Phil Bradley's weblog

Friends Reunited New and improved

For those of you in the UK, you're probably listed on Friends Reunited. You might be interested to know that it's now been updated. It's entirely free, and has a Web 2.0 feel about it. Unfortunately I think it's all a little too late. We've done the thing of contacting friends, finding out if they're doing better or worse than we are, and then the emails tailing off into silence. Or alternatively, getting on like a house on fire with your first crush, leaving your spouse and kids and it all ending tragically. These are really a one trick pony, and I'll give them their due, they've added in work, the road you lived on, armed forces and so on.

I seldom go back there, and I wasn't amazingly impressed with how it's changed. Most upsetting is that they appear to have deleted all the stuff that everyone wrote about their schooldays! This was without a doubt the best bit of the place, and I wept with laughter at some of the stories. [Edited to add: Apparently the memory boards have only disappeared temporarily and they should be coming back soon.}

Word of the day is 'exaflood'

From a BBC News story "Does online video threaten the net?" we get the word 'exaflood'. It is derived from the word 'exabyte'  which is a huge amount of data. It's estimated that in 5 exabytes you could list all the worlds ever spoken by human beings. By 2011 more than 12 exabytes will be crossing the net every month. 30% of the traffic will be video, and another 43% will be people swapping video and other files via peer-to-peer networking.

However representatives of the ISPs interviewed didn't seem overly bothered by this, and the general message coming out of the report was 'don't panic!' Not that I was, but - y'know, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Some Breast Cancer Sites Include Inaccurate Data

Link: Some Breast Cancer Sites Include Inaccurate Data. About 5% of breast cancer Web sites include inaccurate information, according to a new study in the journal Cancer, Reuters reports.

Researchers at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center examined 343 Web pages and found that one in 20 had inaccuracies. Web sites focused on complementary and alternative medicine were 15 times more likely to contain false or misleading information, according to the researchers.

Triple.com - Register Domain Names [Sponsored post]

One of the things that I'm often asked is how to register domain names, how much does it cost and so on. By co-incidence I've been asked (aka paid) to take a look at  Triple.com. This is a very straightforward and easy resource to use; start by typing in the name of the domain that you want, and it will check .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, and .name (No country codes from what I could see though, which is a shame, but I guess we can't have everything!) Triple.com then goes off to see if the name is available, and if it's not it gives you a wide range of suggestions instead.

They will register domains for $9.99, and they will host from $3.99 a month for 1 domain, 5 email accounts, 250 Mb storage and 100 Gb traffic up to $19.99. Consequently it's cheap hosting.They have a bunch of special features and their uptime is 99.9%. Every domain registered includes free security features, forwarding, advanced control panel, total registrant information control and so on. I also liked the fact that they have live support, via MSN, AIM, ICQ and so on, which was a nice touch. Also worth saying that they're a premium quality ICANN authorized domain registrar.

If you're looking for a hosting company, this looks like a sensible option, and one worth exploring.

Newspaper archives and newspaper articles at HighBeam Research

So I found this site: Newspaper archives and newspaper articles at HighBeam Research. Looks very good, drawing content from over 3,000 journals, newspapers and so on. I guessed at the outset it was going to be a charged service - the link to 'Become a member' and 'Membership benefits' kinda hinted that. Of course, the question to ask next is 'how much does it cost please?' So, if you have a couple of minutes to spare, join me in the journal of how a company can manage to completely screw up.

'Become a member' looks like a good starting point. This tells me that I can get a free 7 day trial. I have to fill out a form though. Now, since I have no idea how much the service is, I'm not inclined to do this at this point. So, still no idea how much it costs.

Let's try 'Membership benefits'.  More blurb about how good they are,  a little table feature on the difference between full and basic membership. Yes, but how much does it cost please?

'Help' is given as an option. That's got to be a good bet surely. 'Membership options' takes me back to the same table that I've already seen.  'I have a billing question' - still no indication of price. 'What are the different membership options?' Takes me back to that table again. This is getting very tiresome.

I could go on and list the other pages that I looked at, but you get the idea. It doesn't tell me *anywhere* (that I could find) one simple fact... how much does it cost? So you know what? I'll be giving it a miss. If they can't even get that simple basic point right, how much else have they managed to screw up?

Revision World | Free online revision guides to help you pass exams

Revision World | Free online revision guides to help you pass exams. Revision World is a free resources for pupils and teachers providing revision notes, questions and downloads across a range of subjects.

Top 10 Useful Web Tools from Pandia

Pandia has come up with their listing of Top 10 Useful Web Tools. Worth a look, though I don't entirely agree with their selection.

Yahoo Bookmarks is not a service that I use, since I'm not really a Yahoo person, and I prefer using my start page for the most used stuff, FURL for my long term interests and del.icio.us for anything mildly interesting.

Google Reader is also not my preferred choice - I've been with Bloglines for a while now, and while they're not perfect by any means I still like them.

StumbleUpon is a rather different social networking system, and relies on people finding interesting things, voting for them and learning from others. Never really got into this one, since delicious and automated searches does that job for me.

Vox is a weblog tool and it is one that I use - to the extent of backing up my TypePad weblog(s). It's as good as, and better than Blogger in many ways, and if you're looking for a personal weblog software package, this is pretty good, though if you're more of a Google person you'll want to stick with their offering.

Netvibes is their preference for a start page. I use Netvibes as my backup system on Internet Explorer,  but I'm very firmly in the PageFlakes camp here. More flexible, better options, easier to use, larger user base - really no contest.

Yahoo Mail is another I don't use for the reason given earlier. Pandia like it because of the integral calendar, notepad and feed reader.  However, I'll stick with Gmail for this one.

Facebook is a choice we agree on! Far better than the other options, and it's widely used in the information industry, so it's the obvious no-brainer choice.

Feedburner is a good call if you want to keep a close eye on who is using your weblog.

Google Docs is another choice that I'll happily run with. I still use Word for most of my stuff, but it's useful to have as a backup, or for material I'll want to access when I'm away from home.

Flickr is another 100% good call. There's an awful lot that still annoys me about Flickr, and they simply seem to have stopped dead in development, which is not good, but it's still the photosharing option that  seems obvious to me.

Treonauts - spamming emails near you!

Anyone else having spam from  Treonauts? It's some company that's pushing the Treo (which I don't have, and have never visited their website or had anything to do with them). They've been spamming 2 of my email addresses daily and I'm getting a tad hacked off with them, hence this posting! I'd be interested to hear from anyone else who is getting their tatty rubbish.

Call to regulate the net rejected

A voice of sanity from Vint Cerf via the BBC entitled Call to regulate the net rejected. He makes the very sensible point that the net reflects society, and to limit beyond what is clearly illegal puts people on a slippery slope - "If it's not illegal, it raises a rather interesting question about where you do draw the line." He goes on to say "We have a job to do, collectively as a society, to deal with the problems we discover in the network but suppressing the knowledge of what's going on isn't going to help us. We need to face that problem directly".

Interesting sidelight onto the whole issue of filtering, mentioned below in another posting.

Catch up!

I don't know - I go away for a couple of days, come back and spend the next few days trying to catch up on everything that I missed. Bloglines is currently happily telling me that I've got over 4,000 unread articles. I think this is where the 'delete all' button is going to come into play. However, there are a few things to mention in particular:

ThinkFree Takes Online Office Suite Offline with New ThinkFree Premium Edition: Microsoft compatible suite unplugs users from the Internet, delivers feature set to support anywhere, anytime access to documents. ThinkFree welcomes users to apply to become Premium Beta testers at http://product.thinkfree.com/premium.

Healia is being acquired by the Meredith Corporation, one of the nation's leading media and marketing companies. Read more at: http://www.healia.com/healia/en/healia_news_acquisition

Quintura, a visual-based search engine for web discovery and browsing of any web content, yesterday announced that it has raised several millions US dollars in Series A funding from Mangrove Capital Partners. Quintura will shortly offer an affiliate model for web-sites and blogs to replace a site map with a Quintura interactive cloud for site search and navigation.  The web-site publisher can index the site content and display the Quintura cloud on its site.  The affiliate model will be either free/ads-supported or subscription-based.

Clusty has gone mobile. Details are available from Vivisimo.

Right.. after that quick burst I'm off to catch up some more!