Via Googlified

Via Googlified

Mail Trends, which is similar to Google Reader Trends, extracts data from IMAP servers and displays statistics such as distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week, and time of day; distribution by message size; a breakdown of top senders, recipients, and mailing lists; distribution of senders, recipients, and mailing lists over time; and distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads.

An example of Mail Trends output running a small portion of the Enron Email Dataset, a corpus of about 500,000 messages that was made available by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during its investigation of the Enron.

Parparita notes that Mail Trends is at an early stage of development. It currently lacks support for non-Gmail servers and the capability to split out sent and starred e-mail. You can follow progress on the project on this Mail Trends page.

What’s further missing is turning the analysis into proactive in-box management, a software agent that automatically sorts your in-box, makes calendar appointments, and routes messages.

While Mail Trends is interesting to look at, Mail Triage would be much more useful. With all those engineers at Google devoting 20 percent of their time to personal projects, solving the Mail Triage problem would be a good way to get promoted and improve Gmail.

Startup Xobni (”inbox” spelled backwards) is attempting to manage e-mail overload for Microsoft Outlook users. It includes some data analysis, such as how users and their contacts use e-mail, as well as some more proactive features. For example, Xobni shows recent e-mail conversations and files exchanged with a contact, and a list of related contacts. It also predicts when you would be most likely to get a response from a contact.

Microsoft Research has been working for years to come up with what it calls “e-mail triage.” Apparently, Microsoft hasn’t been able to turn the research into product. TechCrunch has suggested that Microsoft is in negotiations to acquire Xobni.

(Credit:
Google)

Mobile usage also saw a significant boost, increasing from 210,000 on Friday to 476,062 on Monday. NBC, which said it polled users, said it was “stunned” at the number of users who were using mobile video download for the first time.

Traffic to Yahoo’s Olympics site also skyrocketed, up 86 percent to 5.2 million visitors compared with Sunday’s 2.8 million.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

As well as NBC is doing both on TV and on online, it begs the question of whether NBC’s policy of delaying popular events online until they have run on TV in prime time was a wise move or overly restrictive.

Traffic to Olympics-related Web sites soared Monday, the first full workday after the official opening of the games Friday, according to numbers released Wednesday by Nielsen Online (see chart below). More than 2 million people visited the video section of NBCOlympics.com, up nearly 140 percent from Sunday when the site had about 858,000 visitors, according to Nielsen. Overall visits to the site increased 40 percent to 4.6 million compared with Sunday’s 3.3 million.

Meanwhile, Nielsen Media Research reported that NBC’s TV coverage averaged more than 30 million viewers for the first three days of the games, a 26 percent increase compared with the same period during the Athens Games in 2004. The opening ceremony was last week’s most-watched program, attracting nearly 35 million viewers.

(Credit:
Nielsen Online)

Arnold Zafra over at Search Engine Journal wrote that he “cringed” when he heard about the news. Ouch.

It has run a number of programs including its Live Search Club that offer rewards for those that use its search. The Live Search Club effort briefly boosted Microsoft’s search market share last year, but the gains have proved short lived. Microsoft has been losing ground since then and has returned to a single digit share of the market.

A couple of thoughts:

But truth be told, it’s not the worst idea. What’s the harm in giving it a shot? In a recession–or whatever you want to call the current economic malaise in the United States–consumers are open to bribes (oh, I forgot: rebates). So why not see if this strikes the people’s fancy? But this is only a holding action. The reason more people use Google’s search is the user experience. It works better, so they keep returning. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer knows this. That’s why he still thinks making a move for some of Yahoo’s assets makes sense. He’s anxious about staying pat with Microsoft’s current search hand and wants to fix things, either through developing technology internally or buying it on the open market.

So the news is leaking out fast: Microsoft plans to lure users by dangling cash rebates to people who buy stuff using the company’s search. Will it work? At this point, I suppose it can’t hurt–though no doubt Microsoft is leaving itself open to being ridiculed as a Delancey Street hondler.

No way this is the final word.

Chambers and Gore will use Cisco’s telepresence system to communicate with a live audience at the VoiceCon trade show in in Orlando, Fla. They will discuss how unified communications technology, like the telepresence platform, can play a role in reducing carbon emissions, which are impacting climate change.

Al Gore

John Chambers

My colleague Martin LaMonica, who covers green technology, will be listening to the Webcast. So look for a blog post from him later Wednesday.

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers is joining the virtual stage with Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore on Wednesday morning to talk about climate change and technology innovation.

They’ll also discuss other ideas for how businesses can reduce greenhouse gas emissions through innovative technologies and how the technology industry can create a sustainable model for addressing climate change.

Microsoft has been touting the fact that Vista adoption is actually on par with past releases, pointing to some new customers, such as the U.S. Air Force. Microsoft Senior Vice President Bill Veghte told CNET News on Wednesday that at the end of June, Vista was actually tracking slightly ahead of Windows XP in corporate adoption at the same stage in its lifecycle.

But even some of the company’s showcase early adopter customers are moving more slowly to Vista than originally planned. Continental Airlines said in June of last year that it expected to have 7,000 to 10,000 desktops moved to the operating system by the end of last year. As of May, it had only shifted about 2,600 machines to Vista. Continental now expects the majority of its machines to be on Vista by the end of this year, according to a recent white paper.

Expect to hear more about Vista adoption from Microsoft later on Thursday, when Veghte takes the stage at the company’s financial analyst meeting in Redmond, Wash. CNET’s Ina Fried is on the scene and will be reporting throughout the day.

More troubling for Microsoft may be the fact that most of those Vista installs are replacing versions of Windows other than Windows XP, which remains popular with both businesses and consumers. Forrester says 87.1 percent of companies surveyed continue to use Windows XP.

(Credit:
ProhibitOnions/Coca-Cola)

In a new study, Forrester Research uncovers some good news for Microsoft: Vista usage among businesses is up by more than 40 percent since January. The bad news: still, less than 10 percent of the 2,300 companies surveyed use Vista.

In the report, Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel writes that Vista is “New Coke,” and sees a strong case for bypassing the release altogether.

All the news that fits in your screensaver.

Now Blinkx is popping that idea out of the browser and putting it in a downloadable screensaver app. Blinkx Beat lets you create your own channels that automatically play when your screensaver pops on (or whenever you want, providing Blinkx Beat is configured as your PC’s default screensaver). You can also set it to display preconfigured channels like News or Sports.

Blinkx makes very slick video search technology that has been available for quite some time to consumers through Blinkx.com. One of the site’s cool features is that if you enter in a search term, it will play in succession all the videos it finds that term in.

It’s a nice-looking app but it’s already gotten me into trouble. I set up the Blinkx Beat screensaver and then got called off to a meeting. The video popped on to my screen, with audio, distracting and disturbing co-workers. When I got back to my desk, I was greeted with glares. Honestly, I never did get content-based screensavers. Who wants to run an app that’s most useful when you’re away from your PC? But if you want to use your PC as a stand-in for a TV that you’d otherwise always leave on, give it a shot.

To select videos from a playlist, you can use Blinkx’s attractive but uninformative video “wall,” which shows you moving thumbnails of videos in a channel, but not quite enough information to tell if they’re worth zooming in on.

New Web threats today come not necessarily from sites built to host malicious content, but also from legitimate sites that have been compromised. A new safe Web surfing product, Haute Secure, is out of beta and available for free home use with both Internet Explorer and
Firefox. Founded in 2006 by former Microsoft security engineers, Haute Secure hopes to distinguish itself in a crowded field of products, including Grisoft Linkscanner and Finjan SecureBrowsing.

While we were pleased with the product’s ability to block threats on compromised Web sites, Haute Secure did, however, fail to identify a few recent non-exploit-related phishing sites, which surprised us. Using five sites recently reported to a reputable, independent phish-tracking site (most were active an hour or less), we noted that none were flagged as active by Haute Secure. Perhaps that’s because the pages themselves do not contain malicious code. Yet the pages do contain forms which, when filled out and sent in, could compromise your identity. Although Haute Secure uses phishing reports from Stopbadware.org and others, and will warn you of known fraudulent sites, we found the native anti-phishing protection in Internet Explorer and Firefox did a better job at flagging recently reported phishing sites.

And the service really required high-speed Internet to work.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Please stay tuned to Road Trip 2008 here on this blog, as well as on Twitter and on my Qik channel.

There’d be a pregnant pause, and then they’d say, “You’re a what? With who?”

Those of us who were hired as reporters were called cyberjournalists, and each of us was assigned to one TV station, somewhere out there in the U.S. My station was WIAT-TV, channel 42 in Birmingham, and this city’s CBS affiliate.

That was partially because we had some real talent there. Besides myself, there were two other Zatso reporters who ended up working for CNET News.com, and an editor went on to work for PBS’ Frontline.

Suffice it to say, Zatso didn’t last, though for a few months there it was considered a high-flying company with a bright future.

I’d get a deputy or the dispatcher on the phone and I’d say, “Hi, I’m Daniel Terdiman, I’m a cyberjournalist calling from Zatso in San Francisco, and I want to talk to someone about the drunk driver you arrested last night.”

After all, if I showed up at the door of a TV station in Birmingham and said I was a reporter from San Francisco doing a road trip project driving around the South, the likely response would be, “You’re a what? With who?”

Can you blame them? It would be like an alien arriving at your doorstep and announcing that they’re there to talk about the election for school board.

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.–Back in 1999, in the salad days of the dot-com economy, when anyone with a start-up could launch an IPO and see their stock hit $80, I took my first steps into the world of reporting on the Internet.

The humor of the situation, of course, was doing the actual reporting. More often than I can recall, I would find myself reporting on some small crime story, and would have to call the dispatch center for some small sheriff’s office way out in the country, miles and miles from Birmingham.

So, as you can imagine, there weren’t that many people in Birmingham or our other cities with high-speed in 1999.

Living in San Francisco and trying to get my foot in the door, I took a job with a company called ReacTV. It was quickly renamed “Zatso,” as in “Is that so,” and its business was producing Web-based newscasts for the online sites of local TV stations around the country.

The headquarters of Birmingham, Ala., CBS affiliate WIAT-TV. As a cyberjournalist for Zatso.com, I covered news for WIAT from San Francisco.

The way Zatso worked was this: Each morning, I would call the station’s news director from my desk in San Francisco and get the rundown of the stories they were working on for that night’s newscast. We would pick five stories, and then I would go and basically do my own reporting on the stories, looking for additional angles to supplement what the channel 42 reporters were going to report on the news.

Well, Zatso was a good idea. Sort of. The problem was that the business model depended on working with stations in cities like Birmingham and Tuscaloosa and other smaller places. We hadn’t managed to sign on any clients in New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco.

Then, once we were all done, my stories would go onto the WIAT Web site along with video from the five stories that we’d chosen. We did everything because back then, these stations weren’t yet capable of doing this kind of work themselves.

I found myself driving through Birmingham on Sunday on Road Trip 2008, on my way from Kennedy Space Center, where I reported on the Space Shuttle landing Saturday, to Huntsville, Ala., where I’ll be attending Space Camp on Monday. And I realized I had to stop for a little bit of nostalgia.

This has become an incredible annoyance as my main purpose for this laptop was to be able to use it on the fly. Lately I’ve found that I have run the whole battery out in about 8 hours with less than one hour of actual usage. At first I thought it was because the Airport was constantly scanning, which often drained my old MacBook Pro.

My one major pet peeve with the MacBook Air is that no matter what I do, it seems that this machine never goes fully to sleep. Somehow the battery is being drained (albeit at a slower rate) when I set the computer to “sleep” or when I close the lid.

Regular readers of this blog know that I don’t believe that Google Apps is a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Office.

For users who have Office installed on their PC, this is not as bad as you would think. It may be a little bit annoying, but the benefit is that they get to work on these documents and collaborate within the fully functional desktop application. The online application will track revisions and comments made on the document.

Via LiveSide.

Microsoft has also made a plug-in available for Office that makes accessing a workspace a bit smoother. It also enables users to edit things such as notes, lists, calendars, tasks, and contacts in the Web application.

A lot of Web 2.0 purists are going to be very quick to dismiss the notion that Office Live Workspace is a legitimate Web application, simply because of its dependence on the desktop version of Office. I would have to disagree with those people.

While Microsoft is not releasing a completely online version of its Office on Tuesday, it is releasing Office Live Workspace, an online-collaboration tool for Office that works in cooperation with the desktop application suite.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

While it may not be completely Web-based, Workspace offers a lot of value for collaboration on group projects, and it is not limited by online versions of the Office applications. People get to work in an environment that is familiar to them and do not sacrifice any functionality in exchange for collaboration.

Workspace enables users to view documents online, even if their computer doesn’t have Office installed. However, if they want to make edits, they have to download it and make changes in the appropriate Office application.