Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
RSS Awareness Day
Apart from the May Day, some people suggested to make today also the "RSS Awareness Day"
If you don't know what "RSS" is and how to use it, this site does a much better explanation than I do. Have a read, I think you'll benefit from it.
It certainly benefited me. I subscribed tens of news sources and hundreds of blogs. It's just literally impossible to open each site and whether it has been updated.
Then the RSS come to rescure. Through an RSS reader, I can see all updates from all sites I subscribed in one place and only to read stuffs I'm interested in. If you subscribed an RSS document (we call it feed, which if you look up, you'll see a yellowish square icon at right hand end of your address bar) like mine, you don't even have to open my blog again - I output full text to my feed, so you can read them in your feed aggregator.
Most websites and blogs have that yellowish icon. If you click on it, you will get the RSS feed.
What I've found really surprising is that only 6% of world's internet users use RSS. I think the major barrier of introducing RSS to more people is that the whole thing is still bit too complex for some people (especially for those who type www.google.aol in their address bar), they don't understand how HTML works but they know how to visit a website. Well that's good enough for ordinary people, isn't it?
The same should apply to RSS. People don't have to know what RSS stands for, they don't have to know how it works, the only thing they need to know, is how to use it, in the simplest way, which requires quite an effort from major websites and communties and still has a long way to go.
Recommended reading
The Atlantic Monthly has published a quite good introduction of Great Firewall of China . It has discussions of why it happened, how it works, and most importantly, why most time a foreign visitor cannot feel the existance of the wall. If you would like know more on the issue, the one is the place to go.
One thing worth to mention is that just recently large amount of English sites, like English Wikipedia were unblocked in China. Most commentators regards this move as the gesture of "good faith" towards the Olympics. Surely hope so.
Google April's Fools collection
Gmail: New feature that allows you send emails in cutomised time.
Actually this is not very hard to do if you own your server.
In Australia, Google introduced a new service called "gDay", which allows people to search for things that are not happened yet.
In China, Google introduced a new search service called "Human search", which all the enquiries are processed by actual human. It will not appear very funny to non- Chinese. This is a reference to Internet culture in China, real identity of characters in Internet memes are usually exposed by netizens who conducted a real search in real life.
In America, Google Announced the launch of Virgle Inc., a jointly owned and operated venture by Google and Virgin Airlines dedicated to the establishment of a human settlement on Mars.
About ... Bebo
Even you are not a geek, you should know by now that AOL acquired this social networking website for US$850 million. The news was annunced earlier today.
I don't have any comment on this, just a trivia... In Chinese blogsphere, AOL has a "long reputation" of poor management over its subsidiaries. There is even a proverb for this: "If AOL buys it, it dies".
Famous examples of this include Netscape, ICQ, Winamp ... and much more. Most of the businesses acquired by AOL generally did poorer than before.
Just little more than 5 years ago, those softwares still had a place in my computer ... how about now? Netscape is now totally dead(BTW, its legend, and the <blink> continued in Firefox), others are still struggling ... but for how long? Won't be so long I think, just see the people around you, how many of them still prefer ICQ as their first choice of online IM?
I think the key issue is, AOL is too rich to bother whether the acquirement is benefitable. It just keeps acquiring and acquiring, before the money choke all of those business to death. I do not use social networking websites like Bebo due to my concern of information safety and privacy issues, however, my friends use them often, so I sincerely hope that Bebo won't become another victim under AOL.
About ... Ihug
Ihug is one of most recognisable telecommunication brands in New Zealand, possibly just right after Telecom New Zealand.
About it's service... it is declining, but still good. Its email service went nuts for quite a few times in the past years, but it didn't had any impact on me ... I never use ISP email boxes.
However, we may need to say goodbye to ihug soon. Its owner, Vodafone New Zealand, will shut down the brand and merge the current service to becone part of Vodafone New Zealand around April this year.
I guess this is possibly a good news to current customers like me, except...
I was very happy with ihug's old brandband plan I'm on (2mb plan which gives 4 gb allowance, 2gb for peak time and other 2gb for non-peak time).
I don't need a fast speed so I was reluctant to move to the new 7.5mb plan for quite a long time. And another reason I liked the plan, well, you can see it below:
You can sort of guess out how I did it by just look at this picture, and I can swear to you that except normal log in process, there's absolutely no illegal tools/hackings involved.
But I recently received a pretty and polite (but not nice) letter from ihug - they will switch my broadband to a new plan from March(of course, by force) from March, which I don't want to have.
Without the 'extra' data allowance which Ihug kindly provided to me for the last year or two, Ihug's service is not as competitive as other ISPs like Orcon and TelstraClear.
I'm seriously considering switiching to another ISP, after being a 4 year loyal Ihug customer.
Bill Gates' last full working day at Microsoft
This video clip is from 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show. Whether you like Micro$oft or not, this one is quite fun...
