While many people are happy to share their photos, videos and location online, most would draw the line at uploading their health records too. That’s exactly what one political party in the UK is reportedly planning though.
The proposal from the Conservative Party would give individuals the right to choose for a private company to hold their medical records. There would be a variety of companies offering the service and Google’s Google Health and Microsoft’s HealthVault are among those in the frame. (more…)
Written on 25th June 2009
19 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The long awaited Google Voice invites are finally being sent out reports Lifehacker. Now, according to an Google Blog posttwitter account, invites are going out to people on its reservations list. If you want in and haven’t signed up, request an invitation.
For those who aren’t aware, Google Voice is like having your very own personal switchboard. It assigns a unique phone number to each user and calls to that number can then be directed to any other phone line. The service also provides a hub for all messages. The online command centre also enables a user to customise greetings for friends and family or ward off unwelcome callers. Amongst other things, Google Voice also converts voice messages to text – making life easier all round.
Written on 24th June 2009
11 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
The Story so Far
Earlier this month we reported details of how a Dutch news site, Klup.nl had been sued by a local BMW dealer because of the way Google had summarised one of its pages.
Zwartepoorte, a BMW dealership, had discovered a search for “Zwartepoorte + bankrupt” returned a page description, or “snippet”, that supposedly gave the impression that its dealership had in fact gone bankrupt.
No one at Klup.nl had ever even written a story about (more…)
Written on 19th June 2009
113 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Look, I know the majority of people reading our blog are geeks on some level and probably early adopters.
While we try not to, I’m also aware of the fact that occasionally we report on stuff your average Joe won’t understand/appreciate. But, I’ve got to be honest, I never for a second thought that this many people had no idea what a browser was.
Written on 18th June 2009
3 COMMENTS Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Google is reportedly set to launch a new way to browse its News service. Flipper will let you view the results of your searches in a magazine format. This more visual way to browse the news should make it quicker to get a feel for which stories you want to read. It should be a natural format for quick scanning on a touchscreen device like the iPhone.
It’s not only Google News that needs an overhaul though. Another important search tool from Mountain View is in desperate need of some TLC. Over the past few months Google Blog Search has gone from being a useful resource for scanning the state of the blogoshere to difficult-to-navigate bucket of spam blogs and automatically generated Delicious link lists.
If you’re searching for what blogs are saying about a particular subject you need to cut out all the spam and automated nonsense and just get down to what matters – original content, indexed quickly. It’s unclear why it’s happened but Google Blog Search is now longer fit for purpose.
Nearly 24 hours ago here at The Next Web we published a story called “Stop Hating on IE6! You’ll hurt its feelings!” You’d think Google would have indexed it by now? Apparently not. A search for the phrase “Stop hating on IE6″ returns four results – all of them contain references to our post but none of them are the actual post. In fact, the references to the orginal post are from people’s Twitter streams, embedded in their blogs.
So, if you want to find a post in Google Blog Search you’ll have to go via someone’s tweet, via their own blog. Rival blog searcher Twingly finds the original post straight away.
While Flipper looks like a nice new way to use Google’s existing search technology, ta search technology that appears to be crumbling away.
Google is reportedly set to launch a new way to browse its News service. Flipper will let you view the results of your searches in a magazine format. This more visual way to browse the news should make it quicker to get a feel for which stories you want to read. It should be a natural format for quick scanning on a touchscreen device like the iPhone, too.
It’s not only Google News that needs an overhaul though. Another important search tool from Mountain View is in desperate need of some TLC. Over the past few months Google Blog Search has gone from being a useful resource for scanning the state of the blogoshere to difficult-to-navigate bucket of spam blogs and automatically generated Delicious link lists.
Written on 18th June 2009
7 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
CNet TV presenter Natali Del Conte speculated that Google Voice may be launching to the world today, albeit just a rumour, it did trigger a response from Craig Walker, one of the co-founders of GrandCentral (what Google Voice used to be called), he tweeted:
“no, this is not true. Sorry to disappoint. We’re cranking 24/7 to get there, but not tomorrow for sure”
Now whilst it’s dissapointing that its not coming as soon as today, I back up Lifehacker’s view that it is both intriguing and exciting to learn that he dismissed merely the date being as soon as today…i.e. there’s a good chance it could be soon, very soon.
For those who aren’t aware, Google Voice is like having your very own personal switchboard. It assigns a unique phone number to each user and calls to that number can then be directed to any other phone line. The service also provides a hub for all messages. The online command centre also enables a user to customise greetings for friends and family or ward off unwelcome callers. Amongst other things, Google Voice also converts voice messages to text – making life easier all round.
Written on 14th June 2009
3 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
A Google Blogoscoped reader sent in an interesting email with screenshots indicating Google Calendar is to receive Gmail like Gadgets. With tasks recently added to the app, its not surprising Google are taking things further with new enhancements.
Andrew Pariser describes what he sees:
Opened up gcal today, to find an interesting new “Gadgets” link under the google logo. Clicking it opens a right side pane that introduces (more…)
Written on 9th June 2009
0 COMMENTS Keith, Network Consultant, Social Media Fanatic
Google Apps and Virgin America are sponsoring the first ever extraterrestrial online scavenger hunt, called A Day in the Cloud Challenge. The details are still slim but on June 24th anyone with a Google account and an internet connection can leverage their online sleuthing skills to win HP netbooks, 1Tb of Google storage, and a free year of flights on Virgin America.
The online scavenger hunt is a clever promotional tie in to promote Virgin America’s in-flight Wi-Fi and Google App’s “Cloud Services”. As a bonus, Virgin America will be waving the Wi-Fi fee for all Google users. (more…)
Written on 7th June 2009
36 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Now, this is rather fascinating. Technophobe Louis Gray (clearly I’m being sarcastic) shared a link to a site called Blind Search that lets you search all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) simultaneously, the twist is that it shows the results from all three without indicating which results are from which engine – you simply select which of the three is your preferred set of results.
I tested it with a number of various search terms and almost every time selected a different search engine to the last. I couldn’t help but laugh.
Now, what this might prove is that in general, most people could cope just fine no matter what search engine they used. What’s even more conclusive however is that it’s not just about search any more, it’s about the family of services and products accompanying search, the ancillary products, and we all know who wins there.
Microsoft’s most successful ancillary product is likely either Hotmail, MSN Messenger or Live Maps. Yahoo; either Delicious, Finance or Flickr. Google; Gmail, Docs, News, Calendar, Gtalk, Reader Maps and not to forget Picasa, Earth, iGoogle and of course, Wave.
It’s almost laughable the array of quality products and services that accompany Google Search in comparison to their competitors. It’s why I know it will take something seriously special, revolutionary even, to tear my finger tips away from typing Google.com to find what I’m looking for. Whilst Yahoo and Microsoft battle away STILL trying to get search right and fight for their 17% search market share, Google were at this point years ago and have spent the last few years developing innovative, reliable and yes – revolutionary – products, the majority of which are free to use. Whilst Google continue to do this, they’ll have my business, and yours, for a long time to come.
Google’s security team has identified the current Top 10 malware sites in the world. The list reads like a rogue’s gallery of the darker side of the web. Sites listed generally use ‘drive-by downloading’ to install and run malware on vistors’ computers automatically. To make things worse many of these domains are linked through to via advertising and other third party content on a vast number of high-traffic websites.
Current king of malware is Gumblar.cn, one of 1400 Chinese-registered domains on Google’s list. Their figures counted 60,000 sites infected with its payload which according to this account injects malicious Javascript code into every HTML file it can find. Meanwhile, Goooogleadsence.biz and googleanalytics.net were two of a number of sites trying to fool people into believing they were visiting a Google site.
Malware infections are a growing problem. Popular celebrity gossip site Digital Spy had to apologise this week after it inadvertently served up malware in banner ads.
Written on 6th July 2009
5 COMMENTS 
While many people are happy to share their photos, videos and location online, most would draw the line at uploading their health records too. That’s exactly what one political party in the UK is reportedly planning though.
Written on 25th June 2009
The long awaited Google Voice invites are finally being sent out reports 
The Story so Far
Google is 
CNet TV presenter Natali Del Conte speculated that Google Voice may be launching to the world today, albeit just a rumour, it did trigger a response from Craig Walker, one of the co-founders of GrandCentral (what Google Voice used to be called), he 
Written on 9th June 2009
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
