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The team behind location-based instant-messaging service Meetro is launching a free hosted forum service this morning called Lefora. CEO Paul Bragiel came in to give me a demo of it in action last week and I came away impressed. It's a wonderfully easy way to set up good-looking forums without a lot of hassle. Bragiel said that the idea came after looking at many of the popular forum tools out there and getting frustrated with "antiquated" systems that involved knowledge of coding languages, or having to host everything on your own dime. Most of all, Bragiel said … Read more

Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud Web service was knocked offline earlier Monday, but the company appeared to get it back online within a few hours.

A thread on the Amazon Web Services support forum started at 1:51 a.m. PDT. By just past 4 a.m., a support person said all servers that had been unreachable could be contacted again.

It's a far milder outage than the one that occurred in February, when Amazon's Simple Storage Service went down, which appeared to affect hundreds of Web sites.

It's also a reminder of the scrutiny on … Read more

Wildscreen TV is a video host for film or clip makers who want to make some money off their work without having to build their own sites. Content creators who put up their videos get 100 percent of the ad revenue and access to a great video player that converts source footage into DVD-resolution streams. It's not as pretty as some of the "HD" quality streams from providers like Vimeo, DailyMotion, or Motionbox, but if your source content is good it looks simply fantastic.

As with other broadcast video hosts, content creators can make their own channels. … Read more

Update (10:06 AM): The submission process differs from the original plan. If you have the address, please don't send anything there. Please check the updated instructions below. And yes--this is real. Post has been amended from the original to reflect these changes.

We know it's April 1st, but this is 100 percent real. I made James Yu, Senior Product Developer at Scribd swear on his unborn first child that this isn't an April fool's gag. Starting today the document hosting company will take any of your real documents and scan them for you to be … Read more

Today Motionbox is taking an important step forward as a video host. It's now supporting high definition footage uploaded by its premium users, who get to partake in unlimited file size or storage limitations as part of the $30 a year service. Regular users will also notice a quality bump, as the supported resolution has been increased to DVD quality to help meet the now standard VGA quality and beyond on most point-and-shoot cameras.

HD videos can be encoded in any of the popular competing formats, including AVCHD which only recently began to meander into consumer level video editing software suites. Users are also able to edit raw, uncut HD footage in MotionBox's Web-based editing tools. This feature should make it easier and far less expensive for people who want to do simple edits to HD footage without upgrading computer hardware.

The sample clips I've seen are beautiful and load instantly. If you've spent any time on Vimeo and its high definition gallery the experience is similar. Both suffer from the technological shortcoming of not letting embedded clips be in high definition, meaning you'll have to visit the Web site if you want to see for yourself. Update: I've gotten the supersecret embed code to drop the HD player on the page. See update note the end of the post for more information, and click the "read more" link to watch it.

Motionbox is coming to the HD crowd a little late, but it is offering some interesting tandem services to entice prosumers who are looking less at broadcasting to the masses, and more to small groups of friends and family. In a few weeks, MotionBox will launch a custom DVD service that will let users drop clips onto a virtual DVD and have it printed and sent to themselves or to friends. With the right permissions, users will also be able to take your clips and burn them onto a DVD if you make that option available. CEO Chris O'Brien also tells me the flipbooks, which were introduced last November have been enjoyed by users.

If you're a heavy HD user looking to share some HD footage with others on the cheap, Dailymotion and Vimeo serve up free hosting. There are caveats for each though. Dailymotion needs you to be a MotionMaker and broadcast your stuff to everyone, while Vimeo limits your weekly file uploads to 500MB which might be pushing it for some long, raw 1080p footage.

Note: O'Brien says that users will eventually be able to embed the HD videos themselves, but we've been given a special code for this one. Also be sure to vote to see the results in the poll below. Looks like a lot of you don't have HD cameras.

… Read more

Network Solutions has suspended a Web site that a Dutch lawmaker was using to promote a yet-to-be-released film critical of Islam.

The Web hosting service said it is investigating whether content on the site--Fitnathemovie.com--is in violation of the hosting service's acceptable use policy.

The 15-minute movie, called Fitna--an Arabic word that means "test of faith in times of trial"--describes Islam as "the enemy of freedom," according to comments made by Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker and the film's maker. Dutch officials fear the movie could spark violence, as happened after … Read more

Cloud computing, the notion of outsourcing hardware and software to Internet service providers, is showing the classic signs of disruptive technology--it's not good enough for the masses yet, but it has clear potential to shake things up.

Forrester Research on Monday released a report written by James Staten, an IT operations and infrastructure analyst, saying that cloud computing does not meet the needs of large businesses. But that could be only temporary.

The services offered by a new crop of hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services, are where the overall hosting market is going, according to Staten.

"… Read more

You know the warp feature on YouTube that's been kicking around for a while? Well video community YourTrumanShow has launched a similar tool this morning in the form of a Facebook app that lets you view your network of friends in a large array, and watch videos they've uploaded to various services without leaving the page.

Like YouTube's implementation, each video has its own collection of related clips, creating a large Web of videos that you can navigate around like an online map. You're also able to meet new social networking buddies based on your shared … Read more

What does running software in the network mean exactly?

This is one of the questions that users are exploring as they start to increasingly poke at what "cloud computing" means for them.

On the one hand, cloud computing can refer specifically to running some sort of fixed software service--frequently through a browser's user interface--over the network. This is cloud computing in the Web 2.0 sense. We don't necessarily even think of Flickr, Facebook, or Google as "applications" as such. At the other end of the scale, services such as Amazon's EC2 and … Read more