Best of the Web
Today's selection of stories from around the Web that caught our attention
What’s next for Web 2.0? Web 2.0 may be the latest Internet buzzword, but it’s not always apparent what it means. While it’s accepted that it’s an ill-defined term, it usually refers to web sites and technologies where the users contribute to the content. For businesses this may be blogs, wikis and other collaborative tools. The next developments for the technology may become clear at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, where anyone who’s anyone will be trying to spot the ‘next big thing’. As the FT reports, this time the aim of the developers may not be to get venture capital investment but to sell out to Google or Yahoo:
Beauty parade for Web 2.0 start-ups
See full details on the Web 2.0 conference Web site.
Elsewhere The Guardian examines the second Internet goldrush and interviews the Web 2.0 entrepreneurs.
Trojans increase spam Spam emails can be a great time waster and costly for businesses to eradicate. The situation has got worst, according to Information Week, because of new techniques used by spam-generating trojans which make it difficult for anti-virus vendors to catch them. MessageLabs highlights how bad the situation has become, stating that 72.9 percent of all email sent in October was spam:
Trojan One-Two Punch Sends Spam Rates Soaring
UN looks at Web accessibility Around 17 per cent of the population have a disability according to a recent UN forum to examine internet accessibility, as reported by Information Week, providing an economic as well as a moral reason for businesses to take them into account:
UN Forum Examines Internet Accessibility
Protecting the rights of disabled users on the internet could be one area where UK legislation is ahead of the US. The Royal National Institute for the Blind says that UK web sites have had a legal obligation to be accessible since 1999, with October 2004 changes to the law removing the exemption for small employers and adding the requirement for web sites run by police and fire services. In the US things may be less clear-cut, as indicated by the New York Times reporting a September 6 preliminary ruling by a federal judge in California that “in some instances, web sites must cater to disabled people”:
Do the Rights of the Disabled Extend to the Blind on the Web?