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Read/WriteWeb / Weblog


Web Technology news, reviews and analysis.

Microsoft Online Services: Subscription Web Apps for Business
08 07 2008

At its Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston today, Microsoft announced a roadmap and pricing for a number of online software packages for the enterprise and small business market. Microsoft Online Services is currently available in a limited beta and will come in two flavors: Business Productivity Online Standard Suite for $15 a seat, and a Deskless Worker Suite for $3 a seat. The Business Productivity Suite will come with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online (IM and Presence), as well as Office Live Meeting. The cheaper Deskless Worker Suite will only include Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. Companies do not have to subscribe to the complete packages, but can also subscribe to individual services as well. Microsoft Online Services is scheduled to be released out of beta at some point in the second half of 2008.

The Deskless Worker Suite, as Mary Jo Foley notes, seems to be geared towards users who might otherwise be tempted to move to Google Docs or Zoho's online office suite. Microsoft is aiming this product at workers who only spend a small part of their days at a computer, but still need access to email and and other basic online services. As Microsoft is moving more and more services into the cloud, the big question of when (and if) Microsoft will start offering the core components of its office suite like Word and Excel online as well, still remains. For now, Microsoft seems content to offer products like Office Live Workspace that provides online storage in the cloud, but as pressure from Google and others increases, Microsoft will surely have to counter these offerings with a more fully featured web based office suite.

Google Docs Goes Down - How Long is Too Long for You? (POLL)
08 07 2008

Google's hosted office suite Google Docs has been down for more than 30 minutes, rendering documents inaccessible and users frustrated. Short outages are not uncommon, but as the downtime extends this morning it seems a good time to ask - how long is too long for you? At what point would you personally deem a web service too unstable to use, and presuming that varies from service to service, what's your requirement for Google Docs? Update:After 45 minutes of downtime, Google Docs appears to be back up. While microblogging service Twitter has become the poster child of down time, few people rely on constant updtime from Twitter to do their business. Google Docs may be different, however. A growing number of people do business on Google Docs - should they? Picture 360.png

Twits tweeting about Google Docs downtime, from Twitscoop. To be fair it appears that Google Docs has only gone down longer than a few minutes a few times since the service launched. The service is generally very reliable, the collaboration features are useful and it's free for consumer use. If those few service outages cost your company a substantial amount of money or inconvenience, that may be too much down time though. On the other hand, maybe serious business never had any place on Google Docs in the first place. What do you think?

How much down time would it take for you to quit using Google Docs? ( polls)

We appreciate your input; this is an important question and reading your replies will give us something to do while we wait for access to our docs to return. We probably should have enabled Google Gears.

Google Teams up With eBay and PayPal to Combat Phishing
08 07 2008

Google today announced that it has teamed up with eBay and PayPal to fight phishing scams more effectively. Starting today, Google will authenticate every email that claims to be from 'paypal.com' or 'ebay.com.' If a message fails these checks, Google will reject the message and not, as it often did before, allow it through and display a warning message. PayPal and eBay phishing scams are probably some of the most prevalent forms of online fraud, so having Google now fully reject these messages is going to at least prevent quite a few more of these. Google has been using DomainKeys and Domain Keys Identified Mail since 2004 and both PayPal and eBay has been using it since October 2007. So far, however, Google did not completely block all suspicious emails in order to prevent too many false positives. Now, however, Google is taking a more radical stand and will reject any message that does not authenticate. Google says it has been testing this for 'a few weeks now and it's working so well that few people really noticed.'

It is worth noting that Yahoo already announced a similar effort with eBay and PayPal last October. As we noted today, a lot of spam and phishing scams are now also moving towards social networks. Just like with email, users there also have to become more educated about how to recognize potential scams, as technical solutions are frequently no match for the ingenious social engineering that is often at the core of these scams.

More...

The Economist / The Internet / News

Valete
03 07 2008 A tradition in decline ONE fixture of college life is rapidly disappearing. Yearbooks, those beloved annual publications recording the events and people of the academic year, are suffering from plummeting print-runs, or are even being dropped altogether, in colleges across the country. The phenomenon is due in part to the price of the hard-bound volumes, typically as high as $75. For cash-strapped students facing ever-rising tuition and living costs they are a luxury that many can't afford. But the main cause is not the cost so much as the replacement of print with electronic media by and for the Facebook and MySpace generation. With social networks linking hundreds of friends and offering digital photographs and videos the traditional yearbook looks like a bit of a dinosaur. ...

Unbound
27 06 2008 Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry JEFF BEZOS, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, destination for nearly four-fifths of online book buyers, appears harmless. But to some in the publishing industry, he looms like a recurring nightmare. Having upset booksellers' apple-carts in the 1990s with his online stores, he is now widening his assault on the industry, as he personably explained in a speech at Book Expo America (BEA), a trade fair in Los Angeles, on May 30th. From the outside, book publishing looks like an impregnable edifice: 411,000 new titles were published in America last year, and more than 3 billion books sold there. Growth was 4.3% in the "adult trade" segment, the mainstay of the market. In fact, the existing order is fragile. Reading in America, as in many rich countries, is down. A study by the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency, says leisure reading is declining, especially among the young. Since 1985, books' share of entertainment spending has fallen by seven percentage points. ...

Rummaging through the internet
27 06 2008 Computing: New techniques to navigate and gather information online promise to revolutionise web browsing THE web has changed in many ways since it first emerged in the mid-1990s. The first web pages contained only text, and there was a big debate about whether pictures should be allowed. Today, by contrast, it is quite normal for pages to be bursting with photos, animated graphics, video clips, music and chunks of software, as well as text. In one respect, however, the web is unaltered: the clickable hyperlinks between pages are still the way users get from one page to another. But now a Norwegian computer scientist named Frode Hegland has cooked up a new sort of navigation. His free software, a browser add-on called Hyperwords, makes every single word or phrase on a page into a hyperlink--not just those chosen by a website's authors. Click on any word, number or phrase, and menus and sub-menus pop up. With a second click, it is possible to translate text into many languages, obtain currency or measurement conversions, and retrieve related photos, videos, academic papers, maps, Wikipedia entries and web pages fetched by Google, among other things. ...

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NPR / Technology / News


National Public Radio produces and distributes more than 130 hours of original programming each week, and local NPR stations also broadcast many programs which are produced by stations and other radio networks.

Remaking Radiohead, With Dot Matrix Printers
08 07 2008 From giant cellphones to old motherboards, outdated technology holds sentimental value for collectors like Jason Savitt. Another collector, James Houston, rigged dot matrix printers to play a song by Radiohead.

Taking Kindle To The Pool
08 07 2008 Amazon's electronic reader, Kindle, is starting to replace paperbacks, but people question how well the device holds up to surf and sand. Can summer reading be done on the device? Lynn Neary finds out.

Why Do We Still Have To Sign Credit Card Receipts?
08 07 2008 Why do we still have to sign credit card receipts? That's our one-question interview today, and Bob Sullivan of MSNBC.com's Red Tape Chronicles blog has the answer.

More...

PC Magazine / John C. Dvorak / Commentary

The Ideal Internet Connection and the Power User
08 07 2008 Whatever happened to the power user, anyway?

The 10 Top Dvorak Columns of the Past Year
07 07 2008 Take a trip down the Dvorak rabbit hole! We look back at his 10 most-read columns of the past year, and the reader rants they provoked.

No More Odes to Bill Gates, Please!
01 07 2008 Okay, this is getting ridiculous. I've been tracking the sheer number of articles written about Bill Gates leaving Microsoft: There are over 1,000 a day, every day.

More...

Digital Communities / Magazine / Features


Information technology (IT) case studies, applications, news and best practices by and for international, state, city and county government.

E-Waste Spreads Toxic Trash Throughout Developing World
23 06 2008 Obsolete electronics cause environmental problems in poor nations.

If It Was Up To Me
20 06 2008 The Digital Communities program has created and organized a community of peers and potential partners to help and advise those seeking to use technology to initiate change and improvement for their residents.

E-Waste is a Growing Problem for CIOs
29 05 2008 Recycling efforts rely on states, localities and manufacturers due to federal government inaction.

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