A prototype email system being developed at Stanford University is designed to bring the power of semantic technology to our inbox. Called SEAmail, short for “semantic email addressing,” the system will help its users route email to the correct person or persons without needing to know their names or email addresses and without the need for preexisting distribution groups. How SEAmail Works According to MIT’s Technology Review, the program allows users to select email recipients by creating a search query as opposed to typing in names, addresses, or the name of a mailing list. For example, (Read the full post about ‘SEAmail: Applying Semantic Technology to Email’…)

TinyURL, one of the most popular URL-shortening services (although not our favorite) is now being used by cybercriminals to redirect web surfers to pages that contain viruses, trojans, and other sorts of malware. According to Finjan’s Malicious Code Research Center, these criminals are using the service to avoid having their web sites flagged by the Safe Browsing mechanisms built in to modern web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Both web browsers employ Google Safe Browsing, a feature which warns users about phishing sites and other malware. Yet bypassing this filter within (Read the full post about ‘TinyURL Being Used to Bypass Safe Browsing Filters in Firefox, Chrome’…)

Each day, dowry gets an average of twenty Indian women stabbed, burned or hanged. That’s over 7000 innocent victims per year! So please, stay away from it. Advertising Agency: Bhadra Communications, Bangalore, India Client: Vimochan Development Society Art Director: Siju S Nair Illustrator: Retheesh T C Copywriter: Dominic J L Satur, Siju S Nair Published: January, 2009 via E-Mail Source: www.holgerappel.com

Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System has found a new experimental feature for Google Search: preferred sites. Thanks to this, you may soon be able to tell Google about your favorite sites and have them appear more often in your search results. If you like to get your movie data from the IMDB, for example, you can tell Google to prefer this site over other movie review services. This feature would also be very useful if you want Google to prefer results from your local newspaper over stories from national papers, or if you want to see product reviews from specific sites. As it is (Read the full post about ‘Roll Your Own Google: Customize Your Search Results With ‘Preferred Sites”…)

Anyone who has ever crashed a computer without a backup knows the painful and arduous process required to restore the machine to its previous state. As such, many of us keep regular backups of the data on our systems, just in case. But there’s another vast set of data many of us are creating on a daily basis that has little to no backup at all - beyond the services that host that content: our lifestreams. Now, a new service - named appropriately enough, LifestreamBackup - aims to provide the peace of mind that your lifestream data will always be just as accessible as the backup of your (Read the full post about ‘LifestreamBackup: Keeping a Copy of Your Posts, Tweets, Photos, and More’…)

Smoking kills 300 times more people than crime. Smoking kills 40 times more people than fire accidents. Smoking kills 30 times more people than poisoning Advertising Agency: 1pointsize, Chennai, India Executive Creative Director / Photographer: Sharad Haksar Creative Director: Anantha Narayan Art Director: Vel Copywriter: Prakash Source: www.holgerappel.com

When it comes to Web design and development, one thing trumps the latest technology and cool features: usability. Why? Because all of the features and functions in the world are completely worthless if a human user is unable to figure out how to use them. But testing against human factors, creating use cases, and observing focus groups can prove to be a costly endeavor for even the largest of companies. Now, there’s a cost-effective means of seeing how usable your pages are: Userfly, a simple way to test your site’s usability for free - with one line of code. Simply add the Userfly code to (Read the full post about ‘Userfly: Get Usability Insights with One Line of Code’…)

Web 2.0 is pretty cool - so cool in fact that it’s got its own buzzwords and lingo that not everybody knows. Everybody has a lot to gain from participation in this new cultural phenomenon, though, so there’s no reason why everyone shouldn’t know the background on the lingo. We did a little research just to cover our own bases! We thought we’d share it with you. digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/odd_stuff/WTF_Origins_of_5_Popular_Web_2_0_Terms’;digg_bgcolor = ‘#ffffff’;digg_skin = ‘normal’;Think you know where catchwords like FTW and Fail! came from? Think you know who came up with the phrase Web (Read the full post about ‘WTF? Origins of Five Popular Web 2.0 Terms’…)

Contrapunto had the task of creating a campaign with little budget to make women aware of the need to collaborate with the Association of Women Against Genital Mutilation (AMAM). With that objective,they produced hygienic protectors for women’s swimming costumes with an image of a razor blade (as used in genital mutilation practice) and text saying: “Every year two million girls worldwide are unable to avoid genital mutilation” During the activity, a 72% web visitors increase was registered, along with a parallel increase in phone calls to the association. Advertising Agency: (Read the full post about ‘AMAM: Razor’…)

Jing, one of our favorite free screenshot and screencasting tools, just received a major update. Besides adding a new look and feel, TechSmith, Jing’s parent company, also announced a new Pro version of Jing, which, for $14.95 a year, allows users to record their screencasts in HD H.264 video, directly upload them to YouTube, and remove the Jing logos that appear at the beginning and end of videos produced with the free version of Jing. The free version also got a major face lift. While there aren’t too many new features, one new function we definitely like is the ability to customize (Read the full post about ‘Jing Goes Pro: One of Our Favorite Screencasting Tools Just Got Better’…)