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Coming late to the game, Google has announced it is to launch its own alternative to the world’s largest free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The new service, dubbed “Knol” (units of knowledge), will share the same open, user-submitted approach to information but will emphasize on the credibility of its content.

Unlike Wikipedia, authors will not only be credited for the work, but can also earn advertising revenue if they chose to allow ads to appear on the pages. People will also be able to submit comments, questions, and additional content. Knol is currently in an invitation-only beta stage. Google plans to make the service completely free for the public once testing is finished.

Source | Techspot.com

OpenOffice will be shortly available online via the Ulteo Online Desktop, without  installing any additional software.

Until now the latest publication of OpenOffice.org is online and available for only 15.000 beta testers. If you are interested, you can be registered at  http://www.ulteo.com/home/ooo so you can access in several applications of OpenOffice without installing anything and all your work will become through the Ulteo Online Desktop. The volunteers beta testers will have available 1GB storage space while they can create new documents but also access them  from any computer via browser.

Very soon we will have the possibility to watch high quality video from YouTube.
Even if YouTube is still the most popular website for Online Video Sharing, the quality of the videos is not the best.

But recently the co-founder of YouTube, Steven Chen, declared that this is going to change. And this will happen by detecting your Internet speed connection.

So as faster Internet connection you have, the higher video quality, you will get through YouTube. This change is expected to be applied in the next 3 months.

Since today according to Gmail Blog, Gmail is now supporting the IMAP protocol. You can enable it, at Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP > IMAP Access > Enable IMAP. This service is given to public after many user requests, as IMAP is better than POP, as it enables you to use multiple devices to check your email and changes made on one device show up immediately on the other device. So don’t wait, chech it now.

On 16 Nov 07 at the eMetrics Summit in Washington, D.C., Google announced new features to its Google Analytics™ web service such as site search reporting and event tracking, and an updated version of Urchin™ software. This enhanced feature set makes essential Web 2.0 information more accessible and comprehensible, and enables Google Analytics users to better understand their users and to act on reporting information in more sophisticated ways.

Users can enable site search to identify keywords, categories, products, and trends across time and user segments, thereby helping them measure the effectiveness of their websites and their marketing dollars. Site search aggregates data about how searches affect site usage, e-commerce activity, and conversion rates, by tracking internal search patterns. This best-of-breed feature will soon be available worldwide, and it works with Google Custom Search™, GSA, Google Mini™ and many other non-Google site search products.

With Web 2.0 features also spreading on the Internet, measuring their success is increasingly valuable. Event tracking, which launches in a limited beta at the eMetrics Summit, enables Google Analytics users to measure visitor engagement with a site’s interactive elements, such as Ajax, Javascript, Flash movies, page gadgets, downloads, and other multimedia Web 2.0 experiences. Google Analytics users who are attending the eMetrics Summit can sign up for event tracking at the Google Analytics booth, and users should note that when they add event tracking, they must update their page tags from “urchin.js” to “ga.js”.

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Yesterday, Google rolled out a new anti-piracy tool onto YouTube, which identifies pirated video as it is uploaded.

The automated system checks all video as it’s uploaded to the site and attempts to match it to a database of visual abstractions from copyrighted material. However, the catch is that the copyrighted material has to be in YouTube’s database before it can be detected.

This means that the burden is now on the content owners, who have to provide copies of the copyrighted content to YouTube, so that the company can add it to its database.

Depending on the content provider’s wishes, there are a number of outcomes for when copyrighted material is detected by the system. YouTube will either block it, post it or put advertisements into the content, with revenue being shared with the content owner.

The Internet giant first talked about all of this in a US District Court at the end of July, saying that it would be rolled out by the end of September. Obviously, it’s a little later than planned but according to YouTube executives, this is the first image-recognition software to be implemented on a large scale.

Viacom, one of the companies that has filed a copyright lawsuit against YouTube, is “delighted that Google is stepping up to its responsibility and ending the practice of profiting from infringement.” However, the company has always maintained that a filtering system would not end the current lawsuit because the company believes it’s owed damages for past infringements.

Bob Tur, the journalist who was the first to file a lawsuit against the video sharing site was less than happy though. “What a slap in the face to copyright holders,” he said, “Help us not infringe your material. Please give us a copy of everything you’ve copyrighted and we’ll do the rest.”

Source | Bit-tech.net

As you may already have noticed, Gmail since yesterday offers more than 3 GB of Free Storage (right now 3155GB!). First it was introduced with 1 GB of space at April 2005 and now, about 2 years later, it goes for 4GB very soon!

So for those who have million of mails, keep archiving those emails as you don’t have any more to erase nothing, while Google give us more and more space.

And if you think that this space for your email is huge, you can always use it as alternative hardrive.

From Google Blog:

In April 2005, we started increasing Gmail storage as part of our “Infinity+1″ storage plan. At that time, we realized we’d never reach infinity, but we promised to keep giving Gmail users more space as we were able. That said, a few of you are using Gmail so much that you’re running out of space, so to make good on our promise, today we’re announcing we are speeding up our counter and giving out more free storage.

And, just in case you are like my friend Miriam, whose sister sends minute to minute photo updates of her kids in RAW format, then we still have a paid storage program where you can get your fix, and we’re giving you more space than before for the same price.

By the way, businesses, schools and organizations using Google Apps to get Gmail on their own custom addresses (like Google does for our @google.com accounts) will get a storage boost in the coming days, too. Standard and Education Edition storage (now at 2GB) will begin matching Gmail’s counter, and Premier Edition users get a whopping 25 GB (up from 10 GB).

Internet research firm comScore has released new figures looking at the most popular search engines worldwide. Unsurprisingly, Google topped global search charts with 37.1 billion (5 billion via YouTube) searches in August, nearly five times its nearest competitor Yahoo with 8.5 billion searches.

This was the first time comScore evaluated online search activities on a worldwide basis, according to the company, revealing that most of the search activity happens in the Asia-Pacific region, which includes countries such as China, Japan and India. It also highlights that the large number of Chinese internet users has made the Chinese language search engine Baidu surpass Microsoft and rank third in the global internet search business with 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft’s websites came in fourth with 2.1 billion searches, trailed by Korea’s Naver.com with 2 billion searches worldwide.

“Seeing Asian search engines like China’s Baidu.com and Korea’s NHN ranked alongside Google and Yahoo underscores the fact that search has become a truly global phenomenon,” said Bob Ivins, executive vice president of international markets at comScore.

You can read the full press release, including both the top 10 search properties and worldwide search by region charts, at comScore’s website.

Source | Techspot.com

The hacker temporarily suspended the accounts of a “very small” number of members.

According the eBay, the hacker got no access to any sensitive info. Moreover, they emphasized that a malicious hacker broke into an eBay server to get access and not the eBay web site. According the Nichola Sharpe (Company’s spokesman), the eBay is daily hit by hackers.

This was also the reason that the reaction of bigger transactions site was direct and without having negative impacts for users which elements were forced. Things could been worse than this, if the cyber-security team of eBay wasn’t so vigilant!

It’s not often that Microsoft gets the drop on Google. But today it launched HealthVault in beta, a free online repository where anyone can keep their personal health records. Meanwhile, Google Health has yet to launch, having recently lost its leader Adam Bosworth.

With HealthVault, you can import your health records from your doctors, hospitals, labs, prescription drug plans, and other healthcare providers. You can also type them in yourself, or upload data from personal health monitoring devices such as glucose or blood-pressure monitors. The site also incorporates a health-specific search engine like Healthline’s (here is the results page for “glucose“), and lets you save your searches. Microsoft plans to make money through health-related search ads, but says it won’t target those ads to any personal data in someone’s stored medical record. Access to the site will require a Windows Live ID and a password that you can share with healthcare providers. Patient privacy will obviously be a major concern here, and fears of compromising it will likely be the biggest hurdle to adoption among both consumers and their doctors.

But it is worth trying to overcome that hurdle. Getting people to embrace digital personal health records is a Holy Grail for both the healthcare and technology industries. By making health records accessible on the Web to both patients and their doctors, better tracking of medical conditions and quicker responses to changes in those conditions could yield vast improvements in healthcare outcomes. Dangerous symptoms could be spotted earlier by doctors, while at the same time patients would have the information necessary to better take care of themselves. A shift to widespread use of online personal health records is the first step needed to change the focus of the healthcare system from one of constantly treating full-blown ailments to preventing them in the first place.Source | Techcrunch.com