Trend update their HouseCall system
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Security updates, Web services
Trend Micro have recently released in beta HouseCall 7.0. This online disk scan is designed to compliment the existing security systems for the home or small office user – detecting malicious browser plug-ins and other auto-run badness.
There is a small download to put the .exe file on your desktop and then simply follow the on screen instructions.
We’ve found that Trend products are trustworthy and reliable – we scanned a colleague’s home portable with an 80 megabyte hard drive in 12 minutes or so, including moving two viruses detected into the HouseCall security locker.
You may need to restart your system after a full scan.
HouseCall stores details of previous scans on your local computer and is clearly a faster, more efficient version of this security check than previously available.
Check out the Trend Micro HouseCall beta here.
You can visit the Third Sector Web home page here.
Summer Sounds of the City!
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
Just lazing in the garden with the radio, basking in the intense heat of the summer sun. If only?
Instead during August, whilst it’s a bit quieter and we’re getting some housekeeping done, we’re going for an in-house alternative – fresh orange juice at our desks and listening to City Sounds.fm – a gentle blend of trance, drum and base, dance and electronica oscillating in the background.
This simple web site feeds music tracks from cities around the world to your browser – very contemporary and rhythmic we thought. Ideal when you need that break from long periods of web coding…over 10,000 tracks at the last posting.
Created by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud using the SoundCloud.com platform.
With thanks to Emily Chang for bringing this to our attention in her original post.
Have a good summer break from the Thirdsector Team.
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
Music graphic from dalbera on Flickr – A Creative Commons image.
Google Books and Creative Commons
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
Following on from our last post about using Open Source and Creative Commons sources to access information and publications, Google have recently added CC0 license marking to publications inside the Google Books system.
As an example of how authors or publishers of material can contribute to wider general knowledge, you can access The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain at Google Books.
Jonathan Zittrain is a Law Professor at Harvard in the U.S. and a long time commentator and blogger on internet technologies. His blog is viewable form the pages of… Futureoftheinternet.org/blog.
His book is a thoughtful and reflective story about the development of the internet and the danger ‘tethered devices’ offer to stifling the creativity and anarchic qualities that started internet development in the first place. All hardware linked to the computing cloud or by proprietry connections to manufacturers systems are to be viewed cautiously, Zittrain counsels.
The conclusions to the book offer some interesting thoughts on the use of computers in education and focus on the success or failure of educators to embrace the One Laptop per Child programme, for example.
The book is still available for sale from Amazon, but the author has chosen to make the publication freely available under a Creative Commons license. You can download a copy as a pdf file from Google Books here.
This reflection about how to make information freely available continues, but Google, the Creative Commons organisation and the author in this case have provided both a fine example of how information can be made available, as well as making available a thought provoking contribution to the debate about publishing and web technology.
You can find the home page of Third Sector Web here.
Open access publishing on the web…
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
Placing documents in the public domain is giving them away – often seen as an illogical position for a commercial entity to take?
Or should it be better put that placing information online in order to spread that knowledge as widely as possible, is best achieved by offering users of that information clear signposting that copyright and license of the material has been waived.
This is an Open Access argument. If you create information, articles or images that you wish to be freely available to others why not ‘mark’ them accordingly for others to use the material with confidence.
The World Intellectual Property Organisation has been working recently to provide researchers and information users with standardised sources of open access information.
The Creative Commons movement have also posted a set of tools online that can help you generate html to help signify the accessibility of information sources that you have published as original material.
These Creative Commons tools are clearly intended as markers for original content that has not been licensed. Delimiting material already prescribed by copyright is a cautious matter for the original content owners.
The Creative Commons tool kit or code generator can be found here on this Creative Commons web page.
If you are interested in reading more about the Creative Commons as a non-profit organisation you can find a Wikipedia article here.
There is some debate online as to whether the Creative Commons approach is really able to be aligned with the concepts of free software or images, or comparable with Open Source. Surely the point is that the creator of the work has a framework of possibilities available to him or her – deciding which right she or he wishes to devolve themselves of, or not.
We create content for access by the public and in our small way think any framework that helps information users or distributors to be clear about how material can be used is a good thing per se. What do you think?
You can find the Third Sector Web home page here.
Digital Europe – digital world!
Filed under: Conversation, New Web Creations, Web services
The EU Commission released it’s annual digital survey – Digital Competitiveness Report 2009 – this month (August 2009).
In it the Commission highlight the comparative development of broadband/dsl connections across European countries, as well as the use of web technologies by business. The results are surprising – using 2008 data as comparisons.
The UK now does well in it’s broadband/dsl coverage overall. We lie 5th in the Commission league tables with some 99.8% of the whole UK population having access to broadband services.
We do relatively well now in the coverage of rural areas too – with the UK services reaching 99.4% of the population in rural localities. We are beaten by France, Demark, Luxembourg and Belgium who offer better coverage to their rural residents.
In terms of the percentage of all households with broadband connection the UK lies 5th with a take up of 62%. A surprisingly low figure perhaps?
Overall users of the internet in the UK is registered by the Commission as 70%, placing us in 7th. place overall in the European competitiveness chart. Of those 70% of the population who use the internet, some 53% the survey declares define themselves as frequent users.
Of UK enterprises who have a fixed broadband connection we lie in 8th. place, with 87% of enterprises having a fixed connection. Interestingly the economies of Malta and Lithuania have higher business broadband penetration.
The comparative tables in the survey highlight the surge of development needed to still hit the government’s e-business targets. Slightly over half of all UK broadband connected businesses use the internet for form completion and filing (51%), but only 12% of the total broadband user population connect to e-government services. This puts the UK in 15th. ranking for business e-government, but at 12th. place in Europe for overall e-government population users.
This latter figure is very low for a global internet user population of 70% overall in the U.K. with Ireland, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and Portugal all enjoying more e-government literate populations.
The full survey also has interesting things to say about the percentage of employees with ICT skills, or rather those employees who are recruited specifically for their I.T. skills.
To read more abstracts of the research, or to see the Commission Digital Competitiveness Report in full you can find the page here, on the European Information Society portal pages.
You can reach the Third Sector Web home page here.
Google updates image search…
Google recently began a program of updating the search function for images. Recent additions to the advanced image search function include the ability to search by creative commons licence, colour and size.
Micro-stock sites with similar search functions are available, but this addition by Google is a useful adjunct when you are searching for that black and white image, that can safely be re-used in a project document or press release, for example.
The image of the tree above is from Flickr – a Creative Commons licensed image of a tree in Old Wood Lane, near Bingley from Tim Green.
.-(cc_noncommercial)%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG){kind=link}
-
About our business
Very mobile friendly
Tech news from CNN
- Kanye and how Twitter changed communication
If you needed any more proof that Twitter has transformed how we absorb information and communicate, look no further than Kanye West. - New site shows the best of YouTube's worst
We watch more than 2 billion YouTube videos every day, but let's admit it -- we're usually viewing a top 25 clip, a video forwarded by a friend or an old standby like David After Dentist (some of those 66 million views must be repeats). - Adult services blocked on Craigslist
Online classified service Craigslist's decision to censor its adult services section could be a model for other websites, a leader in the fight against prostitution ads said Saturday. - Users amused, annoyed by Facebook Places
It's been two weeks since Facebook users took to blogs and message boards to voice their concerns about Places, a location-based service that allows people to check in to gathering spots via the social network.
- Kanye and how Twitter changed communication
We use Apture
Our Thirdsector Tech blog uses the Apture service to add extra content to our posts.
You can hover your mouse over the 'little book' or 'mini-page' icons next to our links to access the additional information.