Archive for January 2010

Its been a LONG time coming, but we have finally launched the WebEden forum!

The forum will be a place where you can interact with other WebEden website builders, and members of the WebEden team.

Its a great place to ask questions in order to get answers to a problem you may have with your website. There are specific sections where you can ask about domains, email, webite editing, widgets or SEO help.

You might also like to help other users out with your knowledge of building websites. You can also show off or promote your work. And if you want to suggest something to the team, or want to have a moan, then please go ahead.

You will need to register with your own unique username and password. This will be a different username to the one you use to access the WebEden website builder.

You can find a link to the forum across the top green bar of the site. And here’s what it looks like:

Ready to get involved? Visit the WebEden forum now!

A few of the more frequent visitors to WebEden might have noticed a little blue, white and red flag in the top left hand corner of our website.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out what this is all about: We’ve just launched in France!

Now anyone with French as their native tongue can build a WebEden website without having to stuggle with the English language. Website Building tools in France are quite a bit less advanced than the UK, so we have high hopes that the WebEden system will be embraced.

Fancy building a website in French? Know any French speakers who might want to créer un site web gratuitement? Any comments (French or English!)?

A few years ago Google indicated that it would build a space where anyone could store all their documents, music and images online, for free.

They gave it the moniker ‘Gdrive’, but since making the announcement everything has gone pretty quiet.

Then a couple of weeks ago, they quietly added a few new features to their ‘Google Docs’ product. For many, this meant that the ‘Gdrive’ had arrived.

For those of you not familiar with Google Docs, it’s an online service where you can create, manage and store your spreadsheets, word documents and presentations. It’s an online rival to Microsoft Office, with the added advantage that you can access your documents from any location; and collaborate with others online.

The downside of course is that you need to be connected to the Internet to do this. We discussed the ups and downs of each system last year.

Now Google has added extra features. You can upload any file up to 250MB to Google Docs. You get 1 GB of free storage for files that you choose not to convert into one of the Google Docs formats (Google documents, spreadsheets, and presentations). And if you can always buy more space if you want it, at a cost of $0.25 per GB/year.

Here’s a screengrab that shows you where you can upload your files:

Google reckon that you’ll be able to open most common formats using the service. You can also search for files once you’ve uploaded them. And you can share you documents and images with anyone you choose.

Of course there are plenty of rivals for this type of service. Microsoft’s SkyDrive gives you 25 GB of free storage, and ADrive offers a massive 50 GB.

Are you a fan of the online storage model? Or do you prefer to keep your stuff local, on a memory stick or external hard drive? Leave us a comment below.

Google – a word that few of us had heard of ten years ago – is now so deeply embedded in our lives that there are some conversations that can’t take place without it.

It’s impossible to talk about the Internet without mentioning ‘Google’.

It’s hard to talk about finding stuff without mentioning Google

And any type of information reference has trouble slipping by without someone mentioning Google…

Word of the Decade

So perhaps it’s hardly surprising that the American Dialect Society has picked the verb as the most important word of the last 10 years.

The Society looks at the use of English in North America.

The Society’s members voted the verb ‘Google’ – meaning to search the internet – to the number 1 spot. Other technology runner ups were ‘blog’, ‘wi-fi’, and ‘text’.

Grant Barrett, chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Societ” said “I really thought ‘blog’ would take the honours in the word of the decade category, but more people Google than blog, don’t they?”

“Plus, many people think ‘blog’ just sounds ugly. Maybe Google’s trademark lawyers would have preferred it, anyway,” he added.

Word of 2009

The society also voted on the word of 2009. This time it was the chance for Twitter to shine, with ‘tweet’ nabbing number 1.

2nd place in the 2009 vote was ‘fail’, a “noun or interjection describing something egregiously unsuccessful” according to the society.

Word of the 90s

Technology words frequently dominated the ‘words of the 90s’ with annual winners including ‘web’, ‘Y2K’, ‘cyber’, ‘information superhighway’, and ‘e’. But it’s been 10 years since a technology word has won.

In 1995 the society showed its forward thinking by saying that ‘World Wide Web’ would be the one “most likely to succeed”.

Does Google take top spot for you?  Or do you have a favourite you’d like to put forward? Is WebEden your favourite, just like it is mine Leave us a comment below.

Last week we had a story that talked about the fact that despite taking over $1.6bn in revenues in the UK, search giant Google paid just £144,000 tax. This is all because the company’s European headquarters are in Dublin, where Google takes advantage of the low tax regime.

Apparently Nicolas Sarkozy has unveiled plans to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen in France. It’s all part of the French president’s desire to regulate the Internet.

The proposals have suggested that all three of the major search engines (the others being Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing) pay a tax every time a sponsored link is clicked.

That could potentially raise a lot of money: Google has revenues of around £720m in France. Sarkozy wants this money to go towards schemes financing the creative industry.

Its about the music

One such scheme is a government subsidy of digital music and film services, and would be an attempt to reduce illegal downloading of this content.

Carla Bruni – the Franch PM’s wife – is a keen musician and has campaigned to raise awareness of the problems of illegal downloads.

France has already used new anti-piracy laws to stop illegal downloads, with perpetrators being disconnected and fined.

Slowing innovation

Detractors of the new proposals say that the tax would slow down innovation in France. Google France senior policy manager Olivier Esper said that the best way “to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and rewards artists and publishers for their work”.

What do you think?

Do you think that Google should pay more tax on its activity? Have the French got the right idea to tax online advertising? Lastly a plug: do you want to Créer un site web (that’s my way of saying check out our French site!)

Leave us a comment below.