Archive for April, 2008
New Updated Cisco To Buy Stake In Femtocell Maker Ip.access
Posted on Apr 23, 2008 05:40:57 AM
Admin wrote: The companies did not give details on the size of the Cisco investment or how big of a stake the U.S. company would hold in the British maker of small devices that improve indoor cellphone coverage.
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New Actions Second Life Toolbox: 50+ Resources For Second Life
Posted on Apr 22, 2008 06:05:03 AM
Today,
The 3D world of Second Life has taken the real world by storm. It’s a complex beast, though, and sometimes getting the hang of things isn’t too easy; especially if you plan to become a top Second Life entrepreneur. Enjoy our collection of 50+ resources for Second Life consisting of companies, news, tutorials and other stuff which will make your virtual world exploration easier.
Also, don’t forget to check out our post where you can suggest future toolbox topics! (more…)
New Impressive Cellphones Are Bringing Pakistanis Together
Posted on Apr 21, 2008 12:15:07 PM
Today, About 65 million people are using mobile phones each day in Pakistan. For most Pakistanis, the wireless devices are the first phones they have ever had.
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New Scripting 5 Extreme Gmail Makeovers
Posted on Apr 21, 2008 01:05:06 AM
Today,
Sick of the boring old whiteness of Gmail, and eager to try something new? With a Firefox extension called Stylish, which enables you to change the look of any website using custom CSS, you can! It’s time to finally match Gmail’s colors with that cool wallpaper you have.
An interesting Gmail redesign I’ve found via Google Blogoscoped reminded me that it’s been a while since I last checked Userstyles (a Stylish style repository), and I was surprised to find so many well executed styles. For this occasion, I’ve chosen five that offer a very different Gmail experience. Before trying any of these, make sure you have Stylish installed, and make sure you turn off all other Gmail styles before trying another one. (more…)
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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
GMail Phasing In IMAP
Gmail Mobile Gets an Update
New GMail Features Show Up In Some Accounts
Gmail Storage Is Now 6 Gigabytes
Gmail Mobile Version 1.5 Not Lookin’ So Good
GMail Adding Greasemonkey Support?
Nazi Videos On YouTube Cause Concern In Germany
New Script 169.139.222.5: /* Services Offered*/
Posted on Apr 20, 2008 09:55:18 AM
Today, Services offered ? Previous revision Revision as of 20:46, 16 April 2008 Line 6: Line 6: Public libraries exist in most nations of the world and are often considered an essential part of having an educated and literate population. Public libraries are distinct from [[research library|research libraries]], [[school library|school libraries]], or other [[Special Libraries Association|special libraries]] in that their mandate is to serve the public’s information needs generally (rather than serve a particular school, institution, or research population). Public libraries typically are [[lending library|lending libraries]], allowing users to take books and other materials off the premises; they also have non-circulating [[reference]] collections. Public libraries typically focus on popular materials such as popular [[fiction]] and [[movies]], as well as educational and [[nonfiction]] materials of interest to the general public; [[Internet]] access is also often offered. Public libraries exist in most nations of the world and are often considered an essential part of having an educated and literate population. Public libraries are distinct from [[research library|research libraries]], [[school library|school libraries]], or other [[Special Libraries Association|special libraries]] in that their mandate is to serve the public’s information needs generally (rather than serve a particular school, institution, or research population). Public libraries typically are [[lending library|lending libraries]], allowing users to take books and other materials off the premises; they also have non-circulating [[reference]] collections. Public libraries typically focus on popular materials such as popular [[fiction]] and [[movies]], as well as educational and [[nonfiction]] materials of interest to the general public; [[Internet]] access is also often offered. …
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New Updates Update To Tumblr Finally On The Way
Posted on Apr 19, 2008 08:45:40 PM
Admin wrote:
Microblogging service Tumblr today released a short but succinct teaser to fans of the service by way of the parent company’s blog Davidville: November 1 - It’s ready.
Tumblr, the service that makes publishing a link blog or life-stream a breeze, showed signs (at least to its hardcore fan-base) this summer of being dying or dead, having released no major updates to the service or posts to its blog since April 27th.
In August, when speculation was at its height as to the fate of the service, Tumblr team member Marco published an unofficial response to the rumors circulating admitting surprise at the rampant growth of Tumblr, and that “he was sure that when Tumblr was ready, the would announce on the official blog.”
There have been no official announcements as to what the new release of Tumblr contains, but posts to the Tumblepedia by development staff indicate that the update will include “optimizations, bugfixes, and great stuff.”
See also: 8 Pownce Rivals Compared.
New Updates Research Paper: Automated Discovery And Analysis Of Social Networks From Threaded Discussions
Posted on Apr 19, 2008 06:05:06 AM
Admin wrote: Automated Discovery and Analysis of Social Networks from Threaded Discussions.by Gruzd, Anatoliy A and Haythornthwaite, Caroline (2008)From the abstract:To gain greater insight into the operation of online social networks, we applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to text-based communication to identify and describe underlying social structures in online communities. This paper presents our approach and preliminary evaluation for content-based, automated discovery of social networks. Our research question is: What syntactic and semantic features of postings in a threaded discussions help uncover explicit and implicit ties between network members, and which provide a reliable estimate of the strengths of interpersonal ties among the network members? To evaluate our automated procedures, we compare the results from the NLP processes with social networks built from basic who-to-whom data, and a sample of hand-coded data derived from a close reading of the text. For our test case, and as part of ongoing research on networked learning, we used the archive of threaded discussions collected over eight iterations of an online graduate class.Source: In Proceedings International Network of Social Network Analysis, St. Pete Beach, Florida, USA. (via DLIST) (Source: ResourceShelf)
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New Network Emarketer Releases Podcast Numbers; Probably Slightly Off
Posted on Apr 18, 2008 03:15:04 PM
Today,
The numbers are (still) clear - podcasting is big time. EMarketer has released numbers today showing exactly how big time posting is presently, and projections on where it is going. By their survey, the US podcast audience alone has reached 18.5 Million audience members in 2008, and number expected to increase by another ten million by the end of 2008.
They measured the audience size by two metrics, total audience size and active audience size. Active is differentiated from total as individuals who downloaded an average of one or more podcasters per week, as opposed to someone who mas listed to a podcast at some point (ostensibly without subscribing to it).
EMarketer predict that along the current trend lines that podcasting audiences will grow to a whopping 65 million members in the US alone, or one fifth of the current US population. Personally, I think the numbers may a bit low, and quite possibly by 2012, completely irrelevant, unless the study deals exclusively with audio podcasts (a distinction that isn’t explicitly made).
As with 
our podcast at Mashable, podcast feeds are increasingly becoming mixed media, and the rich media showcased on those feeds are increasingly distributed and widely consumed through methods other than typical standalone media players. With our podcast, while we have a respectable subscriber count, even our audio podcasts see the great bulk of their downloads from the embedded player widgets.
With video content, the subscriber download to embedded player viewership becomes even more disparate. It isn’t uncommon for some top-tier video podcasters to see podcast downloads of only hundreds of thousands, but embedded player views in the tens of millions.
EMarketer points to better podcast reception tools, increased awareness, terrestrial radio and improved smartphones (read: iPhone) as the driving forces behind the impressive growth. Given that online video has reached ubiquitous proportions this year not just online but in the worldwide culture, I’d have to say that while the stated reasons driving podcasting growth probably played into things during its first five years, the last year or so has seen most of its growth due to that market.
But What About the Money
Despite what Dave Winer claims, there is money to be made in podcast advertising. In 2007 alone, EMarketer estimates $165 million was made in podcast sponsorship of various types. That number is expected to grow to a $435 million by 2012.
Sounds great, right? Well, quite frankly they’re slightly unbelievable numbers, if the active podcast audience size is to be believed. It was when I tried to figure out exactly how the the numbers broke down, and it would appear that the average listener is exposed to 25 podcast advertisements a week, a number that seems on quite the high side.
While it is true that most active podcast audience members likely listen to more than one show per week, most podcasts don’t presently run advertisements in their shows for reasons I’ve outlined in great detail in the past. So that a generous 50% of podcasts that run ads are playing four and five ads per episode to cover that gap is a bit far fetched.
My guess is that the podcast download numbers cited by eMarketer are vastly underestimated, because it is my experience that the problem is that podcasting is far under-monetized, not over monetized as these numbers would suggest.
The bottom line you can walk away from these statistics with is that there is a statistically significant (in relation to the general population) amount of folks downloading podcasts now, and there’s a good chunk of change up for grabs for the media producing world. These numbers show that, just not as accurately as I would hope.
Script Moral Hazard 2.0
Posted on Apr 17, 2008 09:30:06 PM
Admin wrote: Brian Kelly has just posted on The Demise of Eduspaces, picking up on the email announcement that went out over the weekend that the elgg/eduspaces service was being shut down early in the new year. This service offered free accounts to users on the open source elgg platform that was developed by the EduSpaces team.In a comment to the post, John Haccket of The Learning Landscape for Schools writes:The Learning Landscape for Schools is a recently launched elgg installation for schools….We are supported by E2BN - one of the RBCs responsible for supplying internet services to schools and Local Authorites in the East of England…As the demise of eduspaces has happened so fast LL4S is not really in a position to offer space to all the current account holders - many will probably fall outside the remit of our site. However, if there are now homeless blogging teachers out there that are keen to use elgg with their students we would happy to accept any existing data they have so they can continue their own blogs and bring a safe, global social network into their classroom….LL4S is not a free service as costs must be recuperated, expansion planned for and subscriptions are our only source of income. But I think we are great value!I think my first observation here would be - if EduSpaces had been running under a subscription model, would they be shutting the service down in this way?That said, this does demonstrate an opportunity for sites that do have resources to pick up subscribers en masse if an open source hosted application venture fails, by quickly setting up a ‘disaster recovery’, contingency or resilience migration service into an installation of the same open source application. …
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Brand New Source Register Now For The Under The Radar Conference: $100 Off For Mashable Readers
Posted on Apr 17, 2008 09:16:10 AM
Today,
The Under the Radar Business of Web Apps conference, to highlight 32 startups that have launched within the past year, will be occurring next month on March 20, on the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, CA. Under the Radar is the premier event to attend to get information on some of the industry’s hottest shining stars. After all, the proliferation of web apps is in our future, and the future is now.
Some of the presenting companies include open source e-commerce platform Magento, travel organization site TripIt, text messaging reminder service kwiry, and social tech support network SupportSpace. Speakers include Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal, Brad Stone from the New York Times, and Aaron Ricadela from BusinessWeek. Mashable is a media sponsor for the event, and Pete Cashmore is on the selection committee.
If you’d like to attend, Mashable readers can get $100 off. Just register at this link.