Internet20

When someone asks ‘What’s the news’, I often heard the reply,’Watch CNN for that’. I guess there’s a specific reason why the CNN is one of the most trusted names in the news industry. The latest news about the news company is that they are going to open up virtual reality citizen journalism kiosks.

Second Life is the future online virtual world. As a matter of fact it allows people to live two lives. Welcome to Virtual reality! The best part about this kind of virtual news kiosks is, CNN trains people to be online journalists. The training comes from the organization’s top journalists like Larry King.

Most of us are familiar with the video collection site called YouTube. It’s a place where you can share your videos and comments on the videos made by others. Recently, the online broadcasting site is working on its fight against Cyber bullying scheme.

Engineers from You Tube vowed to do something against online bullying. So, they dedicated a whole new channel to the cause! Still wondering what falls under online bullying? Setting up offensive websites about their teachers as well as offensive text messages are just couple of instances of online bullying. Of course, they are different from your real life bullying: locker room taunts and getting punched, etc.

We all are hearing rumors about Pandora that the company is planning to introduce Music videos to their offerings of streaming audio. Well company is talking with some big time players in the music business at getting MTV like music videos integrated into a new service, called Pandora Video.

With the Pandora new service, users would be able to create their own videos for music. Since Pandora is generating revenue from ads, so the company will focus on user’s web-pages and ads instead of playing music at the background. I will not get surprised if Pandora will start offering video and quality video.

Image: Computer World

Worried how to keep some files as private, while some on sharing basis on your computer? Also, in a dilemma as to how to share the heavy files such as videos, photos, music, and documents by electronic mail.

ADrive.com has come up with a new public sharing enabled feature recently.

Now, one can share the files maintained in the ADrive account, needless of their size, instantly with anyone while keeping the private files safe, secure and away from sharing folders.

The software giant Microsoft is getting innovative and also experimentative. After the Queen of Britain setting “The Royal Channel - The Official Channel of the British Monarchy” on the video-sharing website ‘YouTube’, Microsoft PR people have also started their own channel ‘WindowsVistaAndLive‘ on the site. The channel, started on December 21, offers some good demonstrations of Vista, but it’s making news in the blogging world not for the less known features being publicized on the video-sharing site, but for the comments people have left on the channel.

As one can easily guess, the channel has received good number of comments and most of them are against the Vista. Most bloggers see Microsoft’s move to open the channel for comments as self-destructive. Most of the people who have left comment on its channel have found Vista to be a bad operating system, making is more annoying than appealing.

The quest to look young never dies and men and women try every new product that is released in the market without knowing how effective it is. More over none of the anti-aging solutions come cheap. So, how do you know how realistic the solution is and if it’s really worth investing a huge sum on such treatments?

RealSelf.com is a social networking site that promises a reality check on the anti-aging solutions. The idea is to empower consumers to share experiences and help each other find the right anti-aging & personal beauty solutions: products, treatments, therapies and lifestyle choices.

Google has always found ways to change and improve offering various services to its user, which is pretty much the reason for its unmatched success. It has virtually established and redefined the benchmark in internet-based services with all its innovations and variations of existing products. At times, it has scared the world with technology like ‘Google Map’ due to security concerns (but I find them really wonderful), it has also constantly amazed and pleased its users.

The web is huge, full of a vast treasure of good things. But then with all the bright part of the web, it comes with some really dark alleys as well which need not be visited, at least not by underage children who are too immature to make wise decisions as to what’s wrong and what’s not. This can be really difficult for parents to monitor children and keep them away from venturing into those dark alleys of the world wide web which are best not tread by children. Though you can install a parent-control program to keep your children away from the part of the web which is not suited to children. Given the vast expanse of the web, these programmers have their limitations. They may not be able to include the new entrants of the web. Moreover, you may not want your child to visit some sites which the parent-control programmer may think to be innocuous. So, do parents need to keep standing by their child while she surfs the web and keep saying no to child-unfriendly sites. Not really. Now, parents have an option in the form of Glubble.

There is much speculation regarding the new advertising network Facebook is going to announce on Tuesday at ad:tech in New York. The Facebook documents leaked revealed that the project named Beacon aims at getting more and more third party data about its users into its database.

The Project Beacon makes an effort to work with third parties to gain access to very specific data. An example is if someone purchases a book from Amazon, under Beacon the purchase will be sent to Facebook and automatically included in the user’s News Feed. At the point of sale on the third party site, the user will see a ‘toast’ pop-up asking them if they approve the sale information being included in their Facebook News Feed. The feed information will include the user name, what they bought and where. Users also have a number of privacy options.

Data storage medium has been improving day by day. From the floppy disks we moved to CD’s and then to DVD’s and eventually to tiny USB drives. The latest in this data storage world is the Gdrive. Tech sites online have been talking about this Gdrive which is supposed to store all your data securely at one central location virtually.

This process eliminates the need to carry any kind of storage medium whatsoever. But, people are skeptical about this storage medium. Why? several reasons. First, privacy becomes a big issue when data is stored online even though the Gdrive is supposed to be a pretty secure location online. Second, the amount of data stored is also an issue i.e. file size becomes extremely important. Lastly, the network security is yet another aspect that plagues the user’s mind when it comes to online data storage.