Fancy running your own one-person news site? Newshub (www.newshub.com) is one of the Web's major "headline aggregator" sites, giving the headlines (and the links to the original stories) for several major news services such as Wired.com, the New York Times syndication service and TechWeb.
Now Newshub will integrate those same headlines into your own Web pages - for free.
Basically you create a template page, in order to retain the look and feel (and, above all, your links) of your own site. Then you email its URL or address to Newshub. They grab the page and tailor it (by hand!), adding the appropriate code to insert fresh headlines in the right place on the page every 15 minutes.
Your finished page is stored on Newshub's site, but most users won't even realise they've been taken out of your site. Alongside guestbooks and Web-based chat-rooms, the Newshub service is a good example of a growing number of free services for high and low-budget webmasters alike, which aren't physically on your site, but which are fairly seamless extensions of it. I've given it a test run for about a week at one of my sites for journalism students (see www.newshub.com/newsfeed/ 135) and so far it has worked like a dream. You can customise it further and get rid of the banner ads, but it will cost you around $200 a month.
Netscape is definitely up to something. On Friday its boss Jim Barksdale told a press conference in Paris: "In the next 60 days you will see us massively expanding in the media area." It's beefing up its Netcenter site and (finally) taking on Yahoo.
Netcenter is the second most popular site on the Web after Yahoo, with an estimated 800,000 visitors per day. The reason for the high traffic is that Netscape's site is the default start-up page on its browser - many users simply don't bother to change that setting. Yahoo, Infoseek, Excite, and Lycos each pay around $5 million a year for prominent placement of links to their directories from Netcenter, and one obvious ramification is that Netscape will probably have to lose this trade. In turn, Infoseek in particular will probably be hard hit - it gains about a quarter of its traffic from Netcenter.
Last week Netscape also joined forces with USA.Net to offer free email accounts. Expect a much tighter integration of USA.NEt's email service into Netscape's Communicator toolbars, address books etc.
Ever wonder how accessible your Web site really is? Check out the free service called "Bobby" at CAST (www.cast.org/ bobby). Simply enter the URLs of the pages you want analysed, then the pages are returned - with icons pinpointing disability access and browser compatibility problems. You can even download Bobby's source code.
Ever wonder how they get enough voices to train the speech recognition software used in the "interactive voice technology" for phone systems?
Vocalis, which is based in Cambridge in England, is currently testing voices from "callers in Southern Ireland". You have to download the "prompt sheet" - a list of words and phrases - from its Web site (at www.speechbase.com) then dial a freephone number before May 31st and read out the list.
"It is a little like reading sentences into an answer machine. It will only take five minutes, and the call will cost you nothing," they say. Among the random phrases we were given were: "Could you put me back to the operator", "Breedge (sic) Glennon", "Which theatre shows Mother Goose?" and "The cow wandered from the farmland and became lost."
Er, right. Still, they enter you in a draw for £1,000 or £500 for your troubles.
Apple has dropped the Dalai Lama from billboards in Hong Kong. The Tibetan leader was featured in its "Think Different" advertising campaign, which taps in to revolutionary figures such as Einstein and Picasso. An Apple spokesperson defended the decision: "The Dalai Lama really stands for our message in the United States. But in China, he may not get across the message that Apple is trying to send." Right. So that's what they mean by "globalisation". And "thinking different(ly)".
Computimes editor Michael Cunningham is leaving The Irish Times this week to join award- winning Irish Internet consultancy and online publisher Nua (www.nua.ie). He will take up his new post as Editor and Content Manager on May 1st. Please adjust your bookmarks and email mailing lists accordingly.
The lack of hype for Windows 98 (compared with the global hullabaloo for Windows 95 three years ago) isn't that surprising. Most existing users with a choice will probably not risk the "migration" to the new operating system if their Windows 95 is behaving itself reasonably well. But one place you will notice the difference is in the book-shops.
Their shelves are already beginning to creak with all those titles on the lines of Windows 98 for Dummies and Everything You Need to Know About Windows 98. However, one of the most talked about Microsoft books this summer is likely to be the tell-all account of its marketing and sales strategies, co-authored by Jennifer Edstrom (estranged daughter of the head of Microsoft's long-time PR company) and Michael Eller (a former Microsoft programmer). It should be in North American book-shops by June 11th.
The working title is Barbarians Led By Bill Gates.
One statistic most people overlooked in the Irish Internet Association's recent survey: Microsoft's Internet Explorer has finally overtaken Netscape as Irish Web users' preferred browser. Explorer was used by 57 per cent of respondents (up from 44 per cent last year) while Netscape usage slumped from 55 to 36 per cent.
They are billing it as the first "interspecies" Internet chat, Koko will sign on to America Online in San Francisco this morning to answer questions from curious humans around the globe.
An organisation called the Euro-ISPA is hosting a mini-conference and workshop in the European Parliament in Brussels next June about "the effects of telecoms pricing policies on the European Internet". For information use the telephone (if you can afford it) to talk to Nicholas Lansman, at 0044-171-9760679; or email nick.lansman@dial.pipex.com or http://www.euroispa.org
Physicists at Columbia University in New York unveiled a supercomputer on Tuesday that will simulate the "Big Bang", the birth of the universe.
The computer can do 400 billion calculations per second. It will simulate what happens when matter is heated to three trillion degrees Fahrenheit, the state scientists believe existed at the time of the Big Bang. What the university calls strategic "design decisions" brought the computer's cost to under $4 million dollars, compared with around £50 million for a typical commercial supercomputer capable of the same speeds.
Meanwhile PA News reports that Deep Blue, the supercomputer that beat Garry Kasparov at chess, has been rendered obsolete. Its makers at IBM have unveiled a successor which can work out a billion game moves per second, compared with Deep Blue's 200 million.
It is based on a PowerPC 604e microprocessor, which was born nearly a year after Deep Blue's historic victory over Grand Master Kasparov. IBM says its computer best used with a 604e chip is the RS/6000, which will cost at least £100,000 (very conservatively).
The US Department of Energy uses an RS/6000 to maintain the country's nuclear stockpile, and it is expected to become the world's fastest supercomputer upon completion in the year 2000. A similar machine was used earlier this year to operate the Web site of the Nagano Winter Olympics.
Even the 604e will be obsolete soon. Researchers at IBM say they expect later this year to build a microprocessor that can handle one trillion calculations per second - which will make Deep Blue look positively snail-like.
Software tycoon Bill Gates has donated $1.7 million to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) through his charity foundation. If that sounds a lot, last October media tycoon Ted Turner gave the UN a $1 billion grant over five years for N. humanitarian projects.
The grant by the William H. Gates foundation, established by Gates and his wife, gave $1.7 million to cover a three-year grant for population programmes in poor nations.
The Gates foundation has been active in the population and reproductive health fields, awarding previous grants for research on contraceptives and last year giving Johns Hopkins University money to use computer-based learning to address the problems of overpopulation.
International University: The University of the Web (www.international.edu) will have an online commencement ceremony (what else) next month, beginning with a webcast of the conferrings. The university offered its first classes in spring 1995, and all its courses are delivered over the Internet and the Web.