As you’ve probably heard, Digg Labs launched last week. If you haven’t, see the Digg blog. I was very impressed by Digg labs, not so much because they are particularly useful, but because they are interesting to watch. They were designed by a company called Stamen Design, and I decided to have a look at what else Stamen has been doing. It seems they specialise in visualising data in interesting ways, and some of the stuff they have done is really interesting.

A particular favourite is called ‘Cabspotting’. From the site:

Cabspotting traces San Francisco’s taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible. The Exploratorium has invited artists and researchers to use this information to reveal these “Invisible Dynamics.”

Each cab draws a trail, and that can be used to see all sorts of interesting data in a new way. It also happens to look extremely cool! I particularly like the timelapse videos, which show cab activity at a particular time of day. The colour of the path of the cab can also indicate things, such as its velocity.

All in all, a really interesting project, and I’m sure I could kill hours on the site!

Ajax is the thing to use on your Web 2.0 website at the moment, but integrating it on blogs isn’t something I’ve seen before. AjaxWP is an easy to install addition to Wordpress which ajaxifies your blog. From the site:

The script operates transparently by parsing the (X)HTML of the blog, and adding onclick event handlers to all links that point to internal blog pages. When a user clicks on a link AjaxWp traps the event and, instead of letting the browser navigate to the target page, requests the target page with AJAX.

The requested page is then parsed by the AjaxWp engine, filtering out redundant markup (like the header and footer), and inserted in the designated area of the blog.

Basically, when you click on an internal link on a blog with AjaxWP installed, rather than your browser fetching the new page, the ajax script requests it and it is shown to you without you changing pages. It certainly looks really slick, and probably speeds things up since only the new content is fetched rather than the static areas on a blog.

There are, however, a couple of disadvantages which have stopped me installing it on Gizbuzz. Firstly, it makes all the URLs ugly, and whilst they will work if you send them to other people, I think they would put people of linking and sharing the link with their friends. The other disadvantage is possibly peculiar to Gizbuzz, but the sidebar on the main page of Gizbuzz is different from that on a post page. AjaxWP would not allow for that difference.

Despite my misgivings, if you can’t wait to jump on the Ajax bandwagon, AjaxWP looks like a simple and pretty way to go.

Following from their very successful line-up of the Core processor series, Intel have released the Core 2 series. The Core series, particularly the dual-core Core Duo configuration were very popular in laptop computers, including Apple’s MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops.

The Core 2 line will continue to focus on the mobile computing market but will also aim for more high-perfomance desktop machines. One of the benefits of the Core and Core 2 ranges has been high energy efficiency, and it seems Intel are banking on this once again to get the more heavy-duty Core 2 chips into more laptops, where power consumption is a very important issue.

Where Intel have recently missed out on sales to AMD has been this extremely high-performance desktop market. The AMD Athlon 64 X2 range has almost dominated this type of ‘gaming machine’ for some time, and with the release of the Core 2 aimed at this type of machine as well, it’s obvious Intel wants to regain ground, while still dominating in the mobile space (with the Centrino brand). They are also branching into the new media PC market with the Viiv (pronounced like ‘five’) brand, of which new Viiv machines will be running Core 2 processors. It makes sense, as power consumption for media PCs is also important (to keep cooling requirements down).

The blog of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, IEBlog, have announced that Internet Explorer 7 will be distributed by Windows XP’s Automatic Updates feature as a ‘high priority’ update when it is released. This means it will have similar status to other high priority updates which are generally security patches and important bugfixes.

The knock-on effect of this will mean that a large proportion of Windows XP machines will be automatically upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 without any interaction on the user’s part (aside from confirming the install once IE7 has been downloaded).

Microsoft are offering a free download (requires ‘Genuine Validation’) which prevents the download and installation of IE7, but this is mainly aimed at companies wanting to prevent IE7 infiltrating their networks. It’s doubtful that most home users will be bothered to stop this.

Now there is a fairly good argument on Microsoft’s part about this move. IE7 does include numerous security enhancements, and the IEBlog team cited this as the main reason for auto-distributing IE7 across Windows Update.

There could be a more sinister motive here, however, and that could be to move users away from using or trying out alternative browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

I’ll leave that judgement up to you.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Yahoo do this kind of bundling; their deal with BT to offer BT-Yahoo branded broadband in the UK was another of this kind of business tactic.
This time, however, its Yahoo and Symantec. Apparently, in a move trying to battle with Google and Microsoft, Yahoo will promote discounted Symantec security software and Symantec will provide virus protection in Yahoo’s Toolbar.

Both companies need this partnership - Yahoo shares recently fell by a large margin and they need to try and gain some ground against Google in the search engine war. I guess their idea is that they will entice users into using their search engine by offering them discounts on ‘essential software’.

Symantec are looking increasingly threatened by Microsoft, as they plan in Vista to bundle their own free anti-spyware solution Windows Defender, and have launched a complete security solution including anti-virus with their Windows Live OneCare service. However, Symantec are still by far the leader in Windows security products at the moment. They are attracting competition from significantly smaller security vendors, such as F-Secure, and these smaller companies are beginning to gain a bit of ground. Also, the emerging market of anti-spyware products wasn’t immediately snapped up by the big companies, and smaller firms like Webroot have responded by taking market share in this area.

It will be interesting to watch this move and see how far this partnership goes, and how far Yahoo and Symantec are willing to go in terms of price reduction to secure more Yahoo searches and more Symantec users.

Processor manufacturer AMD are reportedly finalising a deal to purchase graphics chip manufacturer ATi.

AMD are at the moment second to Intel in the consumer PC market for making processors. AMD and Intel’s 32-bit chips can run the same software, but more recently AMD have been branching out to build 64-bit chips that can run 64-bit and 32-bit software (such as the Athlon 64 series), while for the consumer market, Intel have been focusing on staying with 32-bit chips, but making them dual core (put simply, two main processing ‘cores’ on one chip, so it runs a lot faster). Some of AMD’s top processors are also dual core and 64-bit.

Intel haven’t just been limited to main processors, however. For a while they’ve actually been the number one graphics chip manufacturer (selling cheaper integrated graphics chips for low-end computers). For more powerful computers, such as gaming PCs, leaders in the graphics chip market are Nvidia and ATi.

Now that AMD look set to acquire ATi, they will be in much more of a position to rival Intel, with a much more comprehensive package of products. This move will probably also put pressure on Nvidia.

An interesting story, however, is Apple. Apple are in the process of releasing new machines based on Intel processors, moving away from IBM’s PowerPC chips. However, their high-end Intel laptop, the MacBook Pro, uses an Intel Core Duo processor but has ATi graphics. Will this trend continue in Apple’s future Intel products? What will Apple’s graphics chip choice be for its ‘Mac Pro’ (name currently unconfirmed) high-end desktop be?

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft’s upcoming Zune portable music player will support sharing of tracks using wireless networking. It’s not clear from this story what kind of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions will be placed on users who share and sample music this way. There’s also no word of whether this wifi sharing and sampling functionality will extend to users of other devices that use Windows Media DRM (such as Creative’s Zen line). It’s also looking unlikely that the Zune will interoperate this way with any future versions of the iPod that support wifi, due to the incompatibilities between Microsoft’s DRM and Apple’s DRM used in iPods.

I’m sceptical about how well this will help Microsoft in their obvious aim of trying to eat into Apple’s dominant market share in the music player and music download market. Microsoft will certainly have to try very hard to not only match the iPod in terms of style and ‘coolness’, but also they will have to convince people to buy from their Zune music store instead of the iTunes Music Store.

That raises the issue of incompatibility - as I’ve said Microsoft’s DRM is incompatible with Apple’s. This essentially means that tracks purchased through the iTunes Music Store won’t be easily transferred to the Zune. Of course, there will be ways to do it (burning a CD won’t usually include the copy protection), but the legality of these is debatable.

Well, all we can do now is to wait for more news to emerge from either Microsoft officially, or other sources. Microsoft say the first Zune players will be released in 2006, with more coming in 2007.

This offer originally sounded too good to be true - free calls using Voice over IP (VoIP) service Gizmo Project to any landline and mobile (in 60 countries). Well, as the saying goes “if it seems to good to be true, it probably is”, well it certainly isn’t as perfect as originally thought.
I’m not saying that Gizmo Project isn’t a good VoIP service, because it is. Its ability to record calls natively and various other unique functionality makes it often a better choice than Skype or other services. Also it uses the industry-standard SIP system to transmit and receive calls rather than Skype’s proprietary system.

Well, the offer still stands, but basically it means that in order to get the free calls, you have to have registered your actual phone number with Gizmo and be calling someone who has done the same (and uses Gizmo Project regularly).

Still, if you do have friends who use Gizmo Project as well as you, you can now enjoy the benefit of calling them on their landline or mobile for free if they register as well. There is one question raised here, however - if your friend has Gizmo Project anyway, why not call them using that, if they are available?

[via]

EDIT: Just a note to everyone in the UK, we only get landline functionality, not, unfortunately, mobile as well. Mobile calls can still be made at a price in the UK using Gizmo, they’re just not part of the offer.

Just a quick post, as there are only sketchy details about this at the moment; but it has been confirmed that Microsoft are going to release a portable music player to rival Apple’s iPod. The project to build this player is codenamed ‘Zune’ and Microsoft apparently are going to release it sometime this year.

There are already Zune spoof sites popping up and a lot of rumours flying around. All we know at the moment is that it’s Microsoft’s portable music player, it’s called ‘Zune’ and it’s going to be released this year. There will be more details here at Gizbuzz when we get them.

This is a meme which has arisen in recent days, albeit not in a traditional fashion. First there was the Guardian editorial on Thursday, entitled ‘I blog therefore I am‘ (which ironically I first read in the print edition), talking about the sacking of Paris-based British accountant Catherine Sanderson. It concludes:

There is no doubt that blogging is here to stay, until a future technological innovation overtakes it. In the same way that passing around pornography via workplace email led to a spate of dismissals a few years ago, before companies adapted their codes of conduct to cope with the new technology, so blogging will crop up on the boundaries between work and leisure before new rules are defined. Ms Sanderson is claiming unfair dismissal. It will be interesting to see how she fares. Meanwhile employers will have to get used to bloggers working under their roofs.

Robert Scoble, who should know about corporate bloggers, also threw in his opinion about this case a little while ago:

She won’t be the last one. Blogging is like hopping on stage at a major conference. You wouldn’t do that and start talking smack about your boss, would you? Would you honestly expect to stay employed?

What seems to be emerging here is an attitude in blogging which is that no-one is listening. This is interesting, since if one thinks about it, blogging is essentially attention seeking; the desire for other people to read what you have written and link back to you. It’s why I liked it when I hit the digg front page, because people cared about what I had wrote.

I’m sure Newsnight’s deputy editor (who also wrote an excellent post last week, linked to by Peter) Daniel Pearl is talking about the same thing. He vents his frustration about the fact that when people blog about Newsnight, and people respond, they feel that it is in some way spooky that the BBC is watching them:

The thing I find strange about all this is that often people who write blogs, or contribute to them, somehow think that they are involved in a private forum.

I recently came across a comment claiming Jeremy disliked recording his weekly podcast. I posted a response and the blogger seemed appalled - “the BBC’s watching us - spooky” was his reply. But if you write something about us on the internet surely I have every right to read it and respond - that’s not spooky.

I have to say I find the attitude of bloggers who think that this is spooky very odd. Bloggers need to decide if they want people to read what they write or not. If they do, then they should blog, but if they don’t, they should just email their friends. It’s clear that the new media isn’t for everyone.