16,000 Things to Do With GPS

"But a couple of years later, as GPS devices and digital cameras became both cheaper and more widely available, the site began to draw attention. Slowly, people who'd never met Jarrett began to add their photos and travel stories. Today, more than 4,400 GPS-toting travelers have participated in the Degree Confluence Project, covering nearly all the easily accessible points in the United States and Western Europe, and putting a sizeable dent into other populated portions of the globe."

"That is the case with Kathryn Robinson, who was 99 when she first learned to use a computer. Ms. Robinson, who is now 101 and lives at Barclay Friends - A Senior Living Community, a nursing home in West Chester, Pa., discovered the Internet through Generations on Line. She uses the Internet daily to send greeting cards, look up information and communicate with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren."

Sketchy Information

"This is search visualization in action. The closer another writer is to your choice, the more likely the system thinks that you will also enjoy that author's work. Gnooks and other systems are applying data visualization and relationship analysis techniques to help people get a different view of what's on the Web. Rather than deliver search results as a long roster of links, graphical searches show how different categories and types of information relate to each other. The hard part is finding a way of presenting the information without requiring the user to get a degree in how to use the interface."

How "The Passion" Played Online

"There's certainly no question that the film's distributors have masterfully used the online medium to promote 'The Passion.' Can you harness that kind of viral marketing power for your company or product? It's unlikely you'll achieve the kind of success this film has seen unless you've already got a deeply involved fan base. But, at the risk of being irreverent, I can think of a few brands that inspire religious-like fervor. Major League Baseball is one. Apple is another. How about Volkswagen's Beetle or BMW's Mini Cooper? Put your thinking caps on, tap into your fans' passion for your product, and let them evangelize for you."

Web voice technologies get W3C go-ahead

"One of the specifications, VoiceXML 2.0, aims to improve the development and delivery of Web content to interactive voice response applications. The other, Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS), is meant to augment VoiceXML's support for speech recognition and can convert end-user responses to spoken prompts."

New Study Agrees That Customized Newspapers Are The Future

"A week and a half ago, we wrote about Vin Crosbie's suggestion that newspapers need to offer completely customizable online versions to attract readers. Now, the Project for Excellence in Journalism has released a report entitled The State of the News Media that seems to come to pretty much the same conclusion. They say that, while circulation is declining and many newspapers are struggling, there is a light at the end of the tunnel for those who choose to head towards it. They believe that much more customized online news is what will save newspapers. So, I still stand by my original question: why should it be the newspapers who do this customization? Already, people can 'create their own newspapers' just using the web and finding the stories that are interesting to them. What additional advantage is there for the newspapers themselves to offer the customization tools? Is the role of the newspaper to write the news or to deliver the news - or both? "

In Searching We Trust

"It's more like the new kabbalah. With an estimated 200 million searches logged daily, Google, the most popular Internet search engine, 'has a near-religious quality in the minds of many users,' said Joseph Janes, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle who taught a graduate seminar on Google this semester. 'A few years ago, you would have talked to a trusted friend about arthritis or where to send your kids to college or where to go on vacation. Now we turn to Google.'"

Are Event Sponsors Missing Online Opportunities?

"By their very nature, sports events (as well as music or cultural events) bring together like-minded people at a specific time and place around a shared interest. As such they offer marketers an ideal opportunity to communicate and build brand with an engaged, captive audience -- whether in the real world, on TV, or in cyberspace. This can be particularly useful within an environment of increasingly fragmented media consumption. Sponsors should look to the Internet to expand the benefits of their event association and consider setting aside up to 10 percent of their sponsorship budget for online activity. This will allow them to not only extend the reach of their campaign but also engage more deeply and actively with their audience, thus augmenting the branding impact of their deal."

Speed Meets Feed in Download Tool

"Both technologies have considerable buzz. The New York Times reported last month that BitTorrent traffic accounted for roughly one-tenth of the packets on the Internet2 research network. Last week, editors at InfoWorld magazine said InfoWorld's RSS readership had surpassed its website in daily traffic. According to Grumet, an RSS feed of one's favorite bands, actors, shows, games or other 'big media objects' could be kept up-to-date on a computer desktop for daily perusal, rather than forcing music and movie fans to suffer the 'click and wait' delay associated with downloading huge files on demand."

Publishing 2.0

"Me too. It isn't just RSS that's getting huge. It's that more people are getting their Web services without the complicating container we call a browser. What we're stating to see is another Web, alongside the static one we browse like the aises in a store, or the stacks in a library, looking for finished goods to read or buy. This other Web isn't served up the same way as the one we've been browsing for the last eight years. We see it in a news aggregator, or a blog, or a message on a phone, or a search through an engine that only looks for fresh goods. Yes, you can see it in a browser too, but it's different in kind from the static stuff. Most importantly, it's live."

An Oops Button, or a Tool for Retrieving That E-Mail Note You Sent

"The speed and efficiency of e-mail can present problems for an impulsive person. A message written in haste can be dispatched instantly on a whim ('Sell 2,000 shares'; 'I resign'; 'We should see other people'), and there is no going back once one has clicked Send. At least until now. A new e-mail service means cooler heads have a chance to prevail. Subscribers to the service, called BigString, can retract statements by recalling or changing messages that may have been sent in moments of panic, rage or stupor. The service works by converting subscribers' e-mail messages to simple HTML documents, essentially no-frills Web pages. The documents are then sent to a BigString server, where each one is given a long, complicated address and then stored."

Capturing The Net's Comeback

"The reason for all the mojo is that Web profits, once achieved, usually rise much faster than sales. Yahoo! (YHOO ), for example, saw 2003 profits jump 456% on a 71% sales gain. Much the same is true at several of our best performers, notably distance-education leader University of Phoenix Online (UOPX ) and e-broker Ameritrade (AMTD ). More operating leverage is coming: Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy says profits before interest, taxes, and noncash charges will rise 37% or more in 2005 on just a 23% revenue gain. 'As long as there's that leverage, investors are pretty much safe,' Rashtchy says."

The perils of Googling

"I'm not putting down Google. Far from it: it's a great search engine, and I use it all the time. I couldn't do my many jobs without Google, so I've spent some time learning how to maximize its value, how to find exactly what I want, how to plumb its depths to find just the right nugget of information that I need. In the same way that Google can be used for good, though, it can also be used by malevolent individuals to root out vulnerabilities, discover passwords and other sensitive data, and in general find out way more about systems than they need to know. And, of course, Google's not the only game in town - but it is certainly the biggest, the most widely-used, and in many ways the easiest to use."

In search of the deep Web

"Those of us who place our faith in the Googlebot may be surprised to learn that the big search engines crawl less than 1 percent of the known Web. Beneath the surface layer of company sites, blogs and porn lies another, hidden Web. The 'deep Web' is the great lode of databases, flight schedules, library catalogs, classified ads, patent filings, genetic research data and another 90-odd terabytes of data that never find their way onto a typical search results page."

Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious

"'There is a lot of speculation that really important people are highly connected, but really, we wonder if the highly connected people just listen to the important people,' said Lada Adamic, one of the four researchers working on the project. These findings are important to sociologists who are interested in learning how ideas grow from isolated topics into full-blown epidemics that "infect" large populations. Such an understanding is also important to marketers, who hope to be able to pitch products and ideas directly to the most influential people in a given group."

The problem with internet advertising is the ads

"Internet banner ads are little more than billboards flashing at us with garish distracting messages. Pop-ups are like carnival callers trying to muscle you into their show. Spam is the door-to-door salesman that can only be gotten rid of with a shotgun. What's the problem? Here's one explanation. Internet advertising hasn't figured out how to adapt to the usage behaviors of the medium. Advertising in every other media fits with how people use the media."

Extra! Extra! Read All About You

"Rob Runett, director of electronic communications for the Newspaper Association of America, says small and medium-sized papers are also following in the footsteps of the major dailies. To get access to articles, readers are increasingly required to provide such data as age, ZIP code, gender and, in many cases, information about income and personal interests. The motive is a basic one. Newspapers want to make money from their websites. And since most readers are unwilling to pay for content in a world where online news is widely available for free, making money requires selling advertising."