Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 07, 2007 by CyberNet.

Some of you probably remember the controversy that came last Summer when Netscape launched a social news service which they hoped would compete with Digg.  They even went as far as "bribing" some of the top Digg and Reddit users at the time with $1,000 per month to come over to Netscape and submit at least 150 news stories each month to help build a community.  It’s been just over a year now since the service launched, and Netscape is calling it quits.

TechCrunch had reported that there was a good chance that AOL (owners of Netscape) was going to get rid of the Digg clone back in the beginning of August, however Netscape didn’t confirm it nor admit it until yesterday when they posted on their blog about some upcoming changes to the site. Among the changes, they noted that they’ve found that the Netscape brand is associated with editorially controlled news instead of socially controlled news. Therefore, they want to provide their users with what they expect from Netscape and they’d soon start redirecting users to the "New Netscape portal experience."

So now users will go from a "Digg-clone" to a "Yahoo-clone." That’s right, the page that users will soon be forwarded to is strikingly similar to Yahoo’s homepage. Apparently coming up with an innovative layout and style for a homepage just isn’t top priority for Netscape? I’m almost surprised that they’re still trying to keep Netscape alive. At this point, I’d think that they’d ditch Netscape and start redirecting people to AOL, especially because most of their content comes from AOL anyway.

The graph below also gives us some indication of what the road for Netscape has been like over the last few years:

At this point I’m even doubtful that their editorially controlled news on their "new portal" will even be enough.  What are your thoughts? Does Netscape have a chance of making it much longer?

Source: TechCrunch

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on January 15, 2009 by CyberNet.

Google announced today that they will be stopping development on several different services. Among those being given the ax are Google Notebook, Google Video, Google Catalog Search, Dodgeball, Jaiku, and Google Mashup Editor.

I can’t say that I’m really surprised with most of those because you never hear too much about them. What makes me happy is that Google isn’t completely throwing in the towel on the services. For example, Google Video won’t accept any new submissions, but videos already posted will remain online. And the Jaiku is being ported over to the Google App Engine where it will then become an open source project.

The one service I was a bit surprised to see on the list is Google Notebook. Luckily Google is planning to leave this untouched, but as their blog describes there will no longer be any development work done:

Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users. But don’t fret, we’ll continue to maintain service for those of you who’ve already signed up. As part of this plan, however, we will no longer support the Notebook Extension, but as always users who have already signed up will continue to have access to their data via the web interface at http://www.google.com/notebook.

I really love Google Notebook, and it’s too bad they won’t be taking it any further. My wish was that it would someday become an integrated part of Gmail, but that never happened. With the addition of Gmail Labs I still have hope that someday Gmail will get a feature that would prevent having to send those pesky “note to self” emails.

It’s time to bid farewell to these Google services. Some of them have served us well, and some will live on in our hearts. We’ll be telling stories of Jaiku and Dodgeball to our great grandchildren as we reminisce of the times we walked to school/work uphill both ways in hurricane-like weather. Those were the days, weren’t they?

[via Search Engine Land]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 20, 2010 by CyberNet.

In the past year I’ve become a pretty big Evernote user, and have even gone as far as to purchase a premium account. Last week the Evernote team expanded their service even more with Evernote Trunk, which is a centralized area to find third-party hardware and software that works with Evernote. When I saw that I realized that I have never written about the Twitter integration that has already been around for awhile.

Why is this useful? Well, if you’re on-the-go you can quickly send yourself a reminder to your Evernote account with a simple text message. After you follow the steps below you can send a text message in the format of “d myEN [your note]” to 40404 (that’s the U.S. number). The note will then appear directly in your Evernote account inside of your default notebook.

What does it take to link your two accounts? It’s actually pretty simple…

If you have a public (non-protected) Twitter account, then do the following:

1. Follow myEN on Twitter (you will need a Twitter account)
2. myEN will follow you back, and send you a DM with a link (this took about 24-hours for me)
3. Click the link, sign into Evernote, and connect your Evernote and Twitter accounts

If you have a protected Twitter account, then do the following:

1. Follow myEN on Twitter (you will need a Twitter account)
2. Accept myEN’s follow request
3. Send a DM to myEN
4. myEN will send you a DM with a link
5. Click the link, sign into Evernote, and connect your Evernote and Twitter accounts.

Once you have your Evernote and Twitter accounts linked you can move on to the testing phase. To test this out you either need to include @myEN in a tweet, or send @myEN a direct message.

If you used the direct message method you should find that the message appears in your Evernote account almost immediately.

Enjoy posting to your Evernote account using Twitter!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on October 26, 2006 by CyberNet.

Now I have seen some blog makeovers before but I think this one definitely takes the cake. The Windows Vista Blog now bears some resemblance to the Windows Vista Homepage by using some glossy buttons and loads of transparency.

Jim Allchin, the Co-President of the Platform and Services, is the one who made the announcement on the blog. That actually made me a little disappointed because it is the first time he has even posted on the blog! Up until now Nick White has been doing all of the posting and has done an amazing job. I would have preferred to see Nick post about the new blog because he is the one that is really in touch with the community.

Jim’s announcement also seemed too “professional.” He even went as far to say “I’ve been living with Windows Vista (or “Longhorn”) as my primary machine for almost two years now.” Okay, I’m sure that he has always had it installed on a computer to track the progress but I hardly believe that it has been his primary machine for 2-years. For those of you who can’t think that far back read Paul Thurrott’s review of Longhorn (the codename for Vista) from less than two years ago. It was virtually only usable if you didn’t have to install any software.

The new blog sure does look nice but it is apparently not possible to comment at this time. They don’t allow anonymous comments anymore which means you have to sign-up, but there is an error when I try to create an account. Oh well…keep up the great work on the blog Nick!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

If you’re a student, you’re going to love this for writing research papers! The website is Bibme.org and it takes all the hassle out of writing a bibliography because it essentially does it for you. Had this been around when I was a student, I definitely would have used it.

BibMe Background

Before I get into how it works and what you can do with it, here’s some quick background information.  BibMe actually started as a semester project involving 6 students at Carnegie Mellon University. It took them around 15 weeks during this last Spring Semester (2007) to finish the project using Ruby on Rails and AJAX. I’d say for 15 weeks worth of work, it’s not to shabby! Nice work, guys!

It’s not like the others….

I’ve tried other Bibliography builders in the past and none of them had an AutoFill mode like BibMe does. What’s AutoFill? AutoFill allows you to find a book by the title, author, or ISBN number. I searched for a book called Stylin’ with CSS and it pulled up two results. Then I was able to select which book I wanted to use as a source and it got all of the information for me so that with one click, I could add it to my bibliography.

Where does it gather the information like the author, publisher, and year published? I know for sure that they at least use Amazon, but it’s possible that they use other sources as well to gather this information. It also appears that they have a deal with Amazon to make money by suggesting further reading that relates to the source you entered into your bibliography.

Do-it Yourself

While the AutoFill mode is by far the one thing that makes BibMe unique and useful, they also have a Manual entry mode if you’d rather do it yourself, or if by the off-chance they don’t have the information for your source. If you decide to do it yourself, you’ll enter in all of the book info and author names yourself, and then they’ll do all of the formatting for you (usually the most tedious part anyways!).

What’s also nice is that they have a citation guide right on the site so that you can quickly reference formatting guidelines should you need them.

Not just for books

As I mentioned above, the AutoFill feature allows you to enter in the name of a book, and then it will go find all of the information for you. What I didn’t mention though is that it’s not just for books.  Besides books, you can search for a magazine, newspaper, website, journal, film, or “other.” And under the “other” category you’ll find options for an interview, radio/tv, and an encyclopedia. Essentially any source that you could possibly use is covered.

Which format do you want?

I never understood why there had to be different formats for a bibliography, but there are. Need your bib in MLA format? No problem! What about APA or Chicago? It’ll do it for you. There’s a drop-down list that allows you to choose between the three mentioned formats.

Register for BibMe

Okay, you don’t have to register to use BibMe, but you can. And what’s nice about registering is that first of all, it’s free. But more importantly, you’ll be allowed to save up to 10 bibliographies so that you can use them or reference them in the future.

Download

While you’re adding items to the list, they appear on a “My Bibliography” page to the right of your screen so that you can see how everything looks as you add it. That’s also where they display the mentioned “further reading” from Amazon.

Once everything looks just right, you’ll have the option to save to your account, or download it to Microsoft Word.

My only complaint is that at the bottom of the downloaded bibliography, they put “Created at www.bibme.org.” Certainly you’re not going to want to turn your research paper in with that displayed at the bottom. I get that they’re trying to promote themselves, but I think it’s useful enough that others will find out about it from word-of-mouth. I don’t know any student who has enjoyed putting together a bibliography, so they’ll be sure to tell others about the huge timer saver they’ve found which is easy publicity.

If you’re a student, enjoy!

www.bibme.org

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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