DOJ Busts Internet Ponzi Scheme [smcb]
The USDOJ has expressed their intention to seize the property and $53 million in assets of Florida-based “Internet advertising company” AdSurfDaily, according to WebProNews today. The Department of Justice alleges that the company was scarcely a cover for a Ponzi scheme.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, Ponzi schemes are commonly confused with multi-level marketing, which are close but generally lack the strong affiliate marketing cover story and strictly rely on new investors money to pay off earlier investors. The scheme can be counted on to always end in financial disaster for investors at the later stages, but this doesn’t prevent there from being a strong community of folks on the Internet who consistently play the odds, dragging in the unscrupulous to invest and chronicling the rises and falls of the various ‘ventures.’
In the case of AdSurfDaily, it operated under the thinly-guised motif of a “paid auto-surf program,’ a common term for modern Ponzi schemes. ‘Advertisers’ were enticed into the program by promises of a return on advertising dollars spent of 125% - 150%. To recieve the benefit of the full return on investment, advertisers also had to agree to view a few websites that would rotate every day.
As we noted here last month, the founders over at eGold were just subject to DOJ scrutiny as well (pleading guilty to enabling just this sort of criminal activity), and while none of the news reports have specifically made a connection between the two investigations, it’s highly likely that the investigation and cooperation with the authorities on the behalf of eGold led to the actions against ASD.
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August 7th, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
“Operation Aborted” in IE7 Because of Sitemeter
Imagine waking up and your site is inaccessible for no apparent reason. If this happens, site owners could spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what the problem is. Well welcome to that reality. Thousands of site owners have experienced this today after Sitemeter brings their sites to a halt.
Widget Chaos
Sitemeter is a free web analytics tool for keeping track of your site's visitors. A bug found in both the javascript and HTML widget made thousands of sites using Sitemeter inaccessible earlier today including popular blogs such as PerezHilton.com, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Problogger. When users would visit any sites using Sitemeter, they would be presented with an error message pop-up:
Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.sitename.com
Operation aborted
The problem only occurred with users of the Internet Explorer browser due to Sitemeter updating the code for their scripts without double checking for the many miscellaneous blocks of code you sometimes need in order to get IE to work with your site. Thus far, Sitemeter has not responded with any updates, yet the bug has been fixed.
Pissing on its Own Reputation?
The situation brings to light a lot of concerns about the internet and dependency on web products and services. However, the biggest concern is for Sitemeter as a company and how they decided to handle the situation with silence. For one, Sitemeter has made no moves to inform their public of what's going on. For those not as tech savvy as some of us, they were probably hit the hardest due to searching for a solution to a problem that they couldn't readily identify. Bad press for Sitemeter? Any press could be good press, but there's no doubt that this story and more will rank high in Google and Yahoo searches when users are searching for reviews about Sitemeter. Is this really what they want prospective customers to see?
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August 2nd, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off
Weekly Wrapup, 28 July - 1 August 2008
It's time to wrap up the week's web tech news, reviews and analysis on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reviewed a super-hyped new search engine called Cuil, analysed the BT acquisition of web telephony platform Ribbit, looked at why Google bought video startup Omnisio, and investigated why popular Facebook app Scrabulous was shut down. On the trends side we discussed how web apps can work together, checked out Ray Ozzie's latest vision for Microsoft, gave you an overview of 'brandstreaming', and looked at alternatives to Google Knol.
Web Products
This week a new search engine called Cuil launched out of stealth-mode. As some had predicted, it seems Google's announcement about the size of its search index was a preemptive move to take some momentum away from one of Cuil's main features: the size of its index with 120 billion pages. As Cuil's team features quite a number of Google alumni, comparisons with Google's search are inevitable. In our tests, however, Cuil performed nowhere near as well as Google.
See also: Wow, How Did Cuil Get So Much Publicity on Day 1?! and Yahoo BOSS Should Capitalize On Cuil Damp Squib Launch
Why British Telecom Bought Ribbit, The Web Telephony Platform
Communications company British Telecom (BT) has acquired innovative web telephony platform Ribbit for a reported $105 million. BT has been sniffing around the Bay Area for startups to acquire for some time and this one is a great fit. Not just because both companies are in the voice market but because as a means of folding click-to-call functionality into any web application - Ribbit is fascinating. BT was supposed to be a big mover and shaker in the communications industry of the future, but it hasn't worked out that way so far. Can Ribbit move the needle for BT? We think it could in a big way.
Maybe to counter some of the bad news around YouTube this week, Google just announced the acquisition of the Y Combinator funded video annotation and mashup company Omnisio. According to Google, the acquisition of Omnisio will allow them to keep pushing the envelope of what is possible with online video. Neither Google nor Omnisio have commented on the price of the acquisition, but it is clear that the Omnisio team is going to join YouTube.
Yahoo Music Does The Right Thing: Issues Refunds to Customers
Last Thursday, we reported that Yahoo Music was going to shut down its store and DRM licensing servers on September 30, which was basically going to leave anybody who ever bought music from the Yahoo Music Store without a license to play their music. Now, however, Yahoo has announced that it will issue a refund to its customers for the full value of their purchases. Yahoo is also looking at making copies of the music its customers bought available to them as MP3s without any DRM.
The Bigger Questions Behind The Scrabulous Shutdown
As of this week, Scrabulous, the wildly popular Facebook Scrabble game, is no more. If you try to login to the app now you'll get the message "Scrabulous is disabled for U.S. and Canadian users until further notice." You have the option of entering your email address to receive further information about developments in the matter. While Scrabulous fans are certainly angered over the app's shutdown, the unanswered question still looms: did Hasbro have to do this?
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
Some Web Apps Work Better Together
How many new websites can you fit in a Volkswagen Beetle? Sometimes it feels like that's what we're trying to do these days - but all these new applications and services don't have to be crammed into our heads and lives as separate things to try out and remember. Many new technologies work best in concert; the functionality of one application can be vastly improved by using it together with another one. Here are some of our favorite examples of apps that work best together, followed by some favorite workflows from friends of ReadWriteWeb. We hope you'll share your favorite combos in comments, too, so we can all learn some new things.
Peering Into Microsoft's Cloud
On July 24th, Microsoft held their annual Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM), an event where many of Microsoft's top executives come together to talk about the company's progress and achievements. At this year's meeting, Microsoft Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie hinted at Microsoft's cloud initiatives, a part of their Software + Services (S+S) strategy. While Ozzie did not reveal either codenames or ship dates during his speech, there is still some information we can piece together to help determine what Microsoft's cloud will look like.
Brandstreaming: What Is It & Who's Doing It?
If there's a hot new social media trend happening, you can bet that companies are trying to find a way to use it too. It happened of course with blogging, it happened with Twitter, and it is now happening with FriendFeed and other lifestreaming apps. Indeed RSS vendor Pheedo has coined a neat term for this: brandstreaming. It defines a brandstream as "a consistent flow of content created by a brand". According to a recent report, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher's site - through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices.
What Startups Can Learn From Haruki Murakami
Alex Iskold is a big fan of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.
The genius of Murakami is in his discipline,
focus and determination. He seems him as a virtual Zen master - an embodiment of wisdom,
passion, skills and exceptional will. The elements of his work and life story are inspirational and (here's where ReadWriteWeb comes in) particularly
applicable when you're running a startup. Therefore in this post, we take a look at what modern technology startups can
learn from this Japanese literary master.
The Google Knol Threat to Content Businesses - a Wiki Plug-in Might Level The Playing Field
Does Knol (our review) make Google into a “content company”? Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis made a compelling case this week. You can say he is conflicted, because his Mahalo venture has a lot to lose if Knol succeeds. Or you can say that he knows of what he speaks, because he is in the eye of the storm. Jason’s view that Google is the closest we have to an operating system for the web makes sense. His comparison to how Microsoft, an earlier generation operating system vendor, invaded the application market that had belonged to their partners, rings true. This is what dominant tech companies have always done.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
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August 2nd, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off
What Should Exxon Do About Twitter? Absolutely Nothing
Energy giant Exxon Mobil fell victim to a Twitter user spoofing official use of an account named ExxonMobilCorp, it was discovered yesterday, and now a discussion is unfolding among social media advocates about what the company should do.
Many people say that Twitter is frivolous and unimportant. In this case those people would be correct. Just six weeks ago the US Supreme Court rejected Exxon's appeal to drop a lawsuit alleging that its employees in Indonesia "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity" in defense of one of the world's largest liquid natural gas facilities. Placed in this context, whether or how this company deals with Twitter seems irrelevant.
International Corporations and New Social Media
The conversation about how Exxon should have or will deal with the spoofed Twitter account can be followed via a post last night on analyst Jeremiah Owyang's blog. It makes sense to tackle the general questions concerning "big brands" and new media, but a line should be drawn somewhere in order to keep technology in a larger perspective. The case of Exxon Mobil is on the other side of that line.
The Context in Indonesia
Indonesia is a sprawling country of more than 220 million people and an amazing 17,000 islands. It possesses huge amounts of liquid natural gas and gold and has major geo-political significance.
The country has a long and troubled history of international and internal conflicts but the US government's own documents detail US payment of local groups killing subversives based on US provided lists of individuals in the 1960's and US State Department acceptance of Indonesian government massacres of civilians using US supplied weapons in the 1970's.
Key player and Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger retained financial interests in the country's natural resources throughout the 1980's, the human rights abuses alleged to have been committed by Indonesian soldiers working as Exxon employees were far from the only crimes alleged to have been committed in the 1990's (see in addition the Dili Massacre, for example) and since the turn of the 21st century multiple US administrations have sent elite US military training groups to "train the trainers" in Indonesia despite US Congressional bans against direct co-operation with the Indonesian military on the basis of documented human rights abuses.
It's not a pretty picture. There's an intense history of globe-dominating nations doing horrible things to the people of Indonesia.
The Current Lawsuit
On June 16th, 2008 the US Supreme Court denied a request by Exxon Mobil to dismiss a lawsuit titled Exxon Mobil v. John Doe, 07-81, brought by international rights groups on behalf of 11 villagers in Indonesia's Aceh province. The suit alleges that Indonesian soldiers hired by Exxon Mobil "committed murder, torture, sexual assault .. genocide and crimes against humanity."
One British rights organization specializing in Indonesia, called Down To Earth, further reports that "the company has been accused of providing the military with buildings used for torturing local people suspected of involvement in the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and excavators to dig mass graves for the victims of military violence." The worst accounts of the treatment of civilians in Indonesia are something no one wants to read.
Exxon argued to the Supreme Court that the lawsuit against it should be dismissed because it involves issues of international relations that should be left to the Executive Branch. In 2002 the US State Department said that "adjudication of this lawsuit at this time would in fact risk a potentially serious adverse impact on significant interests of the United States..." Indonesia is a country heavily populated with Muslims and the US argued that a ruling on the Exxon lawsuit could harm anti-terrorist efforts, among other concerns.
Since that time various courts have shaped the debate such that now-resigned Solicitor General Paul Clement said this May that the case had been sufficiently narrowed to avoid harm to the nation's foreign policy interests. According to the Associated Press, the Bush administration urged the US Supreme Court to reject Exxon's request to drop the case this June.
Thus the lawsuit still stands and Exxon may, years later, have to answer to some allegations of human rights violations.
And what about Twitter? There may or may not be a time when Exxon's engagement with new social media is important, but this same summer when the Supreme Court has just said they will be judged is not that time.
New Media and International Human Rights
In October we wrote here about the last active bloggers in Burma, fighting to let the world know what was happening there as the military massacred monks and turned the country inside-out. In December we wrote about YouTube's deleting videos documenting torture of civilians by Egyptian police because of the site's policy against violent imagery. On the Fourth of July we wrote about the Iranian Parliament's consideration of the death penalty for subversive bloggers.
The internet and human rights intersect often. If we are to believe that these democratizing media are going to make the world a better place, then it's important to keep them in context regarding what's going on in the world outside of our tech niche. It's with that in mind that we point at the lawsuit and Supreme Court ruling against Exxon when the company's communication strategy with the world comes up in conversation.
After all, as Exxon Spokesperson Alan Jeffers said yesterday about Twitter: "It's our perception that social networking is based on honesty, transparency and trust..."
Photo: A market in Aceh, Indonesia. Creative Commons from Flickr user A. www.viajar24h.com
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August 2nd, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off
Switched On: WHDI seeks to unplug hi-def
Filed under: Networking
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about technology, multimedia, and digital entertainment.
The past few years have seen a wide range of wireless technologies proposed to substitute for the now nearly ubiquitous (at least in terms of new HDTVs) HDMI connectors, but the dust is just starting to settle. Some proposals involve squeezing more juice out of 802.11n. Others rely on ultrawideband technology. Yet another that has many in the industry excited is from SiBeam, which intends to use the 60GHz band to deliver uncompressed 1080p video at 4Gbps. That technology, embraced by a group called WirelessHD, had received the most public support among major consumer electronics companies, with Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Toshiba and LG listed on its site as promoters (and others listed as adopters).
But WirelessHD is still a ways from consumer availability and recently another wireless high-definition technology has attracted some heavy hitters of its own, including Sony, Samsung, Sharp and the cable set-top division of Motorola. Amimon's WHDI (Wireless Home Digital Interface) is different from many of its emerging competitors because it is designed, like WiFi, to be a technology that blankets the home, whereas most competitors focus on an in-room solution. WHDI even operates in the 5GHz band (like 802.11a and 802.11n), but sheds the costly bandwidth overhead WiFi utilizes to correct transmission errors. In contrast, WHDI is a "video modem" technology that attaches to a device's video output to send uncompressed 1080p video. After that, it's survival of the fittest for the bits.
Continue reading Switched On: WHDI seeks to unplug hi-def
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August 2nd, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
Attention Sitemeter Users: Your Site is Down
This just in from one of our regular tipsters here at Mashable - thousands of popular blogs are down tonight, from PerezHilton, ValleyWag, Consumerist all the way on down to LouisGray.com. Why? Because they use SiteMeter, a popular free traffic metrics utility.
As of this moment, there hasn’t been any official statement from SiteMeter via their blog nor by their support personell regarding the outage, but their main site still functions smoothly. Still, for all sites running the JavaScript based counter, when users come to the site using Internet Explorer 7, the page attempts to load, and then pops up a dialog box that says “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site <sitename>. Operation aborted.”
Clicking OK on the box will return the standard error screen in Internet Explorer when a site can’t be reached for connectivity issues.
Firefox users appear to be completely unaffected.
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August 2nd, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Los Angeles medical marijuana dispensary bust
The LA Times reports on a DEA raid at Organica Collective, a Culver City medical marijuana dispensary.
Gina Ferazzi's photos of the raid are wonderful. My favorite is the one of a hipster-looking agent with a healthy soul-patch on his chin and a giant pistol on his belt.
The federal operation came on the same day an appellate court in San Diego ruled that federal law does not preempt the state's law allowing the use of medical marijuana -- a ruling touted by supporters of California's medical marijuana law as a significant win.DEA agents raid Culver City medical marijuana dispensary (LA Times)...
Clyde Carey, 50, of Marina del Rey was at the store Friday visiting a friend when agents burst in through the locked front door, he said.
"We heard some noise outside, and then the door literally burst in, and the DEA came in in full combat gear, told everybody to get on the floor and put their hands behind their heads," Carey said. "It was like, literally, an episode of "24," when they bust in on a terrorist cell."
Carey, who said he has multiple sclerosis and has been a dispensary customer since February, stood across the street near a Starbucks with about half a dozen people who had witnessed the raid, watching agents walk in and out.
He said DEA agents searched and cuffed the roughly 25 people inside the building, which also includes four upstairs rooms. Then agents started searching the premises, removing computers, medicine and money, and using a steel cylinder battering ram to get into the upstairs bedrooms, Carey said.
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August 1st, 2008 - Posted in Boing Boing | | Comments Off
HopStop vs. Google Maps: It’s a ‘Walk Off’
Web users have been able to glean driving directions from a variety of sources for many years now. And more recently, some services have evolved to become rather smart about it, involving overlays for things such as traffic alerts and even an ability to customize a route if necessary. But for city residents who regularly take a more pedestrian role to their journeys, the idea of mapping on-demand “walking directions” has only received a good bit of attention in the last year or so.
Now that Google has arrived with an addition to its Maps service for foot traffic, awareness of walking directions has heightened somewhat. So we thought it’d be fitting to take a stab at comparing Google with a slightly more veteran operator, HopStop. The two are quite different in the way they function, after all. And while Google, due to name recognition alone, is likely to be the de facto source for sidewalk mapping, we like to consider the merits of inventions, irrespective of branding. Let the head-to-head commence.
HopStop, on the whole, is a metropolitan resource. Visit its front page, and you’ll see options for subway and bus information for New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, the general Metro North Area, as well as Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. But alongside those tools is a feature for pedestrians. If the user wishes to, HopStop can be made to deliver walking directions only.
This may not be an entirely obvious choice made available by the service. A search will result in a page filled with lots of buttons and devices. This can be overwhelming and confusing. Of course, having so many things on hand has its benefits. The all-inclusive aspect of HopStop makes it supremely useful for a variety of navigational purposes. But to the first-timer, it may seem a bit overstocked. You may have to look closely at your search results to find the option for an exclusive set of walking directions. Familiarization is key to making the most of HopStop. Once you get yourself fully oriented with the service, there’s a good chance you’ll like it. A lot.
Perhaps the biggest gripe to be had about Hopstop is its limited view on the landscape of the U.S. While Google Maps includes virtually every aspect of the nation (Google’s walking directions of course are limited, but that can quickly change with ample user feedback - something that the company is seeking), Hopstop’s powers are kept to the streets and walkways of the abovementioned regions. So, in some ways it is incredibly thorough. Yet, on a larger scale, it is lacking in comprehensiveness.
Google Maps, with the benefit of walking directions, is somewhat more simple. While Google does offer a public transit information service (appropriately dubbed “Google Transit”), it is not part-and-parcel of the top-level Google Maps service. But for people seeking to make their way on foot, without having to wade through numerous technical accessories, this is probably the best choice.
Sometimes Google Maps fails to provide the perfect route. But it is more or less a decent tool for the task. Also, users can drag the blue line wherever they wish. So if you’re hoping to traverse a route from Manhattan to Coney Island, say, and want to stroll down portions of waterside in Red Hook, you can customize as needed. There is also plenty of Street View coverage to work with in case you’re interested in “getting there” before you’ve even stepped away from your PC.
I would hesitate to call Google Maps a clear winner here. HopStop’s service is impressive. What HopStop is able to do, it does very well. If you’re one to use the full extent of a city’s transportation infrastructure, from concrete walks to light-rail lines, etc., HopStop is the definitive champion. No doubt about that. If you live in the heart of one of the largest metropolitan venues in the U.S., chances are you’ll want to make use of every option you can. But this is a juxtaposition of websites that offer walking directions. And given that focus, Google Maps gets gold.
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August 1st, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
Amazon Remembers Its Origins: Buys Abebooks
Amazon today announced that it will acquire AbeBooks, the online marketplace for used and rare books. Given the breadth of Amazon's product line, it is sometimes easy to forget that, at its core, Amazon is still a book seller, even if its product line now ranges from hosted Web 2.0 services to bulk groceries. AbeBooks, which was formerly known as the Adcanved Book Exchange, launched in Canada and the US in 1996 and has since expanded to Germany, Italy, France, the UK, and Spain. AbeBooks will continue to operate under its own name.
In many ways, buying AbeBooks is almost the antithesis of of what Amazon has done lately with pushing into electronic books with the Kindle and hosting Web 2.0 services like EC2, S3, and its recently launched Flexible Payment Service.
AbeBooks has generally stuck to its roots, by creating a thriving marketplace for rare and used book sellers worldwide. It is not clear if there will be any direct benefits of this acquisition by Amazon for the merchants on AbeBooks, though chances are that Amazon is going to start integrating the AbeBooks inventory into its own store. This will give the AbeBooks sellers access a far larger market to sell to than just the AbeBooks community, though many of them were already listing their inventory on Amazon (and other services like Alibris and Biblio.com anyway).
Currently, there are over 110 million books from over 13,000 sellers available on the site. Besides AbeBooks, the company also runs the book search aggregation site BookFinder and provides a sales and inventory management through Fillz.com.
AbeBooks also has a very active user community. Judging from the email AbeBooks send out to its sellers, it would seem that nothing much is going to change on the site for now and that the management team at AbeBooks is also going to remain in place.
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August 1st, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off
Blizzard Tries To Forbid Open Sourcing Glider
ruphus13 notes a new development in Blizzard's case against MDY, which we discussed last week. Blizzard, the maker of World of Warcraft, has now requested another injunction — to prevent the open sourcing of Glider code. Quoting: "Blizzard has asked the court for a relatively unconventional order prohibiting MDY from making the source code for its MMO Glider software available to the public, and prohibiting MDY from helping people develop other World of Warcraft automation software. Blizzard had previously asked the court to shut down MDY's WoW operations in its motion for summary judgment, but the court's summary judgment order did not address Blizzard's request. Blizzard's requests to prohibit open-source release of MDY's software and prohibit MDY's assistance in development of independent WoW bots are new to this motion — and seem likely to raise eyebrows in the open source and digital rights advocacy camps."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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August 1st, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
Bicycle operated refrigerator
Scott writes in -
Shades of Soylent Green -- G.V. Rao has built a pedal powered refrigeration unit that can be pedaled to nearly freezing in about 25 minutes using human power rather than a motor to run the compressor. A little more information here & here...
Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this! Tags: 360, digg, make, opera
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August 1st, 2008 - Posted in make | | Comments Off
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August 1st, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
KNGT offers up Windows XP-powered icom MK1 carputer
Filed under: Desktops, Transportation
[Via Coolest-Gadgets]Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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July 31st, 2008 - Posted in Engadget | | Comments Off
Social Media In The Military Provides Insight Into The Future of Social Networks
iLink, a social network analytics technology from SRI International has recently been integrated into three online communities used by the military: Platoon Leader, Company Command, and the Family Readiness Group. The iLink technology improves the way the military community members share critical information across several different interest areas - from battlefield problem solving to supporting military families. Here, we take a look at the technology the military is using and how it can impact the future of social networking.
iLink Arises From A.I. Research
The iLink technology was developed as a part of the SRI-led CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) program and was funded and managed under DARPA's PAL (Personalized Assistant that Learns) program. That project was designed to create cognitive software systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise: in other words, A.I.
iLink specifically was the part of the overall CALO project that focused on social search and message routing within social networks. It was also used to develop a system for FAQ generation within a network - they call this technology "FAQtory". With this technology implemented on a social network, FAQs are continuously generated and revised by the community using a Wikipedia-like model, as opposed to being static creations made by the site's authors. But it's not basic as a simple user-generated FAQ system - instead, iLink's FAQtory technology allows for incremental bits of information - even those that don't qualify as answers to the question. As the members contribute these bits of information, the learning system in iLink monitors how users are attempt to resolve queries and is then capable of drafting off of the social network's learning. Essentially, the technology actually enables the social network to discover and amplify its own capabilities
Other aspects of the overall iLink system involve not just incremental learning capabilities, but also the use of prior knowledge to solve problems, message-matching technologies for finding related information, algorithms for gathering data from multiple sources and compiling it together, and the ability to differentiate private information from that which is safe to share.
The Research Behind iLink's Creation
For those that helped create the iLink technology, such as the researchers at SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, they see social networking as a much more valuable tool than, arguably, even some members of our own tech community do today. In a research paper on iLink (filled with details math nerds will eat up), they state:
"The social web provides much more than an opportunity for people to interact and exchange general information. It is a new medium for powerful models of organizing purposeful social activities. This is compellingly illustrated in the growth of open source efforts (e.g., LAMP,2 Wikipedia), which some authors [8, 14, 20, 27, 29] argue represent an alternate mode of social and economic production."
The authors of the paper state that much of the research in social networks has not formally modeled how these networks accomplish tasks. Most of the current work focuses on other areas like structural representation, analysis, and interpretation of social network data. Their work instead introduces a general approach to modeling how real-time, dynamic social networks communicate and cooperate to solve problems because an understanding of this could enhance the development of potential future applications...applications like expertise identification, FAQ generation, and smart RSS filtering.
iLink Model
iLink in the Military
Today, iLink is being used in the military communities to help recognize "who knows what" within a community, connect members to each other, and point members to valuable content, discussions, and others who share their same interests. Those connections between members and resources are made with iLink's machine-based learning to model the users and the content in order to facilitate the information sharing.
Currently, three military sites are using the technology: Platoon Leader, Company Command, and the Family Readiness Group. In Platoon Leader, current and former U.S. Army Lieutenants worldwide discuss and exchange information with each other. Company Command does the same for Army Captains while also allowing them to pose questions in order to solve problems together (crowdsourcing the military!). The Family Readiness Group helps coordinators nationwide share information and best practices with each other in order to point military families to resources they can use.
Platoon Leader
Where The Military Goes...Civilian Businesses May Follow
It was only a year ago that the military shut down access to several social networking web sites, including MySpace and YouTube, to users of the military networks. However, that shutdown was not so much a criticism of the social networking technology itself - only the public nature of those "civilian" networks. Concerned that users would share secure information like schedules or locations (for example: "Hi Mom! We're sailing into Dubai tomorrow!"), the military opted for a "better safe than sorry" policy. They also cited bandwidth concerns - sharing videos and photos can use a lot of bandwidth and not all areas of the world have much to spare.
Yet, social networking itself can be a valuable tool for businesses, and the military has realized that. In an organization, even one the size of the U.S. armed forces, connecting people to information and resources has been a challenge that I.T. has struggled for some time to achieve, and never mastered quite as well as the social networks do. In the past, businesses used impersonal, intranet-based web sites to provide files and documentation, but they miss out on one of the most critical sources of information - the knowledge that is stored in users' own minds. That knowledge that comes from both experience as well as information surrounding the undocumented processes that exist in any organization.
Now that the military is implementing more social networking technologies into their online networks - in addition to the three communities today, it's being evaluated for inclusion in several others - we'll likely see big business soon following suit. For those enterprise organizations that have been slower to pick up on Web 2.0 trends, seeing how the military uses a particular technology will be a big influence that may change their course of thinking. Social networks may just be fun for us as personal activities, but in workplace, they can be valuable tools for getting the job done...or even helping craft military strategy.
iLink's technology has been made commercially available. More information can be found at SRI International's web site.
military photo by: Randy Son of Robert; building by bourget_82
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July 31st, 2008 - Posted in read write web | | Comments Off
VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2 Now Available [Beta Beat]
Mac OS X only: VMware releases a new beta of Fusion 2.0, the virtual machine software for Mac. We were impressed with our test drive of beta 1, and beta 2 adds a few more promising features, like: automatic virtual machine snapshots (for easy rollback in case something goes wrong), mirroring folders (like your Mac's Documents folder to Windows' My Documents folder), better keyboard and mouse mapping, and improved 3D graphics (happy news for gamers). The folder mirroring is a welcome addition to my virtual XP installation—no more constant browsing to a shared Mac folder. Take a look at how it works.
Screencast courtesy of VMware:
The Fusion 2.0 beta 2 has all-around improved Unity and its ability to use apps from either operating system in any context. For example, you can set Windows apps as the default file handler for documents on your Mac (and vice versa). (Adam showed you how to do this to some extent in Parallels last July.) Here's another upbeat screencast from VMware demonstrating:
Right now beta 2 is a free download for testers; Fusion 2.0 will be a free upgrade for 1.0 users with a ($79.99) license.
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July 31st, 2008 - Posted in Lifehacker | | Comments Off
Red Hat Bets Big On Cloud Target
eldavojohn writes "Red Hat's CEO prophetically saith 'The clouds will all run Linux' in a brief interview before the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Here's the skinny: Red Hat management tools take a back seat to grid computing goals, high switching costs are the trick to surviving slow periods, Microsoft's interoperability tools are vaporware, they're striving to catch up to VMWare, Ubuntu is not the competition, JBoss is growing twice as fast as RHEL and Amazon pays the fee while Google wears its own Red Hat for free."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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July 31st, 2008 - Posted in slashdot | | Comments Off
Taglift Collects MySpace and YouTube Data for Ad Recommendations
Your Truman Show, the video blogging and aggregation network that launched its VideoMap earlier this year, is moving further into the advertising realm with the introduction of a new spin-off service called Taglift. This patent-pending advertising technology operates similarly to Your Truman Show’s aggregation capabilities, and evolves from there for recommendation purposes. Considering the most valuable content from popular social networking and media-sharing sites, Taglift can determine better videos to be matched with a brand’s ads.
Taking all of this aggregate metadata into account, Taglift is recommending matches for marketing content and video content for advertisers. By looking at anonymous behavioral data from networks like MySpace and YouTube, Taglift is taking a passive approach to the act of recommendations, not for other end users but for advertisers themselves.
Given the concern that many advertisers had with online video in its early stages, such a filtering process is quite necessary, and as we’ve seen with cross-site recommendation tools like Matchmine, which are also being used directly by other video search engines like Pixsy, the recommendation process is one that is quite necessary as well.
There’s a great deal that can be done with such data, even further beyond its current use as recommendations to two of the major online video ad networks present today. From search and filter results to more integrated recommendations across various social media-sharing sites, the method of removing personally identifying factors from metadata for recommendation purposes offers some interesting insight on a behavioral scale, which can be monetized in a number of ways.
We’ve seen similar tactics being employed by Grayboxx for local business search results. Looking at the growing number of customizable search and recommendation services, scrobblers and virtual assistants (i.e. MyStrands, Pageonce, etc.), the amount of information to be used for behavioral metadata will only grow in specificity over time, hopefully becoming more useful (as opposed to dangerous) in the near future.
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July 31st, 2008 - Posted in Mashable! | | Comments Off
