Website Hype

For those who are interested in both travel and the web, and the way in which various websites can enhance the travel experience, the new website Hi Everywhere! will be of interest. Hi Everywhere! offers to match travelers to people who already live in the area that they are visiting, who are willing to show visitors around, and encourages both guide and visitor to write travel journals of the experience.

The site is based in the US, but many of the people using it so far appear to be based outside North America, and in fact the majority appear to be in Asia.

There are only around 100 members at the moment, which is still not enough to give the site “critical mass”. Social networking sites, forums, and other sites that are relying on user-generated content always face a starting problem – people will only be attracted to the site if it has content, and content will only be created by people coming to the site and joining up.

The presence of this new site has already brought forth howls from pundits who are worried about the safety aspects, yet as long as you meet the other person in a public place, stay in public places, and exercise the usual caution that you would with strangers, there doesn’t seem to be anything to get unduly concerned about. Just use your common sense.

It seems that Hi Everywhere! is a reasonably good idea, you always see more of a place and get an inside perspective when shown round by, and talking to, people who are local to the area. This way you can avoid the tourist traps, and see those hidden away places that tourists tend to miss.

It will be interesting to see if Hi Everywhere! grows in membership, and if it leads to some good sightseeing.

Oh, the rivalry, the jealousy, between Google and Microsoft. Viacom generally keeps itself aloof from these two giants, but, surprise, surprise, it now seems that Microsoft and Viacom have announced a deal that the pundits reckon will be worth about $500 million.

The minutiae of the arrangement is that Microsoft will get video from Viacom and all the related properties such as Comedy Central, and all this will be available on MSN and XBox 360. No surprise there maybe, as Microsoft already distributes a lot of content from Viacom. Additionally, Microsoft will get casual games from Viacom, and Microsoft’s Atlas will be the ad server for Viacom, so Viacom will provide unsold display advertising inventory on its digital sites for Microsoft to sell and serve.

So what does Viacom get in return for all this largesse? Money, it seems. Microsoft is going to buy advertising on Viacom broadcast and online networks over a period of five years, and the two companies are planning to work together on promotions and sponsorships for MTV and BET.

It looks as though this deal is actually going to work very well for Viacom – they don’t actually need to spend anything, and they will be getting really good money for the advertising, plus much wider distribution for their content.

It is possible that this deal, and others like it which may follow, will now force Google to start doing similar with other content providers.

Like most machinations of the world of IT, it is great to sit back and see what will happen next. It will be interesting to see how Google ultimately responds to deals such as this.

The latest thing from Google is the introduction of a centralized identity management system, to be known as Google Profile, which will be shared by all the squillion Google services that have sprung up in recent years.

Google Profile will be a centralized profile system that will provide personalized information to each Google product you use, sharing information across all of these, and unifying all the Google systems that previously did not share data with each other.

Say Google: “A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.”

You can include in your profile a nickname, your real name for contacts, occupation, location, links, photo and a short description of yourself. It is interesting to note that each Google profile is public, and this raises the question of whether the profiles can be searched using the Google search engine.

Rumour has it that there is some degree of chaos around Google accounts, and that the profiling system is being introduced to try to sort out the confusion. It seems that the chaos ensued after the introduction of Google Apps, although this is open to debate.

When Google Apps were first introduced, the way you signed up was by means of your gmail addy, so if you ended up getting your own domain, Google then had two different identities for you. This, along with the fact that more recently you don’t have to link Google Apps to a gmail account anyway, suggests that the new system could be a way of rationalizing matters in terms of identities.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which people use the profiles, depending upon how much of their personal information they wish to be seen publicly. It will also be intereting to see how much the new profiling system improves Google Apps from the point of view of the users.

Social networks are always intriguing, both within and outside cyberspace. It seems at the moment that online social networks are all launching platforms – LinkedIn has done so this week, and Friendster also. Then yesterday Bebo announced that it is going to launch an application platform of its own, similar to and compatible with that of Facebook. Not only this, but Bebo CEO Michael Birch has suggested that his company is also going to work with Google’s OpenSocial.

Bebo, with around 40 million users, is somewhat behind social network giants Facebook and MySpace. Bebo tends to have more of a following in the UK, with somewhat less of an appeal in the US.

MySpace has started including widgets from outside developers, and Bebo is now following suit. It seems that Bebo may be trying to combine the functionality of Facebook, with the freedom of expression afforded by MySpace.

Bebo’s platform is very similar to Facebook’s - users can rate applications using a star system, developers can skin their app pages with their own design. It looks like Bebo and Facebook will be working closely together in the future, and if Bebo is compatible with Facebook, then apps can just be ported from one to the other.

Some people in the business are saying that the OpenSocial vs Facebook issue could be a bit like Windows vs Mac, and a lot of people are not keen to see two competing standards.

It will be interesting to see how the situation vis-a-vis the social networking sites develops over the next few months – there seems to be a lot at stake.

Do you dream of learning another language, but never seem to find the time? Would you like to get the basics of a language before you visit the place where it is spoken? Want to brush up on a language you learned in school, but which you are now a bit rusty at? Perhaps it is time that you took a look at some of the resources that are available on the web, and one resource I find indispensable is the BBC Languages website.

Here you can find beginners’ lessons in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Greek. Having tried out these beginners’ courses for French, Spanish and German, I found them to be fun, interactive, and you hear plenty of the language as spoken by native speakers. The courses take you through basic sentence structures, and you learn loads of new words. There are also intermediate courses available, again with plenty of listening to the language as it is spoken.

As an avid language learner, I find these interactive website-based courses more motivating than teaching yourself from a textbook and tapes, and also the courses are very easy to just dip into in any odd moment, such as your lunchbreak, coffee break, or whenever you have a spare five minutes.

The site also includes learning resources for Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, English for Speakers of Other Languages, Polish, Urdu, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.

If you are a bit of a languages anorak, you can have a great time at this website.

If you thought that a honeypot was just something that bears in children’s stories love, then it may be time to think again: Google Hack Honeypot has been developed in response to the latest type of malicious web traffic, whereby search engines are used as a hacking tool.

So how has this come about? Well, the Google search engine has become a powerful tool, which allows for searching on an immense amount of information, and at the same time, the spread of web-based applications, such as message boards and remote admin tools, has meant that there has been an increase in the number of misconfigured and vulnerable web applications available. Insecure tools such as these, when combined with the power of a search engine and index such as Google, results in a clear means of attack for hackers.

To counteract this, a honeypot is a trap set up to detect and counteract any attempts at unauthorized use of information systems. Generally it consists of a computer that appears to be part of a network, but which is in fact isolated, and which seems to contain information that would be of value to malicious hackers.

A honeypot makes a great surveillance and early-warning tool, and it doesn’t even have to be a computer - it can be files, data records, or even an otherwise unused IP address space. Honeypots should not actually have any legitimate traffic or activity, so that whatever they do capture can then be presumed to be malicious. To illustrate this: a honeypot does not need any kind of filter to separate ordinary e-mail from spam, because ordinary e-mail never comes to a honeypot. A honeypot is basically something that appears to be vulnerable, but in reality is recording illicit use by the bad guys of the computer world.

The Google Hack Honeypot allows administrators to track malicious hosts, allowing them to observe who is perpetrating the attack, and how it is being carried out via the log. This record of data can then be used to deny future access to attackers, and to notify service providers of attacks originating from their networks.

So if you want to keep your site well-protected, you might think about using a honeypot – another tool in our armory against the bandits of the internet.