They achieved it! All the donations came from users of Wikipedia. I think this an awesome way to get funding, not only do the users not get ad’s thrown at them but if they want to they can donate to the cause. You would have thought turning on advertising would bring in more than that amount. being one of the most popular destinations on the Internet. But that defeats the object of the great community that surrounds Wikipedia.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Meebo now has support for the following IM’s:

• MSN
• Yahoo
• AIM
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Yahoo!
• GTalk
• ICQ
• Jabber

This is an amazing portfolio of sites they now support and I can see why the site is so popular. You can also see why MySpace where pushing for Meebo to integrate their service. On the Meebo Blog they said:

Many people outside of Meebo helped make this happen. First off, thanks to the folks at MySpace who encouraged us and helped us to test and gave us their support. A particular shout out to Ali, Dawn and Tom.

The Facebook Integration does seem to be done in a different way, they have a been helping contribute to an open source project that integrated with Facebook chat. I would never expect Facebook to be proactive in asking Meebo to integrate their service.

The strange bit with the Facebook integration, when you sign in you are not using the new Facebook Connect platform. For security purposes I would prefer to be using their new system. I am happier with the MySpace integration as they were helping with the solution.

What do you think? Is this as big a deal as I believe? Post your thoughts below.

The founder of the internet and W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said a few words about the new tool, “it does a nice job helping you improve your content one step at a time.”

Before you put your site through the new validator you can have a look at a few pages that have their best practices specification and a group to join. This is also a way to make sure users get the best experience across the mobile web. But to give you a few tips here is a short list:

• XHTML Basic 1.1. for markup format
• Images should be small, either GIF or JPEG, and have alt attributes
• Remove whitespaces and comments by adding a cleaning step in the publication process (e.g. through tidy)
• Keep page size under 20 KB, and the markup under 10 KB to ensure timeliness of retrieval and rendering by mobile devices
• If you use scripts, ensure scripting support is not required
• Don’t use frames, pop-ups or applets
• Formats that require plugins are likely to break on mobile devices.

Have a look at the new validator, at the moment that validator is having a few problems, possibly due to the ammount of traffic. Let me know what you think.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Have a look at the job listing and apply (if you think you match the spec).

Source: TechCrunch, TweeterStuff

It is a really great second step into the world of HD. They have some example videos up and I just watched one and the quality was incredible and the loading time was amazing too. I have very limited bandwidth here and loading a 4 minute HD video only took about 6-7 minutes.

What do you think about the way YouTube is moving forward with HD?

Source: TechCrunch

This has all been developed to meet the needs of the BBC trust that means all downloaded programmes must be deleted after 30 days or 24 hours after the first play. This was all possible through Microsoft’s DRM technology that runs in their WMA files. Obviously isn’t compatible with any other operating system. So now the iPlayer is compatible with the following operating systems:

• Windows Vista
• Windows XP
• Mac OS X 10.4
• Mac OS X 10.5
• Fedora Core 8
• Ubuntu 7.10
• Open Suse 10.3

So with this AIR application you can download the TV episodes so they can be viewed offline. I think it’s a great idea as their current application doesn;t work with all browsers on Windows, they had to create a firefox extension, but this still left Safari and Chrome out. So this is the natural solution, though I was suprised an organisation such as the BBC has created an application using the AIR technology. Whats your opionion? Are you a Mac or Linux user that has been waiting?

[Download the AIR app]

There were some benefits to having a desktop application. The user experience could be more tightly controlled. Plus they built in peer-to-peer technology to all. As the files were coming from other users this mean that Joost had lower bandwidth bills.

In September Joost enabled their complete flash site that acts similar to the Joost application. This is obviously down to the fact that users are so used to getting their video content through the browser in desktop format.

They aren’t saying why they have discontinued the desktop application. Joost doesn’t offer anything particularly unique or compelling to users over competing sites with proprietary content (like Hulu can offer, although they do have series 1 of Peep Show which is a really funny show.

I still remember having people queuing up on TechJuicer for invites for the beta. I think they will have to find a new USP in order to compete with the likes of Hulu and YouTube.

Source: TechCrunch

I have also noticed that many of the official torrents you can download from the revision3 site don’t work as not enough people have the file to download in the first place meaning most of the time there are 0 seeds.

I think these 2 things combined might be the reason that Revision3 has removed the torrent download option from their episode pages (shown in the image above, there used to be a green BitTorrent logo next to the download arroe). To me this might not be a big deal but as a new media company that wanted to distribute their shows in any way possible without regard for breaking their own copyright (as any new media company does). But to take away a legal, legitimate and official way to torrent their shows might take away part of their audience. But if you download torrents you will know there are other places of getting their content.

I am a big fan of Revision3 and many of their shows, even after axing a few “internet superstars”!

The app is pretty basic, so it will work on any device! It also means it works well on a slow connection, but also makes for a pretty rubbish user experience. They have been clever with the structure of the articles as they have been split into several pages to make browsing faster but also save on the amount of data sent to the client.

What do you think of it? Do you use any other client applications for your mobile device?

Source: ReadWriteWeb

We are not sure why Hasbro have dropped the lawsuit, but we can probably conclude that they got what they set out to do and it was more of a scare tactic.

The majority of users preferred the original version of Scrabulous and preferred it over Hasbros own attempt at a facebook app. The Hasbro version is currently rated 1.3 out of 5!

But the main point is that neither Hasbro of RS Software, the makers of Scrabulous have to go through and expensive court battle.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

TwitterLeague, the site I created in 7 days from scratch is no longer in an invite-only beta! To get an invite you had to read the TechCrunch article or follow me (@ollieparsley) where you would get a code.

But the site has been tested enough and fixed a few bugs so now you don’t need an invite code. Just enter your Twitter credentials to signup/login. Then create your leagues.

If you have no idea what TwitterLeague is then please read the TechCrunch article that was written about me and the application itself. Then just visit TwitterLeague.com and create a league! An example TwitterLeague is below:

Please check it out and let me know what you think by commenting below

But here comes Pastebud with their solution. This does not require a jailbroken phone or even the app store. It is simply a clever bookmarklet that uses Pastbuds servers to allow you to hightlight some text and then use a second bookmarklet to paste the content.

There are a few limitations, the main one being that it can only be used with safari. Here is what you can use the Pastbud app for:

• Safari to Mail
• Safari to Safari
• Mail to Safari
• Mail to Mail

The last 2 items are acheived by forwarding a full email to a dedicated private email address at pastbud which will then return a URL back to you, this then opens safari and then you can copy from that page using the 2 bookmarklets.

Have a look at the following video to see how the app works. Don’t forget to head to pastebud.com for a more in-depth description of how to install the bookmarklets.

I have been using the beta version for a few weeks to run TechJuicer.com, OllieParsley.com and TweeterStuff.com. The main difference you notice is the radically overhaulled User Interface. The design is nothing like version 2.6.x. The main navigation is now down the left hand side. It was a lot to get used to but the speed improvement is really good, especially if you install Google Gears which will download all the JavaScript and run it locally, thus decreasing the time taken to execute JavaScript.

Check out the following tour of the new release:

As WordPress is an open source platform it was great to hear that more that 150 people had their code directly inserted into this release, the highest in WordPress history (albeit not that long a history).

A lot of people have commented on the fact that it looks more like WordPress 3.0, not 2.7. On the WordPress development blog they had this to say:

For those of you wondering why we didn’t call this release 3.0, it’s because we abhor version number inflation. 3.0 will just be the next release after 2.9. The major features in new point releases approach also works well for products like OS X, with huge changes between a 10.3 and 10.4.

I personally think the whole package is awesome, I have been a WordPress fan since I started blogging a few years ago and this has made it so much easier to push out a new post and administer the whole blog. What do you think?

[Download WordPress 2.7]

The IWF have removed the page from their black list and had this to say:

IWF’s overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect.

They are obviously talking about the fact that although lots of users could not access the page, many more around the world wanted to see what the fuss was about, this then brought a lot more users to the article.

The first thing to remember is that this is not an official Google product, though I think they would be happy to use it and continue their domination of Earth!

The operating system can run along side Windows. When it boots up it goes straight into a Google Chrome style browser, nothing else, just a browser. Along the bottom is a Mac style dock with all the standard Google apps and tools. Isn’t this what we were all dreaming? All the data is stored in the cloud so you could have a pretty basic PC with a fairly low spec and have no problems with hard disk space etc. Infact have a look at the required PC spec. It only needs 32MB, yes I really mean megabytes!

The gOS main features are as follows (from the gOS Cloud website):

• Web browser
  Standard web browser for full compatibility with web pages, Flash, and more. On top of that it has access to all the hardware including sound cards and graphics.
• Icon dock
  The icon dock with all your favorite apps sits inside the web browser, not outside. It launches web or rich client applications in new application tabs
• Application Tabs
  Open multiple web pages, web applications, and even rich client applications, such as Skype, using Application Tabs and Cloud’s own application framework. Point and click or press ALT+TAB to switch between tabs. Very similar the way modern web browsers work.
  
• Switch to Windows
  Cloud can be installed with Windows or another operating system, such as Linux. Users may first power on to Cloud for Internet use, and then switch into Windows for full desktop use. With a single click or hotkey, the user can switch to Windows. I cannot tell if a logout/restart is required.

Check out this video of it in use:

What do you think about the concept? I think it is a great idea and a big step in the right direction. I do accept that I need a real local OS but the option of a web based OS when out and about is a great idea. Also the fact that the system requirements are so low it could be put onto a lot more devices than a local installed OS.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

But the problem with this is they have restricted access to a specific Wikipedia article of album cover by “the scorpions”. The album cover has a naked girl (early teens I would guess). In the US it is considered art, but in the UK it is considered child porn.

The restriction appears to only be on a few ISPs and returns a 404 page not found error. I have been able to access the page and grab a screenshot of what it should look like (for the curious users that cannot see it). The image links to a larger image obviously this is down to your discretion as to whether you view the full screenshot.

A large proportion of users that are currently being denied access to the page by their ISP are infact blocking them form editing any article on the site. Therefore defeating the object of a wiki. The following quote is from Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation

It appears that there’s a large number of editors - I can’t say all - who appear to have access issues.

The IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) has said as many as 95% of British users would now be unable to access the page. Of course if you just want access to the cover you can just do a Google Image Search and see the results.

The whole point in censorship is to stop people accessing the content, but surely the number of people vising the page has increased by a large amount. I really find this story facinating and have received lots of feedback from Twitter. Please contribute your thoughts in the comments below. For a more detailed view of the “Great firewall of britain” check out Boing Boing

Whilst writing this article my access to the page was restricted. I got the screenshot before the page was blocked.

So far the following UK ISP’s are confirmed as blocking the page:

• BT
• Orange/wanadoo
• O2 (only confirmed by iPhone users on 3G/GPRS)
• Virgin Media
• TalkTalk

Update: The IWF have now taken the page off their blacklist. Read the article.

Sources: BBC, Buzz Out Loud, Twitter

So I went to the Ghostbusters trailer and under the video there is sometimes a “watch in higher quality” button. It’s normally available when a video that is uploaded has the correct bit rate and quality etc. But on this video there was “Watch in HD”.

This is a big step for YouTube both in the UI and quality of videos but also in the infrastructure improvements needed to stream and play HD videos. Obviously they are not full 1080p video as the chances are most people don’t have the bandwidth, processing power or the resolution to stream HD video.

This is the trailer I was looking for. Watch it in HD by going to the video page and selecting “Watch in HD”.

Source: TechCrunch, Stuff We Like, Engadget, gHacks, Squidoo

• Place videos on your own site/blog and allow users who are not on the hosting site to see the video.
• Publicise the video sharing/hosting site.

So why is it that MySpace, Viddler, Vimeo, YouTube and all the other sites have offered it since day one, but Facebook hasn’t? It may well have been because they wanted anyone who sees a video to login to Facebook, watch the video and after that they might get addicted!

But now Facebook have allowed the official embed code to be used outside of the main site. For a while now you could use a grease monkey script to embed Facebook videos on your own site.

So now when you upload a video you get an option to embed a code, just like all the other sites. Along with just embedding public videos it also takes along with other permissions. For instance only allowing your friends to view the video etc. I assume that flash can read cookies or some other authentication method to see if you are allowed to read a video.

Facebook has about 100,000 videos uploaded every day, which is a lot less than YouTube, but this slight modification will hopefully decrease the gap between Facebook and the other video sharing sites. What do you think? Is Facebook spreading itself too thin?

The best devices for this will be mobile phones/PDA’s that can access the internet to retrieve the latest contact details for people in the contact directory.

Kash Mahdavi, head of Telnic which runs the .tel registry has said:

All other top level domains like .com use the net’s domain name system in the same way. They all store IP address and they are all about websites. A .tel domain, said Mr Mahdavi, could feature phone numbers, e-mail addresses, GPS data or buttons that kick off a Skype call

You might be thinking if/when you can get yours since you can only get a .tel domain if you have a registered trademark. Well there are several phases for different companies/people need to wait for.

Phase 1
Trademark owners can get domains for their brands.

Phase 2
From the February 3rd 2009 domains will be on sale at a premium. This will probably mean that high powered/rich celebrities and businessmen can get their domains before someone else tries to get them. I also assume there will be some sort of approval service

Phase 3
March 24th 2009 is when the doors open to all customers. There will probably be a fee and an approval process. Mr Mahdavi would not be drawn on the final price for a .tel domain but said it would be in line with that charged for other domains.

Check out this video demo:

You can go to the Telnic developer site where you can get developer information and access to sample code, live examples and further details about integrating the service into your application/device. Also take a look at an example site ben.tel.

The whole idea for this I think is great. It will be a way of storing your contact details in the cloud where you can allow access to your details. I am interested to know about the methods and process used to allow specific people more detailed access to your details. What authentication will be in place? OpenID? Google Friend Connect? I am looking forward to seeing how this all pans out. What do you think about the idea?

So earlier today Google announced that Google Friend Connect was open to the public. Have a look at their help documentation and see how to implement it.

But less than an hour after Google opened the gates, Facebook announced the general availability of Facebook Connect. Have a look at their Facebook Connect pages. Do you think they planned this? Did they each have inside information and launch at the same time? Let me know if you have any idea.

So now the big 3 want to solidify themselves as THE dominant force in the internet identity space. Who do you think it will be? Who do you think it should be? I really think it should be Google. Why? Because they do a lot more than just social networking, they have so many applications you can use and they are spread out over the web a lot more than Facebook or MySpace.

Source: TechCrunch (see their Facebook Connect implementation)