The social-networking site MySpace.com has donated technology it helped develop to identify and block sexual predators from online communities.
The company, a unit of News Corp., said it will donate its Sentinel Safe database software to the National Center for Missing &Exploited Children. MySpace has been developing the program with Sentinel Tech Holding Corp.
The program promises to let Web sites to identify convicted sex offenders and bar them from their online communities, although it might not catch those who sign up under false names.
Sentinel Safe contains information on the estimated 600,000 registered sex offenders in the United States and is designed to receive updates from state sex offender registries. The tool is used by MySpace security officials who monitor profiles on the site and match identities against the database, then remove suspect profiles.
The donation of the technology to the center is meant to help law-enforcement officials with missing-children cases and other child-related investigations.
So long, floppy disks:
PC World, Britain’s largest chain of computer superstores, will say goodbye to floppy disks once the current stash is gone.
The retailer said Wednesday it chose not to reorder any more disks because they do not hold enough data and better alternatives exist. PC World has about 10,000 disks in stock. With 155 stores across Britain and nearly 50 more elsewhere in Europe, spokesman Hamish Thompson said the final stock of floppies will be gone “in weeks, if not days.”
A 3.5-inch floppy disk can store 1.44 megabytes of data; a typical MP3 song file can be twice that. And increasingly, customers are choosing to store their data on USB memory sticks or on external hard drives, so the demand for the floppy simply is not there, Thompson said.
Library of Congress treasures can be read online:
Scholars and others interested in flipping through some of the Library of Congress’ most fragile books will be able to tap the knowledge without damaging the artifacts.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said Wednesday the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded a $2 million grant to the world’s largest library for a program to digitize thousands of works with a major focus on “brittle books.”
The project supplements other efforts at the Library of Congress along with private companies such as Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Those massive book digitization projects, however, have typically shied away from materials in vulnerable conditions.
The new “Digitizing American Imprints” program seeks to identify best practices for handling and scanning those books and collections, according to its managers.
The new project will also digitize American history volumes, U.S. genealogy and regimental histories that hold personal collections from the Civil War period, and six collections of rare books, including the Benjamin Franklin Collection.
Site labeling is all the rage:
Internet users are taking avidly to sites that let them label photos, movies and blogs with their own descriptive tags, providing a major new way of organizing information online, according to a survey by the Pew Internet &American Life Project.
The December survey, released Wednesday, found that 28 percent of Internet users have tagged content, and 7 percent have done so on a typical day.
Tagging is used to organize photos on Yahoo Inc.’s Flickr, Web site bookmarks on Yahoo’s del.icio.us and video on Google Inc.’s YouTube. Google’s Gmail e-mail service also uses a form of tagging, although its “labels” are for personal rather than group organizing.
With tagging, a YouTube video of a python attacking rabbit gets tags that include “python, snake, rabbit, reptile, eat, devour, food, chain,” helping to guide people who search the site looking for any of those things.
Yahoo hitches a ride:
Yahoo Inc., overshadowed by several Internet rivals over the past year, is piggybacking on some of the entertainment industry’s leading brands in its latest attempt to bolster its own brand.
The “Brand Universe” initiative, unveiled at a media luncheon at its Sunnyvale headquarters this week, will showcase a pop-culture potpourri of television shows, movies, video games and celebrities on 100 different Web sites that Yahoo plans to create later this year.
Each of the new sites will revolve around one of the entertainment brands tabbed by Yahoo for star treatment.
The sites will pull together an array of photos, message board discussions, blogs and news stories focused on each featured brand, with Yahoo pulling the information from its own Web pages and other Internet destinations.
The branding promotion comes as Yahoo has lost some of its luster on Wall Street and the Web.
Investors became increasingly frustrated with Yahoo last year as its earnings growth fell further behind online search leader Google Inc., provoking a December shake-up that included the departure of Lloyd Braun – the executive who formerly ran the media group behind Brand Universe.
We are gathered here and there:
Cisco Systems Inc. rolled out its real-time video conference system for 50,000 employees worldwide in January, inviting them to test equipment with far-flung friends, family and co-workers.
Most big Cisco offices have TelePresence, which debuted in October. The technology – which includes high-definition monitors, highly sensitive audio equipment and integrated networking gear – starts at $99,000. A system that accommodates at least a dozen people costs $299,000.
TelePresence aims to be so realistic as to make conference-call participants believe the person talking on the monitor is in the same room. Multiple conversations can occur simultaneously, without awkward audio delays or jerky video.
Syd Garrett, a customer advocacy director who moved from Silicon Valley to North Carolina, brought in his teenage daughter and wife to reconnect with California friends and colleagues.
“I was talking with one of the other techie dads, and then the four girls chatting, giggling, interrupting each other, and finishing each other’s sentences,” Garrett said. “After a while, you forget that you aren’t there.”
Chief Globalization Officer Wim Elfrink, head of Cisco’s new Globalization Center in Bangalore, India, encourages workers to book time on weekends, when the system is not used by engineers, salespeople or executives.
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