Web::Edgio Test

This is a test for edgeio…

I’m sure many people will be doing the same thing. It will be interesting to see how edgeio manages these junk postings…

Web::Craigslist is being sued!

This is not necessarily new news, but I had a heated discussion with my good friend Bill about this issue today. A federal lawsuit accuses Craigslist of violating fair housing laws by publishing discriminatory classified ads, and this really pisses me off.

I don’t understand and thus cannot agree with the logic that a website is responsible for its user’s misbehaviour. I understand that’s how it worked in the off-line media such as the newspapers, but Craigslist is a totally different environment that does not produce any content itself, it is just a tool. I think this is like punishing an organization for the fault of its members.

Several Internet law experts said the suit seems likely to fail, citing a 1996 federal law that says an online service provider isn’t considered a publisher or a speaker when it merely passes along information provided by someone else.

I believe, as long as the web site does not make any editorial contributions to the content, it should be the person who published the content that should be responsible. I think the legislators are suggesting that web sites should start policing their own community, and therefore asking them to moderate the content.

I think this has huge implications to this new way of living that we are getting used to. This law suit will not only affect the big players like Yahoo! and eBay, but pretty much any web sites that supports user generated contents – can you spell ‘web 2.0′?

I don’t think Craigslist will lose this battle, but I guess I am just frustrated. Am I totally missing something?

Web::AltaVista?

I just started reading a book called, “The Search” by John Battelle. In one of the early chapter titled, “Search before Google”, John spent half of the chapter talking about the rise and fall of the once popular search site – AltaVista.

It is a truly amazing story – started as a research project to demonstrate the processing power of DEC’s Alpha processor, becoming the most popular search site and then slowly having faded away from our memories. This is one company that had a chance to become what google is today.

I always thought that I kept good track of what happened to web companies, but I didn’t know that AltaVista was sold twice after Compaq taking control of the website. I actually would bet that there are not many people that know who owns AltaVista today — it is owned by Yahoo!

At the peak of it’s sucess, it was first sold to Compaq as part of DEC ($9.6B total value). Unfortunately, once again, AltaVista was run by a hardware company and they had no clue. In 1999, after the founder Louis Monier finally left the company, AltaVista was again sold to CMGI for $2.3B. Although CMGI invested a lot of money for a massive PR campaign and even filed for IPO, the ill-fated AltaVista now had to face a bigger downfall – the Internet bubble had burst just before their planned IPO. It was then sold to Overture in 2003 at $140M, which was, as we all know, eventually sold to Yahoo!

I thought it would be fun to take a look at the Internet Archive’s “WayBack Machine” to see how AltaVista has changed over the years:

 

Web::Ning

Ning is a new venture from Marc Andressen which provides a web service that lets you easily create a simple, social application through cloning existing applications created by other members. This is very interesting because there are hundreds of thousands of potential simple social applications – such as ‘best of xxx’, ‘worst of xxx’, ‘xxx sharing’, etc.

Mike Arrington has written about ning several times (here, here and here). He was especially harsh on them on the second one and I agreed to most of his issues. The recent announcement of launching new features took my attention and I decided to try it out myself.

 

Web::Browster

Browster is my latest discovery, which is also one of my all-time favorites. Basically, it is a plug-in for a web browser (IE or Firefox) that lets you navigate through websites much more efficiently. It is especially useful when you are browsing through a list of links (e.g. search results, news articles, forum postings, etc.) or when you’d like to peek at a page without having to open a new browser window.

Web::Social Bookmarking

Here is a list of websites that has something to do with ’social bookmarking’ or ’search based on human indexing’.

• del.icio.us
• digg
• wink
• furl
• spurl
• blinklist
• del.irio.us
• feedme links
• linkroll
• netvouz
• scuttle
• snap
• clusty
• blingo
• rojo
• simpy

… and here is a great resource for understanding the players.

Web::Allofmp3

This is the ‘best discovery of the year’. Well, I know, it’s been only a month and half into 2006 – big deal. But seriously, I think this is the best kept secret on the Internet. Allofmp3 is a music download service – duh, another one? But this one is different. Very different.

The main differences are:

• The price : I pay in average about $.10~$.15 per song (192k)
• The Quality : You can download 128k, 192k, or CD quality for almost any song
• Availability : You can find almost anything here – They have all the Led Zeppelin’s albums!
• No DRM : No copy protection means you can copy and play this anywhere

Web::Digg

"Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do. "

I tried for the first time today and I’m not sure I have found the best way to use it yet. It is a place where you can submit, tag, and talk/blog about news articles. It seems there are already quite a lot of users, but unless I’m sitting there browsing through all the articles, I’ll be left with only the high-impact ones. I guess the key idea is to let people, not the editor, decide which news items are more interesting than others. But I just feel that in order for that to work you’ll have to have lots of ‘active’ people whom you trust and that seems like a long shot to me yet.

Web::Windows Live

The big news this week is the launch of Windows Live – a new service from Microsoft. I just spent about half an hour playing around and it looks kinda cool. It’s your new home page with all the goodies at one place – news, weather, stock market, rss feeds from various sources.

The concept is not new, but I feel that they have done a good job making it neat (very web 2.0-ish) and easy to use (I assume they used AJAX?). However, I don’t think I’ll really use it everyday yet. It just takes time making a new habit I guess.

Web::iTunes sells 1M videos!

As I’ve blogged here, I thought Apple’s new Video iPod was cool. At the time, not many people seemed to agree. "Who wants to watch video on such a small screen!", was the overwhelming response.

However, it turns out that Apple has sold more than 1 million video contents in less than 20 days! AAPL is more than 6% up in the market and I am now way deep in the money for the options that I bought when they launched the iPod nano:)