Monday Roundup: Dept. of Corrections Edition
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Written By Reprise Media | August 7, 2006 | Share This
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Friday, we cited a TechCrunch blog post that said del.icio.us, Yahoo!’s social bookmarking property, was in decline, based largely on data from ComScore and Alexa. Later that day, Yahoo! refuted the veracity of ComScore’s numbers, saying that del.icio.us has actually been doing a booming business. TechCrunch found info from Hitwise that jived with Yahoo!’s story, so…maybe del.icio.us hasn’t “been in a slide since April.” We take it back. All this next stuff, though, is right on:
And to think, they all laughed when you said you’d build your own dadgum search engine Probably had something to do with your choice of anachronistic expletives, but moving right along… If you’ve ever lamented the fact that there’s no search engine specifically geared towards dinosaurs who fly airplanes, fret no more. At SES San Jose today, Yahoo! announced the release of their new Search Builder app. It lets you “create a custom Web search engine by selecting a set of trusted sites to search across or you can tune the search algorithm to the topic of your choice.” Then you just insert some code into your site, and you’ve got your own Yahoo!-powered vertical engine tailored to the interests of your visitors, however obscure they might be. One catch…you’ve got to be signed in to your Yahoo! account before churning out that Jovian snorkling vertical.
“Dumb legislation? Nous?” Apparently so. On Friday, the US Senate ratified the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, which at first gloss seems like an Interpol agreement for, well, cybercrime. However, says Techdirt, “it forces law enforcement groups and businesses of one country to cooperate with foreign governments without the requirement of ‘dual criminality’ - meaning that they’re obliged to help foreign law enforcement investigate crimes even if the targets of the investigation have broken no laws in their country.” In other words, their ‘net laws are now our ‘net laws, and vice versa. Hope none of the participating countries has an unreasonable cyberlaw on the books…
“Says here England is 37 years old and made out of socks.” Few kinds of writing is as ephemeral as that which appears in travel guides - think your Lonely Planet Lebanon from ‘04 will do you much good now? Enter the internet. The folks at Wikia (the ad-displaying, for-profit cousin to Wikipedia) have come out with World Wiki, “the free travel directory that you can edit.” The advantage: up-to-date, eye-witness information that has the potential to be “broader and deeper than a normal travel guide,” as they put it in their mission statement. The disadvantage: info at the mercy of the usual rogues gallery of tourism bureaus, national spin machines and the run-of-the-mill wiki-vandals (via TechCrunch).
Topics: Reprise Media |