Our poll last week was an eye-opener. We asked: in your current Web activities where an identity is required (i.e. you can't be anonymous) do you ever fake all or part of your identity? In the end 1,542 votes were cast and 57% of people said they regularly OR always faked their Web identity (41% regularly and 16% always). 20% of respondents said they always use their real identity on the Web, while 23% admitted to occasionally faking it. The comments make for interesting reading, for example this one from Jan1:
"If I deal with institutions or people that I do commerce with you get my true me.
but for sites who just want to put me in a database, I fake it."
For more analysis on Web identities, check out Jitendra's post called Nobody Knows You're A Dog 2.0 (you can blame me for the title). Also a lot of great comments on Digg on this topic.
Charles Knight's post profiling some of the best alternative search engines really got peoples juices going. With over 90 comments on the post, not to mention the discussion in Slashdot and Digg, well there's more than enough to get you thinking - and testing new search engines!
]]> Web NewsThe consumer launch of Windows Vista and also Microsoft Office 2007 was 30 January. New Zealand got to unwrap the shrink-wrapped goodies first in the world. Meanwhile Google released stellar Q4 results and Yahoo ramped up its Brand Universe and released OurCity. Also Flickr upset some of its old skool users and Digg fought back against the gamers. Just another week of push and shove in the tech blog world :-)
For those of you who don't think we cover enough startups, well feast your eyes on these detailed write-ups from last week. Innovative web technology galore...
Or if in-depth analysis is more your thing, we won't let you go away empty handed either...
That's a wrap for another week!
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