Today’s interesting links:
I arrived at work early today so I took some time to read one of the ReadWriteWeb articles, I picked “Why Yahoo! Buzz is a Brilliant Idea” and I agree with its title, Yahoo! has made some pretty interesting and clever choices with Buzz.
Yahoo! Buzz is a social news site, fairly similar to Digg. People can “Buzz” articles and the most buzzed articles end up on the front page. Sounds pretty much like Digg up to here.
The twist is that people don’t get to submit articles. The articles are “submitted” automatically. Where from? From the Yahoo! content network. What’s that? Yahoo!’s Adsense competitor: sites making money by displaying ads from Yahoo!’s text ad network. I agree that this is a quite brilliant move. The thing is that Yahoo! has a massive audience. They intend to show some Buzz top stories on the Yahoo! frontpage, which means that if you are on the Yahoo! content network and write an article that gets very popular on Buzz, you might show up on the frontpage of Yahoo:
“Every day, a few of the top Buzz articles will be bumped onto the Yahoo.com main page, giving the story potentially the widest audience possible on the internet. Reports suggest that, in tests, links to Wired.com received over 2 million unique hits in 2 hours.”
The knife cuts on both sides here (as we say in Dutch): the publisher gets lots of traffic, and both Yahoo! and the publisher earn money from this because the publisher is showing Yahoo! ads. For publishers it might also be an incentive to put Yahoo! ads on their sites rather than Adsense ads.
I’m impressed Yahoo.
Electronista:
Canonical today hoped to preempt all comers today with news of Ubuntu Mobile. Its first Linux variant aimed at handhelds, the software is tailored for the Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) expected to launch in spring based on Intel’s Silverthorne technology and is designed to recognize basic iPhone-like gestures such as swiping to scroll through menus and websites. A scrolling visual front end based on Flash or Clutter replaces the traditional Ubuntu desktop and is designed to be used solely with fingers, including with an on-screen keyboard.
MIDs based on Ubuntu Mobile will also have full feature support once users launch actual programs, Canonical promises. In addition to full web browsing support, any handheld should support 3D through OpenGL and will have support for 3G cellular Internet access, Wi-Fi, and WiMAX through services such as Sprint’s Xohm network. Bluetooth, GPS, USB webcams and other add-ons often used with handheld devices will be supported without needing special support.
I really wonder what kind of devices this will run on. The article mentions it’s for devices with 4-7″ screens — not really mobile phone size. I guess it’s mostly targeted at smaller tablet-like computers.
About a week and a half ago, February 16th, Justyna and I got engaged! It happened in a hotel, just after sunset at the seaside, it was very romantic 
(Old picture, and I look a bit weird — but Justyna likes this picture)
Because Justyna is Polish we will probably do two weddings. The civil wedding end of November (hopefully) in Schiedam (the Netherlands, where we live) and the church wedding maybe in June next year in Koszalin, Poland (where Justyna is from).
We’re very happy
Today’s interesting links:
