Blog.Lejer.Ro – Bloggers Heaven

The entire blogosphere was astonished to know Vanessa Fox is leaving Internet search engine giant Google and move to Zillow. Here’s Vanessa’s piece:

For the last two years, I have had a fantastic time helping to build Google Webmaster Central. I have loved working with the (ever-expanding!) team, writing about search on the blog and for the help center, and designing features for the webmaster community. And speaking of the webmaster community, I have been lucky enough to have been able to meet them, get to know their challenges, and well, then there’s the drinking. There may have been a little of that too. Search is a fascinating industry and I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to create such exciting things in the space.

Now I have an all-new opportunity to work on the unique challenges of the vertical and local search space at Zillow. I’m moving on from webmaster central knowing that there’s a great team who care as much about this audience as I do and they’ve got exciting plans in store for the coming year.

YouTube is making the migration over to Google Accounts for login and registration synergy which is letting existing users associate a YouTube account with a Google Account or create a new Google Account.

After Yahoo and Google started buying up the major Web 2.0 communities of Flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us; migration into the parent company registered accounts has been a touchy subject amongst loyal members of each community.

When done slowly however, easing the user into a prefered account registration seems to make the migration a tad easier.

Read full article here.

THE high priests of open source software have congregated at Google’s headquarters to debate the future of the movement and face down recent patent threats by Microsoft.
Leading names of Linux, the world’s biggest grassroots software phenomenon, are spending three days to Friday debating whether an increasingly commercial open source community should fight or ignore the world’s largest software maker.

Dressed in the alternative software movement’s casual uniform of T-shirts and jeans, the group is coming to grips with internal divisions that sap at its success – Linux is now used to power desktop computers, major web sites, mobile phones – since rival factions often create very similar products.

But as many of the world’s top tech companies and corporate customers demand ever more from Linux, open source devotees still fight among themselves with the fervour of a tiny monastic order seeking to root out theological error in their midst.

“Guys: Be seekers of truth, not finders of contradiction,” Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, organiser of the event, only half-jokingly told the 150 attendees of what is billed their “Collaboration Summit.”

Linux is the best-known variant of so-called open source software – software that is freely available to the public to be used, revised and shared. Linux suppliers earn money selling improvements and technical services. By contrast, Microsoft charges for software and opposes freely sharing its code.

Recently, Microsoft has sown dissension by claiming open source programs such as Linux violate 235 of its patents while striking deals to insulate the customers of two Linux suppliers – Novell and Xandros – from patent lawsuits.

Linspire which sells Linux-based personal computers through Wal-Mart and other retailers, became the third company to strike a patent deal with Microsoft.

According to Tom Krazit latest Article, the Beta Safari for Windows was downloaded 1 million copies of the browser since Monday. That’s real and reported directly from Apple.

One million copies of Safari have been downloaded for Windows since Monday.

(Credit: Apple)

CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the Windows version of the browser as a beta release Monday during his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Safari makes up around 5 percent of the browser market, trailing Internet Explorer and Firefox with its 18.6 million users, a figure Jobs used in his speech Monday.

Cynical colleagues at CNET wonder how many of those downloads were started by hackers and security professionals probing for weaknesses, which is probably a fair point. Nine security vulnerabilities have already been discovered in the Windows beta, and Apple released an updated version of the browser in the wee hours of Thursday morning to plug some of the flaws.

Still, there had to be more than a few downloads from outside the security community. The 1 million copies are of the initial beta release, tagged 3.0.

How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long. Over the last couple of years we’ve seen Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google. But different technologies are now being deployed that are even more interesting that the results achieved from large companies taking and processing massive numbers of photos into now-standard 3D views.

Two standouts are Microsoft’s Photosynth Project and newcomer Everyscape, which Brady Forest wrote about today on O’Reilly Radar.

Read full article here, by Michael Arrington