February, 2006 Archives | Homepage
Zillow Offers Real Estate Data Galore
Zillow is a new website that combines extensive real estate data with mashups of Google Maps. Users can search for an address or zip code and browse homes using satellite maps provided by Google. The graphic on the right shows a Zillow search in the 90210 zip code in Beverly Hill, Ca. The dollar amounts for each of the homes are listed and clicking on them brings up additional data about each home including home facts like year built, number of rooms, sq ft. as well as a chart that shows how the home's value has changed over the past ten years. Zillow does not charge fees to access the information. More information about Zillow can be found here and here.Posted on February 22, 2006
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More People Are Surfing the Web for Fun
Media Shift blogs about a new Pew Study that found more people than ever are using the Internet for fun. The study found that 1/3 of web users go online "for no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time."In fact, Pew figures that 30% of web surfers were online for no particular reason on the average day in December 2005, up from 21% who were aimlessly surfing the web on the average day-dreaming day in November 2004.Looking at the PDF file for the report you can see two more not very surprising finds. The study found that younger web surfers spends more time surfing the Web for fun. It also found that broadband users were more likely to use the Internet for fun or "no particular reason."
"Compared to other online pursuits, the act of surfing for fun now stands only behind sending or receiving email (52% of internet users do this on a typical day) and using a search engine (38% of internet users do this on a typical day), and is in a virtual tie for third with the act of getting news online (31% of internet users do this on a typical day)," the report said.
Posted on February 20, 2006
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Google Increases Search Market Share
InformationWeek reports that web searches increase by over 50% in Decemeber. During that month Google gained more market share over its rivals Yahoo and Microsoft.Among the top three search engines, Google was the only one to gain market share, rising 5.7 percent year-to-year to 48.8 percent. No. 2 Yahoo Inc., on the other hand, saw its market share dip by 0.3 percent to 21.4 percent, while Microsoft Corp.'s MSN experienced a 3.1 percent drop to 14 percent.Google is trouncing its competitors in the battle for search leadership. Yahoo has been acquiring other web search and browsing tools like Flickr and Del.icio.us/ but so far they are still losing ground to Google.
While Google grabbed market share at the expense of Yahoo, MSN and smaller search engines, its two biggest rivals still did well in increasing the number of searches on their sites, even though the number of people online increased only a bit, Cassar said. Searches on Google jumped 75 percent in the month to 2.5 billion, Yahoo 53 percent to 1.1 billion and MSN 20 percent to 553 million.
In general, the use of search is increasing because search engines are doing a better job at delivering relevant results and at making available content that wasn't on the Web before, such as music and video. Google has been the most aggressive in getting offline content in its index, Cassar said, pointing to the company's initiative to digitize library books, a project that has been challenged in the courts by writers and authors claiming the project violates their copyrights. The lawsuits are pending.
Posted on February 14, 2006
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2006 Olympic Coverage
NBC has the televised Olympic coverage this year. They also have a large website at NBCOlympics.com that provides continuous coverage of events and medals. The official website for the 2006 Winter Olympics is located at: Torino2006.org. Other good resources include Olympics.org, NPR, AOL Sports and Yahoo. The U.S. Olympic Team also has its own website with information about the athletes located at usolympicteam.com. The blogs are also covering the Olympics and a list of blogs as well as highlights of blog coverage can be found on BloggersBlog.com's 2006 Olympics section.Posted on February 13, 2006
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Songbird 0.1 Officially Hatched
There is a lot of buzz about Songbird now that Songbird 0.1 Proof-of-Concept has officially hatched. Songbird is an open source web music player built from Firefox's browser engine.
Songbird plays the Web. Play any MP3 on the Web without leaving the page. Songbird can view Web pages as dynamic playlists that it can play, save, or automatically download every day.Inevitable LLC, the developers of Songbird, have many plans for the music player. Some of the future plans can be found here. (Via Boing Boing)
Songbird plays your music too. Songbird has all the features you expect in a desktop media player. And Songbird constantly improves. Like Firefox, Songbird's features may be improved with user installed and contributed cross-platform extensions.
Posted on February 8, 2006
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Microsoft Releases IE 7 Beta 2 Preview
Microsoft has released the IE 7 Beta 2 Preview. The new browser includes increased security features including anti-phising and anti-spoofing technologies. It also includes tabbed browsing which was made popular by the Firefox browser and RSS management features. A post on the IEBlog discusses the favorites center in IE 7 that lets you navigate your favorites, feeds, and history from one place. Another post on the IEBlog discusses the new printing features available in IE 7. (via HowToWeb)Posted on February 6, 2006
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Share Drink Recipes at Extra Tasty
Extra Tasty is a social website that allows you to search and shark drink recipes with others. Each recipe is tagged just like photos are tagged on Flickr. One very cool feature of Extra Tasty is that you can select a few ingredients and mixtures (limes, oranges, liquer etc) and a type of booze (vodka, gin, rum, whiksy, etc) and then press a button to see what drinks can be made with them. You can also add your own recipe if you don't find it on Extra Tasty. (Via Social Software Weblog)
Posted on February 3, 2006
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Dabble Aggregates Online Video
Dabble is a new website that allows you to aggregate online videos. Om Malik offers this description of Dabble from a recent post about the service.
Essentially you sign-up for the service and create a personal page, where you can aggregate videos you like from anywhere on the web. Dabble gives you a little script-let that creates a quick tag in the bookmark bar of your browser. See a video you like, say on You Tube or vSocial or Veoh, you hit Dabble It, and the video link is added to your video playlist. You can tag it, create micro-playlists and share it amongst your friend. Pretty much like you do on Flickr. When you want to watch a video, Dabble screen is split into two frames, and the second frame takes you to the page where the video is hosted.It sounds like a useful service. There is so much competition in web video these days it is difficult to say what companies will make it and which will not.
Posted on February 2, 2006
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Higher Fees for Heavy Bandwidth Users?
An article from MediaChannel.org says the Internet is probably going to become a toll road with high bandwidth users charged higher fees.Tom Copeland knows first-hand about the additional costs. Copeland is the chairman of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, and owns Eagle.ca, an ISP in Cobourg, Ont. Copeland purchases his high-speed services from a third party that charges him a per-customer rate as well as a per-gigabyte rate for what his customers download. Copeland says he has one customer who uses $250 of bandwidth monthly.That would be a step backwards toward the days when ISPs like AOL and Prodigy used to charge hourly usage fees except this time it would be based on bandwidth overages instead of hourly overages. Downloading large files like movies and games uses considerably more bandwidth than browsing the Web and reading email.
The problem isn't that Copeland has to deal with that one customer, it's that he has to maintain the bandwidth to deal with that high volume -- regardless of whether it's being used.
"Certainly the bandwidth costs do have an impact on our bottom line," he says.
The same issues impact carriers large and small. Telus spokesman Shawn Hall says three factors come into play: the size of the Internet pipe and access speed, amount of data being downloaded in a month and priority access during high-demand periods.
"The industry has to move toward different charges for Internet customers with diverse needs," he says.
Posted on February 1, 2006
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