ProBlogger muses about the role of blogging and social networking and has a cautionary tale for those considering giving up their blogs to spend more time on social networks like Facebook. The bottom line: don’t. Or so argues Darren Rowse.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Facebook, social media

Microsoft has announced the launch of Microsoft Search Server 2008 which will deliver enterprise wide search just like the Google Search Appliance – but with a free Express version available as a free download and with no ceiling on numbers of documents searched.

For those following the storm of protest around the Beacon advertising system introduced by Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, has now apologised to users and added a switch so that the feature can be switched off.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, social media

The NUJ has voted at the Guardian for a new contract which scraps from current 9-day-in-any-fortnight cap and increases working weekly hours from 35 to 40. The deal didn’t come cheap: the Guardian agreed to a 4.8% pay increase now and a further inflation-related on next April. And there are new securities covering redundancies, according to paidContent. However, the deal does now allow the firm to ask journalists to work for any part of the organisation, paving the way for the integration of the Guardian and Observer and allowing much more resource to be aligned to the web.

Technorati Tags: newspapers, online, organisation, productivity, unions

Wired launches its 10th Annual Vapourware Awards for software (and hardware) which promised to deliver but is just not there. Some of the nominations already on the site:

• Duke Nukem Forever – delayed countless times
• Tesla Roadster – the world’s fastest clean energy car (slowest in the world to get built?)
• IRAQ WMD – well???

and my personal favourite so far

• Chinese democracy

Anyone can enter and there’s a prize for the best comment, so what are you waiting for…?

Technorati Tags: humour, rankings

Yahoo has published its top trends for 2007 based on what has appeared most on its search engine. Google announced its trends a day later (as reported by Techcrunch.)

Technorati Tags: trends, search

Search marketer Andrew Miller reports that Google may be about to launch a wiki-style collaboration platform. Google acquired popular wiki platform Jotspot earlier this year, fuelling speculation that a wiki was on the way. Andrew attended a presentation given by Scott Johnston, the former VP of Product Development at JotSpot and new Googler (Noogler). This is the gist on what he had to say, courtesy of Andrew:

• Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration. [UPDATE] I don’t recall wikis being mentioned specifically but I assume they are part of the plan.

• Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.

• What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.

Technorati Tags: Google, productivity, tools

Technorati Tags: humour, bubble, video, web2