The Web According to Ballmer

BusinessWeek has an interesting article with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. Here’s the intro: Even the people running the richest tech companies are awestruck by Web 2.0 valuations. Microsoft boss Steven Ballmer, who sat down with BusinessWeek editors and writers hours before Google finalized its $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube, questioned how the online video service could …

Some Common Photography Problems – Digital Photography Tip of the Week

I have discussed in the past some common problems people often experience with photography and how they can be corrected. Crooked photos, too much background in your images, red eye. When polling some co-workers about a topic they would like to know more about, these were all issues that came up. I have already covered …

SpamCop.net – Beware of cheap imitations

As I’m sure you’ve experienced, spam (junk email) is a huge problem. If you have an email address than you’ve probably received junk. Most ISPs now try to run services on their mail server to stop this, but some always get through. If you get spam and want to report it yourself, a good place …

YouTube: From gags to riches

From the Globe and Mail: Twenty months ago, a pair of twentysomething buddies founded a company above a California pizzeria that let people post their favourite video clips, ranging from stupid pet tricks to rotund Plasticine hippos that sing. It was a wildly improbable business model, laced with the threat of copyright infringement lawsuits and …

LibraryThing

I’m not a big novel reader, but if I find something good, I can’t put it down until I’m done. I’ve got a small collection of books that are on a couple of bookshelves in my house and I’ve never felt the need to catalog them. But if you have a lot of books, and …

Media-Convert: Web-based converter for most everything

I saw this on Download Squad… Media-Convert is a fairly impressive web service that will convert a file from one file format to another. That sounds pretty benign, but what’s impressive is how many formats it supports. There’s a good chance Media-Convert supports almost every document on you computer, including dozens of audio and video …

Wired-weary youth seek face time

From MSNBC: For some, it would be unthinkable — certain social suicide. But Gabe Henderson is finding freedom in a recent decision: He canceled his MySpace account. No longer enthralled with the world of social networking, the 26-year-old graduate student pulled the plug after realizing that a lot of the online friends he accumulated were …

A Challenge for Exterminators

From the New York Times: On a whiteboard in a windowless Microsoft conference room here, an elegant curve drawn by a software-testing engineer captures both five years of frustration and more recent progress. The principle behind the curve — that 80 percent of the consequences come from 20 percent of the causes — is rooted …

A Gaggle of Google Wannabes

From BusinessWeek: In the race for Web-search share, Ask.com is the tortoise. The search engine formerly known as Ask Jeeves still handles less than 6% of U.S. searches, though it’s been in the industry since 1996, more than a year before front-runner Google. Google controls roughly 51% of searches, including queries conducted on Time Warner’s …

Geekspeak still baffles web users

From the BBC: According to research from Nielsen/NetRatings, people are buying cutting-edge technology but often don’t understand the terms that describe what their device actually does. So while 40% of online Britons receive news feeds, 67% did not know that the official term for this service was Really Simple Syndication. Terms such as podcasting and …