Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on July 24, 2008 by CyberNet.

Back in December, we questioned whether Google was hoping to compete with Wikipedia by launching a new service into beta called Knol. Knol stands for a unit of knowledge, and it is a place where experts go to write articles (Knol’s) on a subject that they are familiar with. It is also be a place where people can go to get knowledge from these experts which makes it a haven for getting and sharing knowledge. This service is now out of beta and ready for the masses to explore.

Every Knol (article) will have either a single author or a group or authors, and now they are introducing something called “moderated collaboration” which will give all users the opportunity to suggest changes that should be made to a Knol. Whoever the primary author is will have say over whether the suggested change is made. On the Official Google Blog, they say:

With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then chose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it.

Suggesting changes is one way the community can get involved, and another is by reviewing a knol, commenting on it or rating it.

As we pointed out back in December when this project was announced, it does have some similarities with Wikipedia, but there are major differences as well. Google has no editorial roll whatsoever. Knol authors also have the opportunity to make ad revenue. There’s even the chance of having two knols on the same subject which means authors will be motivated to produce quality work if they want to make the most from it (money, and visibility).

Because of the revenue opportunities, will those who typically contributed to Wikipedia be more willing to contribute to Knol? It will be interesting to see how this grows, and if it can turn into anything like Wikipedia with the abundance of information they have.

Thanks for the tip Max!

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This article was written on July 13, 2010 by CyberNet.

Sites like Digg and Reddit have been becoming increasing popular because the news and stories that are put in front of the users are those that receive the largest number of votes. Reddit has let users create their own “Reddits” for awhile now, but a site called Slinkset offers some extensive customization while maintaining the fundamental structure of Reddit.

Signing up for Slinkset is incredibly easy. In fact the screenshot you see above is the only information that you have to provide to get a site in working order. Once you create a site, however, you’ll probably want to play around with some customizations. You can do things like change color schemes, fonts, logos, or even provide a custom CSS template:

A simple example of a Slinkset site is this one that has been populated with different ways people use Evernote. On the opposite end of the spectrum is this one that has a more customized design, and actually doesn’t use the voting mechanism at all. Instead it serves as a way to aggregate bad car buying stories.

Beyond the design there are a lot of other settings you can change. You can manage/ban users, use a custom URL (a.k.a. one that is not something.slinkset.com), integrate with your Google Analytics account, and more. One of the nicest features might be that you can insert custom HTML into the sidebar, which means you can include ads or pull content from your own site using an iframe.

Slinkset isn’t something that everyone will use, but it can certainly have its moment. Thanks to some of the privacy features I was thinking that you could create a private site for your work as a way to come up with ideas for, let’s say, a work party. People could submit their ideas, comment on them, and vote for their favorites. Hey, it might be fun.

Slinkset Homepage

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This article was written on February 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Back in September last year we wrote about how the European Court finally ruled on an antitrust case that was started back in 2004 against Microsoft. The ruling? Microsoft was fined $690 million dollars. For this particular fine, it was because the EU felt Microsoft needed to make a version of Windows without Media Player included. At that point, it was a record fine but now the EU is fining them again for a new record fine of $1.3 billion dollars. In all, Microsoft is expected to pay under $2.5 billion in fines.

According to the Associated Press, the issue this time is that EU regulators claim “the company charged “unreasonable prices” until last October to software developers who wanted to make products compatible with the Windows desktop operating system.” More specifically, the unreasonable prices were charged for access to “interface documentation for work group servers.”  The fines this time are the result of “non-compliance” says the EU and they believe Microsoft is still restricting their competitors. Microsoft has said that those issues that they are being fined for have already been resolved so it looks as though Microsoft is going to have to do some fighting to prove their case.

So what are the “unreasonable prices” Microsoft is charging?

• Originally, Microsoft set the royalty rate at 3.87 percent of a licensee’s product revenues
• Companies wanting communication information were required to pay 2.98 percent of their products’ revenues
• At this point, Microsoft has lowered the patent rate to 0.8 percent (only in Europe)
• The Communication Information rate was lowered to 0.5 percent (only in Europe)

We don’t know all of the in’s and out’s regarding EU rules and regulations, but at this point it seems as though they are getting a little fine happy and going after Microsoft simply because they can. Or perhaps they’re just trying to make a point. Any thoughts? Did Microsoft deserve to have another fine slapped on them?

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This article was written on August 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Yahoo has just launched Fire Eagle out of beta, a platform that makes it easy for people to share their location. It’s not a social network, rather they make it possible for existing services including social networks, to incorporate your location. They also have a mobile version available so that when you are on the go, you can easily update your location, or hide yourself which essentially means that Fire Eagle will not share you location with any service.

Examples of how Fire Eagle is integrated into services you may be familiar with include:

1. Pownce – have your messages geotagged with your Fire Eagle location
2. Rummble – location based social discovery tool to help you find people and places nearby
3. Movable Type – display your location on your blog, automatically updated whenever you rebuild

Those are just three examples of how Fire Eagle is being used. Yahoo has a whole gallery of applications that make use of Fire Eagle. For those who don’t want anybody to know an actual location, you can make it up, although that then defeats the purpose of the platform.

The official Yahoo Blog, Yodel Anecdotal wrote about Fire Eagle and talked about how easy it is for developers to create location-enhanced applications. They described is being all about “making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location.”

For those of you who want to start using Fire Eagle, checkout the list of services and web apps that are already taking advantage of the platform to see if any of them interest you and then use your Yahoo ID, if you have one (or just sign-up) to get started. When you want to update your location you can manually do it, or use one of the following apps:

• Dopplr – will tell Fire Eagle the city you’re in
• Brightkite
• Fire Widgets – update your location on your Mac OS X dashboard
• Zone Tag, My Loki or Navizon – will broadcast your location automatically
• Searchquest GPS for iPhone (get it from the App store)

The most natural thing for Yahoo to do would be to integrate the Fire Eagle service with Yahoo Maps so that you could track and view locations of your friends and family.

Checkout Fire Eagle

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This article was written on March 01, 2007 by CyberNet.

For the last 5–hours (maybe more) my Gmail account has been inaccessible, and it is times like these that makes me worry that I could have just lost all of my emails. Sure, I have seen Gmail outages before, but when they are as extensive as this one it really makes me question the stability.

If I try and login to my account it just sits on the “Loading…” screen for awhile and eventually asks if I want to switch to the “basic” version since it is having troubles loading. I gave it a shot, but just ended up with the error seen to the right.

Ashley started a discussion in the forum asking if anyone else was having a problem, and we appeared to be the only ones. At that point I was really worried, but I went where many people turn to when Gmail goes down…the Gmail-Down Google Group. Apparently we are not the only ones with this problem, and someone offered a solution that didn’t help us:

Tried clearing all private data (incl. cookies) from browser. No idea why that should have anything to do with gmail outage but it seemed to work. Hope this helps someone.

However, there is also the more official Google Group for Gmail here, where Google reports that they are working on the issue:

Hi all,

We are aware of the issues a small sub-set of our users are experiencing when logging in and sending messages. Rest assured that our engineering team is working diligently to resolve these errors. We appreciate your patience.

Please refer back to this thread for updates as they become available.

Thanks,
Gmail Guide

I also use Google Apps to manage the email for our domain, so I decided to go and see if that still worked. Yep, it did so I am assuming that it is a specific data center that is having the troubles, and if you’re not located in that data center then you should still be able to access your account.

I am keeping my fingers crossed that my emails will comeback fully intact because I would hate to lose the emails in my account. This is probably why Gmail is still in Beta.

Read about previous Gmail outages

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