'When I was a kid, we had to search the Internet uphill - both ways!'
By TIMES WIRES
Published January 29, 2007
Does surfing the Web exhaust - and even exasperate - older people? The backers of Cranky.com are betting on it. Cranky is a specialty search engine designed to please aging baby boomers by processing every request from the perspective of someone who is at least 50 years old. "Our research found that people 50 and over are confused about searching on the Web," said Jeff Taylor, the Cranky mastermind who previously struck it rich as the founder of online employment site Monster.com. "It's hard for them to under- stand all the results." Cranky is trying to simplify things by showing just four Web sites in the nonadvertising section of each results page and making the sparser listings more relevant to its target audience. After teaming up with Internet research firm Compete Inc. to identify the 500,000 most popular Web sites among people at least 45 years old, Cranky dispatched reviewers to dig even deeper into the top 5,000 destinations. The reviewers then wrote descriptions about the content and tried to ensure the index contained more direct links to the most meaningful information. Taylor isn't expecting Cranky to be an overnight success. "By the time I get it right," he said, "I probably will be 50."
Linux to take on Microsoft with a new foundation
Linux, the free operating system, has gone from an intriguing experiment to a mainstream technology in corporate data centers, helped by the backing of major technology companies like IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, which sponsored industry consortiums to promote its adoption. Those same companies have decided that the time has come to consolidate their collaborative support into a new group, the Linux Foundation. And the mission of the new organization is to help Linux, the leading example of the open-source model of software development, to compete more effectively against Microsoft, the world's largest software company. "It's really a two-horse race now, with computing dominated by two operating-system platforms, Linux and Windows," said James Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "There are things that Microsoft does well in terms of promoting Windows, providing legal protection and standardizing Windows. The things that Microsoft does well are things we need to do well - to promote, protect and standardize Linux."
All college kids can take part in Ruckus
Ruckus Network (www. ruckus.com), which distributes movies and music online to colleges nationwide, is expanding access to its ad-supported music download service to any U.S. college student. Any student with a valid university e-mail account can now to use the service to download music to their computer. Students outside Ruckus' network of affiliated universities will not be able to download movies, but will have access to Ruckus' more than 2.1-million tracks, which they can download to their computer for free.
Network at work, just like on MySpace
And you thought social networking was all about text-messaging among bored teenagers. IBM has launched a set of social software tools that will bring the kind of blogging, idea sharing and war-story swapping typically associated with MySpace and Facebook, the social networking sites popular among teenagers and students, to the corporate world. Lotus Connections, expected this year, will let employees set up virtual worlds where they can meet like-minded colleagues and exchange ideas, all in the name of improving productivity.
The past meets the future soon with Footnotes of our National Archives
Anyone interested in finding out who the FBI was investigating before it became the FBI or seeing the works of noted Civil War photographer Mathew Brady will soon be able to do so digitally. Footnote Inc. has digitized 4.5-million pages of historical records and recently signed an agreement with the National Archives to digitize millions more. Initially, subscriptions cost $99.95 annually, $9.95 monthly or $1.99 per image through Footnote's Web site. Digitized materials will be available for free by Feb. 6 at two facilities in the Washington area and at regional locations in 11 states, says Laura Diachenko of the Archives. After five years, all images digitized through the agreement will be available for free on the National Archives Web site at www.archives.gov.