Stories by Heather Havenstein

New Web metric likely to hurt Google, help YouTube

In a nod to the success of emerging Web 2.0 technologies like AJAX and streaming media, one of the country's largest Internet benchmarking companies will no longer use page views as its primary metric for comparing sites.

Spotplex launches Digg.com competitor with a twist

Spotplex on Monday announced a new content-aggregation site that it said will provide Digg.com-like rankings of Internet content -- with a twist. Instead of requiring users to rank content, Spotplex will automatically rank it based on the number of people reading it.

Google to state its case on public policy blog

Google, which has been working to ward off questions about its privacy policies and defend its YouTube subsidiary against a US$1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit filed in March by Viacom, Monday launched a <a href="http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">blog</a> that it will use to address those and other public policy issues -- and to try to enlist the aid of Internet users in its lobbying efforts.

Digg.com CEO on Web-ranking methodology

Digg is a Web 2.0 company that lets users post news stories, which are then "dugg" (bumped up the list of popular stories) or buried based on the reactions of other readers. The company's Digg.com Web site has been on a steady growth path since February 2005, when a story about Paris Hilton's cell phone being hacked was "dugg," resulting in traffic doubling virtually overnight. Now, the "Digg this story" logo is included with countless online news stories, and having a story or blog post "dugg" has become an online status symbol. Digg.com celebrated its 1 millionth registered user in mid-April.

Microsoft makes down payment onVisual Studio 2008

Microsoft Monday announced deeper integration between its Visual Studio Team System and its Microsoft Project technology, which the company described as "the first down payment" for the follow-on to Visual Studio 2008 due out this year.

Google, universities team in effort to digitize books

The University of Minnesota and 11 other universities in the Midwest announced Wednesday that they have partnered with Google to digitize up to 10 million bound book volumes as part of the Google Books Library Project.

Tool lets Visual Studio developers build Java apps

Mainsoft Wednesday unveiled a suite of tools it says will enable Visual Studio developers to build .Net Web and server applications that can run on Linux or other Java-enabled platforms without writing new code.

Startup building searchable online tours of world

EveryScape Tuesday introduced an interactive, searchable Web site aimed at allowing people to "immerse" themselves in different parts of the world via virtual tours and with access to content created by other visitors.

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