Google acquires YouTube

Google will buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.

"Combination will create new opportunities for users and content owners everywhere."

When the acquisition is complete, YouTube will retain its distinct brand identity, strengthening and complementing Google's own fast-growing video business according to the presscenter on google.com

As always when it comes to Google it is the question and issue of monopoly and if Google is getting to big. But I think that this is great to have all content on both the existing Google Video and soon YouTube indexed on the same search engine. Maybe Google has new exciting plans regarding this?

Technorati tags: Google acquires YouTube

A guided tour onboard Östanå I

Yesterday I was on a guided tour in the swedish archipelago outside Stockholm on the boat Östanå I from Strömma kanalbolaget. It was a 2,5 h trip and the weather was sunny and warm.

It is only a few minutes by boat from the central of Stockholm to reach these beautiful areas.



To the left I caught some sunrain with the camera.







To the right a big ferry that goes to and from Sweden and Finland. Those ferries are a great party place for one or two nights.


Islets and rocks. We are in the inner Stockholm archipelago and don't get very far on a little more than an hours boatride out. When you get to the outer areas the environment of the archipelago looks quite different.

In Sweden we have something called "Allemansrätten", which means that everybody have the right to and access to walk on all land or
islands even if it's private. You must not however destroy and missuse anything. As long as people don't missuse this it is a great thing we have. I can whenever I want to go or sail anywhere I want to and sit down and eat a meal or watch some birds or whatever.

The inner of Stockholm is also beautiful itself with a lot of water and trees.

To the right is a photo of a part of Stockholm harbour. The land in the back is Djurgården where an amusement park called Gröna lund is located and Skansen which is a miniature of sweden.

For more photos from this occasion visit http://flickr.com/photos/waller



Technorati tags: Swedish archipelago, Stockholm

Lotusphere 2007 getting closer

In January 21-25, 2007 it is once again time for Lotusphere. I was there last year and had a really good time. It was my first time as well but from what I've read it was the best lotusphere so far and I understand that because it was a great arrangement with a lot of exciting news both on the notes/domino side but also for websphere and workplace and for me it was the start to get to know web 2.0. I wish I could go again this year, but that's not possible. Maybe 2008, we'll see.

Anyway, take a look at the registration page if you have got a chance to go. Also take a look at my lotusphere photos from lotusphere 2006.

I was google earthing a bit a and zoomed in on the swan and dolphin building. It looks familiar but different.



Technorati tags: Lotusphere
Andra bloggar om:Lotusphere

Blogging with Flicker from my cell phone

Blogging with Flicker from my cell phone
Originally uploaded by Niklas Waller.

It's so easy and funny. Not any breaking news but still...

My laptop and a coffe on the balcony a sunny morning at home with my kids. Ah, that's life!

The web of tomorrow: summary

I have been at the conference "the web of tomorrow" or "Morgondagens webbplatser" as it is called in swedish. It was held on the 5-6 september in Stockholm, Sweden. The person that was leading the conference and presenting all the speakers is Fredrik Wackå, web advisor on his company W PR & Information. He is also running a successful blog in sweden in where he among many other things lists company- and co-worker blogs in Sweden. I would like to call it the accurate list of serious company blogs in Sweden.



The first day began with a lecture by Fredrik about the social web. A brief introduction to rss, blogs, wikis, tagging, podcasting, ajax and more which leads to more participation for visitors and customers and less control for the one's providing the services. Fredrik and the rest of the speakers together gave us some great and useful links to sites that each and one is a good example of the social web or web 2.0 in some way or that it provides news about it. I will list some of them in the end of this blogpost.

There were many good speakers but I will only talk about a few of them, some people that presented something extra that made me think.

Neville Hobson from ABC was the keynote speaker. Neville runs his own website www.nevillehobson.com but also a site called 'For Immediate Release' together with Shel Holtz, where they publich podcasts twice a week about public relations and technology. Neville has been working with podcasting for a long time and was presented as one of the world premier authorities when it comes to podcasting and blogging.



Mr Hobson spoke about communication of the future. He showed us some research about companies and blogs. It was interesting to find out that blogging still is such an unknown area. Many companies and people still don't have a clew what it is. Appearantely France are more aware than other european contries about blogs, while in Netherlands and Germany many executives still find blogging a mystery.

Neville also showed us how different languages are divided among the current 53.4 million indexed blogs on Technorati. It was surprising to me to see how large percentage that was written in japanese and chinese. English is most common but if you put together japanese and chinese then that's the largest group. Swedish wasn't even listed.

I asked Neville and Fredrik if they could estimate how many blogs there might be worldwide, but as I suspected it is impossible. We know for sure it is more than 53,4 million. Probably around 200-300 million blogs, also depending on the definition of what a blog is as Fredrik pointed out. Sweden proabably doesn't go above 100.000 if you count them all, but that's my own personal estimate.

Mr Hobson also came to the issue of trust as we tend to do when speaking about blogs. The conclusion was that we trust 'someone like me' and not companies and authorities which one might think.

There were lots of other great things about podcasting etc. that I will not go further into here.

Eva Beckman from Bolagsverket told us a great story of their mission to build a site for a public authority in Sweden, Bolagsverket. They had 3 months to build two sites with 5 resources, two informers and 3 system developers. She learned quite a lot during this journey and told us about it. Great speech!

Pia de Gysser from Agria Djurförsäkring (pet/animal insurance) was speaking about adaption for target groups on the web together with participation on the web and the fact that Agrias web is and in greater scope will be the customers web. It was a fascinating 50 minutes about how Agria relates to and communicates with its customers. Agria is in great deal working with its customers, loyal customers, through a social web. Some services for the customers are the image gallery, the company blogs (Pias and Sofies) and some recently released AJAX-based services for presenting popular names of dogs, cats and horses.



Neville also did a podcast with Pia during the conference and posted it on his blog.

Ralf Larsson from Electrolux told us about E-gate, an amongst employees popular company intranet which they have built and now use worldwide. They work hard on this intranet and among other things are many internal blogs. E-gate was ranked as one of the world's best intranet by Nielsen Norman Group in 2005.

Urban Lindstedt from No Digit Media, was talking about search engine optimization. I've heard him speak earlier and read his blog uppkopplat.se and it is always interesting to hear about SEO and Urban has quite some knowledge on this subject.

The last speaker was Jakob Palme from Stockholm university, professor in computer science. He told us about the project Web4Health, a site which has in three years gone from 0 to 500.000 visitors/month without paying anything for advertising. It is not a well-known site by name, but due to the excellent work that Jakob and his associates has put into this site optimizing it, it ranks very high and gets a lot of visitors. One of many interesting things that
Jakob told us was that 72% of all their visitors come from search engines. It must be a very high number. Urban said earlier that 30-40% is a good number. This site is probably one of the best examples of how to SEO your site. I got lots of ideas from Jakob as well.

So summarized it was a good, interesting and educational conference and I am quite satisfied. I can't say that their were any big news for me other than perhaps a short definition of web 3.0 which shortly were described as the semantic web. I will dive deeper into that later on.

Some useful links provided on the conference:

• Bloglines
• del.icio.us
• Flickr
• Digg
• diggar.se
• bubblare.se
• Wikipedia
• Google maps
• MySpace
• Second Life
• Slashdot
• Backfence.com

Technorati tags:
Web conference, Web of tomorrow, Web 2.0

Design change in the mail template for Hannover

Mary Beth Raven says that "Unread messages are now BOLD, not red!" about the mail template in the Hannover client. I find those small changes amusing and I think I will like it better.

Technorati tags:
Hannover, mail template

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Hannover, mail template

Morgondagens webbplatser

Imorgon tisdag och på onsdag, 5-6 september hålls webbkonferensen Morgondagens webbplatser av IBC Euroforum i Salénhuset i Stockholm.

På konferensen Morgondagens Webbplatser får du lyssna till svensk/internationell expertis och prisbelönade företag och myndigheter. Genom paneldiskussioner och frågestunder är målsättningen att måla en bild av webben 2.0.

Programmet hittar du här.

Ordföranden är Fredrik Wackå. Intressanta talare är bla Neville Hobson från ABC, Pia De Gysser från Agria Djurförsäkring, Urban Lindstedt, journalist och författare och många fler.

Jag går dit med höga förhoppningar om en spännande konferens och hoppas ha något intressant att berätta om efteråt. Det jag är mest nyfiken på är hur mycket nytt det är som jag själv inte sett, tänkt på eller vet om ännu.

Technorati tags:
Morgondagens webbplatser, web conference

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Morgondagens webbplatser, web conference

wink - The Social Search Engine

wink is a social search engine powered by the people. It indexes tagged content from Digg, Yahoo MyWeb, Furl, Slashdot and other social bookmarking services and displays them on search result pages.

Create your own account on wink. Search, tag, vote and block as you please.
If you like a page (a search result), then add it to your favourites by clicking on a star. If you don't like it, then block it by clicking in the blocking symbol and you won't see it again.



wink also synchronizes will del.icio.us and it is also possible to edit wiki entries inside wink. An explanation and a reference to wikipedia is presented for the meaning of the search word.


A search plugin for Firefox can be installed.

Next version, wink 2.0, is launched next week.

Read more on Techcrunch for a more detailed description.


Technorati tags:
wink, social search engine

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wink, social search engine

File sharing in Firefox with AllPeers

I read a blogpost on Webbomedia by Per-Åke Olsson about a new firefox extension called AllPeers. It is a cross-over between instant messaging and file sharing. Files are shared by drag-and-drop to your friends and family.

It is using Bit-torrent technique but no uploading is required. The data is being loaded directly from each user's hard drive and there is no size limit. It is only possible however to share and upload with users on your contact list.



Seems like a great and useful application. Haven't been able to use it fully yet though due to few people in my contact list.

Take the tour and learn more.


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AllPeers, Firefox extension

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AllPeers, Firefox extension

ScrapeTorrent

Now, where can I find the latest firefox 2.0 release candidate?
I was thinking about that the other day and don't think it's trivial to find it on the firefox homepage.

There are several options. Search for it on Google or Technorati, read some blogs or post a comment and ask for it. And there's another way, use a torrent site. There's always someone who has already uploaded it.

ScrapeTorrent lets you search 4 different torrent sites and presents the results from each and one of them on the same page with torrent links.



This link searches for everything uploaded about Firefox on:

• TorrentSpy
• IsoHunt
• PirateBay
• MiniNova

You can filter zero seeders which is a great feature.


Technorati tags:
ScrapeTorrent, Search torrents

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ScrapeTorrent, Search+torrentsh

The real Firefox

Look at the real firefox I found at AndreaHarner.com.



I wonder if Mozilla knew about this beautiful animal when they created Firefox?

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The real firefox, Firefox

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The real firefox, Firefox

Google MP3 Player - a new GMail feature

I read the Google Blogoscoped and found a blog post about Google MP3 Player. Appearantely Amit Agarwal on Digital Inspiration has been digging into the GMail code and found a MP3 player. It is actually the Google Video Player that can be used to play any mp3 file even without having to login to GMail.

I have followed Philipp Lenssen's advice and put it into an iframe. This way we get a Google-like interface with a progressbar and sound adjustments.

Below is the latest episode from the Taking Notes Podcast - Taking Notes Episode 28:08.17.06 - Sametime on Linux, DominoWiki, Lotusphere 2007, OpenNTF Update, Online Meeting Tips and News.



Now sit back and enjoy this great podcast for Notesoholics from Nick's corner!

or... try it yourself. This is the secret URL -> http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=MP3_URL

Take a look at the source code for info on how to put it into an iframe.

Technorati tags:
Google MP3 Player, Google Video Player, GMail feature, Taking Notes Podcast

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Google MP3 Player, Google Video Player, GMail feature, Taking Notes Podcast

Each week's most popular online video clips

Lifehacker reports about The WorldTV Internet TV Charts site. It keeps track of the most popular videos from 4 services and updates every Sunday at 7pm:

• Google Video
• YouTube
• Digg
• VideoSift
  

Here's the current number one from Google Video:

Also see popurls tracking the most popular urls from digg.com, del.ici.ous and reddit.com


Technorati tags:
video, popular online video clips, Google Video, YouTube, popurls, Digg

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video, popular+online+video+clips, Google Video, YouTube, popurls, Digg

Time magazine lists 50 coolest websites

Time magazine has published a list of the 50 coolest websites. It should have been a list of the 500 coolest websites if you ask me. There are so much going on on the Internet right now and we are experiencing an exponential growing of new cool sites and features following the trends of web 2.0.

On time.com we can read the following:

Many of this year's choices are shining examples of Web 2.0: next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, sites with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manners of media, from blog posts to video clips.

Take a look at the full list.

Technorati tags:
web 2.0, 50 coolest websites

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Webb 2.0, 50 coolest websites

Plans for 'Locations' in Hannover

Mary Beth Raven, the lead project designer for the Hannover project has in a posting on her blog mentioned the plans for 'Locations'.

The old concept of 'Locations' from Notes will be kept but reduced:

• Office (network) -> Online
• Island (disconnected) -> Offline
• Travel (notes direct dialup) -> Travel (to remove?)
  
• Home (notes direct dialup) -> Home (to remove?)
  
• Home (network dialup) -> remove
  
• Internet -> remove
  

In Hannover it will be possible to see all old locations from Notes 7 and to manage locations. When managing locations and choosing to create a new or to edit an existing one the following dialog box will appear:



Read more on Mary's blog and the comments she has received.


Technorati tags:
Hannover, Locations, Lotus Notes, Domino

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Hannover, Locations, Lotus Notes, Domino

NeoWORX blog counter

Maybe you have noticed my new counter further down to the right on this blog? I found it on Paul Mooney's site. Go to NeoWORX homepage and you can try three different applications:

• NeoCounter
  
  It shows the number and nationality of online and past visitors.
  Here's a screen shot from this blog:
  
  
• NeoEarth displays your online and past visitors on a choice of 12 zoomable maps in 4 different sizes.
  
  
  
  
• NeoBoard helps you to establish a community feeling by discussing with your visitors online.
  
  

Registration offers a premium version for 14 days and after that it's your choice to choose the premium version or the free version. The free version for NeoCounter offers a basic online display without past visitors information and unable to customize looks. I think I will go with that one though. We'll see after 14 days.

Take a look at NeoWORX for more info about the counter.


Technorati tags:
NeoWORX, counter, blog counter

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NeoWORX, counter, blog counter

Windows Live Writer

Microsoft has just released Microsoft Live Writer, a tool following the trend of web 2.0 making it easier for us to share information like blogging and photo publishing. It's a beta and some of its features are:

• WYSIWYG Authoring (blog authoring)
• Photo publishing
• Map publishing
• Writer SDK

The .NET framework is required.



In a former blog post I was writing about a new web browser called Flock. Using flock I can publish posts to different blog services and publish fotos to both Flickr and Photo bucket. I am sure Windows Live Writer is a great tool although I haven't tried it yet.

Read more on Lifehacker and on Beta Alfa 2.0 (swedish).

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Windows Live Writer

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Windows Live Writer

Web Operating System

So now something called a web OS has come and joined the world of web 2.0.

At Desktoptwo you can register to use an online web based desktop. It is built in Flash and offers a feel of a regular PC desktop with 1GB space for free and applications and features like e-mail, address book, blog publishing, IM client, MP3 player, Program editor, Acrobat reader, Open Office, Browser and more.



I registered but had some connectivity problems so I didn't get a chance to provide a review. Take a look at Go2Web2 for a good review with more screen shots.

Technorati tags:
Web OS, Web operating system, Desktoptwo

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Web OS, Web operating system, Desktoptwo

Lotusscript version of the @Middle formula

Here is a lotusscript function for the @Middle formula function.

Function Middle (fullString As String, startString As String, endString As String) As String

Dim startposition As Integer
Dim startlen As Integer
Dim endposition As Integer

startPosition = Instr (fullString, startString)
startLen = Len (startString)

If ((startPosition > 0) And (startString <> "")) Then
endPosition = Instr (Right$ (fullString, Len(fullString) - startPosition), endString)
If (endPosition > 0) Then
Middle = Mid$ (fullString, startPosition + startLen, Instr (startPosition + startLen, fullString, endString) - ( startPosition + startLen ) )
Else
Middle = Mid$ (fullString, Instr (fullString, startString) + Len (startString), Len (fullString))
End If
Else
Middle = ""
End If
End Function

Use:
midStr = Middle("This is a wildcard _ and this is what you get +", "_", "+")
Msgbox thestr

Result:
and this is what you get


*** updated 10 aug ***

or make it easier as Thomas Adrian suggested in a comment:

middle = Evaluate(|@Middle("| + mystring + |";"| + startString + |";"| + endstring + |")|)

Exempel:
Dim middle As Variant
middle = Evaluate(|@Middle("| + mystring + |";"| + startString + |";"| + endstring + |")|)
Print middle(0)

***************

*** updated 14 aug***

Here's another approach by Sean Burgess suggested in a comment and it works fine as well.

Dim tmp As Variant
Dim FullString As String
Dim StartString As String
Dim EndString As String

FullString = "This is a wildcard _ and this is what you get+"
StartString = "_"
EndString = "+"

tmp = Strright(Strleft(FullString, EndString), StartString)
Msgbox tmp

***************

One could say that the script I posted is somewhat unnecessary ;-) when it could be done in these ways. Or... you could call it ambitious. Anyway now I would say we've covered the middle function! But please feel free to post other solutions and I will put them up as updates.

Technorati tags:
Show-n-Tell Thursday, sntt, Lotus Notes, Lotusscript

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Show-n-Tell Thursday, sntt, Lotus Notes, Lotusscript

Chat client for multiple instant messaging services

Do you chat?
Well, I use MSN Messenger for private use and Sametime for work related chat. I also have a Google Talk account but there is not much activity going on there, I guess it's too early.

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice to use only one client for all the instant messaging services you use? Hardly any news that it is possible. I tried to make it work with Trillian a year ago, but it failed for sametime. Now, I have found Kool IM.



It's a web-based client and you need to register on the site to start using it. It's very easy to start using. The following clients are supported:

AIM Google Talk ICQ IRC Inbox Jabber MSN RSS Channel Sametime Stocks channel Yahoo

For those of you who don't know what Sametime is, I can very briefly explain that it is a chat client that connects to a Sametime server or actually it is a Domino server with Sametime functionality add-ons. Sametime can connect to the server via a web browser, a desktop client or through Lotus Notes. It's primarily used for work and not for private matters like MSN.

Technorati tags:
Kool IM, Chat client, Instant messaging