Kiwibox to Get Universal’s Catalog

Kiwibox is becoming the newest social networking site to acquire free music.  MySpace and Imeem are two other sites that have recently launched a free music section.  Kiwibox will contain music from the record label company Universal.  It will contain music videos of such artists as Kanye West and Snow Patrol.  The money made off of visitors to the site will go to Universal records the artists and with any money left over possibly even the site itself.  With big name artists such as these it is almost inevitable for this not to bring success to this growing teen social network.

Someone Is Tampering With Twitter Search

Twitter was informed that tweets were showing up on the search engine that don’t actually exist.  There is the same name on all of these tweets that says, “What a day . Wed, 08 Oct 2008″ and also the time in military format on the end.  So many tweets showed up that they covered the homepage for a long while.  The cause of the results at this time is unknown.  If the site is being hacked then questions will rise on the search engines security.

Computer Getting Better At Disguising Themselves As Humans

This generation and technology is proving to be foolish when it comes to new technologies on the web.  Computers are beginning to fool many into making them think they are actual humans they are talking to.  In a test done by a machine Elbot, 25% of judges believed that conversations online with the computer were actually ones with a living person.  Each judge held a five minute conversation but were not told that they were speaking to a computer or human.  In turn each of the five machines fooled at least one judge and was said to have conversational abilities between eighty and ninety percent.

This Week All Eyes Are On Google

This article talks about the financial dilemma that is affecting the search engine Google.  It’s stock is currently down 45% this year which mostly is due to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar.  Half of Google’s revenue comes from out of the U.S. causing much of the distress.  Another uncertainty driving the stock down is the fact that no one knows what the future of Google may be.  Mark Mahaney a Citi analyst believes that Google will be able to weather the storm.  Google has a big impact on the Silicon Valley Ecosystem and their financial help is a driving factor.  If Google slows down their acquisition activity well will also see venture dollars diminish.

MySpace Music’s Billionth Song Streamed A Few Days After Launch

MySpace’s new streaming music application has recorded its billionth song streamed just a few days after it had started.  Itunes took almost three years to hit this milestone giving MySpace the clear advantage over hitting that billionth song mile mark.  The only difference though as to how it got so many more songs streamed than Itunes is that Itunes charges 99 cents per song where as MySpace the music is free.  This is a good sign for MySpace’s future as a top social networking tool.

Many Americans Lack Adequate Firewall

A poll was done trying to see how many people have proper firewall protection on their computer.  When polled it was showed that 80 percent had firewall protection on their computer.  However only 42 percent have proper firewall protection to protect their personal information.  When asked if these pollers felt safe they all felt that their computers were very safe.  It was shown from the study that 95 percent of the same people polled had antivirus software faring them much better against virus’s than hacking threats.  It is important especially in this day in age where technology is advancing and so is the knowledge of users because new ways are being discovered to take other people’s information through hacking into computer systems

Robotic Telepresence For Meetings You Can’t Make

This article deals with the ongoing trend of teleconferencing and how it has upgraded over time.  Instead of simply teleconferencing over a computer screen or television to a group of co workers, technology is now making it possible to have an inhabiting robotic body in the conference room.  This robot can move around, tilt a camera to view whom you are talking to and makes it possible to have face to face conversations with a single person.  I find this a very large upgrade in technology used in business workforces.

More Open Teaching Courses and the Effect on Colleges

This article deals with the growing fad of open teaching courses in which students are able to take online courses along with full discussions on the web.  Since a professors experiment of open teaching done a month ago, 2,000 people have signed up for an online course on “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge.”  Along with this 200 students followed a course by Alec Couros, an info. and communications coordinator for the School of Education at the University of Regina.  Lastly many informal students joined an opened education course taught by David Wiley and old professor at Utah State and current professor at BYU.

Rollyo Search Engine: Sean Campbell, Sarah Olinger, Phil Nelson

After researching a search engine called Rollyo, I have come to find many unique and interesting facts about it.  A unique characteristic of this search engine is how you are able to personalize your page.  It’s claim to fame is “roll” your own search engine.  The engine is both crawler-based and hybrid and searches on multiple databases to retrieve results.  When looking through the site there are no advanced web searches or stop word list used.  However you are able to search different areas on the web and are able to save specific searches.  The results when found are set up as sponsored results, news results and web results.  When searching you can use the whole web, one site or anywhere in between.  One feature that is not present is a translation capability.  However when it comes to navigation it is very easy.  The site is user friendly with a lot of information over plenty of space.  Despite the easy navigation, results shown on this engine are different from others and the websites when shown on the results page differ in order from other engines performing the same search.

Pressures Pushing Professor’s to Podcast Lectures

This article talks about how peer pressure is pushing professor into podcasting their lectures rather than holding them in a class room setting.  Jin Yang a journalism professor at the University of Memphis is one of these teachers that recently podcasted her lectures due to the pressure.  It has not yet been proven that such a decision is positive.  There is a chance that glitches could occur on the internet or even a problem with the overall server as well which could alter the effectiveness of the idea.  It will be time before we realize just how good the idea is and whether peer pressure will continue to effect proffesser’s decision on this idea.