Tag: INFORMATION

While you can't see the Great Firewall of China from space, its reach is global -- preventing those on the inside from accessing sites on the outside. Recently, another popular Web service was added to the block list: SugarSync. As the company's Laura Yecies points out in a blog post, SugarSync's aim "is to make information access fast, easy and ubiquitous." That, of course, is a philosophy ...

The last couple months of this year are starting to look like Breachfest 2010, and a new report in The Columbus Dispatch indicates that the latest victims are registered owners of Honda and Acura vehicles. As was the case with the McDonald's incident, it wasn't Honda or Acura specifically that was attacked -- but rather a third-party company who handled a customer email database. In addition ...

In recent months I've been losing my mind. I don't know if I actually have something wrong upstairs, but I have been finding it increasingly hard to keep things -- ideas, snippets, variables -- in short-term memory. I think, though, that it's just a symptom of Information Overload. I sit here, hour after hour, day upon day, scanning RSS feeds, IRC rooms and forums. The amount of new data, videos ...

My friends think I'm crazy ... overreacting. I've gone and done it, though. I've deactivated my Facebook account. My privacy settings were set to be as restrictive as Facebook allows, and I still didn't feel comfortable with it. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I don't trust Facebook to not use my information (and that of my friends) for evil, or even to adequately protect ...

Fun Tourist Attractions calls itself a "visual travel guide," and the name is pretty fitting. It's a large, carefully curated collection of attractions in places all over the world. You won't find stuff that is really "off the beaten path," but it's great for quickly figuring out what some of the most popular attractions are, wherever you're going. Each location has a list of attractions that are ...

Until now, geolocation has been one of those quaint, semi-useful buzzwords: '... now with geolocation!!!' Twitter, Buzz and Foursquare -- the main exponents of exposing your location -- might not be small, but they pale in comparison to Facebook. With the announcement that Facebook will be enabling geolocation next month, Pandora's Box has been torn open; whether you like it or not, geolocation ...

CCleaner has been one of my most used (and most trusted) apps for years. The same goes for Defraggler. There's no denying that the crew at Piriform really knows how to make useful little programs. Speccy is a more recent addition to the family, and it's a handy little tool for gathering information about the hardware in a Windows PC. While it's not as detailed as some other system information ...

Let me be totally honest here: I am not the world's leading expert on GTD. Nor have I completely settled on a true, universal solution -- because I don't think one really exists. Like most complex problems, there are many approaches, and very few true solutions. Plus, everyone has a different workflow and circumstance, so there's no way to prescribe something for everyone. That said, you will ...

Google Squared, the new search tool from Google Labs, puts search results into a convenient spreadsheet format designed to help you get the basic facts about whatever you're searching for without clicking through to too many different websites. Search for "horror films," for example, and you'll get a list of movies with info like Author, Director, Cast, and Running Time. It's a great layout ...

New web apps often make a lot of claims that just don't hold up under testing. When I decided to put Quarkbase.com through the paces, I fully expected to be underwhelmed. After all, their motto is "Everything About A Website." Holy information overload Batman, this one really surprised me. Pick a domain and hit search, then give Quarkbase a chance to dig up its research. They say to wait about ...

Gen Y, a term sometimes used for those 20-35 years old, are old enough to be (some of) our kids but more importantly make up our next generation of clients. This generation, defined more by popular culture than by age, is an Internet-hungry and online-casual bunch. Currently, there are about 76 million of them in the U.S., not a bad market slice. They communicated first via Instant Message and ...

Okay, confession time. Despite being an early adopter for most things, I hadn't caught the basecamp train and got on board. Why you ask? I had no good use for it, though it is an excellently crafted application. I love software, and thus I checked it out, but for some reason I didn't see how its use would fit into my busy life, until now. Becoming a self-employed web developer threw my daily ...

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_launches_GOOG_411'; Google has announced a new labs project, a free 411 service. The Google Voice Local Search is an experiment, but it aims to get users fully automated access to local business information. The GOOG 411 service holds the same information that would typically be found on Google.com, but for times when you just cant get to an internet ...

Ask has been running some new controversial ads in the UK recently informing people about Google's huge success and the impact it could have. The campaign is trying to get across that 75% of all searches performed in the UK are done through Google, thus limiting the sources that people are getting information from. Ask is trying to ramp up its search engine market in Europe by creating a tiny ...

Want to get a total unbiased report on a new product you are thinking about purchasing? ProductWiki can help. ProductWiki is a product information site that is based off of a collaborative wiki format. The website is entirely maintained by visitors and users who share information or review consumer products from around the world. The goal the team behind ProductWiki has is to create a ...