In the old movies the first thing they do when a woman goes into labour is to send the man out of the room to boil water.

Those days are long gone.

First of all the woman can schedule a Caesarean section, taking most of the guess work out of the delivery date.

Secondly many men choose to be part in the delivery with medical professionals in attendance.

Thirdly if the unexpected happens without warning, a quick labour ensues, and you’re not a medical professional, there’s always Google.

This happened to a couple Marc and Jo Stephens from Cornwall in the UK.

When Jo went into labour in the middle of the night, instead of panicking, Marc did what most net surfers would do. He went directly to the source with all the answers – Google, of course.

He typed in “how to deliver a baby” into the search engine.

Google led him to YouTube and birthing videos. Although we don’t exactly which of the available birthing videos Marc looked at to help deliver their baby, he had a few to choose from.

Mother, father and baby are said to be doing well.

My Broadband reports that the top 10 fastest growing websites in South Africa as follows:

1 – Sunday World (187% growth)
2 – Dispatch (181%)
3 – RealEstateWeb (91%)
4 – Sowetan (79%)
5 – The Herald (77%)
6 – Yellow Pages (71%)
7 – Food24 (68%)
8 – MoneyWeb (50%)
9 – Landbou (48%)
10 – SuperSport (45%)

Funny enough they are all owned by conglomerate media houses and most of them are newspapers.

More and more companies are realising the importance of interacting with their customers and readers online. Many of them are missing the mark when it comes to customer services though.

Companies with impressive websites facilitate effortless transactions, but once they have your money, try contacting many of them online again.

It is one of my pet peeves when dealing with online purchases when an e-mail query gets dealt with days later or not at all. My expectation is that when I purchase online, my query must be dealt with online.

Recently I had the misfortune of contacting DSTV through their website. After an immediate automated response – no follow up on my query a whole week later.

On the other hand I e-mailed a query to Autopage Cellular on the same day. Within in a few minutes I had a query number and another 15 minutes later my question was answered. All online!

Of course DSTV has no competition and can treat their customers in which ever way they choose to.

Other than subscribing to a multitude of rss feeds, I’m addicted to news aggregator sites like google news, muti, amatomu, techmeme, and a whole host of others.

So it was with great delight that I discovered Yahoo’s latest creation when I opened my Outlook rss feeds this morning. It is called Yahoo Glue and can be found at http://glue.yahoo.com/

It has all the latest results from various sources, including images, videos, news, blogs, articles, etc.

Some interesting studies have been publiziced recently about the brain and its health.

The first study declared drinking to be harmful to your brain and apparently the amount of alcohol consumed doesn’t matter!

Tell that to your heart!

Apparently people who drink alcohol have a smaller brain capacity than those who don’t drink and its worse for women.

The second study brings better tidings for net surfers.

It appears that surfing the internet is good for your brain. CNN who also reported on the first study above, tells of another study in Google does a brain good. This study done with older people aged 55-78 concluded that using a search engine brought higher brain activity to the critical thinking part of the brain.

Could this mean if you incrementally increased your drinking in direct relation to the amount of time spent surfing the internet, you could even things out?

Microsoft recently unveiled their aggregator site called Microsoft/web, joining the likes of Techmeme and Google News.

According to Webpronews:

So far, there seems to be a lack of quantity for new content. You can look at any category and view the listings by date and easily see posts dating back to August within the first 20 results. It’s clear that many new popular and important tech stories are absent, but like Cooney says, they know the content isn’t where it needs to be yet, so I’m not going to judge it too harshly at this early stage.

To which Lauren Cooney from GPM Web Platform & Standards, Microsoft, replied:

“-We’re constantly looking for new sites to aggregate content from, and we’re going to be adding the digg/technology page and a few others. If you have suggestions, let me know and I’ll add, as long as it’s relevant for ppl working on the web. And yes, we’re going to be pumping this full of more relevant content too. I hate a stale web page as much as anyone.
-if you check out the product tab, you can actually see that we’ve streamlined MSFT’s web stack installation and provided a bunch of easy to install products that are relevant to web developers too – for free.”

MyBroadband reports of Mxit’s precedent setting domain name dispute victory.

According to the report mixit was registered in 2005 before mxit started its services. The mixit site however, was used as a domain parking site which uses keywords similar to the original site to earn advertising revenue. The parking site serves no other purpose than to earn revenue.

Quote directly from the MyBroadband article :

“According to Reinhardt Buys of Buys Inc. Attorneys who acted for MXit, the decision is of particular importance because it sets a number of precedents and corrected incorrect conclusions reached in previous decisions.

The mixit.co.za domain was registered by an individual, Andre Steyn, as far back as April 2005 and before MXit formally launched its services.

Although the domain name initially linked to an empty website, it was later parked in a so-called advertising revenue services called Sedo Parking.

Sedo Parking and similar online revenue services allow domain name owners to park domain names and link to websites that display keywords and phrases determined by the domain name owner who receives payment for visits to the website and clicks on the pre-selected keywords. “

The implications are huge for other sites hoping to parasite off other popular brands.

At one time or another, we’ve all been made aware of South Africa’s brain drain – especially professionals in fields that require high technical skills.

A concerted effort is being put in promoting Maths and Science as school subjects and government as well as the private sector are making bursaries available for tertiary studies in these fields.

Sangonet featured this topic in two articles ” Maths and Science vs Morals and Values and Maths and Science vs Morals and Values – A Reply to Julie Staub which debates the issues.

3 days old Sci/Tech news!

Looks like the season for search engines to up their game.

Early in October, news broke ofMicrosoft’s Live Search and its SearchPerks reward program.

A few days later Google, not complacent with having the largest search engine market share, launched Search for Blogs.

Lo and behold within a few days Ask.com launched their updated search engine.

If your head is not already spinnning then wait for it…there’s more.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced their partnership with with Microsoft LiveSearch!

Yahoo was the only one of the big 4 who was left out of the loop – until now. Finally getting in on the act, Yahoo revealed the start of a roll out of Yahoo Web Analytics!

So this morning I logged onto Facebook after a week of dodging replying to messages and reading about my friends activities. Actually I seldom log onto Facebook, because I am already too easily distracted.

The log on screen looked different, quite nice.

Facebook is getting really interactive these days first partnering with CNN and now with Live Search to try and keep users logged in as long as possible. Not a bad idea if you realise that many people log onto Facebook all day long while at work.

Users can now search for friends on Facebook or do a web search, using Live Search!

Not bad going!

If you appreciate Microsoft’s efforts in getting more search market share with Live Search, then this is a big leap in the right direction.

I might soon have start logging into Facebook more often!

Ask.com has revamped their website from today!

Not content with being number 4 in the search engine market, they added some new features to their search.

They claim to deliver the best and fastest results, every time.

I tried a search for 5th grade Maths worksheets on gigapedia and Google and so far Ask.com came up trumps!