eBay Ends Auction Of Iraqi Relic
A 4,000-year-old clay tablet thought to have been smuggled illegally from Iraq was removed from eBay just before the close of an online auction.The tablet had a wedge-shaped cuneiform script and had been put up for sale on eBay’s Swiss site. It caught the eye of a German archaeologist, who contacted the German police. They passed the information to their Swiss counter parts.Authorities have launched criminal proceedings against the seller, who was identified only as a resident of Zurich.
No Surprise: Few Know Of Google Docs
The blogosphere has chattered about a study that found nearly three out of four people haven’t heard of Google Docs or other online productivity suites.
MSN Money Wants Its Day In The Sun
Overcoming the inertia that keeps people going to other financial sites confronts Chris Jolley, group manager at Microsoft’s Financial Products Group, every day. He believe MSN Money deserves a look.
Wireless Spending Exceeds Landlines
With more Americans ditching their landlines, 2007 is on pace to be the first year in which U.S. households spend more on cell phone services, according to industry and government officials.
MySpace, Facebook To Spread the Love.
Christmas isn’t even here yet and the social networking giants Facebook and MySpace are already focusing on Valentine’s Day. MySpace will introduce members to a pickup artist, while Facebookers get access Match.com’s Little Black Book, both in efforts to help members’ love lives.You remember in college when you had a large circle of male and female buddies and everything was awesome until two of the buddies started dating and then it just got weird? Well, Facebook and MySpace are looking to mimic that phenomenon online.
Knol Recieving A lot of Criticism
Anil Dash, blogger and Six Apart employee, argues that Google has fundamental problems with creating good editing tools because they can’t really put themselves in the mind of the end user.
Web 2.0 Could Be Bad For Business
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen warns against believing all the Web 2.0 hype when designing with the end-user in mind. While some 2.0 features can help, the majority of sites should focus on mastering the 1.0 aspects that users know and love.The problem, as Nielsen sees it, is that companies follow too much what the hot trends are, and as a result create sites that are unnecessarily complicated or offer little benefit to the average user.
New Hampshire Blog Bans Clinton Staffers
A New Hampshire based Democratic blog has banned six usernames tracked to an IP address belonging to Senator Hillary Clinton’s campaign, because they did not say they were involved with the campaign.The Blue Hampshire blog traced two usernames to the Clinton campaign, along with four usernames that had registered with the blog within minutes of one another that were recommending a pro- Clinton post, according to Dean Barker, managing editor of the blog.
Site- And Source-Related Updates To Google Earth
Improvements to the search engine at Google.com are undeniably newsworthy, but on a sort of life-and-death scale, adjustments to the Google News engine are also important. And a few changes (and reminders) cropped up recently.
StarTrek.com Team Fired; Reorg Cited
Four days after participating in "Star Trek Day" on the Writers Guild of America’s picket lines at Paramount, the StarTrek.com production team received its walking papers from CBS Interactive.