ever be implemented in actual Google search results.

This is not a new idea. A search engine called AfterVote (previously called Younanimous) has had this feature for several months, as well as some other interesting ones, like bookmarking, prioritizing, or blocking certain results altogether. It’s a meta search engine, which means that it combines results from Google, Yahoo and Live search; unfortunately, this also means that Google can simply add their ideas to their products and cut them out of the loop. It would be a pity, because AfterVote is one of the most interesting alternative search engines around. Check out a screenshot below:

Google’s new feature is actually quite primitive: vote up, vote down, or suggest an alternative. The screenshot from the official site explains it well:

[via Parislemon]

I’m not calling anyone out here, but I hate it when some technology that’s been around for a while is suddenly touted as a new thing in conjunction with the iPhone.

AppleInsider talks about Google’s new feature called My Location, which shows your location on Google Maps by calculating your position based on the mobile base unit you’re currently connected to. It’s a cool feature if GPS is not essential to you, and it could be used as a “poor man’s GPS” on the iPhone, but it’s not new. It’s called Assisted GPS and it’s already incorporated in some GSM phones, for example Nokia N95.

As far as My Location goes, it’s a clever implementation of the same principle. Check out the video presentation below:

Soon, many PDFs will feature Yahoo’s dynamic ads; dynamic meaning that the ads can be tailored for a particular audience or rotate, making sure that the same user doesn’t get the same ad twice. The ads will appear in the side panel of the PDF document.

This is the first time that Adobe has allowed dynamic advertisements in its PDF format; on the other hand, it shows Yahoo’s determination to expand their advertising efforts to not-strictly-online media.

For us users, it means just another annoyance, as always.

[via BBC]

Let me get this straight. If you download something that might turn out to be pirated in France, you will lose the right to use the internet. On the other hand, if you drive recklessly, or too fast in France, which might result in someone’s death or serious injury, you get a fine, or even prison time, but you don’t permanently lose the right to drive; e.i. your driving license. I won’t pretend to be an expert on French traffic laws, but I bet that even if you get caught driving a stolen car, you will still keep your right to drive (after you get out of jail, that is).

So why then is the right to use the internet - in my opinion, one of the most basic and most important human rights today - being revoked to people because of piracy? 90% of my income comes from internet. I entertain myself online. I inform myself online. Perhaps I’m not the average Joe now, but trust me, 10 years from now, I will be. Taking someone’s right to use the internet - forever - is like taking their right to ever again drink tap water. It’s stupid, it’s too harsh, it’s insane.

Now, one can always say the oh-so-often used argument: well, if you want to keep your right to use the internet, don’t pirate stuff. Well, it’s not that simple. By that line of reasoning, you can electrocute people for smoking a joint. Or torture them for stealing pennies from a vending machine.

Piracy is not good. But piracy is not synonymous with file sharing. It’s not the same as BitTorrent. It’s different from P2P. You can’t simply forbid all these things on account of piracy. Bad stuff happens in dark alleys, but you cannot forbid people to meet in dark alleys.

I have to admit that the implications of this new deal between the French government and ISPs aren’t completely clear yet. A person caught pirating will get their account terminated by the ISP; but will they have the right to sign up again through another ISP? Or will the government and ISPs keep some kind of black list and make sure you never use the internet again?

Unfortunately, these are the least of the French internet users’ worries. The issues go far deeper. What about users who don’t know they’re downloading pirated material? What about hackers breaking into WLANs and pirating stuff just to get accounts terminated? Huge companies like Google and Universal can’t agree on what is pirated, how to stop it, how to monitor it, but sure, the little guy has to know all this or else his internet pipe gets cut off. Great idea.

The internet is becoming a place I like less and less each day. William Gibson, in his Sprawl Trilogy, envisioned a sort of an underground internet; a secret network behind a huge wall, not connected to the regular matrix. I hope we don’t have to resort to that in the end.

I bet you didn’t see this one coming. According to the latest data from comScore, Google is the top search engine in the US, having grabbed 58.5 percent of the search market, which is an improvement of 1.5% over Google’s score in September. Yahoo is still at second place with 22.9 percent of the market (down 0.8% since Septmeber), while Microsoft’s Live Search is third 9.7% (down 0.6% since September). In absolute numbers, this means that Internet users in the US have conducted 6.1 billion searches through Google and only 2.4 billion through Yahoo in September.

All other things are pretty much equal: Ask.com is still at 4.7%, while Time Warner is at 4.2% (a 0.1% drop since September), which means that Google has snatched another share of the search market from its direct competitors.

Now, I’m sure that no one is surprised to hear that Google is still number one, but it has to be frustrating to the competitors, who are trying hard to catch up, to see their market share slip considerably to the big G. This goes especially for Microsoft who’s put a lot of money and effort into their Live set of services, and Ask whose expensive and still ongoing marketing campaign has yielded little results.

Linking to the source is what us bloggers do, right? However, how exactly do you determine which source is the “right” source? Do you merely link to the site where you first found a news item? Do you link to the sites they linked to? Do you do research and try to find the original source? This is the dilemma that’s been bugging me for the last couple of days.

The thing is, I can make it really easy on myself and just link to wherever I read the news, but is it fair to the other bloggers? What if this site merely wrote a short commentary on someone else’s original story? If you look at Techmeme and how it threads stories, this kind of behavior can completely cut off the original source. If some small blog discovers a story, and then Engadget follows up, and everyone links to Engadget, then Engadget will get the bulk of Techmeme traffic, not the source blog.

So, let’s say we agree that one should always take effort to link to the original source. But things aren’t that simple in this department. Many a time a technology blog will find a mainstream story and find a new, tech-related angle that might make the story even more interesting than the original. In this case, linking to the original source is a bit unfair; especially if I don’t follow this mainstream publication in the first place.

I rarely follow up other stories; I try to do original stories if possible. As far as linking goes, I’m trying to find the original source related to technology and not go further; however, I have a bias towards good commentary and smaller blogs - the big ones are going to get linked to anyway.

I’d like to hear your opinion on this, especially if you’re a blogger! Who do you link to?

I would never, ever, download a bittorrent file off the Internet. However - and I’m speaking hypothetically - if I were downloading insane amounts of videos, music, and warez, I’d like to know not only what’s new, but also what’s good. This is where PickyPirate steps in.

The site is a cross between Metacritic and Mininova/PirateBay. It combines fresh items from these torrent search engines with their grades from the popular review aggregator and creates a nice list of new, highly-rated torrents. It’s categorized, simple to use and easy on the eyes; pity it’s evil.

Since downloading those filthy torrent files is the last thing to cross my mind, I’m certainly not going to bookmark this site and use it daily from now on; I will also make sure to condemn any users that do. Were it not for my high moral standards, I’d probably say that PickyPirate is one of the best and most useful mashups out there; instead, I’m going to add it to the ever-growing list of reasons for the imminent demise of the music/movie industry.

[via TorrentFreak]

OK, whose idea was this? FFFFound.com? And I thought Zooomr.com was over the top. Folks, I know that good domain names are hard to come by these days, but you can’t just string together a senseless array of letters and use it as a domain name because it’s just not going to work.

The site in question is StumbleUpon meets Flickr - you browse through images and tag the ones you like. Cute, but I wonder how many users will give up trying to hit the correct number of Fs in that domain name.

No, I’m not talking about Android. I’m talking about my fresh Sony Ericsson P1i and its dreaded Symbian UIQ3 platform. And the fact that Google saved the day, at least for me.

The problem with the platform is simple: not enough applications. The sheer basics are covered: several GPS applications are available (TomTom, Smartcom Navigator), instant messaging works great (IM+), there are several alternatives for office applications and mobile browsing works good thanks to Opera Mini 4. But so much is lacking.

I’d probably be deeply unhappy with my mobile internet experience if it weren’t for Google. The thing is, Google has more or less quietly introduced a mobile version for every major application they released. Google Reader, Gmail, Google Maps, iGoogle, Calendar - they all work just fine on my P1i. This set of applications are pretty much everything I need to enjoy the mobile Internet.

So, on the surface it may seem that Google has no or little mobile experience, but I don’t think that’s the case. In face, Google is very good at creating and deploying products for mobiles. I can think of no other web-based company which has shown such determination in reaching the mobile audience.

So, when the folks at Symbian claim that Google doesn’t have a clue when it comes to mobiles, they’re dead wrong. I already use more Google applications on my Symbian-based smartphone than native Symbian apps. If I ever switch to Android, I probably won’t even feel the difference.

I talk to web developers often, and one thing they still say strikes me as weird.

Many of them don’t want their site to self-refresh, or be entirely in Ajax. Let them refresh, they say. I agree that Ajax and Flash is sometimes unnecessary, but on certain type of sites, with lots of fast-changing data, having new data show up without refreshing the page (think stock market data, for example) is essential.

The reason for this is simple: page views are still one of the most important metrics considered when measuring the popularity of a web site.

Many arguments have been brought about page views being dead, and they were all right.

However, old habits die hard. As long as page views are considered to be relevant at all, companies won’t risk having their competition laugh at their puny page view numbers, and they’ll shun elegant Ajax, Silverlight, Flash or Flex solutions and replace them with good old HTML and a refresh button.

Since both Nielsen and comScore have acknowledged this problem and adapted their metrics - Nielsen now tracks how much time visitors spend at the site, while comScore gives more weight to visits instead of page views - web developers should relax and follow suit. Unfortunately, robbing yourself of a potentially important advantage still seems to risky to most of them, so they choose to stick with whatever approach gives them more page views.

If you’re wondering where did the year 2005 from the title come from, it’s the year the term Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) was coined. Now, Ajax is already considered slightly obsolete, and some developers are still afraid to use it because they’ll lose page views. Time to let go of the past, folks.

Fuser is a tool that lets you ‘fuse’ several e-mail and social networking accounts into one; or, better put, have them all in one place. You can read, send and receive e-mail from multiple accounts directly from fuser, and organize it with folders. You can also send and receive MySpace and Facebook messages directly from your Fuser account.

Fuser supports AOL, Exchange, Gmail, Hotmail, SquirrelMail, Yahoo and Yahoo Beta, as well as MySpace and Facebook social networks. And, therein lies a flaw: it’s just not enough. I like Fuser, but any service of this type (err, that consolidates other social networking services) must support more than just two social networks. I hope the folks at Fuser will soon add support for Twitter, YouTube, Last.FM and other services because at this point, it feels like an e-mail service with some socnet features thrown in at the last moment.

If you’re asking yourself, how can one RSS feed be better than the original, and why should you care, you’re right up to a point: there’s nothing spectacular here. Still, if you’re not happy with Digg’s RSS feed having only 40 items (more news items usually pass through Digg’s front page in 24 hours), you should consider DiggFeedr.

DiggFeedr uses Digg API and Ruby on Rails to create a new RSS feed for Digg, which has 100 items, with each item containing a bit more details than the items in the original RSS feed for Digg. Furthermore, clicking the titles bypasses the Digg comments and leads you directly to the story, which - although quite easily achievable with some scripting knowledge - can be a great feature for some. Last but not least, DiggFeedr seems to retrieve items a bit earlier than the original Digg feed. Check out a screenshot (taken from my Netvibes) below.