On Message with Ben Gross

The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducts nationally stratified surveys of American households on a wide range of topics related to internet use. Pew regularly publishes reports and data on trends they find.
China’s Online Population Explosion What It May Mean for the Internet Globally… and for U.S. Users: Although just over 10% of people [...]

Xandros Acquires Scalix - Linux E-mail, Calendaring and Messaging Company: Xandros is primarily known for their desktop Linux distribution with that has a look Similar to Windows XP. Scalix is a Microsoft Exchange competitor that run on Linux and other Unix variants that is compatible with Microsoft Outlook and has both commercial and open source [...]

The third Federation for Identity and Cross-Credentialing Systems (FiXs) conference will be held from July 31-August 1 at the Hyatt Regency Monterey in Monterey, California. “This two-day conference and exhibition will bring together private and public sector stakeholders who are developing, implementing and maintaining global identity management systems.”

The ISPCON Fall 2007 conference will be held from October 16-18 at San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California. The deadline for speaker proposals is July 27th. ISPCON is a “conference and tradeshow for wired and wireless ISPs, CLECs, webhosts, VoIP providers and other Internet-based business professionals.”

Internet Phone Company Halts Operations - New York Times: SunRocket, the second largest, Voice over IP (VoIP) provider with more than 200,000 customers has shut down. Options for current customers to move appear to be in turmoil.
IEEE Spectrum: The Athens Affair: A long, but fascinating analysis of the Greek wiretapping scandal involving wiretapping and [...]

Is The Page View Dead?: Nielsen/NetRatings is dropping ranking based on page views. The page view metric can be a poor indicator for sites heavily based on AJAX, Flash, Java or other interactive technologies. Nielsen will add metrics such as total time spent on the site which will be a good indicator for some properties [...]

FreeBurner for Everyone: Two features that were previously an extra charge are now free. FeedBurner Stats PRO provides an additional level of detail about feed views and items clicked on. MyBrand allows you to maintain your FeedBurner feed using your own domain.
Turing test challenges spam filters: Spammers have how moved on to distributing pump and [...]

RIM unconcerned by BlackBerry bugging software: The FlexiSPY software must be installed manually, but is able to record text messages, call logs, emails, users locations and remotely turn on the BlackBerry microphone.
14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature: Mashable has provided an extensive review of personalized home pages. These are worth paying attention to given [...]

Apple Developer Connection has posted official information on developing web applications for the iPhone.
Tero Ojanpera - Putting the Internet in Your Pocket: an IT Conversations podcast with Nokia’s CTO.
release 26: oohs and ahhs: The online instant messenger service Meebo released an update to their Meebo Rooms called Partner Edition designed for high traffic sites. The [...]

All aboard: Google has acquired GrandCentral Communications, a service for managing phone and voice features such as simultaneous ring and web based voicemail. Signups are temporarily limited.
Nielsen Adds to Cellphone Tracking - New York Times: By acquiring the Telephia service Neilsen adds the ability to track consumer behavior such as mobile messaging and web browsing [...]