Internet

One of Wikipedia's co-founders has just announced major changes to Wikia, the search engine he launched earlier this year. Jimmy Wales describes the relaunch as "a complete overhaul of everything", applying the Wikipedia philosophy of user ... involvement to search. This all means that users can add or delete the results appearing for any particular search. They can also rank the relevance of results, which will affect how high up in the list they appear. They'll also be able to edit the headline and description which appears alongside the web address for each result. This means people ... (view more)

It has long frustrated me that I can't saunter into my local Starbucks, buy my favourite over-priced java, slide into an over-sized comfy chair, and browse the Internet. Well, actually, I could, but I would have to pay around $30/month to get it. ... For most Starbucks customers, myself included, the price of a coffee is high enough. Independent coffee shops have had a long tradition of offering free Internet access to customers. The logic is that, if you give them Internet, they are likely to stay longer and buy more. Plus, independent owners are often less the boardroom, bottom-line driven ... (view more)

Were you amazed when tech blog Gizmodo broke the news about Dell's anticipated Mini-Inspiron laptop last recently? Turns out the "breaking news" may not have been all it was cracked up to be. On The Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog, ... Ben Worthen revealed last week that the whole thing was a calculated ploy by the folks at Dell. In late May, the blogosphere was ablaze with excitement after Gizmodo's Brian Lam posted first-look photographs of an ultra-portable, and possibly ultra-cheap, laptop by Dell. "I bumped into Michael Dell at All Things D after his interview, and he was nice ... (view more)

It's been revealed that one of Britain's leading websites spent more than $200 million of taxpayers' money last year, with commercial rivals complaining it's difficult to compete fairly. The website of the British Broadcasting Corporation ... (bbc.co.uk) is regularly among the most visited UK sites. Last December it attracted an estimated 16.5 million visitors, more than the average figures for sites such as eBay. The BBC is an independent broadcasting group which runs television and radio stations. Neither its stations nor its UK website carry any advertising and most of its funding comes from a ... (view more)

Facebook has unveiled a new look for profile pages in an effort to avoid the clutter that some analysts say hurts rival social networking site MySpace. The main change, which will take effect next month, is that pages will be reorganised into four ... tabbed 'folders' rather than having all the information in one long and unruly list. The four folders are: Feed, which will be the page that appears by default. This contains all the updates relevant to that person such as adding new friends, changing status updates or being tagged in a photograph. Info, which has all the profile details such as ... (view more)

Cisco has denied a human rights activist group's claims that the company is helping China's government censor access to websites among its population. The claims came after the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (a group which campaigns against ... Internet censorship and produces tools for getting round government firewalls) published a leaked slide from a 2002 Cisco presentation about potential business in China. The group claims the slide, which refers to China's Internet monitoring scheme being used to combat Falun Gong (an outlawed spiritual group the slide describes as "an evil cult"), ... (view more)

If you're a Wikipedia fan, you've probably noticed that the site's biggest drawback is its search facility. That's because the internal search tool appears to be largely based on early search engines, which simply measure how often and how ... prominently a particular phrase appears on any given page. While it's still a useful technique, such systems can feel quite ineffective now that we're used to more sophisticated searches such as Google, which takes into account how prestigious and respected each site is in the Internet community. And the Wikipedia system has a big drawback in that it doesn' ... (view more)

Comedian Stephen Colbert's claim to be the Greatest Living American has earned him the honour of Internet "Person Of The Year". The award is all part of the 'Webbys', an annual celebration run by the International Academy of Digital Arts and ... Sciences. Now in their 12th year, the awards cover dozens of categories from best home page to best real estate site. Colbert took the lead prize for running a successful 'Googlebombing' campaign. This involved asking viewers to create pages or post blogs describing him as the 'greatest living American'. Eventually, so many people did this that his ... (view more)

The movie download market got a big boost this week with two major players signalling an end to the gap between DVD and download release dates. Apple has completed deals with most of the large film groups, meaning they can now sell movies through ... the iTunes store on the same day DVDs hit shelves. New releases on iTunes will cost $14.99 while older titles will cost $9.99. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers is to axe its rental-only period for movie downloads. Internet users will now be able to buy a downloaded movie on the same day as it becomes available for online rental. Apple will likely use its ... (view more)

Google now has a secret weapon in the ongoing fight against irrelevant image results: VisualRank. VisualRank is basically an algorithm that blends image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighing and ranking images that look similar. ... You are sitting in front of a computer screen, relieved to have finished a lengthy term paper on wild animals. You decide that adding a picture of a jaguar would be a nifty way to give your title page some flare. You connect to an image search engine and type "jaguar" in the designated box. Suddenly, your screen fills with images of automobiles, ... (view more)