Website Hype

Have you got Hulu beta yet? A joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp, Hulu is a new online video on demand service that will also be offering video sharing. The potential of Hulu has been recognised by Tech Crunch, GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb and VentureBeat, who awarded it the Crunchie award for Best Video Startup at the 2007 Crunchies.

As well as movies, Hulu offers full-length episodes of NBC and FOX television programs, including shows from the Bravo, Fuel TV, FX, Sci Fi, Style, Sundance, and Oxygen channels.

Hulu is currently in limited beta testing, during which fifteen to thirty second advertisements are presented where the normal three minute ad break would be.

In a manner similar to an old Martini ad, Hulu claim that their content is available “anywhere, anytime”, (actually, with Martini it was “anytime, any place, anywhere”), but the content on Hulu is currently only available to users in the United States, so not exactly the anywhere, anytime that Hulu over ambitiously claim.

However Hulu does claim that it is working on making its content accessible worldwide. Let’s hope so. What may be holding this back is the process of clearing the rights for each show or film in each specific region, which will take forever and a day.

If you want to sign up to beta test this new site, you can put in your email address on their home page, and they will add you to the private beta waiting list, and send you an invitation with username and password when they are ready for you. This doesn’t happen instantaneously – I signed up and still haven’t heard anything.

Cute, pink, flowery, refreshing and girly, Glogster is a new site that lets users create web pages, which they call “posters”, using Flash elements. Glogster exhort you to “Poster yourself” – now how can you resist that? You can upload photos, songs, text and various other items. Supposedly, you can even embed your poster on another website, but at 960 pixels wide, your poster will be way too big for most blogs or the likes of Facebook et al.

You can build a friend network to which you add other “Glogsters”, making it very much like some of the current social networking sites. You can rate other people’s Glogs too.

When you sign up for an account with Glogster you quickly arrive at a large Flash rectangle where you can drag and drop images, videos, and sounds. You can either use either preloaded images and snazzy decorations from the site itself, or upload your own. Then as an added embellishment you can play about with drop-shadows, fonts, and the like. You can add links too of course.

Some pundits are already saying that the site is a little like Geocities was, before the explosion of social networking sites and blogs. For people who are already using Facebook and MySpace, it is difficult to see what Glogster really has to offer, and the site faces competitors such as Scrapblog that launched about a year ago - although, admittedly, Scrapblog does not have such a pretty homepage.

There was a time when the idea of creating your own website for free was revolutionary, but now it is just old hat. Most ISP’s offer free websites nowadays. A serious part of the critique is that Glogster are not really offering anything new.

At the moment Glogster is attempting to pull in the punters by giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters.

Glogster is one way of using Flash without giving yourself a heart attack, and the very pink and chic homepage may well pull in the teenage girls who love scrapbooking. It will be interesting to see if this poster site takes off. If its design is anything to go by, it could do.

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.