Writing on feeds, search, widgets, and the social web.

Niall Kennedy's weblog, newest first. Page 54 of 72.

Reuters : Resume Fraud Gets Slicker and Easier

Reuters published an article today about how background searches are now being manipulated in the hiring process. Phone numbers to confirm a phony degree, crackers adding a name to a university’s database, and even transcripts are for sale. “ADP Screening and Selection Services, in a 2003 study, found that more than 50 percent of the people on whom it conducted employment and education checks had submitted false information, compared with about 40 percent in 2002” How long will it take before third party verification services (think VeriSign Secure Seal) step in for hosted resumes? Would the market bite?…

MSN Search job page

MSN Search has its own job page. Much more team oriented and focused than Microsoft’s large careers site….

Yahoo! Maps SmartView service

Yahoo! launched a new Yahoo! Maps service today, incoprating new localized content. “The SmartView service lets surfers use the Yahoo Maps section of the company’s Web site to view information on local points of interest, such as restaurants, hotels, parks, automatic teller machines and post offices.”…

Wall Street Journal : Microsoft’s failure to innovate

Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal asks: What does the world get for the 10% Microsoft tax on every PC? (via Slashdot) “When asked which research from its labs has made its way into Microsoft products, the list from Microsoft officials doesn’t exactly bowl over a listener: better software-verification techniques, digital media-player technologies, additions to the SQL database language.”…

Steve Gillmor interviews Sun EVP Jonathan Schwartz

Steve Gillmor interviewed Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president of Sun Microsystems’ software group, about Sun’s plans to include RSS feeds in everything they do. Schwartz also has some good insights into what makes good software for enterprise users as well as developers. “Right now the overwhelming, the preponderance, of feedback we have from customers about what they want from a desktop from Sun is security, familiarity, and affordability —and almost typically in that order.” “Developers don’t buy things, they join things. That’s the epitome of our developer strategy. Give them a community to join.”…

Adobe Designer public beta

Adobe Systems announced today the public beta availability of Adobe Designer, a new point-and-click graphical XML form design tool for designing and deploying intelligent forms in Adobe PDF or HTML….

New York Times : Tickle

Saul Hansell profiles Tickle in Monday’s New York Times. Create a site specializing in helping people discover various aspects of themselves. Add social networking and job connections and a smart business model develops….

BitTorrent 3.4

Bram Cohen released BitTorrent 3.4 yesterday. Notes lots of bandwidth savings and lots of bug fixes over last September’s point release….

Beckham extends contract, gets his own logo

David Beckham was at adidas headquarters in Germany this morning to announce his contract extension and unveil his new logo to appear in merchandise later this year. Similar to Michael Jordan’s slam dunk, the free kick is Beckham’s well known pose….

Jason Shellen’s Google Blogger webcam

Jason Shellen, who works in the Blogger department at Google, has a webcam serving pictures of the Blogger office. (via evhead) Interesting that Blogger, Feedster, and Technorati are full of Mac people….

Wayback Machine brings my past entries to life

Before I ever started using weblogging tools I edited HTML by hand in weblog style. Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, I just went back to my UCLA site and gathered entries as old as October 2000. I tried to keep everything as it was, but took out broken images and patched up some code to make it XHTML compliant….

Vulcan Ventures Project Halo

Luke Timmerman of the Seattle Times wrote about one of Paul Allen’s new ventures last month. Project Halo will attempt to program a computer in the next 30 months to create a computerized tutor that’s smart enough to pass college-level Advanced Placement tests in chemistry, biology and physics. Teams from the University of Texas at Austin, Boeing Phantom Works, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Kraka, Carnegie Mellon University, iSoco, Stanford Medical Informatics, the University of Southern California’s Information Science Institute, KSVentures and Klein Associates will compete to complete the task….

FIFA 100

To celebrate 100 years of FIFA, the Federation Internationale de Football Association, Pele has chosen 100 living soccer players that represent the best, most outstanding, creative players of their generation….

Verizon call forwarding to your airplane seat

Verizon Wireless now supports call forwarding to in-flight telephones in airplanes using Verizon Airfone service. $0.69 a minute, or $10 a month subscription plus $0.10 a minute….

UC Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton

UC Berkeley researchers have developed a robotic exoskeleton that allows a human to walk flat terrain and slopes carrying 170 pounds that feels like 5 pounds. More than 40 sensors and hydraulic actuators communicate and adjust themselves to the human’s motion so no load is transferred to the wearer. No driving device needed….

Toyota Sportivo: the car that governs you

Patrick Gray of Wired News writes about a concept car Toyota introduced in Australia: the Toyota Sportivo. A driver would need to enter a memory card into its console to turn on its engine. Along with the typical stored seat adjustments, mirror angles, and radio presets, the car also shows you the location of your friends on your navigation display. Based on the driver’s hours behind the wheel and driving record, the car adjusts its engine performance, cutting back for motorists with less experience or bad driving record. The current speed limit is displayed against your speed and the car…

Family Guy coming back in 2005

Family Guy will return to TV for as many as 35 episodes beginning in January 2005 according to an IGN.com interview with creator Seth MacFarlane. E! Online News also has coverage….

Cover Songs Database

According to the Cover Songs Database The Beatles are the most covered band and Eleanor Rigby is the most covered song. The most sampled song is Bob James’ Nautilus….

Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search

Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search is a database of all 3150 Calvin and Hobbes strips published with complete references to the books and pages they’re published on. All searchable by keyword. Very cool!…

Tom Bridge leaves MacSlash

As of yesterday Tom Bridge stepped down from his role at MacSlash….

How the Mars Rovers phone home

Philip Chien of Wired News interviewed Jet Propulsion Laboratory telecom engineer Andrea Barbieri about how Mars rovers communicate back to Earth….

New site by Gizmodo’s Peter Rojas?

I have noticed how sparingly Gizmodo has been updated these last few weeks. It looks like Peter Rojas is working on a new site with Weblogs, Inc. called Engadget. If you take a look at Peter’s resume you notice his relationship with Gizmodo ends in March 2004 and Engadget begins. Engadget is “a new web magazine with daily coverage of gadgets and personal technology.”…

Mark Pilgrim’s new job

Mark Pilgrim is now an Accessibility Architect in the Emerging Technologies group at IBM. Congratulations Mark!…

Pew Internet and American Life Project on Content Creation

Pew Internet and American Life Project’s latest survey covers content creation online. Some interesting findings from a phone survey conducted between March 12 and May 20, 2003. 13% maintain their own Web sites 7% have Web cams running on their computers 2% maintain Weblogs, 11% read weblogs, and about a third of readers have left comments. 10% of bloggers update daily. Power creators, average age of 25, are most likely to be blogging. It is interesting to note what has happened since May 20, 2003 that has most likely increased those numbers. AOL launched its AOL Journals service. TypePad launched….