Internet

Interesting post on Wikimedia here.

Google Inc. has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee has been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site.

More details will be put here when the offer is allowed to be made public.

Could this be a case of Google taking the fight to Microsoft? MSN Search, of course, offers recourse to Encarta.

Flickr is brilliant. A really great service, easy to use and full of features.

It’s basically a place to store digital photos online. You upload the ones you want and Flickr automatically makes them available in a few different web friendly sizes, so you don’t need to bother resizing them yourself.

You can then make them available to people to see through Flickr itself, or produce HTML code to display them on another site – this could be a really way handy for Palimpsesters to display images in their posts on the forums. I might look into it and get a little guide written.

The other cool thing, as I demonstrated below, is that it can post photos direct to a blog. If you are using one of the big services, like LiveJournal, Blogger or TypePad, this works with ease. With a system like WordPress, like I use, it is a little trickier. For some reason, when I post photos through Flickr, it comes up with an error saying that it hasn’t worked…even though it has! Never mind, I can live with that. Also, it puts the posts in the ‘Life’ category, rather than in ‘Photos’ and it doesn’t add a title to a post. These things I have to do manually, but it is easy enought to pick up on the next time I am blogging.

Flickr is a cool site, and no mistake.

The Google Blog reveals that Google are now offering a video search:

Soon there will be. Google Video is a new product that enables you to search an index of transcripts from recent TV programs. It’s just an early-stage beta product at this point; you’ll only see stills and text snippets from shows that match your search terms, and you can only search shows from a few channels, dating back to December, 2004, when we started compiling the index. But we’ll be steadily improving Google Video in the months to come, so as they say in the TV biz, stay tuned.

I registered for Yahoo! for the first time today, largely for the Calendar function which is attached to the E-Mail page. It came out very well in a recent PCPlus review of Calendaring software.

The E-Mail addy I got was theclosedcircle@yahoo.co.uk – not sure if I will ever use it though.

Will post my views once have had a chance to use it.