User-generated ranking systems are increasingly important these days. Would you buy something on eBay without checking the seller’s feedback rating? Would you rent an unfamiliar movie at Netflix without glancing at the number of stars it earned from Netflix members? Driven by the dogma of Web 2.0, ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

School bullies probably date back to the origin of schooling children. Some kids will always be bigger or more aggressive than most of the class, and will choose to torment others. The concept of cyberbullying is new, though - the idea of using website postings to harrass other ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

Google is rolling out a major upgrade of Google Apps that seems squarely aimed at the business market. On Thursday, Google will introduce a Google Apps version that, for a fee, offers guaranteed uptime, IT management tools, technical support, increased e-mail storage, and integration with the Docs & Spreadsheets word processing ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

Anyone who operates an online community knows how quickly flame wars develop. Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, has written an interesting article for the New York Times: Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior. The hallmark of the flame is precisely ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

Lots of homes have routers these days, most of them combination wireless access points, switches, and routers that allow multiple computers to easily share an internet connection. Setup for these devices is easy enough that even a non-techie can usually do it. It turns out that one step ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

Toyota’s fledgling NASCAR entry crashed and burned, figuratively speaking. In the midst of preparations for the Daytona 500, Michael Waltrip, owner of the new NASCAR team that is racing three Toyota Camrys, was tagged by NASCAR officials in what is probably the organizations biggest cheating scandal. Four other ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

OK, that headline isn’t true… but Google might want to think about investing in cheap power capacity. According to reports like IT-related energy consumption doubles, demand for electricity to power servers is growing rapidly: The amount of electricity consumed by computer servers has doubled in five years and will increase ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

Yahoo has launched its Pipes tool, and at first glance it’s a bit mind-boggling. In short, Yahoo Pipes lets you combine data from both similar and dissimilar sources, process it, filter it, and output it. One can combine feeds, data from sites like Flickr and deli.cio.us, Google Base ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

We see a lot of “virtual” business these days - Web meetings, office workers who work from home some or all of the time, and even virtual companies with no permanent office. As bandwidth gets cheaper and more available, and as more tools become Web-based rather than hosted on ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post

The 2005 Super Bowl showed GoDaddy to be a skillful marketer. A combination of well-publicized ad rejections, a sexy, funny ad that aired only once, and Internet-only versions of their ads combined to create a cost-effective win. For the cost of one Super Bowl ad (their second slot ...

Continue reading »

Tweet This Post