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YouTube encourages more memes and mash-ups with increased video length
 YouTube, the ubiquitous video host and star-maker of silly cats, cute babies and arguable Scottish phenomenon Susan Boyle, has encouraged those seeking their 15 minutes of fame by giving them just that: 15 minutes.
The video portal, owned since 2006 by Google, dominator of all things tech, has upped its upload limits by 50 per cent - giving users five more minutes, on top of the previous ten, to record their throaty renditions of classic ballads or overdub old cartoons and adverts.
The company says it had not previously increased the length due to ongoing combat against piracy, which some claim the site has facilitated in the past.
However, "because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today," Joshua Siegel, YouTube's product manager for upload and video management wrote in an official blog post on Thursday.
These technological efforts include YouTube's Content ID system, which provides tools for copyright owners to hone in on copyright infringers.
"We will continue our strong commitment to provide advanced technology and tools to protect the rights of small and large copyright owners worldwide," Siegel said.
"We'll also do everything we can to release incremental improvements like this one that benefit our video creators."
Siegel said that the increase in the length of videos available to view and upload has been the most-requested improvement submitted to the Web 2.0 site.
In a celebration of the five-minute increase, as well as to promote it, the website has enacted a "15 minutes of fame" contest, where users are encouraged to make a video explaining themselves to the world.
One can only wonder if Keyboard Cat has five minutes more of material to plonk out on the ivories.
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Microsoft Street Slide makes Google look pedestrian
 Microsoft's answer to Google's panoramic Street View, Street Slide promises features that will offer users an even clearer view of neighborhoods in towns and cities around the world.
Whereas Google's innovative offering allows users to pan 360 degrees around the position in which they are 'standing', attempts to zoom in to the static image result in blurring rather than a crisper resolution.
As Microsoft explained in a recent research paper: "Navigating such photo collections is thus laborious and similar to hunting for a given location on foot: walk 'along' the street (jumping from bubble to bubble in Street View) looking around, until you find the location of interest."
PC Pro reports that Street Slide aims to go one step better, by allowing users to switch from their personal 'bubble' to a flat view of the street, making it easier to identify buildings such as shops in the area. By flattening out the image, the service aims to replicate the way streets would look in real life.
"Dynamically altering the alignment and visible portions of each image simulates a pseudo-perspective view of the streetside from a distance," Microsoft explained, thereby creating a deeper "sense of immersion."
It remains to be seen whether Microsoft's Street Slide will overtake Google upon its release - and more pressingly, whether it will fall foul to the same privacy problems that have plagued Google's service since day one.
During comparative tests, users were reportedly able to track down locations 17 seconds faster with Street Slide, and Microsoft has already been testing its service on mobile platforms such as the iPhone - though as of yet, only a few streets have been captured and digitised.
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Google Street View cleared of privacy charges in UK
 Google has been cleared of privacy breach charges in the UK after its Street View cars were accused of surreptitiously collecting personal data on Britain's streets.
The Information Commissioner Office (ICO) ruled that Google had not gathered "significant" personal details from unsecured Wi-Fi networks, but did say that Google was "wrong" to collect such information in the first place.
In a statement, the ICO explained: "On the basis of the samples we saw, we are satisfied so far that it is unlikely that Google will have captured significant amounts of personal data.
"There is also no evidence - as yet - that the data captured by Google has caused or could cause any individual detriment."
Google has apologised for gathering the data from Wi-Fi networks, which were accessed in order to boost its location-based services. According to the BBC, Google has said its Street View cars will no longer access open networks.
"We welcome the news that the data protection authorities in the UK have found that the payload data contained no meaningful personal information," Google responded.
"As we said when we announced our mistake, we did not want and have never used any payload data in our products or services."
Despite the company's claims that its actions were not illegal, Google is still under investigation by the UK's Metropolitan police as well as officials in France, Germany and the United States.
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Fresh Facebook fears as details of 100m users leaked to public
 Facebook, the world's predominant social network, has suffered a new blow concerning its security and privacy policies, as a downloadable file - detailing over 100 million Facebook users' profiles, names and unique Ids - has appeared online.
Made available for download on the famed but legally embroiled Pirate Bay filesharing site, privacy advocates said the leak proves that Facebook's settings were still confusing and compromised user information.
In fact, that was the stated intention of Ron Bowles, the online security consultant who lassoed the information using a simple piece of code and released the information: to highlight the privacy issues of the 500 million-strong social network.
"It is inconceivable that a firm with hundreds of engineers couldn't have imagined a trawl of this magnitude and there's an argument to be heard that Facebook have acted with negligence," said Simon Davies of Privacy International.
"Facebook should have anticipated this attack and put measures in place to prevent it," he said. "There are going to be a lot of angry and concerned people right now who [will] be wondering who has their data and what they should do."
Facebook officials defended their privacy settings, and said the information contained in the leaked file contains only that which was already available online.
"People who use Facebook own their information and have the right to share only what they want, with whom they want, and when they want," a spokesman said. "In this case, information that people have agreed to make public was collected by a single researcher and already exists in Google, Bing, other search engines, as well as on Facebook.
"No private data is available or has been compromised."
The incident recalls similar controversy earlier this year, when Facebook received a slew of negative press concerning privacy settings, prompting a simplification within the website's structure.
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Women dominate the social sphere
 Women spend 30 per cent more time on social networking sites than men, according to new research carried out by internet market researcher comScore.
In a new white paper titled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet, comScore explains that social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and region-specific sites reach more women than men globally.
According to the findings, 75.8 per cent of women internet users visit social networking sites, compared to 69.7 per cent of men. Women were also found to spend longer on social networks, clocking up an average of 5.5 hours per month compared to 4 hours for men.
The same trend was identified in all five global regions surveyed, with social networks reaching the highest percentage of women in Latin America - 94.1 per cent compared to 91.9 per cent of men. Even in Asia Pacific, where only 54.9 per cent of women web users accessed social networks, the figure was still higher than that of men in the region, which stood at 50.7 per cent.
"We have seen that women across the globe share some similar usage patterns online, such as strong engagement with social networking sites," explained Linda Boland Abraham, comScore chief marketing officer and executive vice president for global development.
"But it's also important to understand gender differences on a regional, country and local level, where cultural differences are continually shaping online usage and content consumption."
Beyond the social sphere, comScore also found that women around the world spend 20 per cent more time on retail sites than men, in particular price comparison websites, while US women were found to make more online purchases (12.5 per cent) than men (9.3 per cent) in February 2010.
Although men were found to dominate some areas of web use, particularly smartphones which displayed a 60/40 gender split, women spend eight per cent more time online globally, with 25 hours each month spent surfing the web.
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