Technology in your hands.

U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet’s current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.

“The surge in online content is at the center of the most dramatic changes affecting the Internet today,” he said. “In three years’ time, 20 typical households will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.”

Cicconi, who was speaking at the event as part of a wider series of meetings with U.K. government officials, said that at least $55 billion worth of investment was needed in new infrastructure in the next three years in the U.S. alone, with the figure rising to $130 billion to improve the network worldwide. “We are going to be butting up against the physical capacity of the Internet by 2010,” he said…

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There’s always a danger when a key employee leaves for a new company that he or she will stir things up by taking a few co-workers along, but some defections can be particularly grating. Looking to coddle its growing workforce a bit more, Facebook started shopping for its own executive chef in January. And when Sheryl Sandberg came over from Google to become COO last month, she said she knew just the guy at her old place. Everything panned out and now, as Carolyn Jung (until recently, the Merc’s food editor) reports at Food Gal, Josef Desimone has been whisked away to become the new Facecook…

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WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

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News Corp’s MySpace earlier pledged support, and the three companies announced today they were forming a non-profit organisation, the OpenSocial Foundation, to ensure the platform remains neutral and viable.

The idea behind the Google-initiated OpenSocial platform is to create a common coding standard for the applications so they work on hundreds of web sites.

The applications could permit chats, games, media sharing and more.

By contrast, sites that haven’t joined OpenSocial typically rely on unique coding that has prevented widgets developed for its sites from working at other places on the web.

The addition of Yahoo could put pressure on Facebook, the number two social-networking site behind MySpace, to pledge support as well, though Facebook has had tremendous success encouraging developers to write tools specifically for it…

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The hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow has released a tool that should make Google hacking a little easier for novices.

Called Goolag, the open-source software lets hackers use the Google search engine to scan Web sites for vulnerabilities.

This is something that hackers have been doing for years, but it can be tricky work– involving custom scripts and tools that sift through the mountain of data available via Google.

The Cult of the Dead Cow is best known for creating the Back Orifice software 10 years ago, which could be used to remotely control a Windows machine.

Like Back Orifice, the software could be used by both legitimate security professionals and criminals. Goolag comes with an easy-to-use graphical interface. It is based on techniques developed by Computer Sciences Corp. researcher Johnny Long, a well-known computer hacker who has spent years documenting the way that Google’s search engine can be used to uncover security vulnerabilities in the Web sites it indexes.

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Web search leader Google plans to start selling ads to appear in web videos and has signed up 20 customers, as it aims to do for videos what it has done for text. Partners include YuMe, an online video advertising network, Brightcove, an Internet TV platform, and comedy site MyDamnChannel. Brightcove, whose customers include CBS Corp, Time Warner Inc and Discovery Communications Inc, will begin offering the technology to its clients. YuMe, a Redwood City, California-based start-up, said on Thursday, it will serve InVideo overlay adverts as part of Google’s AdSense for video beta advertising program.

Google has traditionally used AdSense for text-only advertising but said the video program extends its offer to targeted, contextually relevant video graphical ads and text overlays.

Google has been working on ways of developing advertising revenue for online video since it bought YouTube, the video-sharing site, in November 2006.

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In a move that could shake up control of the $1.4 billion online advertising sector, Google’s acquisition target, DoubleClick, confirmed yesterday that it planned to launch an eBay-style auction system in Australia to sell online adverting space.

The commercial networks have periodically toyed with the idea of setting up their own auction platforms in the $3.7 billion TV sector but have considered the structural change too dramatic for the industry.

While some critics fear the rapid emergence of automated trading exchanges for online advertising will hand too much control globally to the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, all three companies are pressing ahead with plans to establish auction systems in key adverting markets around the world. The exchanges work by publishers listing their advertising space for buyers to bid on in real time.

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As Microsoft awaits a response from the Yahoo board on its $44.6 billion hostile takeover bid, Redmond showed that it is moving forward with new online advertising technologies it has already acquired.

At an event on Tuesday, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs demonstrated seven new advertising concepts including contextual video ads, image categorization and advertising analytics. Microsoft acquired aQuantive, an online advertising and technology firm, last year for $6 billion, its largest acquisition ever — until the Yahoo bid.

Previewing the demo, CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts Monday, “We’re in the course of building an online business, and an online business is typically advertising funded. That’s a new muscle, a new set of skills that we’re building.”

At Tuesday’s event, Tarek Najm, a technical fellow at Microsoft, said, “Solutions to today’s challenges must be capable of handling and understanding the complexity of vast amounts of data. To address that challenge, we are developing advertising algorithms that can anticipate and understand consumer behavior faster than the speed of thought.”

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It may be the most ever paid for a single letter of an internet address.

A British travel company has paid $US1.1 million ($A1.2m) for the domain name cruises.co.uk, a price that is effectively $1 million just for the letter “S” since it already owns the address cruise.co.uk.

The sum shatters the previous record for a .co.uk domain of $US300,000, paid in October last year.

Seamus Conlon, whose company bought the address from a German travel company, said it was a necessary move to retain dominance in the rapidly growing market for ocean cruising.

“‘Cruises’ is consistently ranked first on Google, with ‘cruise’ just behind,” he said.

“We wanted the top positions so that when Internet users are searching for deals … we are the first port of call.”

While the purchase is a record for Britain, it is a long way behind the huge sums paid for more the popular .com addresses.

The current most-expensive domain is sex.com, which was bought for $US12 million in 2005. Running close behind is porn.com, snapped up for $US9.5 million last year.

Original Article

Placing ads on a blog or a site is totally upon one’s opinion. Placing ads that are too intrusive or some inappropriate content (irrelevant to the site) can be very fatal for the site itself. However, many sites do put ads because it does generate a good passive income for doing nothing!

Well, when should you monetize with ads?

Placing ads on anything should require one key element, and that is traffic. Without traffic, placing ads is a waste of time. Which ads should you use to monetize?

Here is a good lists of sites that you can use to monetize your site

Adtoll

Azoogle

Adsense– > quite popular

Yahoo ads

Ad brite