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If Yahoo was looking to take a chunk out of social news space, Buzz doesn’t seem to be the answer. While the site is useful, Buzz is actually competing with sites like TechMeme, NewsPond, Spotplex, and Blogrunner when it comes to tracking the newest and most popular stories. In many ways Buzz is simply a reimagined front page for Yahoo.com, something that’s self-maintaining and can be edited (albeit only upwards) by the masses.

While the service seems to lack some of the community hooks other social news services like Digg and Reddit offer, Buzz has an ace up its sleeve by providing related stories, which for the most part are pretty spot-on. This makes for a much more engaging content discovery experience, and something that’s going to provide more clicks to stories that aren’t making the front page.

Vote for stories, although you can only go up, not down.

As an added incentive to get on the site, Yahoo’s taking a handful of the most popular stories from Buzz and putting them on the front page of Yahoo.com, a move that will send a lot of traffic to smaller sites where the content is being hosted.

The top of Buzz's page is a series of thumbnails taken from popular stories on the site.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

What’s already quite strange about the service is the lack of user involvement that’s been put in by design. While on the surface it appears as a social news site, there’s no commenting system or any way to share what you’ve voted on with others. Unlike Netscape’s Propeller, which did its best to emulate Digg, Buzz can continue to operate without human intervention. Speaking of which, there’s no real upcoming section per se. You can locate stories with less buzz and promote them, but a certain amount of buzz is already given to stories that have been given some search love, making users dig deeper to reach the smaller stories.

Yahoo Buzz, the Internet-meme-tracker-meets-social-news site we wrote about a few weeks back has finally gone live and is open to everyone. The service tracks popular content around the Web by mixing user searches with voting to promote stories to the front page.

Also, the thing has to float. So ONR will be scrutinizing seal design (PDF).

(Credit:
ONR)

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) wants a T-Craft that does 40 knots, carries at least six tanks, and is able to survive 57-knot winds and 60-foot waves. It must also mitigate wave motion, to allow the transfer of vehicles from one ship to the other while rocking on the high seas.

The Sea Base Connector Transformable-Craft program is an integral part of the military’s “sea basing” concept (PDF), in which floating bases fill-in where land bases are unfeasible or real estate prices are just too high. This would allow U.S. forces to reduce reliance on foreign ports, friendly or otherwise (PDF).

The transformer will be able to operate in four modes: from “open ocean transit” to an amphibious mode that can negotiate sand bars and mud flats.

To accomplish that, the companies Alion Science and Umoe-Mandal will need to develop and deploy some combination of new propulsion system, experimental hulls, exotic composites, “variable-geometry” bows that adjust to different dock set-ups, and retractable skirts for under-hull air cushions.

The U.S. Navy has selected two companies to develop a Transformable Craft capable of ferrying heavy tanks from ships at sea, through the surf, and onto beachheads around the world.

(Credit:
Alion Science )

“The T-Craft ship supports the rapid transfer of Army and Marine Corps equipment ashore,” said retired Vice Admiral Scott Fry, vice president of Alion. “This is game-changing technology. This capability does not currently exist. This ship can go across the ocean and link up with a large logistics ship and take on some of the roll-on, roll-off cargo, and then land it on the beach.”

This is phase II of the program. The companies will build full scale models for evaluation and testing. The best design may go on to full production in Phase III.

But McGonigal, who is keynoting at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin on Tuesday, confirmed to me that the game was in fact designed in collaboration with the International Olympic Committee and that McGonigal’s partners in the creation of the game were McDonald’s and global interactive experience design shop, AKQA.

McGonigal, an alumna of leading ARG design firm 42 Entertainment, has either been lead designer on or helped create a wide variety of multimedia games such as A World without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, Last Call Poker, and I Love Bees.

Since The Lost Ring went live on Monday, its Web site has offered up a number of clues for players to follow, while ARG-related sites like ARGNet and Unfiction have been actively discussing the game. It will play out over many months, likely not finishing at least until the closing ceremonies of the Olympics on August 24, 2008.

For anyone who follows alternate-reality games (ARGs), it should come as no surprise that the latest entry in the genre, The Lost Ring, is the brainchild of, among others, Jane McGonigal.

“This ARG extends McDonald’s historic sponsorship of the Olympic Games in a brand-new direction,” said McGonigal, who is a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future. “Its goal is to create global collaboration and bring the spirit of the Games to people around the world. It will invite players from across the globe to join forces online and in the real world, as they investigate forgotten mysteries and urban legends of the ancient games.”

Until now, it was only suspected–though with extremely high levels of confidence–that the game, which is centered on helping a fictional amnesiac woman named Ariadne discover her identity, was a promotional vehicle for this summer’s Beijing Olympics.

‘Find the Lost Ring,’ a brand-new alternate-reality game, is a promotional vehicle for McDonald’s and the Beijing Olympics. The game, which went live on Monday, is centered on a woman named Ariadne, who claims to have woken up with amnesia in a South African corn maze on February 12.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET Networks)

MSI has also announced two new 13-inch models from the X-Slim line. Both have 1366×768 displays and run
Windows Vista Premium, but the $700 X320 uses an Intel Atom Z530, while the more expensive X340 (starting around $1,000), uses Intel’s new CULV platform — basically a much more efficient mobile processor. At 0.7-inches thick and 2.8 pounds, we could see these being a low-cost alternative to slick, thin 13-inchers such as the MacBook Air or Dell Adamo.

Both the new Wind U123 models and the X-Slim Series notebooks will be available in the US this May, and full specs are after the break.

While they’re not the first name that comes to mind when thinking of Netbooks, PC maker MSI earned a lot of ink last year for its MSI Wind U100, one of the first 10-inch Netbooks to hit the market.

The follow-up, called the Wind U123, has Intel’s latest Atom, the N280, as well as a TV tuner and optional 3G antenna. It’ll also come in red and blue, in addition to the standard white and grey versions we saw with the U100.

“I don’t see any reason to do it stupidly and lose money,” he said.

“I don’t think consumers buying consumer electronics yet feel that,” Glasgow said. “Sony did particularly well during the holidays. It was the best in the history of Sony Electronics in the U.S.”

One of the things that appeared to help Sony in 2007 was its expansion of specific television models made to sell in Wal-Mart Stores and Target. Glasgow said the company is expanding that commitment to supplying those retailers with 40 percent more variety of TV models this year.

Though 11-inch OLEDs are the largest size Sony is offering right now, bigger screen sizes are on the way–some day. But there are currently limits on exactly how big Sony can make them right now. Glasgow specifically said that there are major obstacles (mostly to do with the physics of creating the panels) to make OLED screens larger than 30 inches. “It would take another significant investment to get bigger than that,” he said.

Sony is apparently unfazed by Amazon.com’s recent entrance into the electronic book reader market. “The Kindle has helped,” Glasgow said. “I think the (Sony) Reader market needed a boost. We’re selling more since the Kindle came to market.”

But perish the thought that Sony will take trade-ins of now-obsolete HD DVD players. “Sony is not going to make up for Toshiba’s sins,” Glasgow said emphatically.

In the meantime, Sony is “in discussions” with a number of partners in order to get them on the Blu-ray bandwagon. An Microsoft
Xbox 360 console with Blu-ray is certainly “a possibility,” he said.

Another high point was its TV business. According to data collected by market research company DisplaySearch, Sony lead all LCD TV manufacturers in the fourth quarter of 2007 with 12.3 percent of worldwide shipments, considered a major comeback for the company.

Glasgow kept the gloating to a minimum, however, when it came to Blu-ray’s recent victory in the format spat with HD DVD. As one of the leading investors and supporters of Blu-ray, Sony does see prices dropping on standalone Blu-ray players over the next couple years, but it will be 2009 before a $199 unit becomes a reality, he said. Price drops will happen, but it needs to be done in an orderly fashion, Glasgow said.

SAN FRANCISCO–Though times may be tough for other TV manufacturers, Sony says it isn’t feeling a thing yet in its electronics division here in the U.S.

At a press briefing with reporters here Wednesday evening, Sony Electronics President Stan Glasgow said that despite indications of a weakening U.S. economy, all is well with the Japanese electronics giant.

Other tidbits gleaned from the evening:

A boon to Sony’s bottom line has been the growth of its Sony Style stores, both brick-and-mortar outlets, and its online presence. Glasgow said Sony Style experienced a 34 percent growth in sales over the 2007 holiday shopping season.

Put an Address bar in your taskbar
I’d be lost without my Address bar, which I rely on more than shortcuts and bookmarks to return to sites, files, and folders. I can get to a lot of these resources in Vista simply by pressing the Windows key, typing their name, and pressing Enter once Windows retrieves them.

Shift to unlock the Caps Lock key
There are plenty of keyboard-remapping utilities that can disable the Caps Lock key and make other changes to your keyboard layout. You can also find downloadable Registry files (.reg) that disable Caps Lock, the Windows key, Insert, and other keys people find useless.

You can resize and move the Address bar–or any other taskbar item–or the entire taskbar, for that matter. I stick with the smallest possible taskbar at the bottom of the screen, but some people like having their taskbar run vertically along the left or right side of their monitor.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

To place an Address bar next to your system tray, right-click anywhere in the taskbar and choose Toolbars > Address. (Make sure Lock the Taskbar is unchecked.)

Yet Vista and XP let you turn off Caps Lock not by pressing the key a second time, but by pressing the Shift key, which is the way the keys work on typewriters. I’m sure there was an army of former Royal and IBM Selectric users clamoring for this option!

In case you’re curious, you change this setting in Vista by opening the Regional and Language Settings applet in Control Panel (not the Keyboard applet, of course). Click the Keyboards and Languages tab, choose “Change keyboards,” and click the Advanced Key Settings tab. (The options are slightly different in XP, and you may need to add a second keyboard via the settings under the General tab.)

I got a kick out of the recent headlines stating that Microsoft wants to make the next version of Windows less annoying than Vista. Talk about setting the bar low!

Here are three other Windows irritations that I finally got around to addressing, though a cure for the first one has eluded me.

Use the Shift key to turn off Caps Lock by changing this setting in Vista's Regional and Language Settings applet.

But I’m much more accustomed to clicking the little arrow to the right of the Address bar text box to select the file or URL from the list that pops up. Or I can just start typing the URL or file name and choose it from those that appear.

Most of the things that bug me about Windows are easy to fix–the lack of a Run option on Vista’s Start menu is an example. To put Run back on the menu, right click the Start button, choose Properties, click Customize under the Start Menu tab, scroll to and check “Run command,” and click OK twice.

To change the program that opens by default when you double-click a file of a certain type, right-click the file and choose Open With > Choose Default Program. Select one of the options in the resulting dialog box, or click the Browse button, navigate to the executable file of the program you want to make the default for that file type, and click Open. Make sure “Always use the selected program to open this type of file” is checked (it’s selected by default).

Reset your default image editor
I’m a fan of Paint, the simple, no-nonsense image editor built into Windows. Unfortunately, Windows keeps wanting to make Windows Photo Gallery or some other app the default program for opening JPEGs and other image files on my PC.

I tried a half-dozen of each, and none of them worked with my HP laptop, the machine whose Caps Lock key I’m forever hitting by accident. It’s a shame that there’s no easy way to disable this key, which does me absolutely no good.

Under “To turn off Caps Lock,” select “Press the SHIFT key” and click OK twice.

Don Reisinger sits down with Carey Holzman of the Computer America show to talk about Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Toshiba and more in segment 1. In Segment 2, Don has the opportunity to talk with Ryan Kuder, a former Yahoo employee who was laid off last week, to put a face to what really went on at the company’s headquarters. After that, Don asks for jingles and more! Listen now:

Download today’s podcast
EPISODE 3

TODAY’S LINKS: Microsoft holding off on HD DVD reaction, thinks “games” sell consoles - Engadget MacBook Air’s thinness, flash drive point to notebook future R.I.P. HD DVD: Toshiba reportedly ends the war Why Microsoft will announce an Xbox Blu-ray player soon Yahoo and News Corp. — the match made in hell Follow Ryan Kuder on Twitter Computer America

“It’s an enormous multiyear project,” Spivack said. It’s not like a Google beta or a 1.0 version masquerading as a beta.” The same could be said of the other Semantic Web services in the room. It’s going to be a very long beta cycle.

Powerset gives wings to Wikipedia
I got a preview of Powerset’s search engine, which is due to go into beta in the coming weeks, according to co-founder and CTO Barney Pell and as reported by TechCrunch.

Freebase is an community-built database with a large corpus of open data sets, including Wikipedia and MusicBrainz. Powerset includes some Freebase-structured content in its index, and True Knowledge could add Freebase data to its knowledge repository.

Unlike Powerset and other search engines, Cambridge, England-based True Knowledge is building its own knowledge base. Users input facts, as in Wikipedia, but in a more structured manner. In addition, True Knowledge imports data from sources, including Wikipedia, in the form of discrete facts, such “Sacramento is the capital of California.”

Powerset plans to index the Web at some point (at a significant cost, in terms of servers and bandwidth). For now–or more precisely, when the company allows the public access to its technology–Wikipedia users will be the beneficiaries of a powerful semantic index and user experience.

Barney Pell (Powerset), William Tunstall-Pedoe (True Knowledge), Nova Spivack (Radar Networks), Paul Davison (Metaweb)

(Credit:
Dan Farber/CNET News)

Metaweb
Another San Francisco Semantic Web start-up, Metaweb, was also a participant in the salon. The company’s Freebase is more similar to True Knowledge than Powerset.

Tuesday night, Semantic Web mountain climbers Powerset, Radar Networks, and Metaweb participated in a salon at Powerset’s San Francisco office, where I talked with them about their product plans.

(Credit:
True Knowledge)

Spivack said Twine has about 7,000 users in private beta, as well as 40,000 standing in line for access. Half of the users have created private Twines, with corporations and closed communities of interest using the service for collaboration.

True Knowledge
I also got a look at True Knowledge’s search engine. Company CEO William Tunstall-Pedoe said the search engine is in private beta for now, with about 7,000 users.

Radar Networks’ Twine
I also chatted with Nova Spivack, co-founder and CEO of Radar Networks. His company created Twine, an application combining bookmarking, blogging, and RSS reading, with an underlying semantic engine to tie the pieces of data together.

Powerset then extracts and indexes concepts, relationships, and meanings, rather than keywords. (I wrote about Powerset when it first came out of stealth mode, in June 2007.)

The Semantic Web has been just around the corner for a few years. It turns out that bringing a semantic layer of metadata to the Internet is like climbing a mountain in flip-flops.

Rather than trying to boil the search ocean, compete with Google, and deal with spam and 20 billion documents, Powerset has focused its initial efforts on giving wings to the 3 million pages of Wikipedia.

Powerset differs from Google and other mainstream search engines in that it linguistically parses sentences, finding subjects, verbs, objects, synonyms, and other elements using a highly sophisticated, language-independent parser licensed from Xerox PARC).

Major enhancements are planned for the summer and fall, including allowing for complete customization of the user interface. “We have only surfaced a bit of the platform so far. Twine as a platform will integrate with other applications, such as blogs, catalogs, social communities, and corporate sites,” he told me.

The capability to infer truths based on the data repository would be a welcome feature for Wikipedia, which doesn’t have an automated method for dealing with contradictions.

Queries, including those in natural language, are parsed for machine reading, and they access the repository of facts accumulated. True Knowledge can make inferences, such as in the following example.

Hakia’s semantic search engine also indexes Wikipedia and other sources. However, Powerset returns a more comprehensive dossier of results for queries, based on deep analysis of Wikipedia pages and other content, and also provides new ways to navigate and discover facts on the individual Wikipedia pages. More details to come when Powerset officially launches its public beta version.

I should also note here that a free volume encryption utility called TrueCrypt was released for OS X last week (it was previously available for Windows and Linux). TrueCrypt doesn’t do whole-disk encryption, but it does offer a way to conceal the fact that an encrypted volume exists–although that handy feature isn’t yet available on OS X and Linux.

Another problem with FileVault is that it hasn’t always been implemented that securely. Earlier versions of OS X didn’t encrypt the swapfile used for virtual memory, meaning the password could in many cases be easily extracted. And a paper (click for PDF) published last year by Jacob Appelbaum and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann found other potential security weaknesses.

PGP released its whole-disk encryption utility for Windows in May 2005. A perpetual license for PGP Whole Disk Encryption 9.8 for Windows costs $149.

OS X already features FileVault, of course, but that focuses on encrypting the user’s home directory. Without whole-disk encryption, Unix-derived systems including OS X store in unencrypted form details about VPN usage, login times, and what applications are installed in the default location. Some applications including Thunderbird save working copies of documents in an unencrypted area outside the home directory.

Jon Callas, PGP’s chief technology officer, told me on Monday that the software is “in active development” and will run on Intel-based Macs. Callas didn’t want to elaborate on a shipping date, unfortunately.

PGP Corp. is planning to release a version of its whole-disk encryption software for Apple Macintosh computers running OS X.

This promises to be a boon for OS X users, especially laptop users who are more likely to lose their machines or run into snoopy border police and airport security guards who want to poke around the contents of their hard drives. Right now there’s no way for OS X users to encrypt their entire boot disks.

“TVportation” placeshifting: The Archos TV+ DVR is getting Slingbox-style placeshifting functionality. A downloadable plug-in (normally $50, but free if you register your Archos TV+ at the company’s Web site) available in May will add what Archos is calling “TVportation.” It’s a nice buzzword, but it basically means that the TV+ can stream your live TV programming to other Internet-connected devices, including (for starters) the Archos WiFi portables, Windows PCs, Windows Mobile smartphones, and Symbian smartphones. The viewing software will be free for those devices, and there’s no monthly fee associated with the streaming. (The Windows version of the software looked nearly identical to the viewing software for Hava placeshifting products, and an Archos rep confirmed that Hava was indeed contributing its software know-how.) The initial version of the software will only allow for the streaming of live TV and the ability to change channels; for now, you’ll be unable to access programs recorded on the Archos TV+, nor will you be able to manage your recording schedule.

CNET will be updating its reviews of the 605 WiFi, 705 WiFi, and publishing a new review of the Archos TV+; as soon as the relevant software updates become available. In the meantime: what do you think? Do these imminent upgrades make the portables a worthwhile alternative to the iPhone/iPod Touch? And does the TVportation feature make the TV+ a true competitor to a TiVo/Slingbox combo?

Streaming video, audio, and podcast support: Also on the way to the 605 and 705 is the “Web TV and Radio plug-in.” Not to be confused with the old Microsoft “Internet on TV” set-top box, this $20 software upgrade will add dedicated streaming video and Internet radio support to Archos handhelds. The company promises support for more than 600 video streams, 9,600 Web radio stations, and 110,000 podcasts–just for starters. However, unlike the freewheeling Flash video options, this is a walled garden, so you’re stuck with the content providers that Archos aggregates. For instance: the BCAT (Brooklyn Community Access TV) station in the photo above is a New York-area public access station–not exactly HBO.

(Credit:
Archos)

Flash 9 video support: A free firmware upgrade available in May will enable the 605 WiFi and 705 WiFi to stream Flash 9 video. Using the built-in Opera browser, Archos users can go to any Web site using the latest iteration of Flash video (Hulu, ABC, CBS, YouTube, CNET TV–you name it) and watch the video of their choice. That’s a major advantage over the YouTube-only walled garden available on the
iPhone and
iPod Touch. (If you’re keeping score at home: full Flash support is on its way to Archos handhelds, while it remains unavailable on Apple’s flagship portables.)

The GPS accessory for the 605 WiFi was just the first of several product upgrades announced by Archos today. Also on deck are streaming Web video and audio and upgraded media support for the 605 WiFi and 705 WiFi; Slingbox-style placeshifting functionality for the Archos TV+ DVR; and a content deal with Paramount Digital Entertainment. Details are as follows:

Paramount Digital Entertainment partnership: Archos has inked a deal with Paramount, allowing selections from that studio’s movie library to be available on Archos video products. In addition to being added to Archos’ online Content Portal for purchase, future TV+ units will be sold with several dozen movies preloaded on the hard drive, where they can be unlocked (purchased) for instant viewing.

Streaming Web video is just one of several upgrades coming to the Archos line of video products.