The Next Net 25

A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard.

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Things are really crackling in Silicon Valley these days. There's the frenzied startup action, the rising rivers of VC cash, even the occasional bubble-icious long-term stock prediction (Google $2,000, anyone?).

There's so much happening that the buzzword recently employed to try to encapsulate the era -- "Web 2.0" -- now seems hopelessly inadequate, defined and redefined into near meaninglessness by squadrons of aspiring entrepreneurs, marketers, and other fortune hunters.
So it seems a particularly useful moment to wave away the smoke and home in on what's really core. Don't be distracted by the Valley's hype-o-meter pushing toward the red: There's something very real -- and very powerful -- afoot.
Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.
We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe -- not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem crude.
The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world.
The new era is also creating a realm of endless mix and match: Anyone with a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.
Most striking, the Next Net creates endless possibilities for entrepreneurs and established players alike to take advantage of the Web's new power. They are building on the success of early standard-bearers -- Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia -- but also moving beyond those pioneers in creative and fascinating ways.
In the pages that follow, we identify 25 companies, in five Next Net categories, whose approaches help illuminate where the Web is headed and where the opportunities lie. Most are startups, a lot of them with less than 10 full-time employees. Few are currently making money, and it's a given that many will fail. But it's equally likely that somewhere within this group lurks the next Google or Microsoft or Yahoo -- or at least something that those giants will soon pay a pretty penny to have.

SOCIAL MEDIAThe new culture on the Web is all about consumer creation; it's composed of things like the nearly 30 million blogs out there and the 70 million photos available on Flickr. With a click of the mouse, anyone can be a journalist, a photographer, or a DJ. The audience -- that 1 billion-plus throng linked by the Web--itself is creating a new type of social media. That's leading to the creation of hundreds of promising Next Net businesses like the ones that follow.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Digg (San Francisco)What it is: News aggregatorNext Net bona fides: The site's links are picked by the readership, which has been doubling every three months; news items with the most votes make the homepage.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Last.fm (London)What it is: Social radioNext Net bona fides: Its software creates a personalized streaming radio station based on the digital music you already listen to, shares your playlist on the Web, and suggests music from other closely related playlists

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Newsvine (Seattle)What it is: Collaborative publisherNext Net bona fides: Readers vote and comment on stories but can also organize their own pages and write their own stories, for which they collect 90 percent of associated ad revenues.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: Tagworld (Santa Monica)What it is: Social networkingNext Net bona fides: With cutting-edge Web software enabling blogs, photo and music sharing, online dating, and more, members confront a rich smorgasbord of ways to interact, and everything can be tagged for easy searching.

SOCIAL MEDIACompany: YouTube (San Mateo, CA)What it is: Video sharingNext Net bona fides: This site lets people upload, watch, and share millions of video clips. All videos are converted to Flash (a Web-tailored format for graphics and video), making them easy to import into blogs or webpages.

Incumbent To Watch: Yahoo!Hoping to dominate social media, it's gobbling up promising startups (Del.icio.us, Flickr, Webjay) and experimenting with social search (My Web 2.0) that ranks results based on shared bookmarks and tags.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSAs we move toward the Next Net, some of the most useful sites will be those that either help "mash up" -- meaning mix and match -- content from other parts of the Web or act as a filter for the overwhelming mountains of information now at people's fingertips. The companies that follow use content already on the Web as a starting point and then improve on it by organizing it in a new way.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Bloglines (Los Gatos, CA)What it is: Online feed readerNext Net bona fides: The site collects blogs and news from all over the Web and presents it in one consistent, updated, multifeed mashup

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Eurekster (San Francisco)What it is: Search mashupNext Net bona fides: This do-it-yourself search engine, or swicki, allows you to define sites you want to search, post the results on your blog or website, and get a cut of any search ads your audience clicks on

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Simply Hired (Mountain View, CA)What it is: Job search engineNext Net bona fides: It searches nearly 4.5 million listings on other job and corporate sites; subscribers receive an RSS feed or e-mail alert when a job that meets their parameters pops up.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Technorati (San Francisco)What it is: Blog search engineNext Net bona fides: The site filters the almost 30 million existing blogs, shows how many other blogs link to a particular post, and can rank blogs by topic.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Trulia (San Francisco)What it is: Real estate mashupNext Net bona fides: Combining home listings from agents' websites with Google Maps, the site is becoming a hit in California and is expanding into other regions.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSCompany: Wink (Mountain View, CA)What it is: Tag search engineNext Net bona fides: By searching user-generated tags on Next Net sites like Del.icio.us and Digg, Wink filters the Web so users can sort links into different collections and add their own tags and bookmarks.

MASHUPS AND FILTERSIncumbent To Watch: GoogleAlready the ultimate Web filter through general search as well as blog, news, shopping, and now video search, it's encouraging mashups of Google Maps and search results, and offers a free RSS reader.

THE NEW PHONEFor nearly a century, the phone, and voice as we know it, has existed largely in the confines of a thin copper wire. But now service providers can convert voice calls into tiny Internet packets and let them loose on fast connections, thus mimicking the traditional voice experience without spending hundreds of millions on infrastructure. All you need are powerful--but cheap--computers running specialized software. The Next Net will be the new phone, creating fertile ground for new businesses.

THE NEW PHONECompany: SIPphone (San Diego)What it is: Internet phone softwareNext Net bona fides: Its Gizmo Project application allows free PC-to-PC calls, cheap PC-to-phone calls, and sound effects.

THE NEW PHONEIncumbent To Watch: eBay (Skype)The pioneer in the field and still the front-runner, Skype brings together free calling, IM, and video calling over the Web; eBay will use it to create deeper connections between buyers and sellers.

THE WEBTOPIt's been a long time -- all the way back to the dawn of desktop computing in the early 1980s -- since software coders have had as much fun as they're having right now. But today, browser-based applications are where the action is. A killer app no longer requires hundreds of drones slaving away on millions of lines of code. Three or four engineers and a steady supply of Red Bull is all it takes to rapidly turn a midnight brainstorm into a website so hot it melts the servers. What has changed is the way today's Web-based apps can run almost as seamlessly as programs used on the desktop, with embedded audio, video, and drag-and-drop ease of use.

THE WEBTOPCompany: JotSpot (Palo Alto)What it is: Wikis and online spreadsheetsNext Net bona fides: A pioneer of Web collaboration apps, a.k.a. wikis, it has unveiled its new Tracker application, which provides a powerful, highly collaborative

THE WEBTOPCompany: 30Boxes (San Francisco)What it is: Online calendarNext Net bona fides: This Web-based software allows families and groups to create private social networks, organize events, track schedules, and share photos; it may soon allow you to save phone numbers as hyperlinks and make calls by simply clicking on a link.

THE WEBTOP
Company: 37Signals (Chicago)What it is: Online project managementNext Net bona fides: Its Basecamp app, elegant and inexpensive, enables the creation, sharing, and tracking of to-do lists, files, performance milestones, and other key project metrics; related app Backpack, recently released, is a powerful online organizer for individuals.

THE WEBTOPCompany: Writely (Portola Valley, CA)What it is: Online word processingNext Net bona fides: It enables online creation of documents, opens them to collaboration by anyone anywhere, and simplifies publishing the end result on a website as a blog entry

THE WEBTOPCompany: Zimbra (San Mateo, CA)What it is: Online e-mailNext Net bona fides: Taking aim at Microsoft Outlook, its Ajax-based application can, among other things, bring up your calendar for any date your mouse encounters, launch Skype for any phone number, or retrieve a Google map for any address.

THE WEBTOPIncumbent To Watch: MicrosoftBy rolling out Windows Live, Office Live, and other Next Net-centric software, it hopes to grab a dominant -- if not monopolistic -- share of the webtop, which Bill Gates regards as a crucial strategic priority.

UNDER THE HOOD A growing number of companies are either offering themselves as Web-based platforms on which other software and businesses can be built or developing basic tools that make some of the defining hallmarks of the Next Net possible.

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Brightcove (Cambridge, MA)What it is: Internet TV distributorNext Net bona fides: It's creating a video-distribution platform over the Web for producers large and small

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Jigsaw (San Mateo, CA)What it is: Business contact databaseNext Net bona fides: In exchange for their own contact lists, salespeople use this site to access a virtual Rolodex of managers at nearly 150,000 companies

UNDER THE HOODCompany: SimpleFeed (Palo Alto)What it is: Opt-in RSS marketingNext Net bona fides: By allowing RSS feeds to be customized to the desires of each recipient and tracked individually, the site makes such feeds a powerful marketing tool.

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Salesforce.com (San Francisco)What it is: Platform for online enterprise softwareNext Net bona fides: It pioneered Web-based software and is trying to become a marketplace and host for other online apps through its AppExchange.

UNDER THE HOODCompany: Six Apart (San Francisco)What it is: Blogging toolsNext Net bona fides: The company helped kick off and sustain the Next Net with its Moveable Type blogging software and TypePad blogging service.

UNDER THE HOODIncumbent To Watch: AmazonIt's becoming a major Web platform by opening up its software protocols and encouraging anyone to use its catalog and other data; its Alexa Web crawler, which indexes the Net, can be used as the basis for other search engines, and its Mechanical Turk site solicits humans across cyberspace to do things that computers still can't do well, such as identify images or transcribe podcasts.

Trend -Next On The Net Mashups And Filters

Some of the most powerful sites in the new wave of internet development will be mashups and filters, sites which mix and match content from other parts of the net, or act as a filter for the massive amounts of data now available to everyone.
Google Maps is a good example of a mashup. Anyone can download a Google map, add their own data and display a map mashup on their own website which plots new information. < www.trulia.com > for example is a real estate mashup. It combines maps from Google with real estate listings. It overlays listings in a particular area on Google maps.
Mashup companies are good at cobbling together what people want from disparate sources on the web. One of the reasons is real simple syndication, or RSS which enables readers to view what they want without having to visit thousands of sites. This intense personal control over what information is consumed is a feature of the next net.
Filter sites often come in the form of a search engine < www.technorati.com > is the site to go to when you want to find out what blogs are available on the net. Another site < www.wink.com> filters tags and saved bookmarks on other similar sites. < www.simplyhired.com > trawls through job vacancies posted on other sites. These companies all share an ability to take information already on the web and simply organise it in a different way.
Other top sites include < www.bloglines.com > which creates a multi-feed news mashup based on blogs. < www.eurekster.com > is a do it yourself search engine or swicki which allows you to define the sites you want to search, post the results on your blog and get a cut of revenue from any ads your audience clicks.These sites are further examples of the new web business model in which the site itself isn't the earner, it's the peripheral ad content it relies on for income.

Tools to mine the Live Web

THIS EDITION of NetSpeak examines the features of `Live Web' and introduces some tools created for extracting information from this most vibrant part of the Web.
Numerous tools by which netizens can generate/access real-time content with ease are available on the Net.
Tens of hundreds of blogs spanning diverse subjects and the wide array of social bookmark services are some of the web sources where one can find latest information on any subject.
The distinguishing feature of such a Web source is its real-time/dynamic content. This part of the Web, with fast changing information packed on it, is generally called `Live Web.'
The incessant flow of content from `Live Web' sources presents formidable challenge to netizens, who want to keep up with this ever-changing information landscape. Here, we will examine a set of tools created for helping us tame the live web.
Several on-line services for regularly monitoring live web sources and collecting/presenting information in a searchable/browsable fashion are in place. The popular news aggregator Google News ( http://news.google.com ), which periodically scans more than 4,500 news sources automatically, is a good example.
Blogosphere, where thousands of bloggers discuss/disseminate latest news on almost every conceivable subject round the clock, is a prominent constituent of the live web.
Tools developed for scanning the thousands of blogs and filtering out trends/relevant content will help you mine live web more efficiently.
Memorandum, the blog aggregation service that shot into prominence recently, is one such tool.
The service regularly analyses content on blogs related to a specific area and displays the latest important content.
Currently memorandum delivers information from two types of blogs-technology ( http://tech.memeorandum.com/ ) and politics ( http://www.memeorandum.com/ ).
As the readers of this column may already know, blogs and other live content sources host news feeds for helping us monitor the latest information available on them.
Generally, netizens subscribe to these news feeds or RSS feeds with a desktop/web-based newsreader.
Services for displaying web feeds on other channels are emerging. For instance, the free service Immedi.at ( http://immedi.at/ ) offers an awesome solution for reading your favourite feeds in your IM client. The service sends you instant messages as and when the content of your feed changes. It supports popular IM services such as MSN messenger and AOL.
The significance of `Immedi.at' lies in its mixing of two real-time tools — RSS and IM. Normally, to track information, each time you have to visit the news aggregation site or switch over to the aggregator program running in your desktop. But with `immedia.it,' you just have to keep your IM client on.
A summary of updates on your favourite subjects/sites will fall on the IM client automatically as and when it happens. More mix-up tools of this kind may surface in the future.
Besides blogs and news sources, another set of products powering the live web is the wide variety of social bookmarking services.
These services thrive on user-generated content and closely monitoring the quickly changing content on them will help you keep up with the information race.
Many netizens view the front page of the famous social bookmarking service Del.icio.us to get information on the latest sites being bookmarked by its users. In fact, this is an excellent means to locate the latest on-line products being churned out by web developers. Del.icio.us ( http://del.icio.us/ ) is so popular that numerous postings appear almost every second.
To tap this live information flow and display the postings in real-time to del.icio.us viewers, an innovative service called Livemarks has been set up. LiveMarks ( http://sandbox.sourcelabs.com/livemarks/ ) scrolls del.icio.us bookmarks as soon as the users post them on to del.icio.us. It is really exciting and addictive to experience this service, where every second a new site appears.
A feature of on-line bookmarking services and some blogging systems is the facility to attach tags or labels to the content being posted.
Services for tracking tags and aggregating tagged content from different on-line sources are in place. The tag aggregation service, Technorati ( http://www . technorati.com/tags/), featured in the past, is a valuable product in this genre.
The newly released search service Wink ( http://www . wink.com/), which indexes data from the Net's tagged content sources like Furl, is the latest entrant in this segment.
Along with the tag-based search output, Wink provides normal Google web search results also. Along with its excellent search service, Google offers several other products/services that include Google Base, Google Alerts ( http://google.com/alerts ), Google Book Search ( http://books.google.com/ ), Google Desktop ( http://desktop.google.com/ ), Google Earth ( http://earth.google.com/ ), Google Reader ( http://www . google.com/reader/), Gmail and so on. Perhaps you may wonder how to keep up with this constantly growing service base or remember each of them.
Google Services Guide
This is no more a hurdle. Just visit the site Google Services Guide ( http://googleservicesguide.blogspot.com/ ), which hosts an exclusive, alphabetically organised list of almost all products and services released by Google so far. Currently more than hundred services are listed here.

The Next Big Thing In Searching --- Yahoo and Others Embrace `Tagging' as a Better Way To Find and Store Information

AMERICANS conduct nearly 200 million Internet searches every day. Now, several companies want to make that process better by transforming the way people look for and store information they find online.
The new method, dubbed "tagging," addresses a common complaint of many Internet users -- that searching is often clumsy and inefficient. Web surfers often must sift through multiple pages of search results to find what they are looking for. And retrieving the best sites a second time often means redoing the search or trolling through an unorganized list of sites that you have haphazardly saved in a "favorites" folder.
Tagging, however, can cut through the online clutter to deliver more relevant bits of information. That is because many versions allow users to search only sites that other people have already deemed useful. It also makes it easier to find desired information again. Users says tagging services can simplify online endeavors like shopping for a new road bike or acoustic guitar because they allow a prospective buyer to quickly access saved information.
While tech-heads have been using the method for the past year or so, tagging is now moving into the mainstream. Silicon Valley heavyweights -- along with a number of new upstarts -- are now putting major resources into developing tagging services. Last month, Yahoo Inc. bought the popular tagging site Del.icio.us (pronounced "delicious"). Now, the Sunnyvale, Calif., company says it plans to allow Del.icio.us users to access their tagged links through My Web 2.0, Yahoo's own tagging site.
One new site, Shadows.com, allows individuals to save their favorite Web sites under keywords that others can also search. The site, launched last October by the co-founders of Pluck Corp., based in Austin, Texas, attracts more than 275,000 unique monthly visitors, according to comScore Networks. Last week, iLor LLC of Lexington, Ky., launched PreFound.com. Like other bookmarking sites, it allows its users to upload pages they want to save into their own profiles or share them with the public.
Yahoo's Flickr.com, which allows anyone to upload photos from their camera phone or computer to the Web and then store them in a digital album that others can search by the keyword tags, is another early tagging success.
While tagging is still new and the method does have limitations, analysts are predicting further growth in "the tagosphere" as new companies crop up to grab a share of the nearly $15 billion online-advertising market. Tagging sites are free to use, but some run advertisements which display small snippets of ad text targeted to the terms a user is searching for or other words on the page.
Tagging sites are increasingly transitioning beyond places individuals go to for retrieving their favorite Web pages to sites they visit first when they want to search the Internet. That means they are beginning to compete directly with search behemoths such as Google and Yahoo. A Google Inc. spokesman says the company doesn't comment on its competition. "These systems are really coming into the mass market," says Caterina Fake, director of Yahoo Search technology.
Demand for the new sites reflect many Web surfers frustration with current search technology. The major search engines are all built around different algorithms that attempt to determine the most relevant sites for a particular search. But only 17% of Internet users say they always find what they are looking for when they use a search engine, according to a 2005 report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In November, Americans conducted more than five billion online searches, up 9% from the previous year, according to comScore Networks.
Tagging services have multiple uses. First, they allow Web surfers to save hundreds (or even thousands) of favorite Web pages under key words. The technology is named after the keyword "tags" users associate with each page they want to save. (For example, a Web page featuring ski goggles could be saved under the tag, skiing.) For individual users, tagging makes their own favorite pages easy to search and retrieve. Unlike storing addresses in a "favorites" folder on your computer, tagged pages are stored on the Web and accessible from any computer. A tagging site also lets you search among all your stored pages by key word, eliminating the need to scroll through dozens of sites and remember the order in which your links are saved.
There are two main ways to tag a Web site. Del.icio.us, for instance, will ask you to enter the Web address of the site you want to save into a field on its page and to click "save." The site, along with many others, also allows you download a toolbar to your desktop. While Web surfing, you can add pages to your account simply by clicking on the toolbar.
Companies say the greatest benefit of tagging -- and the reason why big Internet companies are adopting it -- is that tagging sites often allow users to make their list of tags and sites available to and searchable by either a closed community of friends and family or all other Web surfers. So, instead of searching the entire Web, users can limit their forays to an edited universe of pages others have already tagged as interesting or helpful. Also, many tagging services include the kind of social-networking features that have made sites such as MySpace.com and Friendster so popular: Users can post comments or vote on the usefulness of sites that others have tagged.
While most tagging sites allow you to tag pages on any topic, some sites are built around a theme. Kaboodle.com is a tagging site for the online shopper that allows users to save Web pages displaying items they are considering purchasing. Through buttons they add to their Internet toolbar, users can turn any product Web page, from a book on Amazon.com to clothing on eBay, into an entry on their personal Kaboodle page where others can rate and comment on the item.
There are some downsides to the new sites. Unlike a typical search engine, the effectiveness of tagging services depends on the quality and quantity of the people who save pages to them. Also, generally users have to use the same tags in order for a search to capture all the relevant pages. (For example, if you search for sites under the tag "winter boots," you could miss out on applicable pages that were tagged under "shoes.")
Some users complain that not enough people are tagging for it to be worth their while. Indeed, even the most popular sites generate less than 1% of Google's monthly traffic. But they're growing fast: Some, such as Shadows.com, are doubling their number of sign-ups every month.
When Mark Johnson of San Jose, Calif., wants to learn more about a company that he hears about in the news, he has largely stopped going to Yahoo, where he says it may take him up to ten different searches to find what he needs. Instead, the 27-year-old, who works for Internet start-up Kosmix.com, goes to Wink.com, a site that lets users search pages others have already tagged. While he still visits Yahoo, often by default, he says he uses Wink.com for restaurant recommendations and for other searches where human recommendations play an important role.

43 Things I (or you) might want to do this year

43 Things is a cool site. It's ideal for tracking and working on your personal progress to learn new things. I like to think of it as tracking play. Remember your goals for the day as a child? Build a fort. Make an ashtray out of the batch of clay you found by the creek? Climb the cliff in the park. Every time you did something on your mental daily goals list you learned something and felt a sense of accomplishment. You grew.
The basic concept of 43 Things is that "people have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. Why is that? First, getting your goals in writing can help you clarify what you really want to do. You might find you have some important and some frivolous goals. That is OK."
This Web site gives you space for 43 entries on your list. Not every item needs to be earth shattering. Learning is incremental and you can grow a little bit at a time and suddenly realize you're competent in something new. With this site you can discover from others registered on the site the many options of what you can choose to do as well as find others who share your interest. It's a way of engaging in life itself. The goal of the site is to let you make your list, edit it, get inspired and share your progress. As you achieve a goal you've listed you can click on the "I've done this" button and share a story about how you did it.
This site appears to be ready-made for those of us learners who like to engage in self-discovery and tracking our progress. I think that we're a profession of inveterate list makers and love to tick off our accomplishments. So here's my suggestion this month. Beware: this could be a yearlong or lifelong project! I want you to go to 43 Things (See the URL in the sidebar), register and list what you want to accomplish this year. You can make it private or share it with others. Just try it! Can't think of 43 things to do? Here are a few suggestions of simple things to try:
1. Take a digital picture with a camera and/or phone and download it to your PC.
2. Register at Blogger and start a blog. Post every once in a while and add a photo.
3. Register at Bloglines and aggregate your blog and RSS subscriptions into one reader. Check out what other blogs align with your interests.
4. Look at Facebook and see the next generation of social networking.
5. Set up a Flickr account and post a few of digital photos online. Tag and annotate them.
6. Look at LibraryElf and see the potential for personal library tools.
7. Check out LibraryThing and catalogue a few books from your personal collection.
8. Register at MSN Photo Album and build an album to share with friends, family, or colleagues.
9. Check out Myspace and see how this service has become so huge globally.
10. Have some fun with the links on the Generator Blog.
11. Download Firefox and compare it to Explorer and Opera.
12. Research bookmarklets and try a few.
13. Revisit Yahoo! and remind yourself why it is visited more than Google.
14. Learn about iFILM and viral video.
15. Get a PubSub account and start searching the future.
16. Make a map of all the countries or states you've been to at Visited Countries.
17. Experiment with some sound and picture search engines like Podscope.
18. Try some new Web search engines like Exalead, Wink, Gravee, Clusty, Mooter, Kartoo, etc., or others you can find at Search Engine Watch's list.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
19. Learn more about visual display tools like Grokker.
20. Check out Google Base and see what the fuss is all about.
21. Register with NetFlix and rent a movie. Learn how to deal with streaming media.
22. Get a Del.icio.us account and play with social bookmarking and tags.
23. Play with Blinkx and learn about searching TV shows, video and podcasts.
24. Try MovieFlix too. There are plenty of free movies here to learn to do this.
25. Set up a Google Picasa account. Post a picture and then edit it.
26. Download an MP3 file to your PC, laptop or phone. Try iTunes, LimeWire, Kazaa, or eDonkey. Look for something that's not music too.
27. Listen to a podcast. There are quite a few about library issues, too.
28. Find your home and your office on Google Maps.
29. Check out your local public library's website. You'll likely find some cool stuff like talking books for that long commute, or classical music collections, or eBooks.
30. Change your ring tone so you don't jump when everyone else's default ring goes off.
31. Visit the Google Labs site regularly.
32. Set up a personalized Google or My Yahoo! page
33. Play with JibJab.
34. Play with Wikipedia. Edit an entry, feel the network.
35. Play with Copernic and extend your searching.
36. Play an online multiplayer game.
37. Take an e-learning course from Click University.
38. Choose any of the above and add your own goals. Include some fun things, too.
I could go on about this forever! Many of you will have already tried a number of the above. They're easy and mostly free. By trying some you may find a serious business use for it too. Many of these sites represent some pretty basic Web and technology skills that will be necessary to survive the next few years. Even if they don't help you at work, they're great party talk, too. This past holiday season I asked every teen and college-age friend and relative I met about the way they used the Web, and many of the links above were tools and services that they considered essential to their lives. It's your entry into the new world of next-generation coworkers.
See! It's easy to try new things. Have fun.
43 Things: What do you want to do with your life?
http://www.43things.com
Blinkx
http://www2.blinkx.com/overview.php
Blogger
http://www.blogger.com/start
Bloglines
http://www.bloglines.com
Click University
http://sla.learn.com/learncenter.asp?id=178409&page=1
Clusty
http://clusty.com
Copernic
http://www.copernic.com/en/products/agent/index.html
Del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us
eDonkey
http://www.edonkey2000.com
Exalead
http://www.exalead.com/search
Facebook
http://www.facebook.com
Firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox
Flickr
http://www.flickr.com
Generator Blog
http://generatorblog.blogspot.com
Google Labs
http://labs.google.com
Google Maps
http://maps.google.com
Google Personal
http://www.google.com/ig
Gravee
http://www.gravee.com
Grokker
http://www.grokker.com
iFILM
http://www.ifilm.com
iTunes
http://www.apple.com/itunes
JibJab
http://www.jibjab.com/Home.aspx
Kazaa
http://www.kazaa.com/us/index.htm
Kartoo
http://www.kartoo.com
LibraryElf
http://www.libraryelf.com
LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com
LimeWire
http://www.limewire.com
Mooter
http://www.mooter.com
MovieFlix
http://www.movieflix.com
MSN Photo Album
http://communities.msn.com/content/features/photoalbum.asp
Myspace
http://www.myspace.com
My Yahoo!
http://ca.my.yahoo.com
NetFlix
http://www.netflix.com/Default
Picasa
http://picasa.google.com/index.html
Podscope
http://www.podscope.com
PubSub
http://www.pubsub.com
Search Engine Watch list of search engines
http://searchenginewatch.com/links
Stephen's Lighthouse Blog
http://stephenslighthouse.sirsi.com
Visited Countries
http://douweosinga.com/projects/visitedcountries
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wink
http://www.wink.com
Yahoo!

New improved Web: ready for the next online revolution? Powerful tools help you work, search, communicate, and share data your way--usually for free

LIKE A CHILD PROGRESSING INTO ADOLESCENCE, the Web has entered a new era of sophistication. We used to spend most of our time just surfing the Internet--reading and downloading whatever we could find. Nowadays we're more likely to create waves ourselves by sharing our opinions, photos, and home videos; collaborating by text, voice, and video; or adding our own data to maps that span the globe.
Applications that run in a browser are now almost as speedy as those installed on PCs, thanks to new programming tools that combine recent Web technologies, like Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Ruby on Rails, with Java and other standbys. These technologies allow more processing to occur on users' local PCs, meaning fewer trips back and forth to Web servers. And browser-based programs can now interact more closely with Web sites. Google, Amazon, and other big sites let anyone create services that incorporate their data. These public application programming interfaces permit the data of Google Maps and similar mapping services, for example, to become content for "mashups"--sites like Trulia.com, which joins data on houses in an area.
The shift from consumption to participation is a critical change in the Web's evolution. It's now easier than ever to post photos, documents, and other files to a blog, or to publish content as a news feed. Many sites permit us to add keywords, or "tags," to our photos, videos, links, and other shared resources. For example, you might add the tags "Barcelona" and "water balloons" to a photo of a soggy day in Spain. Tagged files can meld with similar content from other contributors. Tags also allow audiences--either public or private--to search, group, and otherwise slice and dice our contributions. Naturally, we can use the same tags to discover interesting, funny, or beautiful content we might not have unearthed using a standard search engine.
Here's a sampling of the most useful and interesting sites and services of what some call Web 2.0. All promise to deliver the best Internet experience yet. (Many of these are run by fledgling companies or by individuals, so surfer beware.)
Apps in a Browser
IF YOU'RE USED TO the click-wait-click-wait browser routine, you'll be surprised by the speed of today's Web-based applications. Ajax and other technologies give browser apps the features and responsiveness of their desktop counterparts.
NEXT-GENERATION WEB MAIL
Outlook goes Live, almost: Wherever you go, there's your Outlook data. Microsoft's flagship program for e-mail, contacts, and calendars has never traveled well ... until now. For $45 a year, you can bring all of Outlook's features with you anywhere, via your MSN or Hotmail account. Like the deskbound version, Outlook Live lets you view and manage multiple e-mail accounts, calendars, contacts, and tasks. Unlike its desktop counterpart, it limits you to 2GB of mail storage, and outgoing messages can be no larger than 20MB each. outlooklive.msn.com
Windows visits the Web: Microsoft has hopped on the New Web train in the nick of time with the beta of its free Windows Live service. You can connect to your Hotmail account, get news feeds, and store IE and Firefox bookmarks online. Features that weren't available when we looked at the beta include a Gmail-style mail service, a Web-hosted Messenger IM client, and various Windows security and performance utilities. www.live.com
Gmail sets the pace: Web e-mail had been around for years when Google debuted its free Gmail service in 2004. What made Gmail different, and also ushered in a new Web age, was its slick, quick interface, as well as its spam filter and abundant storage, currently creeping toward 3GB per account. Need to back up some key files? Just send them to your Gmail account, where you can organize and search messages using tag-like labels. Both Hotmail and Yahoo are working on Gmail-like versions of their offerings. (See last month's story at find. pc.world.com/50478 for more on these new Web mail services.) www.gmail.com
WEB WORE SITES
Brainstorm on JotSpot: Wilds make it easy for groups to add text, images, and even files to a single Web page. JotSpot is a wiki that lets workers in far-flung locations get on the same page, as it were. People can create, edit, and read a wild page, all without having to know HTML. The page can be a blog, company intranet, database, group task manager, or anything else team members would need to organize online. The service is free for up to five users and 20 Web pages (registration required), and from $9 to $49 per month for more users and pages. A related service, JotSpot Live, permits groups to enter meeting notes in real time on the same Web page. www.jot.com
ThinkFree puts office apps online: With this Java-based, ad-supported service's browser knockoffs of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, you can do almost anything you would want to do in the originals. The browser equivalents read and write .doc, .xls, .ppt, and other native Office file formats. The free service (registration required) lets you save up to 30MB of documents, either online or to your local PC. You can post files to a blog with a single click. Best of all, ThinkFree Office Online can save files in Adobe's Portable Document Format--something Office applications can't do yet. (Note: The initial applet download can take several minutes on a broadband link, so on a dial-up line it might seem interminable. The applets open faster subsequently.) online.thinkfree.com
Share your musings with Writeboard: Behold the power of text. This free service from 37signals lets you create and store any number of text documents online. You can even invite collaborators to view and edit the files. Just give the document a name, enter your e-mail address, add a password, and you're ready to create your first shared file. The clean interface highlights your edits, and e-mailing invitations to collaborators is quick and simple. The service also retains previous versions, so you can roll back unwanted changes. (Read about 37signals' Backpack personal organizer in the following section.) writeboard.com
Blog in an instant with Writely: Like Writeboard, Writely is a free Web-based word processor that supports collaboration, tracks revisions, and stores and displays your documents online. Files are limited to 500KB in size, but Writely distinguishes itself from other such services by allowing you to publish to a blog, and to upload existing documents by e-mail. www.writely.com
ONLINE ORGANIZERS
Stuff your data in your Backpack: Before, whenever you wanted to travel with a lap top, you would have to load all the files you'd need onto the machine in advance. Now you can put your to-do lists, notes, and other essential files and photos onto one clean, clear Web page. 37signals' Backpack, a Web-based personal organizer, will even send e-mail and mobile phone reminders when tasks are due. Backpack isn't just a personal organizer--you can share pages, and group items by using tags. The service lets you save up to five pages and send as many as ten reminders for free, but adding files and images to the pages costs from $5 to $19 a month. Paying customers receive from 25 to 1000 pages, 80MB to 500MB of storage, and 100 to 300 reminders. If Backpack is more organization than you need, its lightweight cousin, Ta-Da Lists (tadalist. com) is an alternative, backpackit.com
Gather your team at Basecamp: Basecamp, also by 37signals, is Backpack's heavy-hitting big sibling--a full-blown Web-based project manager that permits you to track team members' responsibilities, the time they spend on various tasks, and the group's messages related to the project. The service is free for one project, with some limitations. Fee-based plans are priced from $12 per month for up to three projects to $99 a month for an unlimited number of projects. www.basecamphq.com
HipCal puts your days in order: If you think online calendars are too slow and have too few of the features you need, this free calendar service may change your mind. HipCal will hook you with its snappy interface, address book, group calendaring, and content tagging. The service can even send a text message to your cell phone when an appointment draws near. Now even squares can get hip. hipcal.com
Planzo keeps you up-to-date: Rising Concepts' Planzo: The Online Planning Community has a cutesy name, but it also has some nifty features that HipCal and other online calendars lack, such as the ability to e-mail alerts for an impending appointment. The service's interface is easy to customize, and you can sync your calendars with those of friends who have also signed up for the free service. Two other nice features let you attach files and photos to your notes, as well as create sharable to-do lists. www.planzo.com
Note to self-Remember the Milk: More than just a to-do list manager, Remember the Milk acts like a full-blown calendar, but without the row-and-column display. Separating your life into Personal, Study, and Work tasks (categories you can change), you enter task reminders as you would in any other calendar; you can even create shared calendars for your group projects. Remember the Milk stands apart from other free online calendar/ scheduling services in its support for the iCalendar format for importing and exporting calendars, as well as in its ability to publish your various tasks as a news feed. Www.remeberthemilk.com
Collaboration & Community
WHETHER IT'S TO FUEL your passion for Hungarian cinema or to find new pomegranate recipes, the Web is a great place to meet kindred spirits. (Note that all of these sites require registration.)
THINKING IN GROUPS
Yahoo 360 offers the Web from A to Z: Yahoo's free personal Web site gives you unlimited online space to publish a blog and share photos, and lets you subscribe to and share RSS feeds. You can access your Yahoo Mail, Messenger, Groups, and other services as well. After uploading your content, just invite friends to view your handiwork, even if they don't have a Yahoo account. 360.yahoo.com
Form a chorus in the Opera Community: Much like Yahoo 360, this free community offers up to 300MB of online storage for photos, blog posts, and feed subscriptions, or for creating your own topic-based community. You don't even have to use the Opera browser, my.opera.com
Put your best Faeebook forward: According to TechCrunch.com, 85 percent of college students in the United States have accounts with this online student directory, and 70 percent of them log in to the site daily. Facebook lets you post photos and send messages to other members, but most of its popularity is due to a single feature: You can browse mug shots of the people in, say, your 2 p.m. Social Psychology lecture, find out all about them, and maybe even ask one out on a date (or at least ask for last week's lecture notes). College alumni can join to reminisce about the good old days (you need a university e-mail address). Students at some high schools are also eligible for Facebook accounts. www.facebook.com
Get all chummy at Friendster: Like Facebook (see above) but without the student-only limitation, this free online social directory allows you to put your personal profile, blog, and photo album on the Web, and then see if anyone out there wants to be your buddy. Friendster lets you chat with one person or a whole group. The service recently added peer-to-peer file sharing. www.friendster.com
PICTURE PLACES
Flickr makes sharing fun: Use this free Yahoo-owned service to share your digital photos with everyone else in the world, or just the people to whom you grant access. After you upload your shots to the site, you can tag shows, and post pictures to external blogs. Moving your images to the site is easier if you download and use Flickr's handy batch-upload utility, which also adds a 'Send to Flickr' command to IE's context menu. Uploading as much as 20MB of photos per month is free; a Pro Account ($25 per year) increases the limit to 2GB per month, flickr.com
Picaboo polishes your photos: This is a photo-sharing site with a twist. Instead of uploading individual pictures to Picaboo's server, you download the free Picaboo photo-album software, make slick-looking digital albums on your PC, and then upload a copy of each album to Picaboo's server for sharing with the people you specify. You can use one of the free service's many album wizards, or use a layout of your own devising. Picaboo makes money by selling prints of the albums (though the software allows you to print your own using standard photo sleeves and album covers), as well as individual prints and slide-show DVDs. Photo-album prints cost $25 for up to 20 pages, and photo DVDs cost $10. picaboo.com
BOOKMARKS TO SHARE
Del.icio.us takes the Web's pulse: Want to find out what people are interested in these days? Just look at their bookmarks. While you're at it, let them look at yours. The name of this free site just bought by Yahoo may be awkward, but using it is simple: Register, log in, add two buttons to your browser's Links (IE) or Bookmarks (Firefox) toolbar (the site shows you how), and click a button to bookmark the current page (you can't upload all your browser's current bookmarks in a batch). For the full New Web effect, tag your bookmarks and share them with the universe, or with a small group of friends. family, or coworkers. One of the site's new main features: You can now access your Del.icio.us bookmarks from any Web-connected computer, del.icio.us
Digg deeper for tech news: The free Digg technology news site is similar to the popular Slashdot, with one giant difference: Rather than having editors decide which stories are most important, subscribers rate articles by "digging" them, a process much like tagging. As a result, breaking news tends to appear on Digg a tad sooner than it does on Slashdot. Simply read the postings on Digg as you would on any news site (or subscribe to the service's news feed), or delve deeper into the community by registering and creating your own news Diggs. Alternatively, you could simply bask in Digg's reflected brilliance by posting its stories to your own blog with a single click, www.digg.com
Flock makes browsing a group experience: This new free browser (based on the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox) has a decidedly social twist. It uses Del.icio.us's shared bookmarks by default, and it allows you to tag Web pages, grab news feeds, and link to major blogging services. The browser even displays photo thumbnails in its Flickr toolbar (just in case you find yourself getting too much work done). Though not yet in beta testing when we looked at it, Flock may be ready for regular duty by the time you read this. www.flock.com
For book lovers, it's a LibraryThing: This site is similar to Del.icio.us, but for the tweed set. If you love books, and love people who love books, LibraryThing is for you. Start by using the service to catalog your book collection: Tag your books by topic, share your catalog with others, and then endlessly browse the titles that they have on their shelves. The utterly book obsessed can add the LibraryThing widget to a blog to show visitors what they have been reading lately. Listing up to 200 books is free; listing any number of books beyond that costs either $10 per year or a one-time $25 fee. www.librarything.com
Sharing is a snap with My Web 2.0: This free personal bookmarking and tagging site from Yahoo (in beta when we looked at it) bears the familiar plain-jane look, but don't let that fool you. Unlike Del.icio.us, My Web 2.0 uploads all your browser bookmarks smoothly, and it lets you share your bookmarks via a news feed. The service also allows you to share your tags with a group of friends or associates. myweb2.search.yahoo.com
VIDEO SHARING
Check your radar for Blip.tv: The Swiss army knife of online video, Blip.tv offers free video blogging, podcasting, searching, and sharing. Create your video blog on the site, or simply post links to clips from your own blog. Most of the site's videos are tagged, and Blip.tv generates a news feed of the latest video uploads for your convenience. Better yet, Blip.tv automatically posts videos to the Internet Archive or to your blog. It also sends tagged video links to the Del.icio.us bookmark directory (see the previous section), and thumbnail images to Flickr. blip.tv
ClipShack converts videos in a Flash: It may not offer all the bells and whistles of other video sites, but this free service makes posting your videos quick and easy. Unlike other sites, ClipShack converts your uploads to Flash animations, ensuring that most people will be able to see them without having to download a plug-in. Linking to a clip requires copying and pasting some HTML code into your blog. Inveterate voyeurs can subscribe to an RSS feed of new clips. Uploads are limited to 50MB (the site plans to offer paid services with higher storage limits in the future). www.clipshack.com
Google gets the video bug: Most video-sharing sites want to be the "Flickr of video," making it easy for you to see other people's creations and for them to see yours. Not Google Video. While you can upload your own video clips to the site, don't expect them to appear online just like that--the company must decide if they meet Google Video standards first. Nevertheless, this free service knows a few neat tricks. For example, you can use keywords to search for videos, as well as sample random clips that Google deigns to serve up (usually interesting, sometimes long), video.google.com
Ourmedia.org is your media repository: Billing itself as a global home for grassroots media, Ourmedia.org is a free video, audio, photo, and text upload site that acts as an interface to the Internet Archive (archive.org)--you have to register on both sites before you can upload. You can receive the media contributions of others via RSS, or just browse around patiently (the site is a little slow), ourmedia.org
Vimeo makes Web video easy: Vimeo looks lightweight at first, but the more you use it, the more features crop up. You can upload as much as 20MB of video per week for free in any format you like. You can also tag clips for easier searching, and post tagged links to Del.icio.us to attract viewers. Vimeo lets you post thumbnails of your clips to your Flickr account, and transmit the clips via an RSS feed. (Note that some of the site's content isn't suitable for children.) www.vimeo.com
Everybody's a star at YouTube: YouTube doesn't have the video sharing and sorting tools that Blip.tv and Vimeo do, but posting your clips to the free service is a breeze. Videos are limited to 100MB each, and you have to give each clip at least three tags before YouTube will accept it. Linking to clips from your blog requires copying and pasting HTML code. YouTube offers only one news feed of the site's most recently uploaded videos; and like Vimeo, some of the videos on the site are R-rated. www.youtube.com
Search & Maps
WHETHER YOU swear by Google or use an army of Web search tools and services, there's always more to discover online, and more ways to discover it. Some of the most innovative new Web services combine search results with maps to provide a fresh perspective on places a continent away, or just around the corner.
NEW-LOON SEARCH
Odeo hooks you up with podcasts: This free service could do for podcasts what Blip.tv and other sites are doing for video. Though the site's podcast-upload capabilities were still under construction as we went to press, it nevertheless provides a great way to search for audio files on the Web without having to install itunes on your system. Casual visitors can browse podcasts by the tags assigned to them. Registering lets you do some tagging of your own (a feature itunes doesn't support); it also allows you to subscribe to topic-oriented channels and to download audio to your iPod. www.odco.com
You make the rules at Rollyo: The name is short for "roll your own search engine," which means you can create a custom collection of search engines and topics and then share the resulting "roll" with others. The free site provides logged-in users some starter search rolls of its own, as well as lists of topic-targeted rolls created by celebrities and other "high rollers." You can add your Rollyo search rolls to Firefox's search engine toolbar with a click, and post your roll to your own blog or Web site just by copying and pasting some HTML code. www.rollyo.com
Technorati keeps its ear to the Web: Google Blog Search (blogsearch.googh. com) does a good job of exploring blogs, but Technorati's free blog portal takes tracking blog buzz to the next level. You don't have to register to search blogs, browse its cloud of tags or Top 100 list, or use the site's Blog Finder to locate blogs on a particular subject. But signing in lets you promote your own blog and set up watch lists of topics you want Technorati to track for you. www.technorati.com
Search the smart way with Wink: Search engines are only as good as their underlying algorithm. Finding the nuggets of gold among the results typically requires a human (you) to read through and discard the many links that are only tangentially related to whatever you're looking for. The free Wink search engine incorporates the human element, crawling tagged sites such as De.licio.us, Digg, and Flickr (see previous sections) and drawing on Wink users' tagged searches to separate wheat from chaff. Set up Rollyo-like search sets based on tags, and sync with Del.icio.us and Yahoo's My Web 2.0. www.wink.com
MAPS AND MASHUPS
Freesound Project lets you hear the world: Close your eyes, and you're sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Oagadougou in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, or relaxing to the sound of waves lapping on Spanish Banks Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia. These and other audio field recordings (mostly of animal and environmental sounds) are linked to Google Maps on this very cool free site. fiun.pcworld.com/50554
Leave your mark on the planet with Google Earth: More than just a Web site, the free Google Earth is an application that runs on your PC, allowing you to "fly" over a virtual globe constructed of satellite imagery. Search for businesses and people, view 3 D images of cities, and
get driving directions and distances. More important, the app's public programming interface has spawned a new generation of mashup sites (several of which are described in this section) that piggyback search specifics, databases, or other "geocode" onto Google's virtual planet. Have a GPS unit? Get Google Earth Plus ($20) to import your own map coordinates. earth.google.com
Rise above it all with Windows Live Local: This free site (formerly MSN Virtual Earth) combines Microsoft's MapPoint mapping service with its TerraServer satellite images (see below). Where as Google Earth relies on a downloadable component, Windows Live Local lets you soar over terrain in your browser. Zooming beyond the U.S. border reveals one of the site's limitations, however: Outside of this country, most images are high-altitude satellite views that aren't much clearer than their counterparts in a standard atlas. As with Google Maps, the service's published APIs allow anyone to create their own apps, including maps of eBay seller locations and MSN Messenger chat partners. local.live.com
Google Maps Web Cam Locator looks ahead: Get a pretravel peek at the weather at your destination, or do virtual sightseeing at this site that plots Webcams on a Google Map. Click a pushpin on the map to see that camera's view in a pop-up window. Click again to see the view in a larger window, plus weather and other info. You can even add your own Webcam to the map. find.pcworld.com/50546
Put a place with that face via GeoBloggers: Ever wonder where the beautiful tropical-vacation shots you found on the Web were located? Want to show friends where you spent your summer? The free GeoBloggers site uses the geotagging of your images on Flickr (see page 85) to plot them on a Google Map. Visitors can fly to your photo's map point and conduct searches in the area using Google Earth. They can also jump to your Flickr page or--very cool--download a GPX waypoint file (which encodes the site's map coordinates) for upload to their own GPS device. geobloggers.com
Maplandia.com brings the world into view: This free service puts a regional interface on Google Maps, organizing the site's maps and satellite images by continent and by country. Want to see a map of Colombia? Just two clicks, and you're there. Maplandia creates HTML links you can paste into your blog so that your visitors can view the same map with just one click. www.maplandia.com
Trulia is a house hunter's best friend: Location, location, location. What could make a better mashup than maps and real-estate listings? This free site started small, mapping homes for sale in a few cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, but its goal is to show listings nationwide. Type a city or zip code into Trulia's search field to see listings pinpointed on a map. Using Google Maps' Hybrid setting, you can see at a glance which homes are close enough to the beach, and far enough from the freeway, www.trulia.com
Get a choice of views at TerraServer: Not only can you search this industrial-strength satellite-image database by city, state, and country, but you also get your choice of images from various providers, and you can purchase prints of the maps at prices ranging from $7 to $150. The service sells prints of satellite images from hundreds of famous locations, such as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and other hallowed shrines. APIs let you write applications that grab images from TerraServer (a la Google Maps). www.terraserver.com
Yahoo Maps joins the mashup: Brand new and still in beta as we went to press, Yahoo's free mapping service is a response to Google Maps and Windows Live Local, although it differs in one giant way--no satellite imagery. Nevertheless, Yahoo's public APIs let you create your own mashups (view a gallery at find. pcworld.com/50550), and its smart navigational widget makes jumping around a map easy. maps.yahoo.com/beta
TOP PICKS
THE NEW WEB STARTS HERE
IT'S EASY TO BECOME overwhelmed by the variety of features these fabulous sites offer. To cut to the chase, here are our favorites in each category.
* Web mail: How does Gmail do it? Volume-nearly 3GB worth. Labels let you quickly find your old messages, which you may never have to delete.
* Web work sites: ThinkFree Office Online puts a full-featured Microsoft Office double and 30MB of storage at your disposal wherever you roam.
* Photo sharing: Not only does Flickr make uploading, viewing, and sharing your digital snaps simple, but it also connects easily with blogging, mapping, and other services.
* Bookmark sharing: What's the buzz this morning? By sharing and tagging the highlights of your browsing at Del.icio.us, you contribute to the zeitgeist, and you make your list of favorite sites available both to yourself and to other Web denizens from any PC.
* Video sharing: Blip.tv does online video right, giving you tags, news-clip feeds, and storage of your clips for posterity (and for free) at the Internet Archive (archive.org).
WEB TOOLS
WIDGETS BREAK OUT OF THE BROWSER
THE TECHNOLOGIES that power the New Web are being applied outside your browser, too. Widgets are lightweight applications that sometimes run inside a browser and other times operate as separate programs. They can monitor the weather, measure battery life, reformat Web pages and search results, or do just about anything else that someone figures out how to accomplish in a scripting language. Here are three of our favorite widgets:
* Yahoo Widgets: Yahoo's free program, formerly Konfabulator, for Windows XP and Mac OS X runs JavaScript apps outside your browser. Its widgets float around your desktop (looking a lot like the widgets in OS X) and include a clock, weather display, to-do list, slide show of your Flickr photos, and battery and Wi-Fi signal strength monitors. The Web site offers over a thousand more, plus instructions on how to write your own. widgets.yahoo.com
* Greasemonkey: This free extension for Firefox runs JavaScript code (which it calls "user scripts") to change the way Web pages appear or behave. After you install the program, browse to Userscripts.org to view a collection of tags (called a "cloud") of user-script topics. One of my favorites is a Greasemonkey widget that adds Google Blog-search to the Google search page. greasemonkey.mozdev.org
* Klipfolio: Looking much like an instant messaging client, this free widget aggregates RSS feeds and other complex information (such as the local weather). Unlike standard RSS readers, however, Klipfolio lets you search feeds and sends you alerts when your search terms appear, www.serence.com
MESSAGING
IM VIA THE WEB
IT DIDN'T TAKE LONG for instant messaging to become indispensable for many users. But how will you connect when you're away from the IM client software on your home or work PC? The four big-name IM services now offer Web-hosted versions of their software that let you send and receive text messages from any PC with an Internet connection (see the list below). However, remembering addresses, names, and passwords for multiple IM services is a problem that cries out for a Web solution, Meebo (in alpha) answers the call with its free universal IM service that supports AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and ICQ, pulls the Jabber service (which Google's Gtalk uses).
* AIM Express www.aim.com (page offers link)
* ICQ2GO: www.icq.com/icq2go/
* Meebo: www.meebo.com
* MSN Web Messenger: webmessenger.msn.com
* Yahoo Web Messenger: find.pcworld.com/50556
JOB SITES
THE NEW WEB AT WORK
WHILE BUSINESSPEOPLE are sure to find many practical uses for the new generation of Web sites and services, two of the best newcomers are designed specifically to get you into a business. Indeed ( www.indeed.com ) and Simply Hired ( www.simplyhired.com ) each collect listings from a variety of job sites (including Careermole, Craigslist, Dice, and Monster). They allow you to filter out unwanted job categories and save the resulting search as an RSS feed or e-mail alert that keeps new postings coming to you daily. Simply Hired lets you add prospective jobs to a Google Map so you can compare commute times among your various employment prospects, for example. Indeed's Jobroll feature lets you turn a job search into an ever-updating box you can copy and paste into your blog or Web page as a service to your readers.
HOW-TO
ROLL YOUR OWN SERVICE
YOU SAY YOU DON'T like the way that Craigslist, Flickr, or Google Maps functions? Just change how each presents its data, or combine the information on one site with that on another. ProgrammableWeb ( www.programmableweb . com) lists over 200 mashups, including a Google Map of Hindu temples, a Flickr screen saver, and a matchmaking tool for the HotOrNot.com dating service that turns you into a virtual yenta.
Creating a mashup requires a solid understanding of JavaScript (Wikipedia offers a good starting point at find. pcworld.com/50558). While it's no replacement for actual programming skills, Ning ( www.ning.com ; still in beta as we went to press) lets you set up your own classified listing, photo sharing, review, or social-networking site without writing a line of code.
You can modify one of the thousands of existing applications on the site and have a slick program of your own devising running in minutes. Ning even hosts the site, posting ads alongside your application in exchange, if you're feeling geeky, the service lets you alter the application's underlying PHP code.

Trend -Next On The Net Mashups And Filters

Some of the most powerful sites in the new wave of internet development will be mashups and filters, sites which mix and match content from other parts of the net, or act as a filter for the massive amounts of data now available to everyone.
Google Maps is a good example of a mashup. Anyone can download a Google map, add their own data and display a map mashup on their own website which plots new information. <> for example is a real estate mashup. It combines maps from Google with real estate listings. It overlays listings in a particular area on Google maps.
Mashup companies are good at cobbling together what people want from disparate sources on the web. One of the reasons is real simple syndication, or RSS which enables readers to view what they want without having to visit thousands of sites. This intense personal control over what information is consumed is a feature of the next net.
Filter sites often come in the form of a search engine <> is the site to go to when you want to find out what blogs are available on the net. Another site <> filters tags and saved bookmarks on other similar sites. <> trawls through job vacancies posted on other sites. These companies all share an ability to take information already on the web and simply organise it in a different way.
Other top sites include <> which creates a multi-feed news mashup based on blogs. <> is a do it yourself search engine or swicki which allows you to define the sites you want to search, post the results on your blog and get a cut of revenue from any ads your audience clicks.These sites are further examples of the new web business model in which the site itself isn't the earner, it's the peripheral ad content it relies on for income.

Robert Iger on...Entertainment

ROBERT IGER took over last year as president and chief executive of Walt Disney Co., and moved quickly to embrace the newest in digital entertainment. He signed deals to put Disney-owned television shows on the Internet and Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod, and purchased the Pixar digital-animation studio. He talked with Kara Swisher about the deals, offering Disney content over the Internet and greenlighting "America's Funniest Home Videos."
KARA SWISHER: One of your first two moves was [to make your content available on digital devices]. So talk a little bit about, first, the iPod deal.
ROBERT IGER: It seemed rather obvious to us that the killer application is great creativity . . . married with a fair amount of intelligence about both technology and the consumer. We're investing significantly in creativity, and . . . confining it to just traditional platforms when the consumer is now consuming media on many nontraditional platforms seems silly to us. . . . Since you brought up [the] iPod, I was extremely impressed with the device. The iTunes software is fantastic in terms of creating a very simple, user-friendly experience, and then, of course, the beauty of the device itself, which is very well made, very well designed. . . .
It seemed obvious when we heard that [Apple] was developing a video player that we should move our video content onto the platform.
MS. SWISHER: How has that been?
MR. IGER: The downloading has been quite successful. It's still relatively small in the scheme of things. We've had about six to seven million downloads of Disney ABC shows since we launched in October.
MS. SWISHER: What's been the greatest one?
MR. IGER: "Lost" is first. "Desperate Housewives" is second. But we've had some interesting experiences. We put a movie on [iTunes] called "High School Musical," which was on the Disney Channel . . . and charge $9.99 for it, and it went to the top of the video charts on [iTunes].
We're multiplying the number of platforms that Disney, ABC, ESPN content will exist on. Because people are accessing media on so many more platforms, then why not occupy that space?
The consumer today has much more power over how and when they access media than ever before, and technology is the great empowering tool, and we have to pay attention to that.
MS. SWISHER: [About the same time you made shows available for purchase,] you made a move to stream "Desperate Housewives," and a bunch of shows, very popular shows, the biggest hits on ABC at this point, [free of charge but] with unskippable commercials. Your advertisers, who were paying a lot of money on your network, agreed to go along with it. Tell us about that experience.
MR. IGER: ABC decided to put four shows on ABC.com streamed. Two of them very popular shows, "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives." Two others [that are] not as popular, and in 29 days, they had 11 million streams. They sold advertising in all of them, one advertiser per show with a few 30-second spots within the body of the program that could not be skipped. The result has been pretty dramatic. Over 85% of the people who streamed remember the advertiser that was advertising [on] the program they streamed, which was incredible.
MS. SWISHER: Plus, they can't skip the ads.
MR. IGER: They can't skip them, but it's interesting. They're only 30 seconds long, so when you're watching streaming video on your computer, and you know that it's only a 30-second break instead of a break that's substantially longer, you're not as compelled to skip anyway. . . .
The other thing we discovered is that most of the people that are watching are watching because they missed the show. So we're enfranchising more people. We're giving them more opportunity to watch something instead of keeping it on one platform.
MS. SWISHER: So let's talk about the list of people that your move made mad: the affiliates, companies like Wal-Mart that are selling DVDs, cable companies who pay you a lot of money [for Disney's channels], writers, actors . . .
MR IGER: Well, I think there are a lot of people who are troubled by any traditional content company moving their content under new platforms.
MS. SWISHER: Let's start with affiliates.
MR. IGER: Well, affiliates actually may end up with an opportunity that they've never had before. We gave . . . about 10 ABC affiliates the opportunity to put an ABC button on each of their Web sites. So if you go to the ABC affiliate in Milwaukee, Wis., their home page has a button that says, "Watch ABC shows." You click it, and the player that plays the streaming video comes up, [but] the environment [on the affiliate's Web site] is still, in this case, WISN. We let them sell a commercial around [the streaming video]. . . .
There will be some entities that are alienated, but in the end, we may create opportunities. We're in conversations with Comcast, who would like very much to have the same show streamed on Comcast.net or in a [video on demand] environment.
MS. SWISHER: Do you see ESPN streaming all its content?
MR. IGER: I don't see ESPN streaming its entire service [because the] satellite and cable platforms pay us a huge amount of money [for the right to carry ESPN], but ESPN is already reaching its customers directly in many other forms on either ESPN.com or through other services. . . . I don't think you're going to see one media model in the future. It'll be many.
MS. SWISHER: Actors, writers, directors must be insane at this point about what they're going to get.
MR. IGER: Insane is, I think, too strong a word. There are a lot of mouths to feed, as has been the case in this business for a long time, and I think it will all get figured out, because . . . when you have an increase in media consumption, that's a good thing. We just have to figure out ways to track the consumption and ultimately to compensate all the entities that deserve compensation, and I believe we'll do that.
MS. SWISHER: What else do you see going up on Disney.com?
MR. IGER: Disney.com is going to become a network of the future. You can watch shows. You'll be able to listen to music, play games, buy things. We'll have a fairly robust online store. We have our own photo service called PhotoPass [for] countless millions of people who visit our theme parks [and want to upload photos from their trip].
MS. SWISHER: Do you see having a close relationship with the Yahoos and Googles of the world to get this content out there?
MR. IGER: We're willing to make our product available to anyone who's willing to pay the right amount of money for it or to create an environment that is, generally speaking from our perspective, positive. If you look at the Google video offering . . . you can find CBS shows. You can find NBA highlights. But you can also find a lot of user-generated content, and some of that content is not really an environment that we want to put ourselves [into]. If they offer us an environment that is a little bit more consistent with the environment that we . . . believe is fitting for the content that we create, there's no reason why we wouldn't do business with them. Again, if it's priced right and positioned well.
MS. SWISHER: Is there a difference between user-generated content and the fancy Disney stuff?
MR. IGER: I get a kick out of the fact that there's a lot of talk about user-generated content. In 1989, I was pitched a show . . . and in it there was a feature of people who sent their home videos in, and the host typically made fun of the videos that were sent in, and that became "America's Funniest Home Videos" . . . which is still on the air and . . . won its time period this year, which is pretty ridiculous or pretty amazing.
People are fascinated with user-generated content. I don't think it holds a candle to what I'll call professionally generated content. I don't think people will make a decision to watch somebody's birthday video instead of going to see "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Cars," but they're obviously spending a fair amount of time on it. There's nothing wrong with it at all. We're actually empowering or facilitating some user-generated content, people who shoot videos when they go to our parks, for instance. [It's] not our primary business.
MS. SWISHER: Let's talk about the network. Last night, Bill Gates essentially said the networks are dead.
MR. IGER: In the history of media, there have been a lot of declarations made about genres or platforms or parts of the media business being dead. Consumption of media is going up, not down, and if you play a content game . . . then you have opportunities today unlike you've ever had before. If you keep that content on one platform only, a traditional platform, then in the end you're not going to get enough consumption to really support the continued creation of great content. So the goal . . . is to use multiple platforms, and the television network today is a great platform to generate a lot of consumption. . . .
I think you're going to see continued fragmentation. You'll see people consuming media in more places, more often, [on] more devices than ever before, not just on a television set.
MS. SWISHER: Do you see [Disney movies] being distributed immediately on DVD, cable and satellite, not just in the theaters?
MR. IGER: Not right away, no. . . . I think the movie experience, the big-screen, multiple-person experience is actually a pretty good experience. I think the whole industry should get behind improving that experience. . . . We create a lot of value with the initial big-screen release. So I like the notion of keeping that where it is. How long that lasts in some exclusive window, I don't know. It seems pretty obvious that the windows are going to compress.

Video sites grapple with specter of smut; Critics say smut and brutal images can be easy for children to access at top upload sites

Video sites grapple with specter of smut; Critics say smut and brutal images can be easy for children to access at top upload sites.

The text accompanying the video says a man has stolen a pair of women's underwear.
The clip, first posted on video-sharing site YouTube on May 31 and viewed more than 1,500 times over six days, shows a man standing in what appears to be a dimly lit public bathroom wearing what indeed appears to be panties. As the video plays, the man, shown from the stomach down and thus faceless, begins to fondle himself.
YouTube is not the only well-known video site where such graphic content appears. Many of the companies that let users display homemade videos on the Web are having difficulty keeping their pages smut free. A weeklong review of some of the top user-generated video sites by CNET News.com unearthed scenes of beheadings, masturbation, bloody car accidents, bondage and sadomasochism. It's important to note that no child pornography was discovered.
Right now, online sharing sites such as YouTube, Yahoo Video and Google Video are competing in one of the fastest-growing entertainment segments on the Web. They may also be victims of their own popularity. The vast majority of videos available on these sites depict budding musicians, comedians, filmmakers or just people vying for attention in innocuous, if sometimes oddball, ways.
But industry insiders say that as the sites collect greater amounts of video, tracking and purging sexually explicit and graphically violent content will become increasingly difficult. Industry insiders say that while prescreening millions of homemade videos is likely to be costly and problematic, failing to police the sites could scare off advertisers and lead to clashes with family advocates and lawmakers.
Materials inappropriate for children are too easy for kids to get their hands on at Google Video, according to the New York State Consumer Protection Board, which issued a warning to parents on June 12. The board has a broad mandate to inform and educate consumers but has no regulatory powers. Nontheless, it will continue to publicize the issue in an effort to force Google Video and other video-sharing sites to do more to protect children, said Jon Sorensen, the board's spokesman.
"Very few of the other (video-sharing) sites feature this kind of content on their front page," Sorensen said Thursday. "It's disappointing because we contacted (Google Video) two weeks ago, and they said they were trying to make changes. Still, this stuff continues" to show up.
In an e-mail to CNET News.com, Google said it removes such content when made aware of it.
Unlike New York's consumer protection board, the federal government does have the power to force change. A bill proposed this month in the U.S. Senate would require any Web site that offers sexually explicit content to post warning labels on each offending page or face imprisonment.
The authors of the bill, called the Stop Adults' Facilitation of the Exploitation of Youth Act, or the SAFETY Act, want to decrease the chances that children can inadvertently be exposed to pornography by Web sites that mislabel their materials either deliberately or through negligence.
And video-sharing sites are likely to face enormous pressure to clean up their sites from big advertisers. Some companies are eager to partner with the sector's powerhouses but will steer clear if it means that one of their ads sits next to unsuitable content, said Greg Sterling, who operates Web research company Sterling Market Intelligence.
"There's absolutely a big opportunity for these sites to sell advertising, provided that they guarantee (what kind of) content...goes next to the ads," Sterling said. "Advertisers are going to want control of where their brands are placed."
That's not going to be easy for some sites. Take, for example, YouTube, the largest video-sharing site with nearly 13 million users per month. Guaranteeing the quality of content on the site would mean hiring employees to eyeball each frame of the more than 50,000 videos that get posted daily. YouTube allows videos to last up to 10 minutes, but most are much shorter. If the average video is three minutes, then YouTube would be monitoring 2,500 hours worth of video a day.
"It's going to be hard to guarantee absolute protection," said Mike McGuire, a research analyst with Gartner. "You have to wonder if (these sites) foresaw the kind of expense and effort that they are going to have to put into monitoring their sites."
Yahoo Video has installed a screening system that, when applied, prevents visitors from accessing adult content that may wind up on the site. Google, which has a similar screening system for its photo site, hasn't installed one for Google Video. In its e-mail to News.com, the company said it has added new screening methods, but declined to provide details.
YouTube doesn't prescreen any videos, said company spokeswoman Julie Supan. People are technically able to post anything they want, immediately. The company's user agreement, however--like those at most rival sites--prohibits material that could be considered pornographic, obscene or unlawful, and YouTube leaves it to the community to report violations.
"As the largest community for video on the Web, we could not review all the content that goes up on the site," said Supan. "Community policing on the Internet has proven very effective over the last 10 years."
YouTube users can flag content they think violates the agreement. If a video collects enough flags (the company declines to publish the number), YouTube will review the clip and pull it if executives agree the material is objectionable, Supan said.
But not all flagged material gets pulled. If executives think a clip doesn't violate the user agreement, it remains on the site but is accessible only to registered users 18 and older. YouTube encourages visitors to register, a process that requires a birth date. People who say they're younger than 13 are barred from registering.
The process, however, can be circumvented. In one instance, News.com encountered a clip that had been flagged and restricted, but an identical, unrestricted clip was available under a slightly different title.
And there's no guarantee that a potentially objectionable clip will come to light. An unrestricted clip of a female television host in Europe, who spoke to a live audience while wearing only a bikini bottom, was available on the site for at least three days.
Over at Google Video, which also said it relies on user feedback to monitor content, material uploaded in recent weeks includes a parody of a car commercial that features an announcer using numerous expletives during a mock sales pitch.
"Self-policing flat out doesn't work," said Peter Pham, director of business development for Photobucket, a fast-growing photo-sharing site that's recently jumped into video. "The problem is that most of the people finding this material are the people who are looking for this material. And they aren't going to complain."
By eyeballing each frame of every clip submitted, companies such as Photobucket and San Diego-based start-up vMix want to avoid angering advertisers or family advocates. All videos at Photobucket.com get reviewed, Pham said. Photobucket has developed software that creates a frame-by-frame "map" of a video, allowing workers to evaluate content at a glance, Pham said, adding that Photobucket recently hired 50 people to monitor in-coming video and photos.
A family friendly site doesn't come cheap. The projected cost of all of this is $2 million per year, Pham said. vMix is doing something similar but on a smaller scale.
"What you are trying to do is discourage people from posting this kind of material on your site," Jeff Davids, vMix's chief financial officer, said at the Digital Media Summit in Los Angeles earlier this month. "If they see that their material isn't going up on the site, they're going to go someplace else."
Prescreening may work for small companies that own a miniscule market share. According to traffic tracking site, Hitwise, more than 42 percent of all visits to video-sharing sites occurred at YouTube. The privately held company would conceivably need hundreds if not thousands of personnel reviewing video.
And that won't guarantee a clean site, said Supan. "There are always going to be people who try to take advantage of the system, whatever it is," she said.

MTV puts full weight behind digital strategies

MTV, once the frontrunner in music television, is now playing catch-up with the iPod generation. As its target demographic increasingly looks to mobile, broadband and video-on-demand services for its content, MTV is being forced to step up its digital activities.
At its annual sales presentation in New York earlier this month, the Viacom-owned broadcaster outlined plans to increase revenue generated by new platforms from its current $150 million to $500 million by 2008.
"With each platform we are trying to expand our reach and increase our income," Angel Gambino, the vice-president for commercial strategy and digital media at MTV Networks UK, says. "It's about extending our channels and our brands to new and other platforms, and into newer areas, such as MTV Overdrive into broadband."
In addition to mobile TV channels for the MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Comedy and Game One brands across Europe, MTV's broadband suite includes Nicke-lodeon's Turbo-Nick, VH1's V Spot, Comedy Central's Motherload, MTV U's Uber, CMT's Loaded and its newest addition, MTV Overdrive.
Launched in the UK last month, MTV Overdrive is an online free-to-view, on-demand service, offering viewers clips from MTV shows such as Pimp My Ride, as well as news, movie trailers and music videos.
Along with repackaged popular programmes from its linear channels, MTV's broadband and mobile services offer extras from original series and bespoke digital content.
"While shooting shows for our broadcast channels, our production crews are now also briefed to shoot extra footage so that it can be delivered to mobile or PC," Dan Whiley, the commercial vice-president of digital media at MTV Networks International, says.
"We release two to three original made-for-digital series per year and make one hour of made-for-mobile content and one hour of made-for-broadband content every week. We also create eight to ten mobile games and up to 300 mobile downloads, such as ringtones and graphics, every year."
Gambino believes that these media platforms could also provide MTV Networks, which attracts 1.3 billion viewers worldwide, with a useful testing ground for new programming.
"When we are unsure how something might work, it allows us to use these platforms as an incubation area to build up some critical mass and then find it the right place in the TV schedule," she says, pointing to the upcoming transition of the street-culture show Barrio 19 from mobile to network.
MTV is also fine-tuning its digital strategy to accommodate the increasing popularity of social networks and user-generated content sites such as MySpace and YouTube. Viacom has been busy creating the online music service MTV Urge for launch in the US this month. It has also acquired the online film distributor IFILM, the virtual pet community Neopets and the gaming properties Gametrailers and Xfire.
Meanwhile, MTV has been putting the finishing touches to a new crossplatform channel aimed at its web-savvy audience. "It's completely community- and user-controlled TV," Gambino says of the as-yet-unnamed service, which is due to launch later this year.
"You create your own playlist and are able to get your content up on screen. It ties together social networking, video-on-demand and user-generated content." She also maintains that the new crossplatform channel will offer advertisers a more efficient showcase. "A lot of advertisers spend a lot on TV advertising," she says. "This will give them the opportunity to take an integrated approach."
While MySpace, Google and YouTube have undoubtedly made an impact online, Whiley believes MTV has a clear advantage in this new space. "We've been entertaining youth and adult audiences for a long time," he says. "This puts us in a great position with our audiences, and we really don't view these sites as direct competitors."
It is precisely this longevity that may ultimately attract advertisers to MTV's digital offshoots. "The demographics aren't radically different from people watching the TV channels, but, if the advertising is done properly, advertisers gain premium content to associate themselves with and the benefit of targeting," Dan Cryan, an analyst at the media market research publication Screen Digest, says.
Mat Mildenhall, the chief operating officer at Proximity, agrees. "MTV will not have the scale of Yahoo!, but it will be a much narrower audience," he says. "If you are a trusted brand, you need to be careful how you operate in that space in terms of spam and intrusion, but most people will be gleeful to get MTV content."
So far, MTV has seen almost all its big sponsors, such as Adidas and Sony, advertise with it online and others are likely to follow suit. "MTV has a strong brand which will attract a decent-sized, youth, fashion-orientated audience," Julian Smith, an online advertising analyst at JupiterResearch, says.
As well as being a significant revenue source for MTV, online advertising could also help to build a social network around its digital content.
"MTV has a well-established community which is happy to contribute and participate online," Smith says. "Interactivity is a great way to generate revenue and maintain audience loyalty." MTV is also hoping that this drive into digital media will help take the brand into new territories.
With Europe already a stronghold - the region's digital activities yield the fastest growth rates for MTV's international business - Gambino is looking to push further afield. "We'll start to see a lot more digital growth in countries where our TV business is less mature," she says. "We'll use that as our lead."