HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task and it’s the term for a small job at Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s AI task management service. According to Wikipedia‘s definition, “Mturk enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.” The payments are micro, but the idea is that … Read more

Mozilla has published a wiki page detailing its plans for the next version of Firefox, codenamed “Gran Paradiso”. The target release date is sometime in the third quarter this year and it hopes to release a major version of Firefox every year. While Firefox is still aiming for a broad mainstream audience, Mozilla recognizes that … Read more

GoodSearch is a Yahoo-powered search engine that gives away half its advertising revenues to charities and schools designated by its users. It works like a normal search engine – it’s not only powered by Yahoo, but looks almost identical too. The only difference is whenever you click on ads (located on the right, and top … Read more

Enterprise RSS software company Attensa has announced a partnership with The Real Time Matrix Corp, which develops search and filtering technology. The partnership aims to help enterprise users create focused search channels – essentially topic feeds. Craig Barnes, Attensa CEO, calls this an “RSS Tuner”, which is a nice term signifying that they are trying … Read more

CNET’s huge cadre of editors has published a Best of CES 2007 article. There aren’t many Internet apps in the selection, but Microsoft comes out smelling of roses. They won the Peoples Voice award with ‘Ford Sync powered by Microsoft’ (an in-car communications and entertainment system). Ford Sync is for connecting up devices such as … Read more

YouTube continues to grow and on current Alexa figures, the online video site is now ranked number 4 web site in the world – behind only Yahoo, MSN and Google itself! The chart below shows YouTube well ahead of MySpace now and (on today’s data) now ahead of China’s biggest search engine Baidu. Just 6 … Read more

By Steve O’Hear, a Mac fan who runs a ZDNet blog called The Social Web. Steve was also the writer and director of the documentary In Search of the Valley: a personal journey into the psyche of Silicon Valley. Today’s Macworld keynote by Steve Jobs was possibly the most hyped since his return to the … Read more

With two conferences to keep track of (CES and Macworld), it’s easy to get lost in all the website coverage. One blog though is doing an outstanding job of covering both events – Engadget. I’m also enjoying the CNET CES coverage for down and dirty details on the products. Today I’ve been scanning through the … Read more

At the Steve Jobs keynote speech at Macworld this morning PST, he announced “three revolutionary new products”. An iPod, a phone, an internet mobile communicator. But turns out it’s all one device: the fabled iPhone! We’ll have extended analysis about this later today, but for now let’s review the news. Here’s the feature list: Instead … Read more

After only 3-4 months of general release, distributed social network MyBlogLog has been bought by Yahoo for an estimated $10-12M. This adds to Yahoo’s collection of trendy Web 2.0 apps – they can pop the MyBlogLog folks in with Flickr and del.icio.us. When MyBlogLog initially came out in October 2006, I described it as “a … Read more

Yahoo issued a slew of press releases today, at CES, all about their mobile Internet services. The main news is the launch of Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 (now available for java-based handsets) and Yahoo! oneSearch. This comes on the back of recent initiatives by Google, which appears to be leading the Mobile Internet and … Read more

Web Security firm Finjan has just released their Q4 2006 report on web threats, which includes describing two cases of web 2.0 hacker attacks, on Wikipedia and MySpace. What’s more, the report says that hacking the Web is very much a commercial activity nowadays – which is keeping Web security companies like Finjan on their … Read more

Bill Gates’ keynote at CES was webcast live by Microsoft. This keynote was entitled ‘Connected Experiences’ and a relaxed-looking Bill Gates kicked things off by cracking a joke about how, at future CES appearances, he might talk about infectious diseases (referring to his increasing involvement in philanthropy work). The Digital Decade He starts off by … Read more

It’s going to be a big week of tech news, as Apple’s Macworld conference and expo in San Francisco goes head-to-head with the 40th annual CES (Consumer Electronics Association) show in Las Vegas. Both conferences kick off Monday 8 January and there will be no shortage of blogs and other websites covering the news. What … Read more

In the current Read/WriteWeb poll (see below), we’re asking what ‘search 2.0’ concepts you think stand the best chance of beating Google. The results so far are interesting, because Artificial Intelligence is currently top pick – despite having a history of underachievement in the tech industry and there being no real AI search contenders yet. … Read more