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Internet nominated for Nobel Peace Prize 2010

Posted on by design4web

How do you like the idea of Internet being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2010? The world might see Internet succeed the 2009 awardee US president Barack Obama as it is officially fighting for the world’s most coveted prize alongside a Russian human rights group and a Chinese dissident.

It was the Italian edition of the Wired magazine which supported the idea of an inanimate object getting the prize. Wired reportedly nominated Internet for promoting “dialogue, debate and consensus through communication” as well as democracy.

In an article published on Nov 20, 2009, titled ‘Wired Backs Internet for Nobel Peace Prize‘, the magazine said, “The internet has clearly been a boon for news junkies, LOLcats and the makers of goofball videos. But it’s also proven to be a powerful international force for peace.”

Internet Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

Internet Nominated For Nobel Peace Prize

“The internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and to propagate peace and democracy,” Riccardo Luna, editor-in-chief of the Italian edition of Wired magazine opined.

Besides using the instance of Iraq elections to establish how Internet could be used as a ‘weapon of global hope’, the magazine went on to say how it can be used for terrorism and warfare to prove the power of the media.

Premier endorsers of Internet for Nobel Peace Prize nomination include 2003 Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and famous Italian surgeon, known for his contributions to breast cancer treatments, Umberto Veronesi.

So, now that it has been officially nominated, the world has to wait and see if a medium of communication trumps activists and fighters to win the Nobel Prize 2010. The winner will be announced in Oct 2010.

Yahoo ! GeoCities: Now Closing after 15 Years of Web presence

Posted on by design4web

Geocities was created in 1994 as an easy way for people to create a Web presence. Fifteen years later, Yahoo has decided to close the doors on the iconic webpage service. Ars reminisces upon the good times of Geocities.

U.S. Internet search giant Yahoo! Inc., said it would close out GeoCities, a personal Web page service it purchased for $2.9 billion in 1999. The GeoCities Web page now sports a prominent note that says, “Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available.”

Yahoo bought GeoCities for more than $2.9 billion in dot-com-priced stock in 1999, when GeoCities had more than 1.1 million users. However, while the idea of having a personal presence on the Internet has caught on, GeoCities turned out to be a backwater, not the mainstream.

Still unclear is what exactly will become of GeoCities pages. New sign-ups are already no longer permitted, but what about existing sites?

Here’s how Yahoo put it: “You can continue to enjoy your Web site and GeoCities services until later this year. You don’t need to change a thing right now–we just wanted you to let you know about the closure as soon as possible. We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

The purchase 10 years ago anticipated the popularity of personal Web pages, but GeoCities did not match up to the interactive capabilities of social networking services, like Facebook, Cnet said. Unsurprisingly, Geocities has declined in popularity in recent years thanks to the plethora of similar and easier-to-use services—not to mention the rise of social networks like MySpace that allow the same demographic to make equally horrific pages and try to pick each other up at the same time. Add to that the explosive popularity of various blog platforms and the suffering of the online advertising market, and it’s really not a shock to see Geocities going the way of the dodo.

Google shuts down many Products

Posted on by design4web

Just recently, Google’s 3D world Lively was shut down. Now Google announced they’re canceling a couple of other products or product features. These are:

  • Mobile service Dodgeball. “We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available,” Google says. The original founders of this Google-acquired company already left a while ago in frustration due to Google allegedly not evolving their product.
  • The Mashup editor, which is still only available in a limited test version. This product, originally released in 2007, was letting you create programs accessing and mixing APIs like the Google Maps API. Google suggests the App Engine would now be the way to go, as far as Google products go. “Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months,” Google notes.
  • Video uploading at Google Video. For quite a while now Google had made acquired YouTube their official video upload site, at least judging by things like where Google uploaded their own content for official blog posts (and judging by how much easier it was to get videos onto YouTube in terms of speed and lack of bugs). Google Video is a meta video search engine these days. Now that change in direction has become more completed and official: “In a few months, we will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video,” Google writes, adding that existing uploaded content won’t be removed, though.
  • Google Catalog. This was a bit of a precursor to Google Print, now known as Google Book Search. The scanned and OCR’d catalogs of this collection are painfully out of date by now, tough. “[W]e’re bidding it a fond farewell” Google says, stating they want to focus efforts “to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.”
  • Last not least, Google Notebook – while not being directly canceled – won’t be worked on anymore. “Starting next week, we plan to stop active development on Google Notebook. This means we’ll no longer be adding features or offer Notebook for new users.” Google say they will continue offer the service for existing users. The Notebook extension won’t be supported anymore, though, Google adds. Google suggests users look into Google Docs, as well as the SearchWiki feature.