Tech for Lunch!

I am an absolute music lover, and since music and technology very often go hand in hand, the Internet is an excellent source of information and new music. I read a quick article that shows which sites are the destinations most often visited to get band information. The order usually goes something like this:

1. The band’s official website
2. Wikipedia entry
3. Myspace profile

This isn’t very surprising to anyone who has visited wikipedia pages looking for information on a specific band or style of music. Since the information on Wikipedia is generated by users, the level of detail is usually far superior to any reviews site you’ll find online. The band’s official website usually gives a good biography and discography, but sometimes getting the entire band history, bands of the same style, and even anecdotes on a band will get you much further.

Although there are currently many more artist pages on Myspace than on Wikipedia, this could be something to start looking into for them. the recent statistics show that users are more interested in getting accurate and detailed information on the bands they love than just the surface/marketing information. I am most certainly in that boat. Myspace pages are not my first destination when I look for band information and Wikipedia has so far been an excellent source of information to find related genres and bands.

You should probably add Wikipedia to your list of destinations if it isn’t on there already - Even for music information!

When it comes to browsers, I’m sort of split between the two sides: Internet Explorer or Firefox. I think Internet Explorer 6 was a pretty decent browser because it’s fast and doesn’t use too much system resources, but it’s certainly not the most compliant out there. This is probably the reason why so many people have stuck to it and decided not to upgrade to the dreaded Internet Explorer 7. That IE7 is a real mess of a browser and, although it may do the job for regular home browsing, it’s definitely not compliant and has the highest crash and bug causing record of them all. So the best browser, if I stick only to the major players, would have to be Firefox 2. FF2 is a stable, robust and 100% compliant browser and has the “plugins” capability which allows it to add any of the features that competitors can come up with in a matter of days.

Firefox 3 has been in the works for a while now and the company openly discouraged regular users from trying it stating that it was a beta that should be tested only by developers. This week however, that speech has changed and you can now give this version a try if you can’t wait for the final build which should become publicly available sometime later this year. Mozilla said that their website should be updated very soon to reflect this information and perhaps give some more details about the release dates.

Firefox 3 is now in it’s 4th round of beta testing and the fifth (and possibly final) round is due to begin in the coming weeks. This round is mostly for aesthetics, visuals and minor bugs, but all the features should remain as they are now. The most interesting improvement to this version for me will definitely be the memory management. Firefox 3 is supposed to use less memory than the previous version - a much needed improvement.

I will certainly give Firefox 3 a go and let you know what I find very soon. I can never wait for final versions before I try something!

We had an article not very long ago that discussed the importance of introducing your kids to technology at a young age. Parents know very well the importance of their kids’ safety on the internet and products aimed at this task have existed for quite some time. The inherent problem with many of these products, is simply the way that they approach the subject. Usually, a program gets installed on the computer and filters content and destinations using a blacklist which is updated by the product maker. But the internet and its “kid-unfriendly” content grow much faster for these filters to keep up appropriately.

This is where the newly launched Kidzui.com comes in:

“Built just for kids, the revolutionary new KidZui browser makes surfing the Internet fun and engaging for kids from ages 3-12. KidZui has all the sites and games your kids love and tons more. With the KidZui browser, your have access to over 500,000 websites, pictures and videos.” The idea behind this software, and the reason why it presents itself as being different and much more efficient than the others, is that instead of blacklisting the bad websites, it blocks everything and whitelists the good content. Everything gets reviewed by parents and teachers who are on the staff and they are constantly reviewing more based on requests, browser searches and current subjects. Everything is also categorized by age and by topic so kids can just browse through what’s available easily. Parents have the option of allowing sites which are not normally allowed by Kidzui and can also blacklist some sites which are approved by Kidzui if they need to. This could be useful if your kid is using a specific site too much, for example.

Here is a look at the interface which is very nicely done and colorful for kids to enjoy and keep coming back to. They should feel right at home and the browser gives them the opportunity to socialize with other kids who are using kidzui as well. Everything gets ranked and voted on by the kids so the relevant and most popular content will end up on the start page, making them easier to find and get to. Kids can set their own avatars and get points for being online and doing different things so they can show their personality to the world in a safe environment. They can share content with other kids, but no chat is enabled to keep things clean.

The introductory price is $4.95/month, but even at the regular price of $9.95/month, it’s a pretty good deal if you don’t want to have to check your kid’s every move on the internet. This is the only system that I know of which properly enables a safe environment for kids online. Kidzui comes in a PC and a Mac version.  Keep in mind that a lot of the competition is free so you may want to take a look at some other products if a monthly price is not your thing.

We have been hearing about Hulu for quite a long time now and we had yet to see what is had to offer.  Well, the site is now officially opened to the public, as of March 12th 2008.  They had been in beta since October 2007.

Hulu’s ambitious and never-ending mission is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premium content when, where and how you want it. We hope to provide you with the web’s most comprehensive selection from more than 50 content providers including FOX, NBC, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros., Lionsgate, and more to deliver premium programming across all genres and formats, television shows, feature films, and clips. Watch full-length episodes of current primetime TV shows such as The Simpsons and The Office the morning after they air, classics like Miami Vice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and clips from Saturday Night Live, Nip/Tuck, and others. Hulu also offers full-length feature films like The Usual Suspects, Ice Age, Three Amigos!, and The Big Lebowski as well as clips from films such as Napoleon Dynamite, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Devil Wears Prada and many more. Hulu is free and ad-supported — available anytime in the U.S

Just like many other web sites that offer services of this sort, the content is only available to US audiences.  That’s an easy problem to get around if you want to set yourself up with a proxy server.  I have tested this succesfully.

Hulu looks very interesting and I hope their content becomes available to a wider audience, but in the mean time, what they have to offer may be the beginning of a new wave of media content availability on the internet.  We’ll need to wait a little bit to see how much engagement they will get from viewers and if the studios will continue providing updated content to keep viewers coming.

There is a rumor running wild right now that Facebook will launch their own integrated chat client into the very famous web site. They are currently testing the client to see how it all fits into the interface and get the kinks out of the way as much as possible. The bulk of the IM Client is built on the popular Jabber engine and this should make it easily compatible with a bunch of other applications and help it grow popular very quickly.

The interface to the Facebook IM will be integrated directly into the user’s Facebook page and allow them to chat with all their friends on the site. I personally like the idea because I do not have all my Facebook friends on my MSN (or any other client for that matter) and this allows you to chat with people you might not have been able to reach previously. I know for a fact that many of my contacts on facebook don’t even use any other IM Clients and this will make my life easier (and make me lazier) when I want to reach them. Hopefully, there will be a good presence awareness mecanism built into it. I tried a chat client for facebook previously which did not do such a great job at that.

This is some really cool news for those of us who like to keep close with their social networks, but it could be a bit of bad news for other, already existing chat clients which are built on the Facebook framework. I don’t think the blow will be that severe, because there are so many chat clients out there, that war has not been won by anyone yet. I’m sure some other client will come by that will have all the features we wish were in the Facebook one.. and then Facebook will put out a version which will integrate all those nifty features :-)

I recently came across an article that discussed the possibility for the major players in targeted ads services to be able to display an ad with your name on it. It’s actually a pretty interesting matter because it ties in very closely to our privacy. The actual subject was all the information that gets gathered on each one of us while we are online. At first you think that the ads you see are only contextual, meaning that they match the content you are looking at on a certain page. But it turns out that the big players out there are capable, and have becoming increasingly good at spotting the patterns in your online behavior, personal tastes and interests. They can track all these things because they put the systems in place. They give you opportunities, which you can’t resist, to give them all the information they need to track you at all times.

Rest assured, if you are banking or doing other personal matters, they do not “see” all that in detail, but they do know you are somewhere on a financial service and probably also can match some kind of personal data to it to be closer to identifying you. Naturally, there are privacy policies and rules, usually even put in place by these companies, to prevent them from actually using that information directly. AOL and Yahoo!, for example, wouldn’t really want to do that just yet, but they say they have the technology to do it or something very close. Google say that they might be able to do it, but since their model is based on what I described above, (targeted ads based on page content) they aren’t aiming at that just yet. However, they do not have a policy against it.

Microsoft say that they have all the information to be able to do it, but they use a special algorithm to determine what ads get served based on demographics, content, etc.. and once that algorithm has gone through, they have no way of tracking your personal information back to you. The caveat here is that Microsoft does not consider your nickname or your first name as “personal information” ;-)

There have been companies who have already asked for this kind of advertising and that is why I don’t think I’ll be too surprised on the day I see my name or nickname appear on the ads I see on every page I visit. The debate on privacy is always a sticky one, and I’m sure we’re going to here about this some more in the future.

I’m always interested in seeing the incredible amounts of traffic that get generated by certain sites. Google’s numbers are incredible, but they are certainly not the only ones to get huge traffic these days. Social networking sites are a very popular trend. They have been around for a few years and are still going strong. Compete released the rankings for the top social networking sites for February 2008:

Obviously, MySpace is still the leader in this segment and Facebook is rapidly gaining ground. The interesting thing is the sheer number of unique visitors and monthly visits to these sites. 65 million unique visitors and close to 1 billion visits on MySpace pages during a single month is nothing short of impressive.

The next most interesting point in this figure is the growth that has occured for certain sites. It appears that niche sites are the ones that are grabbing user’s interest on a growing basis. Fubar and Cafemom are good examples of niche sites. Fubar is billed as the “first online bar” and cafemom is directly targeted at, get ready for this one: moms. Other great movers are sites which add a technology touch to the whole social networking fad. Twitter is probably the best example of such a site.

I’m very curious to see what the next big thing will be after Social Networking.

Yesterday, I looked at the new Internet Explorer 8, Beta 1 and mostly discussed the internal behavior and rendering capabilities. Today, I wanted to show you what some of the new features are in more detail. There are quite a few improvements, but many of them are “Features” that should have been there a long time ago or were already implemented in other browsers such as firefox. Let’s start with the two most important ones: Webslices and Activities.

Activities add a contextual (usually a right-click) access to an external service, based on what page you are on or the selected text. Typically, these services will allow you to LOOK-UP information, such as a map, news on that subject or a dictionary definition, or SEND information to a blog, email or facebook profile etc. take a look at the screenshot I made in which I highlighted a postal code and got the map for it. You can move around in that pop-up map just like any other map. Notice the domain name(netfix.ca) is in bold in the address bar. That is also a new security feature to allow users to quickly identify which domain they are on to protect against phishing, typos and misguiding URLs.

Webslices are done by website developers who will make a portion (or a slice) of a page available to users. Users can subscribe to that slice and get updates regularly from wherever they are on the internet. When you subscribe to a slice, it gets added at the top of your IE8 window and turns bold when an update is available. You could use webslices to get weather, ebay auctions, news feeds, facebook friends statuses, stumbleupon buzz etc.. Basically anything that gets updated so you don’t have to navigate to that page everytime you want to see what’s going on. I think webslices will be like sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista and we will see slices for just about anything eventually. That’s probably one of the reasons why IE8 beta 1 is for “developers” ;-) Notice in this screenshot that the domain is also in bold in the address bar.

So this covers the two main new features of IE8, but another one that is worth mentioning for those of us who had to wait for it, is the developer tools. You can now debug HTML, JScript and CSS directly in the browser. Tools like these have been a part of firefox for quite some time, but hey.. better late than never! Most of the other improvements are for stability and speed. Rendering of HTML and CSS as well as JScript should now be a bit faster with IE8 and more improvements are set to be released with the next betas. We’ll just have to wait and see what the community’s feedback will be and what Microsoft will do about it.