Technology, Computers, Science, The Internet, Games
Mike Arrington says Google may be in talks to acquire YouTube. The rumoured rate $1.6 bn. That’s far lower than what anyone would expect. But then how trustworthy are these reports? Search me.
technorati tags:Google, YouTube, Acquisition, Techcrunch
Islandoo questions what comes first the TV or the Web?
Recently MintDigital launched BloomBox “a web application that makes it easy for television producers and broadcasters to make shows based around user-generated content.” A couple of weeks ago MintDigital soft-launched Islandoo, the first BloomBox-powered website that lets you apply, via the web, for Channel 4’s hit reality show Shipwrecked, which airs on BBC America and Channel 4.
Islandoo was created simply because at the end of Shipwrecked 2006, when Channel4 (RDF) asked for applications for Shipwrecked 2007, they immediately received more than 50,000 responses. Unsurprisingly the Shipwrecked production team were overwhelmed, even with six researchers, it was impossible to give each application the attention it deserved. So with the help of MintDigital, they set about utilising the latest Web 2.0 social networking techniques to help them filter the best applicants i.e by getting people to vote to see who the community thought should go forward for an audition.
“Islandoo is the first social networking website of its kind. The fact this community has a clear objective leads to a massive change in behaviour from other social networking sites. Users need to make friends in order to go through to the auditions. Therefore anyone who joins Islandoo gets bombarded with friendliness. ” said Andy Bell UK MD of Mint Digital
In less than 20 days, Islandoo has already signed up over 10,000th users. They are on track to generate over 10 million page views in the first month alone! This amazing statistic is not surprising given the fact that while I have been writing this post, Sneedy69 who signed up just 8 minutes ago has already received 20 fans and 30 comments.
He are just some of the feedback comments from other people who have recently signed up to Islandoo.
“I’m literally just doing this and making a cup of tea roughly every 45 minutes… MySpace has already got me by the balls and now this!”
“You’ve just created a profile and you think you have just signed up for a normal site. And then it hits you…”
“This site it more addictive than crack!”
From TechcrunchUK
Wikia’s Facebook-like College Wikis
Wikia has quietly launched semi-private college/university wikis. And they’ve taken a page out of Facebook’s game plan by requiring users to have an approved university email address in order to edit the wiki. The wiki itself, however, is viewable by everyone.
The goal is to have better data by keeping out people who aren’t directly affiliated with the university. On the downside, of course, is the fact that people have to find their college email address in order to add content. Facebook clearly provides enough incentive to users to do that. It isn’t clear yet if Wikia will have the same level of success.
This is still an experiment, and pre-existing open wiki’s about colleges and universities can be found at students.wikia.com. No word from Wikia on how they will handle having two versions of wikis for each university (one open and one semi-private).
Wikia continues to march along and do well after raising $4 million back in March and hiring a former eBay executive, Gil Penchina, to lead the company. Gil says Wikia is now generating 5 million daily page views on a million unique visitors. And their recently launched Travel Guides now have over 1,200 articles in ten languages covering 160 cities, just eight weeks after launch.
From Techcrunch
technorati tags:Wikia, Wiki, Facebook, Networking, College, Community
Google today launched Code Search, a search engine and index of source code that is collected from publicly available sources. Google claims that the new code search engine will be able to find almost any code that its crawler can find. It does seem that the Google index of source code is a lot broader than those found at competing sites Krugle and Koders. For instance, Google Code Search will index the content of zip and tarball files on open source sites such as openssl.org, while the other search sites seem to return a lot of results from sourceforge and a few other centralized repositories.
The first thing you notice at Google Code Search is that you can use regular expressions in the query field when searching, and there are a lot of search options to help you further refine what you are looking for. On the front page of Google Code Search there is a nice overview with some pointers on using the service.
From Techcrunch
technorati tags:Google, Search, Code, OpenSource
