Now YaCy it!

Google dominates the search market. Bing has made an impression and Yahoo still has a loyal following, but Google is king, especially in the West. However, a new search engine has just been launched, and it does things differently.

The new search engine is called YaCy (pronounced “Ya See”). Heavily backed by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), an organisation that advocates digital rights and online freedom, YaCy aims to de-centralise search by using a ‘peer to peer’ approach.

Predictions for 2012

Changes in technology and their impact on the world have been relentless over the last few years, and 2012 doesn’t look to be any different. Below is a list of predictions and trends for 2012.

Social networking continues to dominate

The number of global Facebook users reached 700 million in 2011, and is predicted to reach 1 billion in 2012. While growing fast in countries like Brazil, Facebook already dominates social networking in the West. Twitter’s rise, especially in the media, looks set to continue. Social networking played a key role in the civil unrest of 2011, most noticeably in the ‘Arab Spring’, and we can expect to see more people organise online this year. This is the year that companies are going to attempt to drive a lot of their sales directly through social networking, although I’m a bit sceptical about this being successful. People primarily use social media to socialise and not to shop.

How much Klout do you have?

One website that has been getting quite a bit of press coverage recently is Klout. This is a new service that attempts to measure online influence by monitoring social networking traffic.  It allocates a score of between 1 and 100 to individuals and organisations, with the higher the score, the greater the influence.

The founder, Joe Fernandez, had the idea for the site when he broke his jaw and, unable to talk, took to Twitter in order to communicate. He soon realised the influence of the medium, and saw how useful it would be to measure this.

Looking through the scores, they seem to reflect how many social networking users are interested in celebrity culture – Canadian teen pop idol Justin Bieber scores a perfect 100. Closer to home, Stephen Fry scores 82, Wayne Rooney gets 81 and Ed Milliband 35.

Power of the Password

The recent News of the World phone hacking scandal illustrated how easy it can be to access poorly protected information. The investigators who hacked into the phones were not IT geniuses; they just exploited basic flaws in the caller ID and PIN systems.

A few years back, a default PIN was provided for access to mobile messages – with the onus on the user to change it if they wanted to. Needless to say, many people never bothered to change this default PIN. Even when they did, it was often to an easy to guess number, like 1234 or 3333.

While things have improved with mobile message security, people still often pick easy to guess PIN numbers, and this problem applies to other technologies as well. Ideally, passwords should have a mix of letters and numbers, upper and lower case and even symbols. The same password should not be used again on any other website or email account either. The problem is; so many passwords can be required now that it can be a nightmare to try and adopt this best practice.

Cyber snooping by employers

The internet has led to an increasing clash between personal and professional lives. Once upon a time it was only your CV or application that counted when trying to win a job interview, but one new trend is to vet perspective employees using their online presence.

It’s well publicised that many employees have got into trouble at work due to comments they’ve made on social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook. A lot of organisations now have strict internet usage policies, and it’s estimated that 8% of companies have dismissed staff due to their online actions. What is less well known is that an increasing amount of job applicants are vetted before the interview stage, using the information about them that can be garnered from the internet.

Copyright reform

Many of us have been ripping our CDs and DVDs for years. When de-cluttering my previous home in preparation for putting it on the market, I decided to move my CDs into storage as they took up an entire wall of the living room. I’ve always had a few key albums stored on MP3, but I embarked upon ripping all of my collection and connecting the main music system to an MP3 jukebox on a computer.

Now I live in a much bigger place, but the CDs are still in boxes in the garage. I just can’t justify the pleasure of having them on display when I can save so much space, as well as use of shuffle, playlists etc. that you only get when the music is digitised. The thing is, despite the widespread practice or ripping your own CDs and DVDs, it’s technically against the law.

A number of changes to the UK’s copyright laws, based on the Hargreaves Review, have recently been announced by the Business secretary, Vince Cable. Amongst these is the legalisation of “format shifting”, that practice of ripping your media onto a computer, MP3 player etc. The Hargreaves Report pointed out that if 90% of people are doing something technically against a law, there is something wrong with that law.

Viral marketing and Unions

Viral marketing is a way of using existing social networks to reach an audience for campaigns and advertising on the internet. The idea is that, if the message is good enough, people will tell their friends about it through email, Facebook posts, Tweets etc. People are more likely to value the opinion of their friends, so if the message is successful then a large amount of viewers can be reached for a relatively small outlay.

Unions have been experimenting with viral marketing for a number of years, with varying degrees of success. The TUC was one of the first to experiment with this approach with the ‘Comfort breakdown’ animation in 2005. The humorous video featuring a dog undergoing work break issues was aimed at younger, white collar non-union members to promote the ‘join a union’ feature on the Worksmart website. More followed, including the ‘Why the long face’ song and video targeted at betting shop workers for the Community union.

Operation: Debian

Like most technologies, operating systems – the software that runs on computers and allows everything else to work - keeps on changing fast. Most of us will have heard of Microsoft Windows, Mac OS or even Linux. However, the old dominance of these familiar operating systems is changing.

Cloud computing is being touted as the future by some, as demonstrated by the recent launch of Apple’s iCloud service that allows users to store data such as their MP3 music collection online. Cloud computing refers to the idea that people are storing more of their information “in the cloud” of the Internet rather than on their local devices. Google has been pioneering this with Google apps, a powerful service aimed at SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises) that stores all user data and applications on the internet, but many of the other big players are developing their own cloud services.

China Strikes

China is undergoing a period of rapid industrialisation and growth, having recently become the second largest economy in the world. This has led to strains in industrial relations. With China’s strict controls on the free press and trade unions, and the sheer size of the country and population, it’s been difficult to get a clear picture of the industrial action taking place. Thanks to a great new online resource, this has become easier.

Developed by Manfred Elfstrom, a PhD student at Cornell University in the United States, this new website shows a map of China, highlighting each occurrence of strike action with a red marker. As well as being able to view the location of each dispute on the map, the strikes have been categorised by industrial sector. There is also a timeline showing previous industrial action, allowing some useful analysis to take place.

Fair Game?

The video game market has increased enormously over the last two decades, overtaking film industry revenues in 2009. In 2010 it was worth an estimated £3 billion in the UK alone. But throughout this period of growth, video games have often received a bad press.

Games have been accused of increasing aggression in children, desensitising users to violence and reducing attention spans. Leading critic, Baroness Greenfield, accuses games of physically changing children’s brains, and links the rise in diagnoses of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder over the last decade with the increase in gaming.

The big 'Apple'

Apple computers have gone from strength to strength in the last few years, launching iconic products like the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad. Indeed, last year Apple overtook Microsoft as the biggest technology company in the world on market value. Not bad for a company that almost went bust in the 1990s.

Apple followers are famously devoted, and this was illustrated last year when two professors at Texas A&M University published research that compared the cult of Apple computers to a faith.

Can 'The Daily' save newspapers?

Traditional journalism has had a tough time of it recently. With so much content now available for free online, newspaper sales have been falling steadily for years with free papers representing the only growth area.

The launch of ‘The Daily’ by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation marks an interesting experiment for a news industry facing an uncertain future.

‘The Daily’ is an online newspaper with a new approach. It is a gamble on the future of devices we will use as it is not available on desktops or standard laptops. This new newspaper is only available on the iPad but there are plans to launch on other tablets systems soon like Google’s ‘Honeycomb’. Murdoch believes these sleek new devices are perfect for displaying news, and the design of the ‘app’ makes the most of the screen, with beautifully rendered rich media on the hi-resolution machine.