Web Log

A roundup of this week's web news in brief

About the car  that tweets

READ:FORD HAS teamed up with the University of Michigan, Microsoft and Intel to come up with ideas for the connected car of the future. The fruits of the project are two Ford Fiestas that are making their way across the US packed with a host of custom-built social media applications.

http://bit.ly/cSRCmF

Your own  TED talk

CREATE:THE TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference has become a global phenomenon with the launch of TEDx events. If you are planning to speak at one of the events, or even if not, watch this tongue-in-cheek video from Sebastian Wernicke where, based on analysis of more than a week's worth of TED talk videos, he advises how to create the perfect speech.

http://bit.ly/bhahIP

Your site in  Geocities mode

VIEW:NOSTALGIA ON the web is a bit strange when you consider that the medium has only been mainstream for the past 10 years or so. Before Twitter, before blogs, there was Geocities – the service that allowed you to create your own basic webpages using a set of templates. Yahoo may have killed the service this year but it lives on through the Geocities-izer, which allows you view any site with those distinctive spinning animations and tinny background music that were the signatures of the service.

http://bit.ly/akbWKS

The most desirable Twitter users

FOLLOW:A BUG in Twitter, discovered and quickly patched this week, allowed unscrupulous users to make other accounts follow them automatically.

Social media blog Mashable has done some analysis on which accounts got the most new follows as a result of the flaw and created an alternative Top 20 list of Twitter users.

Talkshow host Oprah Winfrey tops the list.

http://bit.ly/92p1hC