Category: Web, Tech & Design

No I don’t live on another planet, but I just got around to checking out A9 today.

A9 is Amazon’s new search engine. It’s based on Google, but they add other features that they think are interesting.

They actually provide 7 reasons why we should use A9. None of them really convince me though, especially saving my search history, how could that be a good thing?

I like the colours they used for this site though.

They also offer a toolbar which does what most search engine toolbars do from highlighting search words to linking to site info to blocking popups.
One thing this one has that the others don’t is a diary feature that lets you take notes on any web page you visit, and reference them whenever you visit that page, on any computer that you use.
Nice, but not something I’d actually need.

All in all, I don’t think it brings much more to the search engine scene, just more sponsored links and distraction from the actual search results.
I can also imagine how many sticky situations it’s history feature will put some people into 😛

Something I’m interested in though is the name. What does A9 stand for?
Does anyone have a clue?

Researchers have set a data transmission record over the Internet2’s high-speed backbone. Data sped between Los Angeles and Geneva 10,000 times faster than a home broadband connection.

The record, announced on Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Internet2 member meeting in Virginia, was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 kilometres at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second. This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The network link used to set the record reaches from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland.

Internet2 is a consortium of more than 200 universities working with industry and government to develop next-generation Internet technology.

The new record used IPv4, the current system for Internet addressing, and was set by members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Geneva-based CERN. The same team had previously set a new mark of 4 gigabits per second over the same distance using IPv6, the next generation of Internet protocols.

Now that’s perfect beauty, a sweet dream come true…

Dude, with a connection like that we could start tranferring people through the internet 😛

[More: ZDNet]

Yahoo! oops I mean Yippee or whatever other expression of joy 😛 Maybe even Gooooooooogle 😛

I finally got myself a GMail account.

It turns out my wife who uses blogger for her blog has been getting this message inviting her to join GMail for a couple of days whenever she logs in to her blogger account. Anyway as she’s not really interested she just ignored it.
She just told me about it a few minutes ago, and well I jumped on the occasion and created an email account there.
My email address is: meddah[AT]gmail.com.

I still need some time to discover and try all the features it has that I’ve read about here and there on the net, but it looks cool and I like it’s speed (not necessarily in page loading, but in the whole experience) and the fact that we don’t have to go to the server and back upon every click.

GMail lets you use search to find emails you want, so it drops the concept of folders and classification of emails that other providers have.
Maybe the most important and cool feature of GMail is the discussion based approach to email, in which emails are grouped by discussions and a discussion is pushed up in your inbox when you get a new email in it. It changes the way you look at and use email. I think it’ll be great.

I’m also redirecting an email account I have that receives 99.9% SPAM emails and only 0.1% good emails to it to test it’s anti-spam capabilities 😛

I will most probably write about GMail again soon when I test it more to give my opinion and share what I think of it.

A new technology called Clear Play for DVD Players will enable people to play any movie they desire without any worries about censoring any undesired scenes involving sex or violence, drugs, drinking or even bad language.

It costs 70 US Dollars and skips all undesired scenes and mutes undesired savage language.

How nice…
This is an indirect way of turning new hollywood movies into old style silent short films.
Come on, I mean with all the sex, violence and bad language in today’s movies, basically nothing would be left if all that were cut out?!

But what’s interesting is how this will work from a technological point of view.
How will these players recognize these scenes and the language in them?
I don’t believe a player can actually do it efficiently on it’s own. Children will still get a few lifetime shocks every now and then.

I think that for something like this to truly work, DVDs should provide help by using some way of marking the scenes that should be cut out or the language that should be silenced.
This can be as easy as throwing an xml file on the DVD with the scene start and end time marked, and whether it should be skipped or silenced.

Anyway, I’m interested in knowing how they’re doing it.
If anyone has any idea, please share.

[Via AquaCool]

Yesterday, I just remembered theGlobe.com, the place where I actually ventured into creating my first website and web presence.

I don’t know what reminded me of it, but I just was curious to know what they’ve done with themselves now.

theGlobe.com was one of the first big free email, free hosting, free chat, free everything portals that the internet became full of back in the days.
All I ever used was their free hosting, but they had a bunch of other interesting services too, or so they thought.
I remember my username was mmmmusic there. Ok it sucks, I know, but back then it seemed like a good name for a website by me “MMM” about Music.
Anyway, as always, I start with one thought and end up with another, so in the end I started my Tina Arena website there instead of making it a general music site, and I created a little website about Tunisia.
So effectively, the name sucked even more because it had nothing to do with the content.

Anyway, I was later lured to tripod and I never used theGlobe again. Only for occasionally hosting an mp3 or video file for my website.

Through the years I watched from a distance as theGlobe changed and mutated from form to form trying to find some logic and some way to make money out of offering free services.
When will they ever learn?

It seems as though they’re still at it.
Their latest reincarnation is called voiceglo which offers a free p2p internet telephony service.
Seems like an interesting service, but I just have this feeling that the cycle of reincanations is still far from over at theGlobe.

Kinja, a new web portal for aggregating and reading blogs has launched as a beta.

It enables the user to create a digest of his favourite blogs which is displayed like a blog itself and which the user can share with other people.

If you’re interested, here’s my current digest. I’m still working on it though, and not all my faves are in yet.

Google announced today a new service called Gmail that will offer a gigabyte of free email to it’s users.

The service is currently in it’s beta phase, but should be out soon.

Google plans to make money from the service by inserting advertisements into messages based in part on their content, effectively extending its AdWords program for presenting contextual ads in Web pages to e-mail.

More information on the service can be found here: Gmail.

Personally, I think this is an April Fool’s Day joke by Google even though there have been rumours about Google launching an email service for some time now.

Update:
It seems this is not an April Fool’s Day joke and that it’s really for real.
Google announced the service on April 1 to generate a lot of fuss, talk and speculation about it in order to inform as many people as possible.
Very smart guys those Google people.

Well with 1 GB of email space, I’ll sure be signing up when subscription is enabled. I think I might even stop using all my other webmail accounts too.
Who needs a few MBs when they can have 1 GB ?

After releasing local search lately, Google yesterday rolled out test versions of tools for personalized searches.

1. Personalized Search: this lets users define a personal profile by selecting from several categories, including news, science, business/industries, and computers. A search through the selected category can then be fine-tuned by using an on-screen slider tool to, for instance, bring more pertinent results to the top of the list.

2. Web Alerts: Similar to the already-in-place news alerts that Google offers, Web Alerts lets users enter a search string, and will then send a daily or weekly e-mail with links to newly discovered pages.
Google’s alerts will also include findings from its news pages and Froogle shopping site.

Google also debuted other enhancements to its general search engine, news engine and shopping engine Froogle.

I think this part of a push by all search engines towards personalizing search more and more in an effort to provide users with more useful results that are personalized to their interests and location.

Terra Lycos’ HotBot search site launched a search toolbar that includes the ability to search local hard-drive content and to read RSS feeds, reports eWeek.

The local-content search feature supports e-mail files from Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, Microsoft Office files, PDFs and most text-based file formats. The toolbar also lets users index their Web-page browsing history so they can search content from those sites.

Eventually, this is a space everyone in the search business will be trying to break into.
Microsoft will have a plus over the rest when Longhorn is released with search being a major point for them. But still Google have been making in-roads to the desktop with their Google Deskbar, which can in the foreseeable future turn to searching local files as well as online destinations.

Who actually wins the battles in the end depends on how good their technology is. But obviously with Windows being their own, Microsoft has the best chances, I think.

[via Online Blog]