New features:
New reposts to share what you hear: reposts allow your friends, fans and followers to repost your sounds for others to hear.

A more interactive waveform player: More visible, more interactive, and no more comment clutter.

Play sound continuously: press play and keep listening. Explore another page but while still listening to content.

Easier to navigate.

New search with faster and better results.

However no information on whether you’ll be able to upload and stream higher quality audio over 128 kbit/s.

The move builds on a partnership between Microsoft & Facebook created when the Software-giant bought a 1.6% stake for $240m back in 2007, which is now worth more than $1bn when Facebook goes public.

“This will help Microsoft compete against Google and may encourage people to try switching to Bing”. Greenlight, a London-based digital marketing agency have different opinions suggesting that Microsoft could be encouraging Facebook to launch its own search engine that would be well integrated into the Facebook experience which could capture 22% of the global search market effectively tying its own noose.

Microsoft has nearly doubled its Market share to 15% but mostly at the expense of Yahoo with a search agreement making the results shown on Yahoo are actually performed by Bing, which Microsoft pay a percentage of search ad revenue. Google remains around 66%.

Microsoft has said that the service will be rolled out in the next couple of days in the US but has not mentioned any other locations.

This ruling comes after The Pirate Bay was brought up in UK court on the 30^th April. The government now requires all UK ISPs including O2, BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Sky to prevent all of their users from accessing the site.

However this has led experts to question how effective these blocking systems will be. Proxies and VPN systems allow Chinese residents to tunnel around firewalls, the same security flaws will be apparent in any DNS blocking system.

The UK government also want unrestricted access to residents’ internet records without the need for a warrant. This questions whether ‘Internet Privacy’ will be a thing of the past. Other experts are taking a more optimistic approach. Mark Little says: “I know it’s fashionable to say ‘oh, it just won’t work’, but we should keep trying.”

Has the internet been a pirate haven for too long?

Is it time to police the internet more efficiently?

Will these new policies violate privacy online?

Google’s upcoming algorithm update is to introduce a new search engine ranking penalty for sites that it judges to be over optimised and contain excessive SEO attributes according to Matt Cutts from Google.

Matt Cutts announced that the new over optimisation penalty will be introduced into the search results within the next few weeks. The objective of this update is to create a level playing field for any website that is to be included in its search engine. This will bring a whole new meaning to the phrase “content is king” as it will result in websites that have great content ranking better than websites which have content purely targeted at achieving high search engine listings.

The new algorithm will be looking at different aspects of a website such as whether they have included too many keywords on a page or have exchanged way too many links with other websites.

It will be interesting to see how this new alogorithm will affect the search engine results and if it will influence the way in which websites are created in the future especially where content and SEO elements are concerned.

Developed by co-founders Eben Upton and Peter Lomas, the Pi has also been described as kick-starting the second computing revolution as it will give opportunities for inventors and developers to make their own hardware. One organisation has said they are trying to create an in-car entertainment system where the Pi would be built into the car and controlled via an Android phone over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Another idea is to build a weather station based on the Raspberry Pi which will have a temperature, air pressure, humidity & a speed sensor along with a webcam.

The target price for the whole computer is just £25-£35 and will have a 700MHz ARM chip, VideoCore IV GPU which can handle 1080p resolution and 256 Megabytes of SDRAM which is shared with the GPU. It’s not a lot but it is a good way to get young people more involved with computer technology affordably.  Learn more by visiting the official Rasberry PI website at http://www.raspberrypi.org

The cloud works by storing information on remote servers, this can be user data, photos, documents and some services such as Google enable users to store music files. This can be a real benefit for some users as it grants extra storage space and your files can be accessed anywhere.

Cloud computing allows users to run and operate a software application which is stored on the internet. This is currently big in gaming. ‘Onlive’ offers a service where you can play top-rated games through your browser; this is available on many platforms including tablets. Because all computing is done on the cloud, high specification machines are not required. However it is recommend that you have a high speed internet connection with low latency.

Other services such as iCloud (Apple) can store Contacts, Reminders, Mail, Photos, Documents, this allows users data and settings to be synced across all apple devices. The user can back-up their iPhone/iPad and be able to restore all device information. Steam created by Valve is a PC based game client has a cloud service allowing user game data to be saved including keyboard, mouse and gamepad settings in case of logging in from a different location.

Anyway, enough of what the cloud is… is it safe?

They say it is impossible for the whole cloud to completely crash, as it is a lot like the internet where a single system isn’t reliant on one connection but many. However it is possible to lose information to disasters such as floods or earth quakes wherever the computing centre is. Although it is said that large companies have contingency plans in place for things like this such as backups.

Another big issue regarding the safety of information stored in the cloud is security. As technology and the internet are growing at a massive rate it has also put a lot more pressure on companies for keeping the information secure from potential threats such as hackers. Only a couple of months ago was Steam hacked and the intruders obtained copies of back up files of Steams transactions which included user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. But Jay Heiser, an analyst from technology research company Gartner, says the biggest risk when using the cloud isn’t confidentiality, but the possibility of losing data.

It has a Metro style User Interface but also uses the classic desktop interface that we have seen since Windows 95. Microsoft proposes that this is Windows reimagined and reinvented, whilst maintaining the speed and reliability of Windows 7.

I have read many reviews of what people think about the new OS, some which are pleasant and others not so much. I personally think Microsoft has had to make this big change to keep up with Apple. The tablet market has affected PC sales a great deal over the past few years, as most casual home users would now rather a tablet than a laptop. Obviously you will still have your PC gamers who aren’t going to give up their PCs that easily, but whether they will convert to Windows 8 for desktop PC’s is another story.

It is difficult to tell whether large corporations will deploy Windows 8 considering they would have probably converted to Windows 7 not so long ago and dealing with compatibility issues (if any considering its very much like Windows7) might not be worth it.

As soon as you start Windows 8 you are presented with a mosaic of tiles which are your apps that you can organise and name into groups. Microsoft says the desktop is not the main feature but is built around the metro style. Having experienced the apps it gives a much cleaner look than any iPhone/iPad app and are all based around the same design.

It is important that the interface is easy to use, with more practice it should get easier to use. On a touch display however it should be very easy to use with certain gestures that control how the apps are displayed on the screen. One of the features is you can have the two apps open at the same time one being a quarter of the size which you can flick to alternate which is the smaller app, you can also do this with the desktop.

Another big change is you can login via a Microsoft account such as Hotmail which will be your user account which is able to connect to the cloud so you access your files across multiple devices.

The metro apps are developed using the new Windows Runtime and uses various programming languages such as C++, Visual Basic, C# and JavaScript. There is a wide range because Microsoft wants to get many people involved in it as possible. One thing I have noticed with the App store is there are hardly any apps in there, which may only be to do with the fact it is just the preview version of the operating system. It does need a lot of improvements to be successful and to compete with Apple.

Rumors suggest that the retails version well be launched around October.

• Host it yourself, and display it using your own player
• Upload and embed it from YouTube.

Each method has its positives and negatives, and we shall go through them.

Self hosted

This allows you to have full control over your video content; you have rights to upload any material of your choosing. Visitors to your site are not lost through back links to other YouTube pages, which keep visitors on your page for longer. Often you need to find your own media player which you can add to your site, often these players can be expensive to buy.

If your hosting provider bills based on bandwidth usage, self hosted video can be a problem. If high quality video is being used, you will find your allowance being quickly chewed up. This can be combated by using a fixed or unlimited plan.

YouTube

With YouTube people do not suffer the same bandwidth problems as before, as all content is hosted externally. However this brings problems of its own as embedded videos link back to other YouTube pages, in turn losing your visitors. This can be combated by linking back to your website in video descriptions. Some content may be removed under copyright grounds, which is a problem if you use licence audio in your video.

However there are definately positives to YouTube, it is extremely easy to upload and embed videos. Playlists can be created to collate video reels for different pages and sections. You have limitless uploading space, which means you can keep uploading as much HD video as you wish.

In conclusion, both methods have their advantages and disadvantages. But it really depends what you are looking for at what resources you have at your disposal.

W3Techs evaluates the technologies which it can find on your site. For example Designaweb.co.uk uses the apache server, 81% of websites use this server and provides 43% of all web traffic. The average of these two numbers produces the score for that subsection. The average from subsections makes up the total score for your website.

The higher your score the more up to date and reliable the technologies of your website are. The website encourages you to use the latest versions of PHP and jQuery in order to boost your score. Even if you optimise your site with all of the most up to date versions of your software you will struggle to get a score above 75. This is due to the way that the algorithm functions, so a score above 60 is considered to be very good.

If you have a few spare minutes try testing your own site, you may find a few things that you can tweak and optimise. http://w3techs.com/sites

Google Gravity
This is a neat little application which has been written in HTML5 and JavaScript. It mimics the effects of gravity on the homepage of search engine, “Google”. Elements such as the navigation bar, logo and menu all fall from their respective places plummeting to the bottom of the screen. The user can then move the window around, causing the elements to be hurled around as if they were in a shoe box.

Not only that, individual elements can be picked up with a click of the mouse and dragged all over the screen. I had fun spinning some of the items around, such as the logo and launching it into all the menu items. The whole little application works really well, and has lots of potential to be used in interactive webpages.

Depth of Field
Never before have I seen a webpage render graphics so beautifully. If you are looking for a surreal experience then you defiantly need to check out this project. Moving your mouse changes the angle at which you look at a collection of constantly moving marbles. As you move around you realise how amazing this 3D simulation is, even more so when you remember that you are viewing this inside a webpage.

The depth of field effect is usually used in cinematography and video games; it is really interesting how Doob had managed to incorporate this into a website.

Clouds
Ever wanted to know what it is like to be a bird? Well now you will! One of Doob’s latest ventures allows you to fly through the clouds high in the sky. The application entitled “clouds” uses the WebGL graphics library for JavaScript which allows incorporation of 3D graphics in HTML pages.

I found myself immersed in the experience for several minutes, enjoying flying thousands of feet above the ground.

Links
Google Gravity
Depth of Field
Clouds