Web

Flickr wants your pets to take photos

~ Posted in Lifestyle / Gadgets / Web on August 16th, 2007.

Flickr, now officially (and finally) out of gamma, have announced that they hope to encourage more potential snappers to get involved in the hobby of photography.

But Flickr are looking for a special type of photographer, the household pet. The king of photo sites has revealed plans to launch a gadget that allows our domestic buddies to take snaps wherever they are without the aid of humans. The device, dubbed the PetCollr, will essentially look like an oversized collar which will fit to the pet around the neck. Initially the PetCollr will be available to cats and dogs, but more …

Refreshr traffic generator goes beta

~ Posted in Web on August 13th, 2007.

The much anticipated Refreshr web statistics tool is now officially in beta. SEOists and traffic statistic obsessives worldwide can now rejoice.

WebTrafficDrive, the product’s makers, officially made the announcement at 16:00 GMT yesterday at their global Headquarters in London. The reaction was initially of wild enthusiasm which then dissipated into muted appreciation.

Refreshr is a website tool that instantly ups the amount of hits to any website. Once installed on your local machine, the Refreshr bot simply ‘visits’ your website through your internet connection and masks itself as a different visitor (upon refreshing) every time it is …

Googleplex visitor may have found Google’s search algorithm

~ Posted in Web on August 10th, 2007.

A college student has made a huge discovery whilst on a work placement program at the Googleplex, the Google Headquarters, it is reported. Andrea Hawkmonkey contacted The Technology Herald with her exclusive find - the details of the secret Google ranking algorithm.

Andrea commented on her finding:

“I was walking from the Googleplex building to the car park and happened to look at a crumpled memo. I unravelled the memo and was amazed at what I read. I knew the very instant I started reading that it was a secret code detailing the nature of the Google search algorithm.”

Ms Hawkmonkey was …

Digg to strip the word ‘awesome’ from story titles

~ Posted in Web on August 9th, 2007.

Digg founders published a road map today detailing surprising plans to scan submitted titles from stories and to strip the word ‘awesome’ from them. The news comes after recent complaints that the word is being misused.

Jeff Makeshift, a Digg spokesperson commented:

“The decision was taken due to the amount of stories that reach the front page with the word ‘awesome’ in their title. Some stories do feature awesome content, but the majority of them are not really awesome, causing the meaning of the word to become diluted. At Digg, we do not want to be held responsible for the word …

Lolcat Owner: I Haz No Happy With Grammer

~ Posted in Web on August 3rd, 2007.

A reporter’s account of a harrowing tale. This feature article is exclusive to The Technology Herald.

Judy Waggledagger was shocked and distraught after finding a doctored photo of her cat on a Flickr account she was browsing on ‘her Internet’ she explained to The Technology Herald. We were sitting in a trendy café in Manchester Airport, Britain, and Judy was scrunching up her napkin in anger whilst giving her account of the story.

Two months earlier English teacher Judy was happily uploading her weekly batch of cat photos to her Flickr account. She glowed in pride with her efforts as she had …

Google Introduces AdSpeak

~ Posted in Web on July 31st, 2007.

With the dominance of Google’s services, it’s no surprise that a new advertising tool is being launched later this month. With a monopoly in the online text ads industry and a succesful start in their campaign to rule print ads, Google have decided to pioneer adverts in a new media - speech. A product to tie together the virtual and real worlds. Soon, people won’t be having normal conversations but will be spouting marketing phrases randomly during speech. They will be AdSpeakers.

But exactly how do they plan to achieve this? Well, the concept is simple. They take the …