Dial DIR-ECT-IONS

A group of experts in the field of voice user interfaces, speech-recognition technology and navigation have banded together to create a voice-activated system, called DIR-ECT-IONS, that provides mobile phone users with driving directions and store location services via SMS/text messages

Second Life Loses Gamblers But Finds God

An Italian Catholic priest is urging the faithful use the virtual world to get in touch with reality.

Wikipedia founder plans open-source search engine

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the world's biggest community-written online encyclopedia, announced Friday that he had taken a small step toward his next big goal: a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google.

Check out Jimmy Wales other site:

Twerq: Yet, another search engine



TWERQ is a robust tabbed search interface integrated directly into the web page. This uses less system memory and offers you the advantage of containing all searches inside one browser window or tab. You can refine and search for multiple search terms simultaneously with each set of results displaying in it's own tab. This allows you to instantly flip through each set of results and quickly identify which search term is most relevant.

Web-based Instant Messaging is Growing

Who needs downloads? Not instant-messaging fans, apparently, according to Nielsen NetRatings. The online division of the legendary statistics-crunching company just released a study that tracks the fastest-growing instant-messaging software products from August 2006 to June 2007, and the results indicate that Web-based is the way to go.

Guidelines for Avatars

IBM Corp. will publish official guidelines this week for more than 5,000 employees who inhabit Second Life and other virtual worlds where Big Blue hosts meetings with clients and partners.

Best Business Ideas In The World

Business 2.0 magazine presents its fourth annual look at great business ideas from outside the United States. (more)

Global connections

With an interactive map, you can see a country-by-country breakdown of Web usage across the globe. (more)

Where are they now?

Last year Business 2.0 identified 23 really cool Web 2.0 companies outside the United States. Here are 10 that have become hits. (more)

Podcast Spot



Podcast Spot is the best place to get conversational with podcasting! Create a podcast and share it with your friends, family, or even the world.

8 Internet TV apps in 8 weeks

From Joost, Miro, to Zattoo. Is it time to ditch your cable TV subscription?

Minisodes: Watch an hour of TV in 6 minutes

Classic TV shows normally an hour or 30 minutes are cut down to four to six minutes on the Minisode Network.

That is, who among us hasn't felt the double-edged sword of our media age: So much video from TV, DVDs, the Internet and even cell phones ... but too little time to watch it all?

The Minisode Network has a solution.

Launched in June as a broadband channel on the MySpace site, it offers, for our streaming pleasure, episodes of vintage Sony Pictures Television series like "Silver Spoons," "Starsky & Hutch," "Diff'rent Strokes" and even Ricki Lake's talk show.

But the, um, sparkling array of programs isn't what makes the Minisode Network a cultural godsend. It's the convenient packaging: each episode has been pruned from its original half-hour or hour length down to a handy running time of somewhere between four and six minutes!

Mashable

With in excess of 4.5 million monthly pageviews, Mashable is the world's largest blog on social networking.

What does that mean? It means sites like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, hi5, Piczo, Bebo and YouTube.

If you're launching a new social network, or a tool that plugs into MySpace and the rest, Mashable wants to know!

Mashable is written by Pete Cashmore, a new media expert. It ranks among the Top 100 blogs worldwide.

Adobe AIR Gradually Graining

Adobe Systems (ADBE) has been working on an ambitious new way to view Internet content without launching a browser window, and there are encouraging signs that Web developers might latch onto it. The platform, Adobe AIR, is sort of like desktop widgets on steroids. Read more here.

(Here are a few of the apps Adobe is showcasing.)

Web Information Transit Map

Are you feeling lost in the Web 2.0 world? Are your social networking skillz a little rusty? Don't worry, the Information Architects Japan folks can help you find your way. Click on the map below to download a readable version or to view a clickable online version.

The YouTube-ification of politics: Candidates losing control

Read how YouTube has changed the face of politics, perhaps forever.

New online maps [map mashups] for homebuyers

New Web services use Google Maps to help home hunters combine stats on everything from traffic congestion to school-district budgets. Business 2.0 Magazine reports.

Apple Steve Jobs Top Powergeek

Steve Jobs was crowned the king of the online music revolution by Blender, topping a list of the 25 most influential people in Web music. "The iTunes Store and the iPod have done more to change the way people listen to music than anything since the CD, and maybe since the sound recording," Blender's editor-in-chief said. full story

When Web 2.0 Meets Information Infrastructure

Ever had that needle in a haystack feeling when looking for your own personal information or scouring for corporate data or files?

The Next Wave: Yelp

By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune senior editor

Yelp is a hot web startup with two ambitions: to have fun and to seize as much of the $100 billion local ad market as possible. (more)

The Next Small Thing

The Web Goes Wild Over Widgets

BusinessWeek writer Catherine Holahan explains what a widget is. She shows how widgets make their way across the Web and appear on users' blogs and social network pages.

The Next Small Thing

Bits of code called widgets open the door to viral marketing across social networks. Silicon Valley sees them as a Web revolution in the making

• Slide Show: The Wizards of Widgets

Living in a Widgetized World

With widgets, any page on the Web can be your point of sale. Marketers met at a conference to figure out how to spread them far and wide

Thumbstrips

ThumbStrips is a Firefox plugin that records a filmstrip of screenshots.

The plugin comes from Intuit’s Innovation Lab, an Intuit R&D unit headed by former General Manager of Quicken Roy Rosin.

ThumbStrips records a filmstrip of a users browsing session to make it easy to return to and share pages a user has visited. The plugin was developed after observing people struggling with the back button and history lists. A sharing component supports collaborative search or people doing research projects, trying to share with each other where they’ve been and what they found there.