Front news - Matoumba

Build your own Ferrari F430

First pics of emGTA: The Lost and Damned/em released

need some help/info

Daniel Holbach: The HoF

Planet Ubuntu

- 40 minutes ago

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/dholbach.png alt= plt;insert #8216;The Hoff#8217; joke heregt;/p pa href=http://hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com/img class=alignnone src=http://hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com/images/rockstar.png alt= width=224 height=124 //a/p pI#8217;m very pleased the stronga href=http://hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu Hall of Fame/a/strong is a href=http://www.jonobacon.org/?p=1407announced/a./p pIt#8217;s been great to work with a href=http://www.kryogenix.org/days/Stuart Langridge/a: he#8217;s a rockstar himself and his Web skills are simply phenomenal; on top of that he didn#8217;t even mind my stupid questions. img src=http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif alt=:-) class=wp-smiley / /p pThe HoF is great in many ways: it serves as a window into many parts of our community: translations, bug work, development, work with upstream, but also showcases dedicated members of our community in areas that are probably less measurable./p pa href=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SponsorshipProcessSponsoring/a of course is important to me as it#8217;s THE way to get involved in Ubuntu Development and it#8217;s great we have so many people dedicated to help starting others to get involved./p pIt#8217;s been great to get so much feedback already. I have a big bunch of new ideas already - expect new great things soon. img src=http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif alt=:-) class=wp-smiley / /p pThe featured contributor was a great idea and I#8217;m also happy that so many took the opportunity to thank a href=http://hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com/?feature=nick-aliNick Ali/a. He absolutely deserved to be on there. (Did you find the #8220;Thank Nick!#8221; link and clickt it already?)/p pTo stay in the spirit of thanking: thanks everybody for great ideas, thanks Ken Wimer for the great #8216;rockstar#8217; button, thanks Markus Korn for helping me with launchpadlib and everybody else. img src=http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif alt=:-) class=wp-smiley / /p pIf you have any suggestions for the next #8220;featured contributor#8221; feel free to mail Jorge, Jono or me with your suggestion and a description why./p p#8211;/p pMy 5 today: #a href=https://launchpad.net/bugs/300483300483/a (rrdtool), #a href=https://launchpad.net/bugs/300532300532/a (glunarclock), #a href=https://launchpad.net/bugs/261017261017/a (psad), #a href=https://launchpad.net/bugs/300547300547/a (modconf), #a href=https://launchpad.net/bugs/289449289449/a (ubuntu)/p pDo 5 a day - every day! a href=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Dayhttps://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day/a/p

Add a comment

spirit,smilies,showcases,blog,ubuntu

Catherine de Médicis nue

wholesale ugg/supra/ato/air yeezy/gucci/puma/af1/bape/jordan/dunk/coach/women sneaker

No Surprise Here: Telco Employees Access Obama's Phone Records

Techdirt

- 47 minutes ago

We've pointed out plenty of times in the past, that any time there's a database of info out there, the data is almost certain to be abused. The latest example? Employees at Verizon Wireless a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10104997-83.html?part=rss#038;subj=news#038;tag=2547-1_3-0-20" target="_new"improperly accessed Barack Obama's phone records/a to see who he was calling and who was calling him. The access was just for his regular phone used for voice communications -- not his Blackberry. Also, the employees had no access to his voicemail or anything -- just calling records. At least Verizon Wireless came out and admitted this, rather than covering it up, but it's yet another reminder, that data will be abused. br /br / And, of course, Obama isn't the only one facing such an issue. Reader lavi d writes in to point out that a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081121/ap_on_re_us/joe_the_plumber_records"eighteen background checks/a were conducted in Ohio by gov't employees on Joe Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber. Eight of those background checks were done for no legitimate reason, including one at the request of the director of Ohio's Department of Job and Family Services (who has now been suspended). We had a href="http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081027/0417052654.shtml"mentioned/a three such cases earlier, but even more have since come to light.br /br /a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081121/0112582907.shtml"Permalink/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20081121/0112582907.shtml#comments"Comments/a | a href="http://techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20081121/0112582907op=sharethis"Email This Story/abr / br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=3f5e8fedb6ca93ec6afa88812957f412p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=3f5e8fedb6ca93ec6afa88812957f412p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=3f5e8fedb6ca93ec6afa88812957f412" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?a=9f6Cn"img src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~f/techdirt/feed?i=9f6Cn" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.techdirt.com/~r/techdirt/feed/~4/460665995" height="1" width="1"/

Add a comment

email,checks,news yahoo,yahoo,borders

Google Now Lets You Upvote Results and Comment On Them

Google Blogoscoped

- 49 minutes ago

Google has gone live with a big change to their result pages, at least for those of you who are logged in (if you’re not seeing it yet, it may still be rolled out for your Google Account). It’s called SearchWiki, and lets you edit the position of the results you’re getting, and add comments to them. SearchWiki was in experimental stage for some time now.

Specifically, you’ll be seeing three icons accompanying results, and further options below the listing:

Up vote: An up arrow, similar in functionality to what you may know from social sites like Reddit or Digg. Clicking it will turn the icon green and move this specific result up one position. Once upped, a down arrow appears as well, which will trigger the result to fly to the bottom of the listing. (At his blog, Ionut Alex. Chitu mentions: “[Y]our changes are available only when you repeat the query and, in some cases, for similar queries (e.g.: [google.com] in addition to [google]). That means you can’t remove a web page or a domain from all search results”.)
Remove: An X icon, which will make the result disappear in an animated puff. It won’t be completely gone for you, though; at the bottom of the page you’ll see the note “You have removed results from this page” with an option to hide them altogether, or restore them.
Comment: A Speech Bubble icon which lets you make a comment on the result. The comment will be public, Google disclaims. Once saved, you’ll still be able to edit or delete your comment later on. Others are now able to upvote your comment or flag it as innapropriate, like on the “All SearchWiki notes” page. (That page also serves as the next best thing to see the pure vote-based ranking.)
Add result: The plus icon is shown below the organic results, and it lets you add any URL at all to your result page.

Now, when you change something, you won’t immediately shift around the page for others. For now Google says it’s a mere customization on your end. (You can see all your customizations in one place at the “My SearchWiki notes” page.) However, Google indicates in statements provided to Search Engine Land that they won’t completely rule out the possibility of this impacting everyone’s rankings in the future:

<<I asked what would happen if 10,000 people all added “Matt McGee’s Widget Page” to their own results for the phrase [widget]. “We’re always looking at user data as a signal,” [Google’s Cedric Dupont] says. And in a situation like that? “We’re not closing any doors.">>

Also, once a result was upvoted, you’ll be seeing who else voted for this result, though it will only show compactly as e.g. “ [up] 9 11 - Picked by Rat, Mr, yinan.wu, and others.” This may add a more social feeling to search results. (Google calls it a “community” in their announcement post on this, but we need to keep in mind how diverse this group is, even when they might have stumbled upon the same pages in results.) Note this field won’t show your full email address to others, but your nickname, which you can change on your account profile page.

It’s probably also not a huge jump to imagine that Google could one day extract keywords from the comments of a particular result to aid them in their results selection for exotic queries. And as opposed to a web index, which at least in theory anyone with enough servers could build, the upvotes, hides and comment data is something Google will exclusively own thanks to their (massive) user base.

Now, all these new features come with a certain amount of clutter, naturally. Ionut in the comments remarks, “Google should provide a separate wiki mode (placing a link like ’edit search results’, ’change the results’) that adds voting buttons, commenting options.” I guess doing so wouldn’t get as many people to participate though – which would decrease the valuable crowd intelligence Google may tap with this move.

[Thanks Russell O., Tony and Oradzuza!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Now Lets You Upvote Results and Commen ... | Comments]

[Advertisement] Find the right keywords for your campaigns at KeywordDiscovery.com

Add a comment

repeats,email,philipps,blog,search engines

iPhone for JavaScript Developers

wholesale Dunk,Adidas, Puma,Prada, Chanel,Gucci,Lacoste,LV

wholesale Chanel,PATEK PHILIP,ROLEX,OMEGA,Breitling,glashiittee,taghever Brand watch

Healing Health Care

Shoot The Messenger

'Pyramid Banks' Come To Colombia

Pfizer's Nigerian Nightmare

Detroit Plans A Plan

1 job, 11 interviewers

Does the 2.2 update work with a 2G unlocked iphone?

Verizon suspends staff for ogling Obama's phone bill

Apple updates iPhone firmware

iPhone 3G Shortciruit

TechCrunch Euro Tour 08: Yes, even Belgium has startups

TechCrunch

- 59 minutes ago

A couple of weeks ago I headed over to Belgium as part of my ongoing TechCrunch Euro Tour, to get a taste of the local web/mobile entrepreneur community (BTW, come to the London and Helsinki events soon). I hooked-up with another TechCrunch writer, Robin Wauters, who had kindly arranged a TechCrunch Belgium meetup in Gent. Gent is quickly becoming one of the main places to startup in that country, as it’s a short drive from Brussels (which has the main airport and the excellent Eurostar), but Gent is cheaper, somewhat prettier and is a big university city with lots more potential talent to draw from. The startups each pitched their wares and here’s what I found. [Apologies for the delay in posting this, I've been visiting tech companies in China, of which, more later]. Thanks to Bart Claeys for the photos, below.

Adhese Control
Adhese has come up with a way of tracking the rich media ad campaigns increasingly littering the Web. It can tell you where your Flash creative is appearing and what people are doing with it, even if it goes through a network like Doubleclick. It will report impressions and clicks and interations like numbers of mouse rollovers etc. Interestingly, it will also track Flex / Air apps. You just add a small line of code to the banner or app. The cost is impression based. [Crunchbase]

Attentio
In May this year Attentio, which develops technology in the social media analytics (sentiment, topics, & brand profiles), won â‚¬1.5Million in backing. Their showcase blog trend search Trendpedia.com is very interesting - here’s TechCrunch’s trend graph. Their Attentio Brand Dashboard (SaaS) is sold through advertising and PR agencies which use it for issue detection, influencer identification, marketing ROI and basically to understand their word of mouth brand. Their main differentiation is being able to do this across European languages and sources. The average selling price is Euro 15-25,000 per year. They have deals now with the likes of Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and Lexus. It’s an interesting market - similar trend tracker Umbria was acquired and TNS bought Cymfony. According to Gartner the “Social media analysis” industry will be worth $3bn by 2013. But of course, at the end of the day this is still anapp that has to be sold by humans, rather than scale virally across the web. [Crunchbase]

Casius.com
Casius is a service aimed at home owners who want to find trusted tradesmen, but they’ve been a long time coming. They raised EUR4m in 2000-2004 but burnt the lot, did an MBO in 2005 and since then are generating EUR6m per year in revenue from their service in Belgium. Tradespeople pay to go on the service and are matched to customers, not unline the UK-based MyBuilder.com. I rather wonder why it’s taken them so long to really get going and question the strategy of “getting big in Belgium first,” but the model seems predicated on local salesforces selling the service into the trade. That doesn’t scale too fast. And I hate their .com home page. Village People anyone? [Crunchbase]

Gloweme
They want to launch an MVNO in Belgium which is basically Blyk but with mobile web adverts instead of SMS. Blyk, if you recall, offers a very cheap mobile service aimed at the youth market in return for their opting into targetting advertising offers and campaigns. Gloweme think it can pull off a virtually free MVNO by allowing users to market the service to their friends in exhange for credit. Think Multi-Level-Marketing but in mobile. It must be said that ideas for MVNOs are not normally pitched at events like this, but I guess you’ve got to start somewhere. Odd place to start though. CEO Frank Bekkers “is an expert in MLM”. Ah…. [CrunchBase]

Contact Office
Self funded and profitable since 2003 they are a SAAS service for 450k users. It offers a full-blown suite of products like shared calendaring, contacts, shared bookmark, IMAP client, pretty much you name it. It has a sophisticated Ajax front end, drag and drop, Java backed end and was developed for modular integrations. You can manage your data (emails, contacts, meetings, documents, tasks) in this “virtual office” from anywhere. When I asked what the exit was for this business, the answer was “a trade sale”. Ultimately this is basically the opposite of Web 2.0 - lots of apps wrapped up instead of best of breed allowed to flourish as independent apps. But they clearly have a business with customers and revenues, so you can’t knock that.[Crunchbase]

IntroNiche
Their pitch: The Credit Crunch means you need to do great marketing. You need to attract customers and retain them. But it seems one company’s giveaway is another company’s gift. So this is a “B2B Craigslist for offers”. One business has a giveaway that is another business’s potential offer to get new business. So businesses trade these items. It sounds like it could work. Maybe. Just as well they are staying in consulting, while waiting for some kind of critical mass to develop.[Crunchbase]

Mollom
Mollom is a web site and protection moderation service which comprises some of the people who came up with the Drupal content management system, which is impressive. Right now they are concentrating on developing Spam filtering systems for companies, and they have already signed up a number of large players like MTV. It’s a hosted service with an open API. They don’t believe spam classification is binary ( in the same way Akismet does). Although they use Captcha’s only 4%of visitors have to fill out a captacha. So far they have blocked 30m spams on 3,000 sites. There is also a further model here which is bubbling up the best content - because if you can find the worst (spam) you might be able to find the best. It’s a Freemium model and they are self-funded. I think this has long legs. [Crunchbase]

iStockCV
Coming from the premise that most jobs sites suck and don’t appeal to the new online generation, IStockCV will publish your CV in many languages and allow you to upload a video CV as well. It’s a social network for CVs aimed at new generation used to doing things like a Seesmic video. They have also Integrated Tokbox so they can do live meetings. Promising. [Crunchbase]

KnowledgePlaza
This is a Web-based secure knowledge sharing platform with some social tools. You can share and manage bookmarks, documents and files, e-mails, contacts, microblogging. Apparently not so much like Huddle or Basecamp (project management) as “knowledge sharing”. Competitors might be Connect Beam, which is social bookmarking in the enterprise. Started in January they have a team of 15 and are backed by EUR500,000. At the moment they have 1,000 users with one big client and can’t say who it is, although there seemed to be hints that it was a global consulting firm. My stumbling block with KnowledgePlaza is that they have to sell the service into clients, which would slow adoption. But each to their own.[Crunchbase]

MyOwnDB
They bill this as “Microsoft Access on the Web” or the missing Microsoft / Google app for databases. Still in demo mode, MyOwnDB is an open source database application you can download and run on your own server or have your data stored on one of their servers. Competitors would include Dabble, CouchDB or EditGrid, but the difference is that it’s open source and you can use it right now. They says CouchDB is too technical for the average user. And MySQL is a great database, but if you want to share data you still have to develop a product doing that. They are aiming at the installed base of Microsoft Access business users. The two guys behind it founded UploadforMe.com. [Crunchbase]

Happenr
With the quintessential Web 2.0 “r” in their domain, these guys are attempting to build the “largest database of events going on in Europe”. Their point is simple: Eventbrite have ticketing but no content. Eventful has content but not ticketing. Happenr combines both and is focused on European events. It will therefore compete with Amiando in Europe. An iPhone app is on the way and they have seeded the engine with lots of events organisers. It ended up getting some traction on TechCrunch. But clearly work is needed on th