Rev2.org

Are you based out of Paris? Did you download your favorite music collection from Limewire or any other P2P software? According to a new pact between French Internet Service Providers, the government and film and music rights owners, you’re Internet access could potentially be barred.

According to the new agreement, users will receive a warning for each illegal download and if they repeat their “mistake” for three times, they could loose their Internet access.

I’m sure everybody is keen to find out answers two couple of key questions: why & how? Why is this being done? It is being used to target intruders who make multiple copies of music for profit. I’m also trying to explore how the authorities are going to differentiate between a torrent of legal software and copyrighted content.

The deal has invoked mixed reactions from experts and internet users. According to head of recording industry, John Kennedy, “This is the single most important initiative to help win the war on online piracy that we have seen so far”. French president Nicolas Sarkozy says, “The Internet must not become a high-tech Far West, a lawless zone where outlaws can pillage works with abandon or, worse, trade in them in total impunity. And on whose backs? On artists’ backs.”

On the other hand, French consumers’ groups and politicians, say that the deal is too restrictive. Needless to see the average internet user is unhappy. The project has not been voted yet. Before any action is taken there must be a legal complain of downloading on a specific file by the music producer. Not only that, the independent authority has to find downloaders of the file and warn them.

But the question remains: why would an ISP loose on customers? The whole scandal sounds like a breach of freedom of information.

I’m sure this will get the French protesters lining up.

This year has seen the emergence of several online word processing services which are acting as viable Microsoft Word alternative for web junkies. An innovative free word processing service called GreenDoc is the latest to join the league of ThinkFree, AjaxWrite, and ZohoWriter. With many popular names out there, the entry might appear to be tough but with its set fresh features the future for GreenDoc looks to be exciting.

Let’s start with the UI of GreenDoc. Something interest about the GreenDoc homepage is that it allows users to create documents from scratch, right there and then. The WYSIWYG editor looks like a customized version of TinMCE, but nonetheless, it’s proved useful with site’s offerings: without signing up, you can instantly save your document right then and there and come back to GreenDoc to access it.

When you publish your documents without registering they are named as ‘anonymous’ and stored on the site for 90 days. However all your ‘anonymous’ documents will be linked to your account on registration.

Another thing that I really like is that GreenDoc offers its users a great opportunity to earn revenue through Google Adsense. The concept is simple,:users can link ads provided by Google AdSense on their published documents page and earn 70% of the profit depending on number of clicks made. Rest of the 30% helps GreenDoc to pay the server costs. Among other features users can link YouTube videos and print their online documents.

Overall, GreenDoc looks effective and is definitely worth a try if you’re looking for a change from your traditional word program. You could also use it for a bit of income, but how exactly you plan going to get 20,000 visitors to your document and lick on the ads is beyond me.

Here’s a great piece of news for the 150 million PayPal users worldwide. Palzoo.com: a social networking site for PayPal users. PayPal is an extremely popular e-commerce gateway allowing users to make money transfers and payment via the internet. The key driver for Palzoo is to establish connections between PayPal users at one central location.

The beta version of Palzoo allows members to rate paypal shops, discuss anything about Paypal, recommend shops, auctions to friends, accept donations and try out several other things. For each of the listed shops under the ‘Shops’ link there’s a description of the shop as well as user feedback about it. There’s a tagging feature too which tags items on keywords like FTP, MP3, buy etc. Users can easily share items of interest with other members of the site. This is for ease of understanding.

Overall, a few bugs are present on the site here and there, and definitely, there’s a huge scope for improvement when it comes to the site and information structuring. However, I think all is forgiven for a newly launched startup and there’s tremendous power in the idea. Recommended to all frequent PayPal users!

The Dutch Ministry of Justice has temporarily put a ban in place which would restrict its 30,000 workers from accessing Wikipedia at work. It might come across as a shocking news, but the development is not really unreasonable.

The ministry is planning to analyze the misuse of Wikipedia during this temporary ban. It has been reported that 800 Wikipedia entries were edited from the ministry computers.Majority of these changes were minor but some of them did involve political figures and parties. The worst part was that these entries were being updated during work hours affecting productivity during work.

Ministry spokesman Ivo Hommes said, “We’re doing this as a temporary measure while we investigate how much use - and misuse - our people make of Wikipedia, and what we can do about it”.

As a reader when you come across this news, you might find it disappointing as access to an encyclopedia is being limited in the 2.0 era of user-generated content. Similar questions were raised when Telstra had banned its employees from using Facebook. In both the cases worker productivity-loss came as a big issue.

Update: Even Facebook seems to be facing the heat of bans. An update from The MEMRI Blog quotes that Syria has blocked Facebook.

Amidst the fuss going around Amazon’s Kindle, social networking giant Facebook has generated buzz with its decision to acquire Chinese social networking portal Zhanzuo.com for a whooping amount of $85 million. There has been speculation going around for quite sometime about Facebook’s entry into the Chinese region and this news doesn’t throw a surprise at all.

China’s market is booming big time and as such China is the second largest internet market after the United states. The last few weeks or so have had quite a bit of news from China. There was news was about Facebook’s decision to register domain name Facebook.cn. Then there was discussion about Xiaonei.com, Facebook’s Chinese copy-cat.

So for whom is Zhanzuo.com and what generates Facebook’s interest in it? Zhanzuo is extremely popular site in student community and has a user base more than 7 million. Also, it ranks amongst the top 250 sites in China in terms of user-base, popularity and stuff like that. Add on that, Facebook’s already existing base of more than 100,000 users of its English-language network in China.

Duncan Riley has pointed out that Zhanzuo.com’s traffic has slowed down during the last couple of months. Well, if we go by the comments and the news reports Duncan looks to be wrong. As a matter of fact, Alexa had reset the counters to 0 for several Chinese sites including Zhanzuo.com. The funny logic of student’s school causing traffic dip looks a stupid one

There has been mixed reaction from experts about Facebook’s plans. One of the comment in Techcrunch says, ‘Although things are changing (towards western country), especially in big city, I am afraid it is still not a proper time for a site, like Facebook to become popular.’ Another internet analyst, a new media expert think the same. It might be because of strict norms or past incidents which caused problems for Yahoo in China. The bottom line is “There has been no successful foreign acquisition in China.”

However, that is history. Facebook is playing its cards well. Understandably after extensive research Facebook has zeroed in on Zhanzuo.com. So there’s a definite opportunity out there. Although the deal is yet to be finalized, if the move pays-off Facebook could really really make it big.

Update: According to Nick O’ Neill on AllFacebook.com the acquisition rumors of Zhanzou.com are false.  A Facebook PR executive is believed to have told Nick, “Facebook has no plans to acquire any company in China.”

For the two giants, Apple and Microsoft, yesterday turned out to be quite a day in the blogosphere.

So who started the debate? It was instigated by none other than the Robert Scoble whose post virtually rebuked Apple as his Macintosh didn’t boot after a routine installation update. Robert summed up his extremely critical post by saying, “Well, sorry. The shine is wearing off. Screw you Apple.” The dead machine particularly pissed off Robert for two key reason:

- The advertisements shown claim that Mac is better than Windows.

- There hasn’t been much of assistance from the PR team at Apple.

Some obvious questions which strike your mind after reading this post. Is Apple really inactive in social-media? Has Apple been making some efforts to communicate socially? Did Apple look into Robert’s post? From the post it seems as if Apple is really not concerned to engage in online conversations and relies on its followers to defend its brand.

The debate moved over to Andy Beal’s post at Marketing Piligrim who started by citing Robert and then included his own thoughts. At the end of the day, Andy’s thoughts appear to be in sync. with Robert meaning a weak up call for Apple to engage in online conversations. So who’s making a point here.. Apple’s need realize embrace blogs, forums, social networks, Twitter etc. is realized by none other than its customers. Andy is bang on when he says, “It’s simple: Apple’s customers embrace social media on behalf of the company.”

Sadly, comments to the conversation were closed a little while ago. According to Andy, “It’s clear that Apple supporters are unable to continue the conversation in a cordial manner. After receiving abusive emails and comments from Apple supporters, I’m forced to close the comments.”

On the other hand, Microsoft’s new Windows Live platform gives users a new set of social and sharing tools that aim to address the growing significance of social media. Microsoft had conducted a research titled Windows Live Social Media Opportunities this month before launching the Windows Live service. According to the report it was found that social media tools are vital for consumers and represent a great opportunity for advertisers.Microsoft would now be using these tools to track behavior. Contrasting strategies from the two, isn’t it

What do you think, is there a serious need for Apple to participate in online communities, forums, twitters and other social platforms?

Handset companies are diving deeper into social networking space. Motorola is the latest to join the bandwagon, with its decision to make an equity investment in Tilefile Limited, a social-media platform developer. Tilefile has developed an innovative social media platform that establishes connection between users and communities via a “content-neutral” media format.

A statement made Motorola’s managing director Reese Schroeder says, “Our investment reflects our commitment to innovative companies, such as Tilefile, as they strive to seamlessly connect people and communities.” Hmm… I’m not sure whether it is commitment to innovation or fierce competition from rival companies like Nokia which seem to be surging ahead.

Having said that, the move shows that social networking has made an impact on these mobile companies which have been traditionally into hardware and software of handsets. I was listening to FIR podcast the other day, which focuses on the shift from desktop computer to access web. Today’s consumer doesn’t really like to be tied down to the computer, and that is why we have a product like the iPhone that is making it big. With so much of activity going on it is natural for consumers to expect features of sharing video, pictures, music and links on the cellphones.

The Tilefile platform combines audio, photos and videos into a single content-neutral format which is called “Tile.” The social activity takes place around each tile. The Tile “front” is the media and the “back” of a Tile is the community. Users are empowered with a non-linear view of multiple “social media packages” which fits phone and web. These Tiles can be clubbed with others to form combinations that can be easily shared or launched to other locations on the Internet. The social activity also travels along and thus connects people via messaging, sharing and publishing.

Motorola’s move doesn’t come as a big surprise as rival Nokia has already forayed into content and services. As a matter of fact, Nokia prefers the “Internet company,” although its profitable deals come from low-cost handset sales in emerging markets. Is Motorola going to benefit from this deal? Only time can tell.

Shoeboxed.com, an online service for Receipt organization has re-launched with improved, intuitive design and a basket of new features. Apart from improvements in its receipt tracking function the service has also ventured into the Social shopping segment.

The social shopping feature keeps a track on buying habits of users and also allows them to compare their purchased items with that of friends. Essentially, that’s what Social shopping is all about. Leveraging the collective wisdom of crowds to make shopping decisions.

The core functionality of Shoeboxed is that it enables users to organize their e-mail and paper receipts, which displays their average expenditures in a professional manner. Although, it doesn’t match a thorough accounting package, the functionality of Shoeboxed does fit the basic requirements for a non-accounting geek. Its functions have become more efficient for e.g. users can now add photos and even share their items with the entire shopping community (flaunting what you’ve with others in the community ) Amongst other additions, users can share their experience of a particular product with others and recommend it to others.

The home-page now displays popular items being bought by other users. Users can simply click on listed items to make the purchases. To make receipt scanning easy for the site users, Shoeboxed is also offering a paper scanner at a special price of less than $100.

Headed by Taylor Mingos, Shoeboxed has come a long way since its launch, last year. Post its site-launch, Shoeboxed has moved to Berlin, before hopping back to North Carolina.

As a Blogger, gauging through reader’s thoughts, suggestions and feedback ends up being a tedious, if not a nearly-impossible job. Every now and then, your best hope is to try to gauge your readers in more open and lively discussions to improve the quality and meaning of the posts. Adding on to that functionality is a new social software widget by a startup called Skribit. Skribit is an intelligent service which enables blog readers to provide site wide feedback. A brilliant idea and best-of-all it allows bloggers to collect real time feedback from their blog readers.

Skribit was borne at Andrew Hyde’s Startup Weekend in Atlanta and is essentially a brainchild of Paul Stamatiou.

In an e-mail discussion with Rev2, Paul Stamatiou spoke at length about Skribit, Startup Weekend, and more.

Driving the collective wisdom of blog readers, a life saver for bloggers, a social widget, a magic wizard for bloggers, are all the kind of things I’ve been hearing about Skribit. According to you, why is Skribit needed?
The key element of Skribit is that by using it, you’ll be able to produce better content for your blog by letting readers tell you what they want to read and having readers also rank those suggestions. I say that from the standpoint of a blogger, but Skribit naturally has a community of readers/suggesters that can use Skribit.com as a portal for tracking their suggestions and more importantly, viewing “what’s hoppin’” in the blogosphere. In my pitches for this idea during the first night of Startup Weekend Atlanta, I referred to Skribit’s homepage as potentially becoming a source for the news of tomorrow, sorted by categories and all of that. Over the next few weeks, we’ll see how much that concept becomes reality.

A blogger always had an option of writing a post to invite reader comments/thoughts/feedback. How is Skribit different in this case?
As a blogger myself, I always invite lively discussion and feedback by asking questions at the end of most of my posts. While this is a great tactic for attaining post-related feedback, Skribit aims to retrieve site-wide feedback and is done in a fashion that makes such suggestions more accessible to other readers as well as the blogger.

That is, suggestions in comments tend to be in the context of the article, regardless of any questions asked. Skribit is more for the wider topic area that the blogger draws from. The Skribit widget creates a lower barrier of entry for the reader to make a suggestion and therefore results in a better chance of having more readers, including infrequent ones, make suggestions.

Does it have any other uses, or is Skribit for bloggers only?
At the moment, the scope of Skribit is focused around blogs but since it is a simple widget it can practically be embedded on any webpage. Once we fully test it with bloggers, we will evaluate our feedback and see where else Skribit should be applied.

What other features are do you plan to include in Skribit?
Right now, we’re focusing on building a stable product with a solid feature-set. You can definitely expect to see more from Skribit. Our Basecamp account is filled with great ideas for features.

How was your experience at Startup Weekend?
Startup Weekend Atlanta was a phenomenal experience. I didn’t think that 60 people would be able to build something so focused and driven. Groups quickly formed for development, business development, marketing, design, usability and so on.

Each group pumped out amazing work in a short amount of time. Not only do we have a product but we have a plan of where to take this product in the near future. I want to give a big thanks to Andrew Hyde for coming up with the whole Startup Weekend concept and keeping everyone focused as well as Lance Weatherby for leading/setting up the event and finding our great venue.

Although it’s a little quick to ask, how has been the response from the community so far? Is this actually turning out to be the missing weapon in a blogger’s armory?
When we were initially coming up with the details for Skribit, we thought Skribit would either be virally huge or not be used at all. It looks like it is gearing up to be something big. I’m very eager to begin testing and receive quality feedback from real users. I installed the Skribit widget on my blog this morning and after only a few suggestions, Skribit already proved its worth.

Brett Welch, co-founder of GoodBarry, was kind enough to give us 200 exclusive invites for Rev2 readers. The invite gives you 3 months of free GoodBarry — the normal service price being $39/month. You can do just about anything during the three month period from creating a website to setting up an e-mail marketing solution.

GoodBarry has been built from scratch to be an integrated, customer focused system and assist online business owners with website management, e-mail marketing, blogging, shopping and leads generation. We interviewed Brett recently, which you can read here.

Click here to head to the signup page and enter GBREV2 as the invitation code. Again, we’d like to thank Brett for his kindness — that’s $8000 worth of GoodBarry love!