Gallup:
Gallup Daily: McCain Moves Ahead, 48% to 45%  —  McCain enjoying increase in support following convention  —  PRINCETON, NJ — The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update shows John McCain moving ahead of Barack Obama, 48% to 45%, when registered voters are asked for whom they would vote if the presidential election were held today.

As we noted earlier, the 2008 Paralympic Summer Games in Beijing held their official opener on Saturday. The next week and a half will bring roughly 4,000 athletes from 150 countries into one athletic village, challenging one another for hundreds of medals gold, silver and bronze in nearly two dozen sports. With that in mind, if you’re keen on taking in the views and the news as they come from the Chinese capital, here are a few places to stay abreast and in tune.

While the NBCOlympics.com isn’t playing host to events scheduled through the 17th of the month, when the Paralympic games officially wrap up, the NBC Universal Sports website is, according to Alan Schwarz of The New York Times’ Rings blog, slated to present 50 hours of live coverage, as well as on-demand footage. In order to watch live coverage, viewers in the US will be required to schedule their days to an early morning routine, seeing as how many events will take place as early as 5 AM ET.

So far, two videos are presented in the Universal Sports archive: one for the opening ceremony held Saturday; the other a highlight reel of the ceremony plus coverage of a portion of Day 1 events. As for software compatibility, video is not presented in Silverlight, nor Flash, but in Windows Media format. Mac users can view coverage through a browser plugin called Flip4Mac. Personal experience shows this option to stutter and flicker at points, but it is a mostly decent delivery.

Another way to watch the Paralympic games up close is through ParalympicSportTV. This is done through Narrowstep, and while video detail isn’t particularly outstanding, the channel is tagged with the IPC (International Paralympic Committee) label, an association which might be of interest to some. If you have trouble viewing content at the main ParalympicSportTV page, an archive has also been established on YouTube. Nearly three dozen clips have been added to the collection so far.

Want extra reading material to go with the IPC’s coverage? The committee president, Sir Philip Craven, has gone ahead and created a blog, to which he has posted daily items for a short time. The broader Paralympic.org website is home to a good amount of news and resource information, too.

Across the Atlantic, the BBC offers a page within its Sport section devoted to Paralympic happenings. Of course, there’s ample focus on competitors from Team Great Britain, but according to BBC News, live streams are being offered “for six hours a day through the red button.” Quite thorough, I think. That is in addition to evening showings on BBC2 and via the BBC’s iPlayer service.

Lastly, being an American, I think it behooves me to briefly mention the U.S. Paralympics Team website, which is just chock-full of material to pore over. It last links to news stories, video clips, photo galleries, event results, and even a link to Universal Sports’s Paralympic coverage. Plus, if what you see gets you interested enough to take part in paralympic game play yourself, you can head over to its event page to see if something is happening in your area in the near future.

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Zogby:
Zogby Poll: Republicans Hold Small Post-Convention Edge  —  But the race is tight, as both campaigns consolidate support  —  UTICA, New York - Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin left St. Paul, Minnesota, with a smallish bounce overall and some energy in key demographic groups …

Join us now for our weekly review of Web Technology news. This week was dominated by the launch of Google's new open source browser Chrome. As the Ed tweeted during the week: how often does a major Internet company launch a brand new browser? Check out our extensive coverage and analysis below.

This week we also reported on another major announcement from Google: a YouTube-like app for Google Apps. Finally, check out our poll - it asked our readers what word processing tool they mostly use. The results may surprise you...

In what may be the story of the year in Web tech, this week Google launched Chrome, its open source app browser. Can Chrome kill IE? Will it kill Firefox? Or will it go the way of Google Base, Google Sites and other Google Flops? The browser became available for Windows users in 100 countries and 43 languages this week. It's Live now at google.com/chrome.

As mentioned, we at ReadWriteWeb extensively analyzed this big news. Here is our coverage...

The news first leaked on Monday morning via Google watchdog Phillipp Lessen, who scanned and posted a printed comic he received in the mail from Google. You can view it here. In the comic, Chrome was framed as a browser for applications instead of just web pages.

As soon as Chrome was made available as a download, the ReadWriteWeb team took the new browser for a spin. We walked through it live and shared our screen as soon as the browser became available. The video of our session is posted below. Thanks to DimDim for help with this.

You can also see the slideshow from the press conference here:

Our coverage of Chrome initially touched on issues like browser performance and business implications for Firefox - but one thing we picked up on shortly after was a curious section of the Chrome Terms of Service.

The terms include a section giving Google "a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services." That seems pretty extreme for a browser, doesn't it?

Later in the week Google removed the offending section of the Terms of Service. It seems that the default Google service TOS includes these kinds of claims, even though they may not be as appropriate in some circumstances as in others. We're not sure when such claims would be justified but we're glad they've been removed from Chrome. Here's the original version of the End User Licensing Agreement.

Note: be sure to check the comments of this post for a rigorous debate!

See also: Google and Privacy: A History and It's Time for a New Terms of Service Regime

It wasn't all good news for Google. Ryan Narraine, a security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, reported that Chrome also inherited a potentially serious security flaw from the old version of WebKit it is based on. An attacker could easily trick users into launching an executable Java file by combining a flaw in WebKit with a known Java bug and some smart social engineering. Security expert Aviv Raff, who first discovered this flaw, set up a demo of the exploit here. (Note: This page will automatically download a Java file onto your desktop). You can safely click on the download, as it only opens up a notepad application written in Java.

• Video of Google Chrome Announcement
• Chrome Is Coming To Android
• Chrome To Get Extensions - Just Not Yet
• Chrome: 1% Market Share In Less Than a Day
• Chrome Not Ready For Enterprise

Google Video for Business Launches: YouTube for Enterprise

This week Google launched a new product for the enterprise market, Google Video for business. It's a new application in the Google Apps office suite, enabling workers to upload and share videos inside their organizations. Videos can be shared on an individual, group or company-wide basis. Google sees it being used for such things as executive communications, product training, trip reports, "social videos" for the company intranet.

We think this has the potential to break open the Web Office market, because up till now nobody has done rich media for the enterprise as an easy to use browser-based package. Google Video for Business manages to do this, mostly because of YouTube's influence.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Poll: Which Word Processing Tool Do You Mostly Use?

We ran a poll a year ago asking which word processing tool you used the most. What we were really driving at was: how many of you are using an online word processing service (Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, etc) as your main tool, instead of a traditional desktop one (MS Word, OpenOffice, etc). We ran the same poll this year:

Which tool do you mostly use for word processing? ( polls)

The best of the online word processers was still, you guessed it, Google with their Docs program at 17% at time of writing. But Microsoft still dominates this market, polling at 48% of our readers using it as their main tool.

For further analysis of the poll results, see: Word Processing: Most of You Still Use Desktop Software

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

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• Option 1: I did not attempt to read it.
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• Option 2: I read it online.
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• Option 3: I successfully downloaded it by clicking the button and was able to read it.
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• Option 4: I successfully downloaded it using the posted work-around and was able to read it.
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• Option 5: I successfully downloaded it using the posted work-around but was unable to open it.
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• Option 6: I attempted to download it, got an "ebx.etd" file instead, and gave up.
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• Option 7: I am running linux.
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• Option 8: I am unwilling to install new Adobe software to read it.
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• For those in Denver, Tony Award winning actress Deanna Dunagan will be headlining "Stories on Stage" tomorrow (Sunday), reading Mr. G's story "Chivalry". If you click on that link, there is an audio interview in which she explains why she selected that story.
• 
  
• Who Killed Amanda Palmer? goes on pre-sale Monday!
• 
  
• For those outside the US who have found themselves unable to download Neverwhere, HarperCollins also offers The Neil Gaiman Reader. This is not the book of essays of the same name edited by Darrell Schweitzer, but rather a PDF containing the few few chapters each from Neverwhere, American Gods, Stardust, and Smoke & Mirrors. It also requires Adobe Digital Editions. (HarperCollins previously offered a version which worked with regular Adobe Reader. If you're on linux you can probably find it online by googling.)
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• There is now a Graveyard Book shirt available from NeverWear featuring artwork by Mr. G himself! Available in S, M, L, XL, XXL, and girl's baby doll sizes.
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Most people rarely read manuals when I buy a piece of equipment (who does?), so very often, manuals just get tossed aside and forgotten. 

That of course is usually the point in time when you suddenly discover that you need to refer to the manual - and of course you can’t find it.

SafeManuals/Diplodocs is a huge resource of authorized manuals with more than 1.2 million manuals uploaded for almost everything you can think of with a manual - from domestic appliances, TV & Audio equipment, phones, to computers, cars, watches and digital cameras. 

What I really liked aside from the huge choice manuals:

• The ability to preview the 1st 3 pages of any manual before downloading to confirm it’s the manual you want
• Multi-language manuals (English manuals are of course predominant within the site)
• Links to manuals related to the product automatically displayed - Some products have more than one manual insert in the box (For example: Full manual & quick start guides), so you can pick what you need

Never fret about lost manuals again!

Do you read manuals when you buy new equipment? ( surveys)

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