Ourstory.com

OurStory.com

They take the simple idea that media exists in time, and come up with an end-to-end photo organizer, storage and sharing experience. The photos are organized around events and timelines, and they can be shared and contributed to by multiple users via site or email.
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The timeline collects and organizes your favorite stories, photos, videos, quick notes and letters once and for all.

Their tagline: Capture your stories, save them permanently.

MySpace-style websites perfect for disaster survival.

Disaster officials are encouraging the use of social networking sites to communicate with citizens when a major disaster strikes.

MySpace-style websites perfect for disaster survival.

Dialling emergency services when a major disaster strikes is a typical first response. Now US computer scientists are recommending useful follow-up: logging on to a social networking site, such as MySpace, to share information and survival tips.
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"The current success stories from social networks are so provocative that it is worth giving it a try," says Shneiderman. "We have an opportunity to engage these emerging technologies for social benefit."

Genealogy 2.0

The Next Generation of Genealogy Sites

One new entrant, Geni.com, which was launched last month by a former PayPal executive, offers a new model, based on connecting living relatives free of charge. The site is part genealogy, part six degrees of separation: Instead of paying a fee to research family records buried in archives, it asks users to build their own family trees -- using the knowledge of living relatives -- that eventually will merge into one giant family tree for the world. That is the hope anyway.
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Geni.com is taking some of the elements of popular so-called social-networking and user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia and MySpace. It went live in mid-January and has registered more than 100,000 users since then. It has done no traditional marketing yet, but blogs such as Digg (where users submit news stories) and Tech Crunch (which focuses on technology) passed the word. The site is free. Rather than charging fees, Geni plans on selling advertising and also plans to generate revenue by creating "premium" accounts and selling products, such as posters or coffee-table books of the family trees.
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The Generations Networks -- founded as MyFamily.com, Inc. nearly a decade ago and now operating eight sites including Ancestry.com -- has built its $150 million a year businesses primarily by selling subscriptions to passionate family historians for access to archives that track family lineage, such as census records, draft cards and death certificates. The Provo, Utah-based company is offering more free, ad-supported features, allowing family members to build trees by attaching ancestors' names, photos and stories. Since adding these features last July, Ancestry.com users have created more than one million family trees, with 150 million names, 400,000 photos and 10 million family documents from the site's thousands of record collections.

The article by Emily Steel also has a good list of genealogy sites and their cost.

What Consumers Think About Online Fraud

From RSA, findings from the latest consumer online fraud survey of 1678 adults from 8 countries

Consumers say ‘Username-&-Password’ must go: 91% of account-holders are willing to use stronger authentication methods offered by financial institutions

Trust in the online channel continues to drop: 52% are “less likely” to sign-up for or use online banking; 82% are “less likely to respond” to banking-related e-mails

Moms Turn to Blogs

Women, the principal audience for morning TV, are tuning out in increasing numbers in a Wake-up Call to A.M. News.

"Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist's office," said Lauck, who writes for websites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. "They don't have anything new or particularly relevant to my life. It seems like a lot of fluff. I feel like I can get information faster and cleaner on the Internet."

They are turning the TV off and turning to  Mommy blogs  to swap tales about the pressures of modern motherhood.

"Now that I've been blogging, the morning shows feel like they're staged to me, whereas the mommy blogs are pretty authentic — to the point of being almost too honest some times," said Blecherman, a former senior manager at Deloitte & Touche who now does part-time consulting from home. "It's a way to get really fresh information from other moms, kind of like a virtual moms group. I don't see a need to watch the morning shows."

Social Networks Useful to Share Identity

Sharing video, photos and music with friends and family online or How Social Networks Became Useful.

According to a November eMarketer report by senior analyst Debra Williamson, 2007 ad spending on U.S. social-networking sites will jump to $865 million from $350 million in 2006 a close to three-fold jump. By 2010, the report estimates, spending will reach $2.15 billion.

Meanwhile Bruce Nussbaum calls Identity, the New Paradigm.

A while back, I posted an item on "identity" as a new paradigm that could replace "experience" in our business culture. Academia, especially linguistics, has been talking about the shift from experience to identity for some time. The idea is that the concept of "experience" is passive.
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But life really isn't like that. People are not passive--they make their own lives. People interract with their environments to create their distinct identities. Let me repeat that--people interract with their environments to create their own identities. This amounts to co-creating your own products and services.
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YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Second Life and in the gaming world, you create an identity. Yes, there are avatars and they are the purest form of identity. But for me, it is the identity you build in the real world working with tools provided by companies that is the most interesting. How you configure you iPod or how you organize your cell phone defines you and reflects who you are. TiVo, Nikes, the sessions and workshops you chose and listed at the World Economic Forum, etc. That's your identity. None of that is passive.

The Appearance of Security

Sitekey was touted as the great solution to avoid phishing scams.  When you first log into a Bank of America account, you are asked to choose an image like a basket of fruit.  That becomes your site key or indicator that the Bank of America website you logged into is a real Bank of America site and not a fraudulent one designed to capture your account numbers.

Problem is less than 10% of online customers with site keys will stop and go no further on a so-called Bank of America website that does NOT have the image.

Study finds security flaws on web sites of major banks.

Internet security experts have long known that simple passwords do not fully defend online bank accounts from determined fraud artists. Now a study suggests that a popular secondary security measure provides little additional protection.
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The Harvard and M.I.T. researchers, however, found that most online banking customers did not notice when the SiteKey images were absent. When respondents logged in during the study, they saw a site maintenance message on the screen where their image and phrases should have been pictured. The error message also had a conspicuous spelling mistake, further suggesting something fishy,.

Elder Surfing

Surfing net is top pastime for elderly

Browsing the internet has overtaken DIY and gardening to become the favourite pastime of older people, according to a survey.


The internet is named as one of the favourite pastimes of retired Britons

The current generation of "silver surfers" spends an average of six hours online each week, research by the insurance company AXA found.