Still not entirely sure how to explain Web 2.0 to your friends? You weren’t alone in 2006. In a fitting marriage of context and content, “Web 2.0″ was the No. 1 most-cited Wikipedia entry of the year, according to Nielsen BuzzMetrics. The oft-repeated buzz word handily beat out other tech terms such as “blog,” “Meme” and two conjugations of “Podcast” for the coveted top spot.
Wikipedia had a banner 2006 as its audience more than doubled, according to Nielsen NetRatings.

Wikipedia had a big blog boom itself this year with almost 29,000 citations, a 54% increase from 2005. The site also saw its audience more than double, leaping from 17.8 million unique visitors in November 2005 to 37.8 million in November 2006, according to Nielsen NetRatings. It should come as no surprise, then, that actual encyclopedias such as Britannica and Columbia have nowhere near the web readership as their Wiki counterpart these days.

Source: Advertising Age

With Google Chairman Eric Schmidt sitting on Apple Computer’s board of directors, people have been expecting the two companies to do some kind of deal that will combine the best of both companies’ technologies.

That may happen next week when Apple’s Steve Jobs takes the stage at Macworld in San Francisco on Tuesday. Jobs is expected to reveal more about the video playing device he tentatively has called the iTV.

Google watcher Steve Arnold says Jobs is likely to announce that Apple will use Google’s video search capability. “Apple needs to cut a deal with someone to find and distribute videos,” said Arnold, who is managing director of information technology consultancy Arnold IT. “There’s this huge Internet video flood that’s been unleashed. But you can’t find anything.”

Source: InformationWeek

Google Calendar has surpassed MSN Calendar and is rapidly approaching Yahoo Calendar in U.S. visitor market share, according to data released on Wednesday by Internet metrics firm Hitwise.

Hitwise said that the number of visitors to Google Calendar had increased threefold since June.

Unlike MSN Calendar or Yahoo Calendar, Google Calendar has been getting significant traffic from non-Google properties.

Source: InformationWeek

According to data from the NDP Group, OneCare has had little success in stealing users from the traditional consumer security powerhouses like Symantec and McAfee. While OneCare accounted for nearly 11% of U.S. consumer security suite sales in June, the first full month after version 1.0 debuted, by October its slice had shrunk to 6%. Symantec, meanwhile, remained the dominant player, with 74% of the market in October, while McAfee held down second place with approximately 10%.

OneCare 1.5 will be available from the Microsoft Web site as well as in the retail channel. After a free 90-day trial using the downloaded version, users must pay the $49.95 annual fee. Existing paid users will be able to upgrade to 1.5 free of charge.

Source: InformationWeek

Using IE6 was “unsafe” 284 days last year even for users who patched their systems as soon as Microsoft released fixes. An analysis by the Washington Post’s Stuart Krebs revealed that exploit code for critical unpatched flaws in IE6 was available for three-quarters of the time last year.

Even worse, for at least 98 days last year no patches were available for flaws that were been actively exploited by hackers to steal personal data. Firefox users, by comparison, were exposed to critical, unpatched flaws that were actively exploited for just nine days last year. This single period of exposure compares to multiple overlapping periods of vulnerability faced by IE6 users.

IE7 promises improved security for surfers, at least in theory, but its release in November came too late in the year to significantly alter the threat landscape, Krebs notes.

Source: The Register

Last year, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies predicted hard-drive companies would announce 1 terabyte drives by the end of 2006. Hitachi was only off by a few days.

The company said on Thursday that it will come out with a 3.5-inch-diameter 1 terabyte drive for desktops in the first quarter, then follow up in the second quarter with 3.5-inch terabyte drives for digital video recorders, bundled with software called Audio-Visual Storage Manager for easier retrieval of data, and corporate storage systems.
Hitachi terabyte drives

The Deskstar 7K1000 will cost $399 when it comes out. That comes to about 40 cents a gigabyte. Hitachi will also come out with a similar 750GB drive. Rival Seagate Technology will come out with a 1 terabyte drive in the first half of 2007.

Source: News.com

For most companies, e-mail plays a mission-critical role in day-to-day business operations. While providing great value, the spontaneous and casual nature of e-mail often results in misuse that can be comical to outsiders while costly to the enterprise.

MessageGate, Inc., a leader in practical e-mail governance, has compiled a list of 10 unforgettable e-mail blunders from 2006 that surely will be haunting the sender in the New Year.

10. Politics – as usual

A lawyer at the Small Business Administration was fired after sending and receiving more than 100 e-mails through his government computer in support of the Green Party in California.

9. “But I wasn’t being paid!�?

An intern sent all of a company’s sensitive IT diagrams to her personal Gmail account so that she could have samples of her work for the future. This included every server, the applications running on those servers, the IP addresses and a multitude of other sensitive network security information. This information is now stored and indexed on Google’s servers.

8. “Change the toner…please!�?

A company discovered its top e-mail sender was not an employee, but the copy/fax machine. Tens of thousands of emails sent over a period of days alerting various users of low toner were universally ignored; meanwhile, mail servers were strained and folders were filling up.

7. I bought how many houses?!?

A financial services company discovered employees were disclosing customers’ personal financial information through unsecured e-mail as they sought to close loans by sharing credit reports directly with applicants via e-mail.

6. Biting the hand that feeds you

Morgan Stanley asked two bankers and the firm’s former chief economist in Asia to leave after they distributed an e-mail critical of Singapore. From the e-mail: “Actually, Singapore’s success came mostly from being the money laundering center for corrupt Indonesian businessmen and government officials. Indonesia has no money. So Singapore isn’t doing well.”

5. A costly pack rat

A financial services company learned that a system administrator was testing the systems responsiveness and load by cramming the e-mail network full of test messages (to the tune of 80-90k per day). In addition to causing huge system bottlenecks, the firm’s archiving policy was saving terabytes of test mail per year and archiving it for an undetermined time.

4. Live, from W-R-O-N-G

Recognizing the unusual messaging patterns of one employee, a financial services firm discovered that one employee was running a disc-jockey business at the expense of the corporate server. The large music files he was e-mailing to potential customers were being archived for an indefinite period.

3. He said, she said
Thomas J. Perkins, the former HP director who unearthed a series of scandals at HP, held the upper hand in his public-relations battle with the chairwoman, Patricia C. Dunn, until his callous e-mail was forwarded to the media.


2. How do you say ‘oops!’ in German?

Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s largest bank, lost its spot among the underwriters of Hertz Global Holdings Inc.’s initial public offering after an employee sent unauthorized e-mails to about 175 institutional accounts.

1. Thanks, but I no longer need the job

The video resume of Yale senior Aleksey Vayner was sent from a financial institution that he was applying at to YouTube. With the Internet world mocking Vayner, he is threatening to sue numerous institutions including UBS and YouTube.


Impossible Is Nothing! Video

Adobe Systems will issue patches next week for older versions of its Reader and Acrobat Reader software, which contain a dangerous vulnerability that could be used for phishing attacks or to remotely access files on a computer.

The problem affects versions 7.0.8 and earlier of the Acrobat and Reader programs. Adobe is telling users of those versions to disable the Acrobat and Reader plug-in in their Web browser until the patches are issued.

Since the problem became public, Adobe has also been encouraging customers to upgrade to Reader 8 , the latest version of its program, which is not affected by the vulnerability.

Source: Yahoo

Chinese Web users lost around 10,000 Internet domain names due to disruption caused by last month’s earthquakes off Taiwan, state media said on Friday.

The domain names — or Web site addresses — vanished after Chinese users were unable to update them or failed to re-register them on their expiry, the official Xinhua news service said, citing China International Network Information Center.

Domain name servers were not responsible for lost domain names if holders did not re-register in time, Xinhua quoted a center insider as saying, since the loss was an “act of God”.

But domain name servers may compensate individuals and companies under a scheme yet to be finalized, Xinhua added.

Source: Reuters