ITGumbo: spicing IT up

As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.

And so says Mozilla's rationale behind the launching of Weave, a new Mozilla project which is aimed at deeper integration of Mozilla's Firefox browser with the desktop and the web. Specifically Weave will look at finding ways to enhance the Firefox user experience through increase control over personal information and provide new opportunities for developer to build innovative online experiences.

A study by the Pew Internet and Americal Life Project revealed that social media are gaining a stronghold on teens life as more and more teens are using social media for content creation and interactive communication.

Based on the study 64% of online teenagers whose ages range from 12 to 17 years old, are increasingly creating online content, as compared to 2004's data.35% of this teenagers are girls who are into blogging while 20% are online boys.

Amazon.com has launched a new Web service for running queries on structured data; SimpleDB. Similar to what it has successfully done with online book buying service, Amazon is hoping to achieve the same with database service.

The Amazon SimpleDB offers the same core functionality of a database such as real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data. The big difference is that it eliminates the operational complexity of how an operational database works.

What would you get when bloggers from top corporations such as Cisco, Coca-Cola, Dell, GM, Microsoft among other top corporations organized through a formal Blog Council? Best Practices.

That is basically the reason why this group of corporate bloggers decided to band together and forms a what they call “vendor-free environment” to share tactics, offer advice based on past experiences and develop standards-based best practices that will serve as a model for corporate blogs and corporate blogging.

Facebook partners with ABC News to offer Facebook members the US Politics application where they can access political reports from ABC and discuss issues about the upcoming election in 2008.

With the US 2008 election barely a year away, ABC News’ president David Westin said the partnership is considered “a great opportunity to make available to the people already having the ongoing discussion and debate on Facebook the full range of ABC News political reporting." The new Facebook application will contain up to date information about the presidential candidates and other campaign reports while members exchange ideas, express opinions, or debate about election issues.

Who would have thought that two big industrial names would ever thought of coming up with a portal for pet lovers? Well, brace yourselves folks, as NBC Universal and Procter & Gamble team launches Petside.com, a feature-rich web portal for, well dog and cat lovers.

Petside.com is your usual web portal in the likes of Yahoo and AOL with full menu of information about dogs and cats. You'd definitely find a lot of useful information in Petside.com. From links to diagnosing pet's illnesses, to shopping sites for pet stuffs.

Going.com, a social networking site, recently announced that users can now buy concert tickets online. Starting with the Moby concert this week, the Web site now allows its users to check on who plans to go to the concert, know how many are interested, make decision on whether they want to go or not, and be able to buy the tickets they need in case they do.

From a Canadian publisher and philanthropists comes a social networking site specifically made for artists, MyARTINFO. Although, the My+Niche Word branding is kinda cliché already, for Louise McBain it doesn’t really matter at all.

McBain established MYARTINFO as a venue for artists whether famous or lesser known to showcase their artistic work, chat with fellow artists online and even blog about, what else but art. MyARTINFO aims to assemble all artists, and even non-artists who are members of the art community under one whole network of people and art works freely available to the web consuming public.

Wikipedia, the largest free encyclopedia online, has now become an online status symbol, according to a Reuters report. It has become a much coveted online space among netizens since it has become the most widely used reference on just about anything or anyone. It’s like if you’re not in it, then you’re not really as famous as you think.

The New York Times reports that News Corp’s popular social networking website MySpace, and eBay’s VOIP program Skype will exchange vows sometime soon as MySpace adds the Skype features to its instant-messaging (IM) software. The team-up of these two large web-based services is considered a perfect fit that will help them keep up with similar services such as Yahoo and Microsoft who already provide users capability to make voice calls on top of its instant messaging feature.