Modern News

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites, as the company seeks to enhance the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features.

The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo.

The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world’s No.1 social networking site.

Earlier this month, Google Inc unveiled a new service dubbed Google Buzz that replicated many of the social networking features that have made services like Twitter and Facebook Internet success stories.

Facebook and Twitter – which said on Monday that users of its service generate more than 50 million Tweets every day – pose an increasing threat to established Internet giants like Yahoo and Google whose businesses depend on selling online ads to large audiences.

In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft Corp.

Yahoo said that beginning on Tuesday its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called “real time search” capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year.

Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year.

Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example.

“We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique,” Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters in an interview.

Yahoo would not comment on any financial terms involved in the deal with Twitter.

According to some media reports, Microsoft and Google paid a combined $25 million for the right to include Twitter data in their search results.

(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic; editing by Carol Bishopric)

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LONDON (Reuters) – Digital dumping is on the rise, according to a survey, with growing numbers of people preferring to use email and social networking Web sites to break up with their partners.

Over one third of 2,000 people polled (34 percent) said they had ended a relationship by email, 13 percent had changed their status on Facebook without telling their partners and six percent had released the news unilaterally on Twitter.

By contrast, only two percent had broken up via a mobile phone text.

The rest had split up the old-fashioned way by face-to-face conversation (38 percent) and by telephone (eight percent).

“Digital Dumping will soon take over when it comes to ending a relationship,” said Sean Wood, Marketing Manager for DateTheUk dating service for whom the survey was carried out.

“It’s often easier, quicker and avoids any misunderstandings.”

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

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By Chisa Fujioka

TOKYO (Reuters) – An increase in online journalists and freelancers has made the press more vulnerable to repression, but new media are also helping raise awareness about such attacks, a watchdog group said on Tuesday.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in its annual report, released at a Tokyo news conference, that freelancers and local reporters faced more risk of attack from dictators, repressive governments and militant groups because they did not have media organizations to back them.

But blogs, social networking sites and other new forms of media have also helped fight censorship, although there were exceptions such as in China.

E-mail alerts, Facebook petitions and blog posts helped raise the visibility of imprisoned journalists in Iran after crackdowns on the media in the aftermath of a disputed presidential election last June, CPJ said.

That international pressure helped in the release of high-profile journalists such as Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari and freelancer Roxana Saberi.

“When you attain a critical mass, when you get the blogosphere buzzing or you get people retweeting, or you get people signing petitions and passing around information on social networking, then you get the mainstream media covering it and you can build a groundswell and you can affect governments,” Joel Simon, CPJ executive director, said at the news conference.

But advocates of media freedom faced obstacles in China, where CPJ said tight online censorship hindered access to information on infringements.

“Censorship technology is growing and becoming so sophisticated in China, that makes it even harder for local people who are interested in getting a word out about these imprisonments or about other infringements, to contact us, to contact their counterparts overseas, to contact the media,” Madeline Earp, of CPJ’s Asia program, told the news conference.

Google Inc., the world’s biggest search engine provider, threatened last month to shut its Chinese portal and pull out from China, citing cyber attacks and tightening censorship.

But Earp said bloggers in China had not given up on working around censorship by information authorities.

“It’s always a moving target — what are they going to come up with next to try to stop the conversation,” she said.

“But it’s the authorities who are … aggressive. And it’s the people on the ground who are then reacting to that and thinking, okay, we still want to get the truth out, what’s our next move going to be?” (Editing by Jerry Norton)

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I have some basic tutorial videos for some of the applications for Google Wave. These are basic videos on how to change your name and avatar, adding a youtube video, and adding a website using the iframe gadget. I could do a whole week or more of the uses for Google Wave, but I thought that I should do some basics for people just getting started on Google Wave.

I would advise you to maximize the videos to view them

First to change your name and avatar
you go to the top of the Contacts box and click on your name:

and your profile box willl come up:

Now I will show you on the video how to go from here:

Click on pic for video

Now how to add a youtube video to Wave:

Click on pic for video

Adding a Website to Wave:
You use the iframe gadget that you can find here
along with many other gadgets, bots and extensions.

Click the pic for video

This will probably the first installment as I play around more with Google Wave. This is just the basics, along with the post I did before on Google Wave and collaboration and Brain Storming.

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