Everyone’s heard of Wikipedia – the infamous encyclopedia that can be edited by pretty much anyone, yet remains accurate and quick enough to look up information on it, as long as cross-references are made.  The only thing Wikipedia has yet to improve on is its payments to contributors – something that Google seeks to remedy with Knol.  The world can never have too much information – can it?

Basically, Google is launching a new encyclopedia called Knol.  User-based, just like Wikipedia with a twist – contributors get paid.  Contributors are allowed to write “pages”, and are then given the option of implementing advertisements for the pages – they also get a cut of the profits made.  Not a bad idea – people get a cut of how well their articles are written, a great example of capitalism!  …right?

My main concern would be plagiarism.  Who’s to stop someone from copying articles from Wikipedia and pasting them directly into Knol?  On a small-scale that’d be a simple situation to quell, but if used on a large scale it might be a hard situation to stop (I’m sure it’d be in the Terms of Use somewhere).  However, Google being the giant it is might have already thought of such a situation and are just biding their time for someone to tempt them into being banned from anything Google for life.  Scary thought, isn’t it?

Another nice serving of food for thought – although the details haven’t been released, how would one user be able to contribute such a large article?  Wouldn’t there naturally be some bias – and thus require the intervention or assistance of a second user?  If so, would the profits be split in half?  If everyone does this, won’t the profits become so diluted that it wouldn’t make much of a difference anymore?

Knol looks like a great concept, but there are certainly a few kinks to be worked out.  I approve of the idea that there is never enough knowledge, but how Google pulls this together I will be anticipating.  Actually, I know they’ve got a way, I just can’t figure out what it is (I live by faith).

Paramount is about to make internet and movie history with a move that ordinary consumers like us would never have considered. I’m sure that the ability to stream movies on the internet is no news to you – either through legitimate means or shadier sites such as the notorious Peekvid. However, have you been able to watch a movie premier online, officially? I would think not – something like this has never actually been done. The movie to remedy this is Jackass, and you might think of me as one for bearing such bizarre news.

Jackass 2.5 is basically a collection of clips featuring arguably hilarious attempts at ridiculous (did I mention hilarious?) stunts – somewhat similar to an ordinary episode of Jackass. Thus, we can also safely assume that the budget would be somewhat similar to the production of an ordinary episode (make that three) of the show. A perfect candidate to test out how well this method of distribution works (due to its low budget, in case you didn’t get the hint).

To mark such an occasion, Paramount is offering – dig this – two weeks of free streaming of Jackass 2.5. After the two weeks, the movie will be available for download through Amazon and iTunes and made available in a variety of other formats, I would assume.  Um, as for how they will be able to stream such a volume of video at high quality, I’m left out of the loop.  And as for the funds, I’m guessing there will be a couple (hopefully just a couple) of advertising banners on the actual window where the video will be located.  And…commercials will be a definite turnoff.

After taking step back, I realized how huge a move this is for the entire industry – it could signify the coming of one of two sad realities: one – movies will never be successful if they are directly released to the internet, or two being cinemas and theatres will be made obsolete by the success of such a new medium.  I like the new convenience, but I’m hoping that cinemas will be able to survive such a migration (if one is made), as they’ve been taking hits over the few years with the increase in piracy, price increases, and whatnot.

The future of the world as we know it is at stake here – pretty literally.  The decision could change our lives forever.  Will movies be able to be released in high quality to the internet, or will the cinemas still be the way to go?  Discover the outcome after the premiere of Jackass 2.5.

So you’re on Facebook and you just wrote an urgent message on your buddy’s wall. Alright, it’s kind of confidential, so you had to send him a message. But that doesn’t change how urgent, and you need to get ahold of them fast! You can:

1. Panic.
2. Get out of your comfortable chair to find your cellular device and browse through your contacts.
3. Wait.
4. Use Truphone to call them via Facebook to their cell phone. Convenient.

It can’t be that simple, can it? Truphone says “Why not?” It can. And if you’re ready to listen to a young fool explain it imperfectly, then read on! In a nutshell, Truphone uses a piece of software that they put together themselves to connect your computer via the internet to landlines.  To be honest, the whole concept is actually pretty darn complicated, and I think that this diagram would help:

For more information on how it works, click here.

You might be wondering why such a complex piece of software just works on Facebook.  The brilliant thing about this is that it doesn’t – it works almost like Skype and Gizmo, using VoIP.  However, in order to use it with your phone, you’re going to have to have a Nokia N-series and E-series (I’m out, I’ve got a Sony Ericsson).

Back to the original reason why I made a post on this news, here’s the link to the Facebook widget:

http://www.truphone.com/truphonefacebook.tru

Have fun, and enjoy your Truphoning.  Special thanks to Nick at Truphone for contacting me about such an interesting piece of software.

As a graphic-pre-designer, I’ve always been interested in computer graphics and how they work. While I enjoy professionally made wallpapers from InterfaceLIFT, sometimes I figure I just need some of my home-made wallpapers – but those usually didn’t turn out too well. But finally, I’ve discovered something that blends the best of both worlds – fantastic, possibly vector images (quite literally) that can be fitted with a selectable background to make your own wallpaper.

Enter Vivid Wallpapers, a site which allows you to create wallpaper with premade backgrounds and high-resolution fantastic characters, like Wario or Bowser, or more realistic people. The only con I saw to this was the prefabricated backgrounds were a bit too girly for my taste, and the characters weren’t very wide in variety. But, asides from that, I was fairly impressed.

Alright, so it’s not the greatest thing in the world, but it’s a nice start.  I guess I’ll work my way up from there!  If you’re looking for a change, why not give Vivid Wallpapers a try?  You’ve got nothing to lose, and everything vivid to gain.  Have fun!

Link: http://vividwallpapers.com 

Addicted to Facebook?  Tubed on Youtube?  There are some of us that just can’t get enough of social networking websites – so many in fact, that the more tech-friendly ones created Flock, dubbed The Social Web Browser.  Flock has a Firefox engine (can’t improve on perfection, right?), but the main feature would be the built-in integration with Facebook, Flickr, and Youtube being the most significant names.

Of course, I myself find such integration very distracting, so I didn’t download it myself.

However, if you are one of those social animals, why not give Flock a shot?  With a Firefox engine and social networked implementation, it couldn’t get any better (for you).  That is, until Firefox 3.0 gets released.  Yay!

Link: http://www.flock.com

So, you lost that USB thumb drive, eh? Or maybe you just never got around to getting one of those hefty devices – or you always forget to bring that stuff! It’s alright – Web 2.0 brings ADrive to you, with – dig this – 50 GIGABYTES of storage for free. This presents a few concerns – sure they’ve got enough storage, but will the speed be able to match those of USB thumb drives? And will it be consistently available, or will their servers not be reliable enough for all that traffic? Lastly, will someone be able to access your account and steal everything?

First, addressing the speed, I got about 179kb/s in the second it took to upload my file up to ADrive. However, while uploading a larger file, I saw a significant decrease in speed as time progressed, till around a constant rate of 60kb/s. A reasonable speed, especially for a free service – although it might take a while when it comes to file sizes with gigabytes. As for downloading – I found rate to be twice the upload, so around 100kb/s – a bit on the slow side, but it’s still in it’s beta stages.

For the couple of days I’ve been using ADrive, I’ve been able to access it 24/7, both at school when I need data and at home when I do the homework.

Lastly, ADrive forces you to create a password with a few complicated measures – which I was glad to see, as this information could be confidential (not mine, unless you’re planning to steal homework – oh no!). However, I’d like to have seen a few more security measures, but maybe I’m just being plain ol’ paranoid. The lack of is understandable, as it would be pretty inconvenient for its users, on second thought.

The mentality I had towards this relatively new service was the same I had towards GMail a couple of years ago – this sounds too good to be true, but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. Hopefully you’re not too skeptical of this service, and you grow to enjoy such a convenience as I did.

Visit: http://www.adrive.com/

MediaMaster’s motto is “Your music. Anywhere.” This effectively explains what kind of service it provides; for all of you that just didn’t get it, MediaMaster allows you to stream music you uploaded from a computer to any other device that can access the internet. The term device is used because the music can be streamed to a variety of mediums – from your Facebook profile or blog to your Smart Phone or PDA. Convenient? You betcha.

The site is run with HTML and some touches of Flash, but the uploader uses Java. Also, for some reason, it took away the Aero from my Vista interface, leaving a very bland Basic theme. The uploader is pretty straightforward and easy to use, which is great because it’s essential to the whole process. I especially found the drag and drop functionality extremely useful – saved a bunch of time when compared to that boring ol’ “Browse button” method.

It took a while to upload those files as I had selected 15 songs for upload (hey, that’s just a fraction of a fraction of my music collection). I can’t say I expected differently, because I didn’t – even though we’re entering Web 2.0, there are still physical hardware limits to how fast the upload goes – which I would like to see improved (not significantly, but even a slight change would mean a lot per song).

Playing music couldn’t be easier, and is quite an interesting (to say the least) experience. I’d like to mention that Aero was still available when I was accessing this page, so I’ll blame it completely on the uploader. Music is encoded at a maximum 128-kbps when uploaded, which is great quality when compared to the rest of the competition. You can choose what rate music you’d like to stream, as your internet speed might vary from place to place (understandable). Also, there are album covers! 14/15 were matched correctly, and the one that wasn’t was probably due to the fact it was not released yet. Not bad.

MediaMaster is definitely an underhyped addition to the internet, so I hope this breaks its empty streak. I’ll try to upload some screenshots later. In the meantime, sign up for MediaMaster – it’s free!

Link: http://mediamaster.com

A couple of minutes ago, I was trying out Microsoft’s Skydrive Beta with my @live.ca account. To my dismay, the service wasn’t available in my region – Canada – a message that really pops up much too often. Quickly adapting to the situation, I tried using my other @live.com account, and surprisingly, I was allowed in.

So, to even things out a bit, here’s a link that user my friend Jaydster posted.

http://blog.hznet.nl/index.php/2007/11/06/update-livecom-registration-is-opened-other-live-too

Those links allow you to get @live.whatever e-mail addresses worldwide! Grab ‘em now, hot off the press.

I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time – precisely probably around a year or so.  But then again, haven’t we all?  You might’ve seen people using this hardly found e-mail address, but you have never found out how to sign up for an account!  What the heck is Live.com, you are wondering.  And why can’t you get an e-mail address there, whereas other people can?

Correction – now you can.  Simply visit http://get.live.com, and sign up for a hotmail account.  You will be able to select @live.com from the dropdown menu if it’s available in your region – and if not?  Tough luck.  For all you Canadian readers out there, you will be getting an @live.ca e-mail address, which I appreciate as I find unique.

But why do people already have an @live.com e-mail address?  I, being one of them, got mine from a Javascript “workaround” (for a lack of better term, and “hack” is such an ugly word) that was available for a few days till Microsoft closed it up.  Thank Goodness that Microsoft was kind enough to let all of us “workarounders” keep our @live.com e-mails around though, much respect in that sense.

As for the actual e-mail service – does it offer anything different from GMail?  Well, basically, it’s Windows Live Hotmail, which is a lot flashier but also a lot slower than GMail (speaking from firsthand experience).  So unless you want to reserve an @live.com or @live.ca e-mail address, I don’t see much of a rush so far.  GMail’s just pushed the envelope too much.

Final verdict?  Get it – there’s no harm reserving your name.  Who knows – perhaps in the future, Windows Live Hotmail might surpass GMail in user satisfaction and speed!  And besides, @live.com is just such a cool ending.

Recently as I was just browsing the web, I stumbled on this website through a set of forums. Apparently this site allows you to change your bitmap images to nice scalable vector images! What’s the difference between a bitmap and a vector image though? As you might already know, a bitmap image uses pixels to render the photograph, whereas a vector image would use geometrical shapes such as lines and circles to make it much more scalable. Try enlarging one of your images – then you’ll see what I mean!

VectorMagic is a project of Stanford University’s, and is a website that allows you to upload a bitmap file and convert it into a vector file. Due to traffic constraints, VectorMagic limits the picture to one megapixel after converting, but it’s a pretty simple matter to just scale it back afterwards. You will be able to download the files as either a .EPS file which can be edited in Photoshop, or a .SVG file (which I have no information about). From my experience though, Photoshop transforms the .EPS image into a bitmap image again for editing. I’d recommend getting Corel Paintshop Pro, the Vector equivalent of Photoshop, to properly edit your vector images.

VectorMagic is a very promising tool – and is great for transforming logos and such. However, those bitmap images lose a bit of detail through the process, making the resulting image a bit cartoon-ish, I daresay. This can be slightly remedied by using the “high” detail selection.

An example of a bitmap image transformed to a vector image.

As for any recommendations I could suggest – why not use something like Flash or Silverlight to render VectorMagic? As the golden age of the internet dawns, why not use something that will be a little more future-proof? Although I am satisfied that this program gets the job done, I still think it can go a bit further in the aesthetics department. Also, as it is funded by an educational institution, I realize that it’s difficult to support heavy loads of traffic – so please, branch out to other servers so the one-megapixel limit can be lifted! PLEASE!

Overall, my verdict is VectorMagic still has a nice sparkle to it, and it’s certainly a keeper. But, unless it becomes more aesthetically-pleasing, I’m afraid the Web 2.0 will take off and leave it behind, which would be a shame!

Link here: http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/