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In the English speaking world, the free blogging platforms that stand out from the crowd are Google's Blogger and Wordpress.com. While those services are also popular in Japan, a particularly strong homegrown contender is Ameba.jp., which is now looking to tap into a global audience by launching as a Facebook app. More than just a blog platform, Ameba is unique in the way it has socialized blogs via a virtual online community - Ameba Pigg. Yes, it's an odd name... But it is Japan after all. Read More

Ahhh, social network status updates. How would we know what breathtakingly exciting (or mind-numbingly boring) activities our friends and family are up to from one moment to the next without them? And if you sometimes find it’s a chore just reading these missives, spare a thought for those people writing them. But soon, by combining networking and messaging platforms with emerging ambient intelligence systems that use sensors and smart objects to create awareness of users’ whereabouts and activities, such status updates and other social information could be generated automatically. Read More

Not long ago, radio manufacturers had only to worry about the basic look of their devices. Rarely were new stations added, reception methods hadn’t changed in a long time and, generally, smaller was better. Sure, they had to combine an alarm clock in some models, but that wasn’t too difficult. Now a radio has to be a veritable Swiss army knife of appliances, and this is where the new Sensia from Pure excels. Its list of features includes a large color touch screen display, DAB, FM stereo and digital radio with full Band III, wireless media streaming, input from iPods/iPhones and MP3 players, and Pure Apps that let you connect with Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and thousands of podcasts. Read More

Kodak is trying to out-flip the Flip with its latest pocket digital video cam, the Zi8. Aimed squarely at the heart of the hot compact video market, the Zi8 outdoes the Flip Ultra HD with 1080p recording, electronic image stabilization, an SDHC card slot, and an external mic jack. Plus it'll shoot 5-megapixel stills, track faces, and is designed to perform better in low-light conditions. Read More

If you’ve got nothing to hide there’s no need to read to any further. But if you’re worried about someone digging up something from your past – and we’re talking non-criminal here – which may influence or damage job prospects, relationships, your social or professional life, then good news is at hand. The University of Washington (UW) has developed Vanish – a prototype system that places a time limit on information uploaded to any web service through a web browser. Electronic communication sent using Vanish - such as e-mail, posts on social networking sites and chat messages - would have a brief lifetime and then self-destruct, becoming irretrievable from all websites, inboxes, outboxes, backup sites and home computers. The University says that not even the sender could retrieve them. Read More

Most users have come to accept the new Twitter-style Facebook home page - but one thing continues to infuriate: all the annoying quiz and application updates in your news feed. But all is not lost if you are sick of learning "what Simpsons character" your friends are - here's a quick and easy way to make those annoying quizzes disappear from your news feed. Read More

Tapping the Internet – including personal Web searches, news reports, blogs, chat rooms and social networking sites – is fast becoming a way to get a complete, up-to-the-minute view of public health threats, say researchers from the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston (CHIP) in a Perspectives article published Online First by The New England Journal of Medicine on May 7, 2009. In an accompanying sidebar, they describe the use of HealthMap.org – a freely available Web site that aggregates, categorizes, filters and displays real-time information on emerging infectious diseases – in tracking the current H1N1 swine flu outbreak.


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Even in the digital age, there are still some cases where the pen is mightier than the keyboard. Scribbling a quick diagram or making a few quick handwritten notes can convey some information much more effectively than a slab of text. That’s the reasoning behind Livescribe’s Pulse smartpen, a computer in the shape of a pen that not only digitally captures handwriting, but simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing to create what it calls “pencasts”. Now Livescribe is taking pencasts to the next level with a social media tool that enables them to be embedded within any website or blog. Read More

Social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are designed to make keeping in touch with friends and family easy, but as the list of such sites continues to grow, the task of keeping up to date with all that data can quickly lead to information overload. "Lifestreaming" applications designed to simplify the process by aggregating data from multiple sources are now emerging. AOL's Socialthing is the latest lifestreaming app to join the ranks of FriendFeed, Tumblr.com and the recently announced Vine from Microsoft. Read More