Watch a Short Video Tour of Microsoft Bing

Bing is the name of Microsoft’s new search engine that expected to go live sometime next week. You can find overview documents and screenshot images of Bing here while of video tour of the Bing.com service is available here.

See What’s Popular on the Web In One Page

OurSignal is an interesting visualization that shows the current most popular stories from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Hacker News and Yahoo! Buzz in one page.

Most Popular Tech Stories on the Web

The font size in the visualization is relative to the popularity of a story (bigger means more popular) while colors denote the trend - warm colors mean that story is increasing in popularity while cool colors indicate that the story is sliding off the charts.

What’s useful about OurSignal is that it auto-hides headlines of all stories that you may previously read in the browser. It does so by matching the web address of stories against URLs stored in your browser history and if there’s a match, it means that you’ve visited that link before and so it’s not shown in the the visualization map.

Stories on the OurSignal page are refreshed every 15 minutes so this could do as an interesting screensaver as well.

New Evolution of Web 3.0 and its Concepts

This slide neatly sums up the main differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0.

Web 1.0 - That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 - This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 - This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

If that sounds confusing, check out some of these excellent presentations that help you understand Web 3.0 in simple English. Each takes a different approach to explain Web 3.0 and the last presentation uses an example of a "postage stamp" to explain the "semantic web".

The Evolution of Web 3.0

View more Microsoft Word documents from Marta Strickland.

Here is another classic video explaining the Web 3.0 concepts.

Why Web 3.0?

View more Microsoft Word documents from Sabin Buraga.

How China Censors the Internet ?

An employee of Baidu, the Google of China, has leaked a document folder that suggests in detail how authorities in China censor the Internet.

These internal documents contain information about internet monitoring policies of China, how censors can search web pages for sensitive keywords and the unique point system that is used by government to reward the "more efficient" Internet police staff.

Related: Know if your site is blocked in China?

List of Words Banned in China

Here’s a quick list of blacklisted topics and sensitive keyword phrases that are blocked on the Chinese Internet. These include:

* Chinese Communist Party, Ruling government
* Puppet government, One-party system
* Dictatorship, tyranny
* Human rights in China & Freedom of expression
* Gao Zhisheng (Chinese lawyer and activist)
* Falun Gong (Banned cult in China founded by Li Hongzhi)
* Keywords related to Military, Gambling, Brainwashing & Sex
* Kidney harvesting from live people, Organ Sale
* Tiananmen Square Massacre
* Tibet, Taiwan Independence
* Cheating in Examinations, Fake Diploma courses
* How to make bombs, counterfeit money and so on.

In addition to keywords, these documents also include a long list of web addresses that have been deleted from the Chinese web.
The full leaked folder with all the keywords and other Baidu documents is available for download here.

Inserting Images in GMail

Well, it's about time. You no longer have to use workarounds to put images into your messages or attach images when you really want to inline them. Just turn on "Inserting images" from the Labs tab under Settings, and you'll see a new toolbar icon like this:



Make sure you're in rich formatting mode, or it won't show up. Click the little image icon, and you can insert images in two ways: by uploading image files from your computer or providing image URLs.

Keep in mind that Gmail doesn't show URL-based images in messages by default to protect you from spammers, so if you're sending mail to other Gmail users, they'll still have to click "Display images below" or "Always display images from ..." to see images you embed.

How Internet Works ?

Below video shows simple & detailed way about the working of Internet and its history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIQjrMHTv4&feature=player_embedded

Nominations for India MVP 2010

Microsoft has putted in an effort to praise the individuals who are working to make the world a better place with technology. MVP award is all about helping such individuals and providing them with a tag “MVP” so they can stand out in front of public. Microsoft also provides access to BETA software’s and many more resources which let them enhance their skills. If you have been helping the crowd either offline or online and sport specialty in any Microsoft product, you are capable of being an MVP.

MVP stands for Most Valuable Professional, and for this award you neither have to be a expert or a professional. The basic requirement is you have been actively helping a crowd in some technology field.

You can either be a author or an offline speaker promoting today’s technology. Microsoft needs the individual to nominate themselves here so they can catch up with new talents. If you find yourself capable of being one of them, nominate yourself MVP India Site. You can also check more information on the current MVP’s.