Blog News Watch

At the end of 2006, there were some gossips that News Corp. the sole owner of Myspace might extend their network to China. Very little known about this plan, except from some Bloomberg articles. Anyway now things are getting clearer as word are out News Corp. is finalizing a deal with partners, including private equity heavyweight IDG, to launch a networking Web site venture in China within a few months. Financial and Chinese government sources confirm this last weekend.

But things will be quite different in Oriental Myspace, News Corp. will own only less than 50% of it, The IDG-Accel China Growth Fund, managed by venture firm International Data Group Technology Venture Investment, will also own a stake of it. There was no indication whether there will be any third or forth party will be involved in the venture.

Well as we all know, China isn’t an easy place for a foreign online service provider to get an Internet content license and other news licenses, News Corp. might be busy taking care of Beijing’s requirements. How much this venture is costing News corp.? Well they politely skip that part out. News Corp. biggest asset in this oriental venture will be Luo Chuan, a former head of Microsoft’s Windows Live unit in China who will be more likely the first Myspace China CEO.

So far in previous attempt News Corp. failed to team up with local television stations and newspaper publishers, as Beijing still tightly controls mass media. So what holds in the future for News Corp. in China, the world’s second-largest Internet market behind the United States, with about 137 million Web users? Something more than just chicken soup and chopstick for sure.

Source: CNN Money

MySpace, News Corp., China

Once again Pew Internet and American Life Project bring up some interesting stats of social networking/web 2.0 arena. According to published article of BBC, tagging or labeling online content gaining popularities as a whole new search tool.

As more and more people put their own content online, they are also being invited to tag it with descriptive keywords to help organise their data.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the trend in tagging is growing among US web users.

For users like us who uses social networking sites tagging is just an obvious tool to navigate around the sites we visit. But this tagging/ labeling is something more than just easy navigation tool. I am sure you heard about Semantic Web, in which information is machine processable (rather than being only human oriented), thus permitting browsers or other software agents to find, share and combine information. The Social tagging may not be the perfect Semantic Web component like RDF, but sort out data based on supplied keyword within a network. Some of the tagging like-technorati tagging can be even inter network wide. Anyway if we have to talk about future of semantic web and content labeling it will be a long session, so lets just focus on the social tagging.

In simple word, Tagging is a kind of content labeling which makes the content easily searchable and easier to organise information within a network/site. There are different forms of tagging in different network, like flicker got it’s picture tagging, technorati got it’s keyword tagging etc. Currently most of these tagging works only within the network’s data/content, for example with Flicker tagging you can’t expect to find YouTube video. Despite it’s limitation, tagging makes life a lot of easier. Tagging allows social groups to form around similarities of interests and points of view. People using same tag brings up peoples closer to each other who share some common test. No doubt tagging is getting quite a ground among US users, according to research over a quarter of online Americans - 28% - had tagged content such as a photo, news story or blog.

Consider tagging is the doorway to full content labeling.

Tagging, Content Labeling, Semantic Web

Remember Vodafone is supposed to launch a new open source community portal called Betavine, at 31st January. Well they didn’t miss the schedule, now its live and kicking. The portal looks cool, and definitely will get some attention of bedroom based open source developers. The portal contain seven cool downloadable application for developers to get started.

As a Vodafone Betavine developer you will be able to:

• Create your own projects and host applications
• Blog about your projects
• Interact with your users and the Betavine community

Paul Walsh of Segala have more details on this. Stephen Wolak, Web Technologies Manager at Vodafone Group. Stephen has revealed to Paul how this portal will encourage students to get involved and become a strong workforce.

We are planning a set of student competitions in order to engage academia in the creation of new mobile and internet communications concepts and applications.

We will update the Portal with an open source site to encourage the development of open source software in this space.

Segala may provide ongoing updates about the Portal and evaluations on applications as they’re uploaded, as Segala is a definite contributor in the portal itself.

Disclaimer: I work as a Web application developer in Segala.