Media

YouTube is great for entertainment, but it's not the ideal place to look for an instructional video you can actually use. That's where VideoJug comes in.

The site, which launched in beta version a few days ago, aims to be the ultimate source of video instruction on just about anything imaginable, from identifying cancer to cooking pasta. "We are building a living encyclopedia of life, on video," the site proclaims.

Unlike most video-sharing communities, VideoJug produces its own instructional work, as well as gather and index videos submitted by the public. Many of them are produced … Read more

An Amazon patent that is pending details how the online auction giant could compile personal data from customers to create a profile of products the person might want to buy, according to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article Tuesday.

"The database, which would combine information disclosed voluntarily by customers with facts gleaned from public databases, conceivably would give Amazon a larger or more detailed profile of its customers than any other retailer," the article says. "Such a database would include the gender, date of birth, interests, occupation, education, income level, residence, race and ethnicity of customers for Amazon's '… Read more

AOL says it has resolved a small technical issue that prevented some of its members from getting to AOL Web pages temporarily Tuesday morning. "This was intermittent and not servicewide," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said in an e-mail. "It was addressed and handled quickly. Don't have a cause as of yet."

For years, the San Francisco-based prankster group, the Cacophony Society, has been having its own brand of fun during that city's famous road race, the Bay to Breakers, by having members dress up as salmon and then run the race route "upstream."

They call their version of the race the "Breakers to Bay," and it has become a tradition.

But now the group is a little bit peeved, reports Laughing Squid, because its antics have been spoofed by rum maker Bacardi for a T.V. ad without any form of credit.

In the ad, two … Read more

Guessing who will come up with The Next Big Thing is a perennial sport in this business, and today's emerging technologies provide reason for even more speculation than usual. Among the latest to weigh in with predictions is Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog, which makes a valiant effort at sorting through start-ups that remain buoyed in the wake of MySpace and YouTube.

First on the list is Fanpop, a social site that's built around specific topics that it calls spots. (Fanpop's honchos explained to us why it's not a "social network" here.) … Read more

Long before it fell victim to the talk-radio craze, San Francisco station KSFO-AM used to broadcast shows from the Golden Age of Radio every night. Most were comedies, but my favorites were horror tales from the likes of "Inner Sanctum Mysteries" and "Lights Out"--which, of course, were the source of endless nightmares for a 10-year-old kid.

So I had mixed emotions upon coming across Pseudopod, which bills itself as "the world's premier horror fiction podcast." (There are so many others?) While not quite an interactive networking site, Pseudopod does depend on material … Read more

The ever-cheeky Register is always entertaining, but this post is as notable for its spot-on social commentary as it is for its wit.

We won't spoil the many punch lines in "10 ways to make yourself a YouTube star," only to note that its sub-headline says it all: "Fight strangers in the street, do strange things with animals."

The most serious competition to MySpace may come from another country.

Already, it's been noted that MySpace will likely face the problems of fleeting fidelity that have typically befallen social sites dominated by youths. But it may confront an even more formidable challenge based on the habits and sensibilities of an entirely different culture from Cyworld, the wildly popular social network in South Korea, which is opening in the United States.

The ubiquity of Cyworld in South Korea makes MySpace look like a fringe hobby. More than 90 percent of South Koreans between 20 and 29 are estimated to … Read more

AOL has launched a beta test of a new photo site that lets users tag their photos, create galleries and comment on other peoples' photos, features popularized by the Yahoo-owned Flickr. AOL unveiled the new AOL Pictures beta site on Thursday.