Networking

I've written here before about emergency locators, those gizmos that can help rescuers find you if you become lost in the wilderness.

The tragic death of CNET's own James Kim and the disappearances of Microsoft's Jim Gray and famed adventurer Steve Fossett have convinced me that anyone who travels outside populated areas ought to carry one of these devices.

Following that earlier post, I was contacted by SPOT Inc., makers of the SPOT Satellite Messenger, which began shipping through major outdoor retailers this fall. They offered me a SPOT messenger for review, and I happily accepted. It … Read more

I'm a little late to the party with this unboxing of my new OLPC XO-1 laptop, but the machine arrived while I was out of town visiting my family for Christmas. In fact, there's a story there.

Before I left, I started hearing that people were receiving their XO-1's, and I realized that if mine didn't show up before I left, it would almost certainly arrive while I was gone. The OLPC people sent out no shipment notifications and didn't reply to several emails, so I had no way to delay the shipment or contact … Read more

The pro-Net neutrality lobby hasn't seen much action on legislation billed as necessary to "save the Internet" this year. But a key congressional Democrat says to expect a new push in 2008.

Rep. Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who leads a key House of Representatives Internet and telecommunications law panel, had previously said he planned to revive his anti-discrimination bill from last year this December.

But a spokeswoman told CNET News.com on Wednesday that life for her boss has been hectic in recent weeks with pressing other issues, such as the Federal Communications Commission's recent … Read more

Back on November 5 I wrote about an independent fundraising effort on behalf of the Ron Paul campaign. The occasion was Guy Fawkes Night, the commemoration of the 1605 attempt to blow up the Palace of Westminster in England. As I said at the time, this was a strange occasion for fundraising in a US presidential campaign, but at least it gave the organizers a convenient tagline for the effort: they called it a "money bomb".

Dopplr, which I briefly mentioned making an appearance at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference back in late May, has opened up its doors today after being in private beta for the last seven months. The service is designed to let friends and other small groups share their travel plans with one another. In an ideal world, if all your friends used Dopplr, you'd be able to see when they're in town, or elsewhere to coordinate things like meet-ups or shared accommodations.

To get going with Dopplr, you simply need to plug in the dates and location of your next vacation or business trip. This information gets slotted onto your profile as a Dopplr trip, and assuming you've made friends on the service, they'll be allowed to see your schedule and visa versa. In order to add your buddies, you can invite them one at a time, or make use of your contact list from Gmail, Flickr, Twitter, or with an HCard microformat import.

Like Facebook's news feed, Dopplr keeps a running tab on your activity and that of your friends, so you can view it in one big stream. For those not inclined to check on the site every day, Dopplr is set up by default to send you weekly newsletters with your friends' latest trip additions and journal entries, along with a list of other Dopplr users who are visiting your home city. There's also a mobile version that gives you quick access to your slated trips, as well as the option to add a new one. In many ways, it's similar to the iPhone version of Google Calendar, albeit with a little less panache.

In many ways Dopplr attempts to solve a problem that could be managed with existing solutions given a little elbow grease on the part of users. For example, my family uses Google calendar, and we've got a separate calendar set up just for trips we want to share with one another. What sets Dopplr apart is its social side, which has a number of small conveniences thrown in for both privacy and keeping track of others. One of them is frequency, which shows you which of your friends visits a place the most. You can also see if you're visiting any of your friend's hometowns, and if they'll be there when you are--which can help you avoid those "oh no, we were in the same place and didn't meet up?" moments.

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PALO ALTO, Calif.--Though the favorite metaphor to describe the Web has long been a highway, or for some, a "series of tubes," the man credited with inventing it all thinks of the Web more like the human mind.

"Lots of people are doing research around the Web...and there are interesting results, but a lack of a core curriculum in the universities," Tim Berners-Lee told a gathering of scientists at HP Labs and other Silicon Valley executives here. "I've been told the Web has 10 to the 10 to the 11 (number of) … Read more

I've been playing around with a pretty cool service this afternoon called SeeToo. It's targeted toward people who want to share a private video with someone else but don't want the rest of the world to see it or for it to sit on some server farm out of their control. Unlike other services that have played around with the idea of multiple users watching the same video at the same time (see Lycos Mix, YouTube Streams, and Meebo's rooms) SeeToo handles video links like one-time conference sessions. You can only get in if the video … Read more

Amazon has released Kindle, its new e-book reader.

[Later update: my Kindle review is online now.]

Newsweek has published a lengthy article about it. CNET's coverage includes a review, a photo gallery, a Crave blog, and a News.com blog. That's plenty of factual coverage.

I won't rehash the basic features of Kindle, but I will try to compare it with the Sony Reader--now in its second generation and Kindle's primary competition. I will also talk about what I see as the strong and weak points of the Kindle design.

Disclaimer: This is all based on … Read more

The Web 2.0 style IT management tool, Paglo launched in beta on Monday.

Paglo is essentially an IT search engine that indexes a ton of information about the network you are managing. For example, if you are concerned about how many copies of Microsoft Office are installed on computers at your company and want to make sure that you are complying with your license, Paglo allows you to view that statistic in real time.

There are three key elements to Paglo: the Crawler, Search Index, and UI. If you are a network administrator, for example, you install the Paglo … Read more