Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

18-12-2007

by Damien Mulley

After spending what seems like months in Tibet meditating to find the right spirit for Rattleblog, we're back -- and just in time for Christmas!

While it wasn't clear to start with early on, 2007 turned out to be the year of the social network, with Facebook getting more attention than any social network ever. Of late though the press and a group called MoveOn.org went after the company about its Beacon advertising system and others reverse-engineered the service to see exactly how it worked.

Mashable reports that estimates suggest that ad spend on social networks will be in the region of USD4 billion by 2011, which is probably why Google is now so very interested in making alliances with other social networks to out-Facebook Facebook.

The Inside Google blog reports that the search giant has finally released profiles for those that use Google services so you have the same profile for all of them, and years after creating social networking site Orkut, Google now allow users to find their friends via their GMail addressbook. Something other social networks have been doing for the past two years. Little slow there Google, aren't we?

However, in a nice game of chess, Techcrunch reports that Facebook checkmated Google's Open Social Alliance by getting Bebo to support all applications that run on Facebook. This now gives the tens of thousands of Facebook application developers access to the European markets where Bebo is thriving. Facebook has also said it's open for business with everyone else too.

Last week saw the furthering of Google's attempt to take on more services that suck in a lot of web traffic without making Google money. While it was clear for a while that Facebook was a threat, now it's going after Wikipedia with Google Knol, but reactions so far have not been great. Knol is like Wikipedia but with ads and only Google-designated experts can write articles. Google Blogosoped quotes ex-Googlers who point out Google's dislike of web properties that don't run ads and their elitist attitude to information on the web.

Nicholas Carr also points out that Wikipedia is getting better and better Google rankings as time goes on and still won't accept ads. As an ad company, Google must see the ad-free model of Wikipedia as a massive threat to revenue as more and more number one slots on search terms are Wikipedia links.

Staying with Google just once more, it seems the company has rejigged its homepage once again. First it dumped its price comparison service, Froogle, and replaced it with Google Video; now it's dumped Video and replaced it with Google Shopping, which is just Froogle re-branded. Well, it is shopping season.

To more general news now. Tech blogging network Blognation looks to have bitten the dust just before Christmas. While active, the site and its Irish network covered some interesting technology topics. We hope that come Easter it might rise again.

The Research Buzz blog reports that we can all now look up the full census data from the Dublin 1911 census. We wonder were house prices and traffic the big problems of the day, as they are now?

Meanwhile, with data loss happening more and more and becoming an almost weekly occurrence in the UK, Boing Boing reports on a petition to make it mandatory that all organisations publicly disclose that their data has been lost. It comes at a time when the Ideal Government blog notes that people no longer trust governments to keep their data safe.

Not overcast but cloudy -- that's the future of computing if Amazon and Google have their way, according to Kevin Burton. It appears that Google's big plan is that we will move more and more of our data on to Google servers and web businesses large and gigantic will do the same.

If we thought e-mail and blog spam weren't bad enough, Searchengine Land shows that even maps can now be spammed. As maps become more intelligent and interactive, it makes sense in a twisted way for businesses to spam the maps so their offerings show up on maps. While e-mail becomes almost unusable, let's hope that online maps won't have the same fate or it's back to paper and awkward foldings of giant maps.

Lastly, according to Engadget, Rentokil has created a high-tech mousetrap that texts you when it catches vermin. We guess the loud snap isn't notice enough. We wonder will version 2.0 send you picture messages too?

Happy Christmas everyone!