Archive for the ‘internet’ Category
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009 |
In the old movies the first thing they do when a woman goes into labour is to send the man out of the room to boil water.
Those days are long gone.
First of all the woman can schedule a Caesarean section, taking most of the guess work out of the delivery date.
Secondly many men choose to be part in the delivery with medical professionals in attendance.
Thirdly if the unexpected happens without warning, a quick labour ensues, and you’re not a medical professional, there’s always Google.
This happened to a couple Marc and Jo Stephens from Cornwall in the UK.
When Jo went into labour in the middle of the night, instead of panicking, Marc did what most net surfers would do. He went directly to the source with all the answers – Google, of course.
He typed in “how to deliver a baby” into the search engine.
Google led him to YouTube and birthing videos. Although we don’t exactly which of the available birthing videos Marc looked at to help deliver their baby, he had a few to choose from.
Mother, father and baby are said to be doing well.
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Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 |
My Broadband reports that the top 10 fastest growing websites in South Africa as follows:
1 – Sunday World (187% growth)
2 – Dispatch (181%)
3 – RealEstateWeb (91%)
4 – Sowetan (79%)
5 – The Herald (77%)
6 – Yellow Pages (71%)
7 – Food24 (68%)
8 – MoneyWeb (50%)
9 – Landbou (48%)
10 – SuperSport (45%)
Funny enough they are all owned by conglomerate media houses and most of them are newspapers.
More and more companies are realising the importance of interacting with their customers and readers online. Many of them are missing the mark when it comes to customer services though.
Companies with impressive websites facilitate effortless transactions, but once they have your money, try contacting many of them online again.
It is one of my pet peeves when dealing with online purchases when an e-mail query gets dealt with days later or not at all. My expectation is that when I purchase online, my query must be dealt with online.
Recently I had the misfortune of contacting DSTV through their website. After an immediate automated response – no follow up on my query a whole week later.
On the other hand I e-mailed a query to Autopage Cellular on the same day. Within in a few minutes I had a query number and another 15 minutes later my question was answered. All online!
Of course DSTV has no competition and can treat their customers in which ever way they choose to.
Posted in community, internet | No Comments »
Thursday, November 20th, 2008 |
Other than subscribing to a multitude of rss feeds, I’m addicted to news aggregator sites like google news, muti, amatomu, techmeme, and a whole host of others.
So it was with great delight that I discovered Yahoo’s latest creation when I opened my Outlook rss feeds this morning. It is called Yahoo Glue and can be found at http://glue.yahoo.com/
It has all the latest results from various sources, including images, videos, news, blogs, articles, etc.
Yahoo will apparently not be replacing Yahoo Search, but use this as an additional tool. Since the site only went live very recently, the amount of topics are a limited number for now.
As long as the results are current and relevant, it can only be good for us aggregator addicts.
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Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 |
Some interesting studies have been publiziced recently about the brain and its health.
The first study declared drinking to be harmful to your brain and apparently the amount of alcohol consumed doesn’t matter!
Tell that to your heart!
Apparently people who drink alcohol have a smaller brain capacity than those who don’t drink and its worse for women.
The second study brings better tidings for net surfers.
It appears that surfing the internet is good for your brain. CNN who also reported on the first study above, tells of another study in Google does a brain good. This study done with older people aged 55-78 concluded that using a search engine brought higher brain activity to the critical thinking part of the brain.
Could this mean if you incrementally increased your drinking in direct relation to the amount of time spent surfing the internet, you could even things out?
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Monday, October 13th, 2008 |
Microsoft recently unveiled their aggregator site called Microsoft/web, joining the likes of Techmeme and Google News.
According to Webpronews:
So far, there seems to be a lack of quantity for new content. You can look at any category and view the listings by date and easily see posts dating back to August within the first 20 results. It’s clear that many new popular and important tech stories are absent, but like Cooney says, they know the content isn’t where it needs to be yet, so I’m not going to judge it too harshly at this early stage.
To which Lauren Cooney from GPM Web Platform & Standards, Microsoft, replied:
“-We’re constantly looking for new sites to aggregate content from, and we’re going to be adding the digg/technology page and a few others. If you have suggestions, let me know and I’ll add, as long as it’s relevant for ppl working on the web. And yes, we’re going to be pumping this full of more relevant content too. I hate a stale web page as much as anyone.
-if you check out the product tab, you can actually see that we’ve streamlined MSFT’s web stack installation and provided a bunch of easy to install products that are relevant to web developers too – for free.”
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