Category: Web, Tech & Design

Top Online Activities

According to a Pew Internet & American Life Project research, using a search engine is now the No. 2 activity for Web users.

The project also found that those likely to spend more time on search engines tend to be in their 30s and well-off.

Email remains the top internet activity for web users, and news is now the third most popular Web activity.

If I were to list my top 5 web activities, I guess they’d be:

1. News
2. Search
3. Email
4. Blogs
5. Chat

I almost get all my news off the net, find it easier to search for things on the net than bother to remember them, still have to use email although I’m starting to hate it, love blogging and reading blogs, and well it’s always nice to have the occasional chat with friends.

WSIS Reflections

So, as my previous post already told you all, I was at the Kram Palexpo, as it’s now being called, for the World Summit on the Information Society; One of the greatest events that have ever been held in my dear country Tunisia.

I’d like to talk about the organization a bit before I move on. I think Tunisia has done a really good job organizing this event. The badging process was really smooth and practical even though there were a lot of people. Security is really high. The Kram palexpo has been extended to cover the space needed for the summit, the ICT4ALL expo and all the parallel events. In short, I’m really proud of Tunisia’s organization of the summit.

Now back to the summit itself…
One of the main points everyone was talking about and wondering about going into the summit was Internet Governance; Will it remain in the hands of the US or will a world governing body take it over.
As expected, things will remain as they are with the US holding on to full control of the internet.

News reports chose to put it this way: “the delegates reached to an accord that leaves the supervision of domain names and other technical resources unchanged. They agreed instead to an evolutionary approach to Internet management.”
Which is a nice way to say that the US told everyone to buzz off and keep their hands off the internet.

As I said earlier, I took a quick tour of the ICT4ALL expo, which I will certainly have to go back to in these coming days.
I met a number of old friends (offline ones as well as online ones), as well as some new great and interesting people.

Now, some of you might be asking what I was doing there and how I got in.
Well, today was mainly part of my participation in a really exciting project called ReachOut which is organized by the British Council and CholertonShand, in partnership with the WSIS Youth Caucus.

The project’s idea is to encourage and enable open discussion between young people from Arab countries and the United Kingdom about issues raised by the United Nation’s World Summit on the Information Society.

So a group of really interesting people came together today from different Arab countries (Libya, Jordan, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia), and we got to know each other, visited the Kram palexpo together, and then went back to the British Council where we had a live video conference with another group of equally interesting people at Oxford University in England.

The topics discussed revolved around the different uses of ICT as a tool for development and its role in globalization, culture, dialogue, e-learning, …etc.
It was a very rich discussion that we all hope to build upon and create projects out of the ideas we’ve been brainstorming about.
The event was and will continue to be blogged live here.

I’ll be going back to the Kram palexpo tomorrow, and will hopefully meet some more interesting people that I’ve gotten to know online and get to talk more to the people I met today.
I will also be taking a lot more pictures and trying to get some good quality ones, as the ones I took today were rushed and ended up not so good.
Anyway, I put some online on my flickr here.

Quick Blog From WSIS

This is a live post from the Kram palexpo, where the World Summit on the Information Society is being held. I’m currently on a tour in the ICT4ALL section where countries and companies from all over the world have put up their shiny stands and presentations, scattered leaflets right and left…etc.

It’s been great meeting a number of old friends from other countries, as well as some new interesting people from all over the world.

There’s certainly a lot of interesting stuff and ideas floating around.

I’ll be taking some photos and writing more about this later, as I still have a lot to see and more people to meet.

Microsoft’s Free Desktop Applications

Although no specific plans have been made, it seems like executives within Microsoft are examining whether it makes sense to release ad-supported versions of products such as Works, Money, or even the Windows operating system itself.

This comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of Office Live and Windows Live, two products that will be ad-supported complements to its existing desktop software. Microsoft workers maintain that the software maker may be forced to go further if rivals launch ad-supported versions of popular programs such as PowerPoint.

I think it’s interesting that the world’s biggest software maker is thinking about this and slowly moving some of its software online.

It remains to be seen how far they go and how good a strategy this turns out to be in the end. It’s true that online advertising is more mature than it was a few years ago, but I’m still not so sure it’s mature enough to cover such ideas. Or maybe it’s ideas like this that will make it more mature by giving it more important and interesting properties to appear on.
I’m really interested in seeing how all this plays out.

Oracle To Offer Free Database

Oracle will soon be announcing the beta release of Oracle 10g Express Edition (Oracle Database XE), which will be generally available by the end of the year. It is targeted at students, small organizations and software vendors that could embed the Oracle database with an application.

The free edition will be limited in usage though. It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk memory and 1GB of memory.

The new low-end edition is aimed squarely at free and open-source alternatives to Oracle’s namesake database.

It feels good to see giant arrogant software makers crumble a bit under the pressure of open source software and make them more consumer friendly.

Flock

FlockYesterday, I downloaded the developer preview of Flock, the newest browser to hit the internet.

Many people must be thinking this is another browser too much, but well if they bring us something new and cool, why not?

The main point behind Flock is the attempt to integrate as many innovations and social apps into one place, the browser. From del.icio.us bookmarking and tagging, to Flickr integration, to blogging, to feed aggregation, …etc.

Flock is based on the open source Mozilla code base that was used for Firefox too, but it’s a bit faster than Firefox and has a cooler UI, although it comes with a bigger footprint.

I’m still playing around with it and not too sure if I’ll be switching from Firefox to it or not. I guess only time and how good the final release is will tell.

Yahoo! Podcasts

Yahoo today launched Yahoo! Podcasts, a new podcast search service, that will enable people to easily search podcasts through keywords, categories or user-generated topic tags.

The podcast site includes a central directory of shows indexed by Yahoo, community tools for ranking and recommending specific clips, and compatibility with many different types of multimedia software and wireless devices.

Searchers can listen to or subscribe to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for individual shows or episodes of programming or entire series.

Yahoo also plans to eventually offer tools that will enable people to create their own podcasts.

This is another big step for podcasting, which is something I’ve been thinking of getting into for a while. A lot of ideas and thoughts have been playing around in my head and I haven’t decided yet on what my podcast will be about.
Hopefully it’ll get off the ground soon though.