Tech for Lunch!

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.

Well, it certainly looks like HD-DVD will not be the standard for High-Definition media releases.  Paramount announced (about a week ago) that they will be dumping HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray and the scheduled releases are getting harder to find.  Paramount’s decision comes after Toshiba announced that they would no longer manufacture HD-DVD equipement.  Toshiba was the main driving force behind the standard.  The fact that Sony has integrated the Blu-Ray technology in the Playstation 3 has probably played a role in these decisions.

On a technical stand point, there are several differences between the two formats and there was a format war, just like for Beta vs. VHS, to determine which would be the format of choice for consumers.  The main difference between the two is that HD-DVD can hold a maximum of 30gb of data, while Blu-Ray can hold 50gb.  There are others, but nothing that is really noticeable by consumers.  Personally, I had not made a choice yet, so I’m happy there is a standard on which we can rely from now on.  What this means for consumers is that we will be certain that all movies will be coming out on a single format rather than on having to “hope” your favorite movie comes out on the format that you have a player for.

The computing side is affected by these decisions just the same.  Computer users also had to make a choice on one format or the other, but not anymore.  I’m happy to see that we should be able to store 50gb on a single disc eventually.  We will have to wait for prices to go down a little bit, but I think we can expect the same chain of events as we saw for the DVD format.  Sooner or later, we will just take it for granted and not even worry about it anymore.

In the midst of a Microsoft/Yahoo! battle about the software giant’s wish to takeover, Yahoo! is still moving along as planned on many projects. One of these projects is the new Yahoo! Buzz, which is currently in a testing phase.

“Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web. A story’s Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more. Stories with the highest Buzz Score may be displayed on the Yahoo! homepage.“

The idea behind Yahoo! Buzz is nothing new, but combined with the power of one of the most visited sites on the internet, this could be extremely beneficial for users and advertisers alike. Just like Techorati or Digg, Buzz is user-driven and uses visitors opinions, search terms and reviews to judge on the importance and relevance of content. Once an item such as a blog post or a news article has become reviewed as interesting to a majority, it is promoted to the front page for everyone to see.

As you can imagine, this is a very powerful way of finding relevant content quickly and gives users the possibility to make any kind of article, video or blog become top rated. Yahoo! says that this is one of many moves that can be expected to open up the Yahoo! search results and the site for third-party developers. This makes all the Yahoo! search results and it’s affiliated sites more social and relevant for their users.

The other very interesting facet to this type of sites is for advertisers. This makes targeted advertising a lot more interesting and much more reliable because they can see near real-time what it being searched for or voted on the most. I will take a look at Yahoo’s innovations in advertising in a later post.

Yahoo! Buzz is already available online even though it is in testing. You can take a look on Yahoo! Buzz.

Most children will be introduced to a computer before age 3 which can be a very good thing. Many games offer important developmental skills such as listening, sequencing, visual memory and more! Some games encourage children to learn colours, shapes, counting, differences, letters, numbers, music/songs, patterns and sequences, phonics and vocabulary. Obviously the help of an adult is required. These types of games are available both in French and English. I have 3 girls under the age of 4 and they very much enjoy playing on the computer, whether it be to color or learn.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• Jump Ahead Preschool
• Kea Coloring Book (which is free)
• Caillou: Four Seasons of Fun
• The “Lapin Malin” series
• And there are many more out there worth checking out.

Try them out with your children and let me know what you think and if you see an improvment with your child’s development. It will certainly give you an opportunity to sit down with your kids and have fun playing on the computer at the same time.

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