Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

25-10-2006

by Damien Mulley

This week's Rattleblog features an eclectic mix of items about virtual worlds, future video turf wars and broadband news.

According to James Corbett, Irish bloggers are finding that Second Life isn't living up to the hype. While big business seems to be investing more in this virtual world, and even Reuters is putting a journalist in there, some Irish bloggers still don't believe the hype.

Pat Phelan covers the massive profits Google has made in advertising for yet another quarter. Last week saw Yahoo warn that the online advertising boom was slowing but Google, which once again beat analysts' expectations, has shown the boom is still there for them. Without doubt Google is now an advertising company with a technology arm.

Techcrunch reports that bloggers might just do what Microsoft and Sun couldn't do and provide a single sign-on for a wide range of sites and services. Technorati is the latest to adopt the Open ID login system, which allows users to have a single username and password to log into Technorati, LiveJournal, Typepad and social networking site Vox. We all look forward to the day we don't need to remember 15 different usernames and passwords to do anything online.

Cameron Marlow blogs about yet another new Amazon service called Askville which models itself on Answers.com and Yahoo Answers, except this service rewards people for asking questions as well as answering questions. The advantage Amazon may have in this crowded space is that there is a significant community already signed up via the Amazon site, which contains millions of reviewers already interested in sharing their knowledge.

Blogger Philipp Lenssen reveals details about Google's GDrive application which allows you to store all your important documents on Google's servers. Philipp managed to get a copy of the application and has posted screenshots and help manuals. The application is only meant for Google employees right now but it's only a matter of time before this is released to the public. Microsoft already offers such a service with Live.com

The ink is barely dry on the Google and YouTube deal and it seems the music companies are going after the other video hosting sites for copyright infringement. While YouTube has yet to get the slap of a legal letter from one of the big music companies, the letters to the minnows of video sharing is surely a shot across the bows of the newly sugar-daddied YouTube. Where there's cash, there's a lawyer willing to take it. (Disclosure: This blogger is in training to be a greedy lawyer.)

According to Steve Poland, MySpace tried to make a last ditch bid for YouTube and failed. The social networking site has instead made its own video hosting service more prominent on MySpace. It could even eventually block YouTube videos being hosted on MySpace and force users to use the in-house system but this would run the risk of a user backlash. It seems the video hosting market could heat up even more.

BoingBoing reports that Iran has decided to cap broadband speeds at 128k due to fear of the influence of the internet. The very strong blogging community in Iran were less than impressed.

Staying with broadband news, Om Malik reports that Maverick French ISP Free, which released a startling low-cost broadband service and then brought out almost-free voice calls and TV on the service are now rolling out routers for customers that also function as WiFi hotspots that other people can connect into. The company hopes eventually to have 30,000 wireless hotspots as a result.

Lastly Richard Charkin covers National Blog Day in the UK. Ireland has yet to have such a day. Perhaps this time next year Rattleblog will be covering such an event?

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.