Networking & Internet

It seems like everyone is hopping on the social networking bandwagon. Just last week, address organizer Plaxo launched a social networking site (Pulse), and I was blown away to see that there at least 43 sites/applications to build social networks (Reviews 1, 2).

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How Long Before Social Networks Enter a Consolidation Phase?Read More »

Remember the V-Chip? Well, the Senate Commerce Committee recently voted to send the Child Safe Viewing Act [the bill on LoC’s THOMAS website], which would be an Internet version of TV Ratings, to the US senate for consideration. This doesn’t mean the bill is a done deal. Far from it, but its introduction is inevitably going to be met with mixed opinions.

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US Senate considering V-Chip Bill for the InternetRead More »

We all know that Yahoo is going to update their video site and push it to compete with YouTube. Well, they are also going to be adding video capabilities to Flickr, which was only for static photos to date.

While many see the juicy news point in all of this being that Yahoo is playing catch-up to YouTube/Google and other video sharing sites that have made it big, I feel the bigger picture here is that video is here and here to stay, and the Net, and users’ comm lines can now generally support it. Even the smallest of sites will need to support video in some fashion. Not having it will mean falling to the wayside.

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Flickr Adding Video; Why They Need ToRead More »

Amazon is in the news this week with 2 new services either online or coming soon. First up, they’ve been toying with a new web service for payments that will compete, of course, with Google and PayPal. It’s currently in testing, but the word is that it’ll be announced this week.

Amazon’s other news is in the home delivery grocery biz. While many industry analysts say that this business died in the early 90s with companies like Webvan, Home Grocer, and Kozmo, I disagree. Companies like Peapod and Vons/Safeway continue to quietly run home delivery programs. Entitled Amazon Fresh, it is initially only running in the Seattle area, and I think the secret to them being successful is probably going to be managing the size and then the expansion of the service. Companies like FreshDirect in the NYC area are quite successful in sticking to their geographical area.

via TechCrunch.

In the spirit of self-help movement, and with the (great) help of the Web, you no longer have to depend on somone else to figure something out, solve a problem, or learn something new. In this article, we cover some of the various sites that exist now to assist you. These sites vary in their approach, but they are all quite deep both in the variety of content and the detail that they cover subjects. I’ll do my best to break these sites down into some broad categories, but note that there is a lot of overlap.

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Help Yourself … Using the Web: The Top WebsitesRead More »

Here is one of those things that has questionnable value, is definitely going to be out of date in 3 months, but yet is still mesmerizing; heck, I know I stared at it for a good 20 minutes, and visited some of the sites listed on it, just to see what they were about (ok, so they were mostly the Chinese and Japanese sites). Oh yeah, so what is this thing?? A company called Information Architects released this pictorial called the Web Trend Map (2007 version) that shows (in their words) “the 200 most successful websites on the Web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.” Oh man, it’s colorful and filled with detail. Here’s what makes it a bit more interesting than just the color-coding of popular websites: it’s the outlook that IA puts on these sites, whether they think they’re heading up, down, or about the same over the next year or so.

You can get your very own copy of this image, in sizes up to 1600×1024, PDF, a clickable web page version, and even a screensaver for Mac OSX.

via TechCrunch.