Stories by Heather Havenstein

Google renames personalised home page, adds gadgets

The company has announced that it will rename its personalised home page to iGoogle, which will now include Google Gadgets. Users with no programming experience or web design experience can create gadgets for iGoogle and send them to their family and friends.

Google head announces PowerPoint competitor

Google plans to take another swipe at Microsoft’s Office suite of tools by adding presentation software to its Google Docs web-based tools for word processing, email and spreadsheets.

Hitwise predicts the next YouTube

Hitwise, which collects internet usage data directly from ISPs to measure the traffic to more than 800,000 internet sites, has tapped the six Web 2.0 companies most likely to reach the soaring success of YouTube, Wikipedia or Flickr. To do so, it looks at the types of early adopters now using the sites.

Google to unveil AJAX API for adding feeds

This week, Google is set to roll out a new Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) API geared to help AJAX developers more easily add Atom and RSS feeds to web applications or blogs.

Leading vendors declare end of browser wars

The browser wars are over, and now Microsoft, Mozilla and other vendors plan to focus on positioning the browser as a development platform. That was the consensus of a panel of representatives in San Francisco at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo who help develop internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and the Google Reader.

Wikipedia founder talks up new project

Larry Sanger’s answer to his former firm, the Wikimedia Foundation, is a new online encyclopedia called Citizendium, which was launched this week. Sanger, Citizendium’s editor in chief and a co-founder of Wikipedia, talked about how the new offering differs from Wikipedia and why he decided to abandon the “ignore all rules” philosophy he championed there.

Conflict erupts over proposed blogging code of conduct

On the heels of the posting of death threats against prominent blogger Kathy Sierra, technology publisher Tim O'Reilly has released a draft code of conduct for blogging that calls for an end to anonymous comments and a commitment to online civility.

Health IT returns take longest time

It takes a long time for healthcare organisations to see a return from IT investments, according to a recent report. This may explain why the industry has long been seen as a laggard in technology spending.

IBM takes aim at JBoss

IBM and Covalent Technologies Thursday announced that they have each contributed technology to the open-source Apache Geronimo community to help users migrate from the JBoss application server to IBM's Apache-based application server.

LTU targets media firms with image-based search engine

As several companies look to develop a better way to cull through text based on the meaning of the keywords -- or a "Google killer" -- a maker of image-based search technology is moving to expand its potential customer base.

CIOs use Web 2.0 to keep up with competition: study

Web 2.0 is more than just a passing fad for consumers — according to a recent survey of CIOs, adoption of technologies like wikis and RSS are making their way into businesses facing competitive pressures if they don’t embrace the emerging collaborative tools.

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