Latest in web trends

The Internet has brought together cultures and nationalities that had previously never really interacted very much. The openness has also fanned perceptions and prejudices on all sides. The following are some of those notions that I realized people from other countries believe about Americans, and how Americans sometimes feed those beliefs through their online behavior.
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Every company has its secret sauce, and Facebook is no different. The social network utilizes a special sharing algorithm called "EdgeRank" which decides what your friends see whenever you interact with the pages of companies and brands. How does the algorithm work? The magic is a bit vague, but you've probably seen the evidence of its existence.
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Many of you remember the Dotcom Boom that happened in the late nineties. All it took to make your stock go up was a ".com" or an "e-" attached to your company's name. Of course, all good things come to an end, and the bubble burst in the year 2000. With that said, there were several popular sites around this era that just seemed to vanish. What happened to them? We have 5 of the top websites that came into existence because of the boom.
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Aaron Swartz was behind things we’ve all heard of, like RSS and Reddit, and believed academic journal articles should be free for all. He downloaded thousands of articles using his university log in, and was arrested and charged for it. Now that the dust on this case has settled somewhat, it’s time to take a look at this question again: should government-funded research articles be free for all online?
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With 2012 coming to a close, it's that time of the year again when major tech companies share their year in review with us. With Facebook, Twitter and Google, these retrospectives are always fascinating because they give a tremendous amount of insight into what millions of Internet users around the world are searching for, what they're talking about, and what events, people and topics are grabbing their attention.
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A small blank square and a blinking cursor. A window through which the entire world exists. You only have to say the right word – any word – and your every desire will be delivered. But traveling to the wrong place can bring very real tragedy and horror to a family, and traveling there is as simple as typing in the wrong word into that little square box. Then there’s the question of those monsters and demons. What are they, where are they, and how dangerous are they? We took a long, hard look.
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Many people get on sites such as Omegle and ChatRoulette to meet exciting new people and have interesting conversations. However, a lot of the time, they will encounter several other different types of chat personas along the way. That said, it would seem as if not everybody is on these sites just for a friendly chat. However, I've narrowed down about five of these personas for you to take a look at.
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"User reviews" are actually a pretty recent phenomenon. Before the prevalence of the Internet, user reviews were called testimonials, and you’d only see them on TV commercials and product pages. Nowadays, anyone can write anything on any product - and there’s no filter for what you can say. Enter the problem of fake and falsified user reviews.
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Assuming you play online then you're guaranteed to have met certain types of online gamer. It's unavoidable. There are a wide range of them out there, but they can all be pared down to just five main types (and their opposites). You can try and ignore them, but they're there regardless, plying their trade as an annoying n00b, an incessant talker, a quiet quitter, a tiresome cheat, or an unwilling team player.
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We all make mistakes from time to time. It's natural, a part of life, a learning curve which we use to better ourselves. Typos are no exception. They happen often, and if writing forms a big part of your life, whether for your job or for sheer entertainment, typos can be a tiresome subject matter that can get you down when they're pointed out to you. Repeatedly.
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Viral videos are accidents. I don’t think they can be created deliberately, though I am sure people try. A video going viral can launch careers and give someone their 5 minutes of YouTube fame. So, how do you catch the best ones before they happen or as they are happening? Keep tabs on these seven viral video sites to watch what’s buzzing right now.
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It's very easy to track the goings-on of the web. When Web 2.0 came into full bloom, The Internet became more social and trendy than ever. Now, not only do we want to be able to track these trends, but we want instant access to trends that are hot and buzzing. For that, I've got three very simple and popular websites that I enjoy using.
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I have a criteria of about 8 to 10 items that I personally look for when I do SEO analysis, but of course one of the most important is search volume. Having monitored the search volume for thousands of different phrases over the course of time, I have come to recognize a few very large, not insignificant patterns in how humanity around the world tends to use the Internet - or at least how they use the search engines.
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We know all too well about the browser wars, don't we? Firefox is better at this, Chrome is better at that and so on. While it's great that we have all this competition going on right now about which browser is ultimately the best, I've been thinking recently about whether all of this will exist in the future.
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Just in time for the Iowa Caucuses, Google released this week its US election coverage website which brings together the news, opinions, videos, and other resources that you might find in a Google search on a particular presidential candidate or issue. Google contends that "there’s no question that the Internet is set to deliver more political information, opinion and news than any other medium throughout the 2012 U.S. elections".
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