The Twitter phenomenon, in which anybody can tell his or her followers anything -- in 140 characters or less -- now has a payoff that can go beyond the thrill of self-publishing.
When reading this article, you will most likely fall into one of two groups.
The good news: data from governments and other organizations is increasingly open and online. The bad news: it's rather dull.
Now that Apple's iPhone is officially for sale in China, the question is, will the country's 700 million mobile phone users want to buy it?
It's a good time to have an iPhone, be moderately geeky and live in New York.
The group that controls top-level domain codes for Internet addresses is poised to permit non-Latin language codes for the first time in its history.
The next time you say you want to help make the world a better place, try putting your mobile where your mouth is.
Professor Michael Wesch should be flattered.
The European Union has launched a digital library that offers documents dating to nearly 60 years ago, in 23 languages.
Finland has become the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right.
When Jimmy Wales visited the headquarters of Hudong.com last month, he had one question for its founder: is it possible for Wikipedia to be the number one online encyclopedia in China?
When Apple launched its App Store last summer, few imagined it would reach today's numbers so quickly, if ever.
"China is not on the Internet, it's basically an intranet. Everything is banned by the Great Firewall," says Sherman So, co-author of "Red Wired: China's Internet Revolution."
China Unicom, the country's second largest mobile operator, said on Monday it would launch Apple's iPhones on the mainland this week as it announced plans to buy back a minority stake held by South Korea's SK Telecom for $1.28bn.
Vodafone on Tuesday announced it would start selling Apple's popular iPhone in the UK from early next year, in a move that should bolster efforts to turnround the mobile operator's ailing British business.
Even the most cunning of slackers may have finally met their match in a new piece of office surveillance software.
As millions of students across the world go back to school this month, 178 students from 49 countries will turn on their computers and step onto the virtual campus of the world's first global, tuition-free online university.
This summer a San Francisco cafe called the Marsh began advertising to passersby that Foursquare "mayors" of its establishment could get free drinks.
Apple's iPhone is set to make its debut in China by the end of this year after the US company reached agreement with China Unicom, the country's second-largest mobile operator.
Facebook has announced it is to overhaul its privacy settings to make it clearer for users to know who has access to their personal data.
When BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates received a text message from their service provider on July 8 instructing them to install an upgrade on their handsets, they had no idea the application also contained software that, according to BlackBerry's maker, would enable third parties to peek at private information on their phones.
Individual computer users in China may choose whether to install a controversial content filtering system, but the system will be installed on computers in any public place, China's minister of Industry and Information Technology said Thursday.
The United States hailed a World Trade Organization ruling to open Chinese markets and ease controls on the import of U.S. films, DVDs, music downloads and books.
Are comics made to be read on cell phones, Kindles and iPods the new pulp of pop culture?
On the surface, a fast-growing service called Bit.ly performs a small task: it shortens URLs.
The white BMW Mr. Liu drives around this humid coastal city in southern China may be real, but the spiffy little black smart phone he carries with him is definitely fake.
A legal battle has put the future of Skype in jeopardy, according to eBay, which owns the online communications system.
Given the magnitude of Japan's recession, it should perhaps come as little surprise that the fantasy-obsessed animation industry has received a hard dose of reality.
Microsoft knows a good thing when it sees it. And what Google has going on with its search advertising business is a good thing -- which, of course, is why Microsoft wants a bigger piece of it.
An undersea cable plugging east Africa into high speed Internet access went live Thursday, providing an alternative to expensive satellite connections.
It's being presented as the future of cinema and a movie-going revolution.
When Huang Long Hao stepped on stage carrying a kitchen sink to battle against a team of hundreds of Chinese consumers on a recent Saturday afternoon, he knew that he and the sink were most likely going to lose.
The death of Michael Jackson and Internet attacks in the United States and South Korea share a cyber-crime connection.
While China is seriously cracking down on the exchange of virtual currencies for real cash, virtual economies backed by newfound legitimacy elsewhere are quickly gaining ground in the real world.
In death as in life, Michael Jackson continues to light up the Internet.
Michael Jackson has officially become the most popular person on Facebook, with more than 7 million fans on the social networking site.
China has announced it would indefinitely postpone a mandate requiring all personal computers sold in the country to be accompanied by a controversial content-filtering application, state media reported.
Had the government not delayed its controversial order that all computers be equipped with Green Dam by July 1, the result would have been the same -- Chinese computer retailers were far from ready.
China's last-minute decision to postpone a controversial content-filtering application on computers sold there is the latest example of the trouble that Western technology companies face doing business in the world's fastest-growing economy.
An online map showing where swine flu -- or H1N1 virus-- is spreading has gone viral, so to speak.
The frantic hunt for the right cell-phone charger will soon be a thing of the past -- in Europe at least -- as major manufacturers on Monday agreed to introduce a universal adaptor within six months.
Cyber criminals are setting snares that move at the speed of news.
Cyber criminals are setting snares that move at the speed of news.
On Saturday at 10 a.m. it's show time for Brenda Zhang and her subtitle team. They roll out of bed, meet each other online and chat, while their modems download the latest episode of "Prison Break," which just aired half a world away on Friday night in America.
If you like to search for "music lyrics" or "free" things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And "free music downloads" puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm's way of malicious software, known as "malware."
The Chinese government will require all PCs sold in China after July 1 to include software that blocks "harmful" content, news reports said on Monday.
It's hard for an editor to ignore an idea that hundreds of readers have voted for.
No longer is the promised land of Apple's App Store reserved for technical wizards.
Rupert Murdoch's plan to put News Corporation websites behind a pay wall is "going to be like putting toothpaste back in the tube."
When the rest of the publishing world herded to a free model of online news in the 1990s, Gordon Crovitz didn't follow suit. As a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and journalist with Dow Jones, he was part of the team that decided news on the Web should be paid for.
A few nights ago Yulinar (full name withheld), a 23-year-old insurance agent in Indonesia's capital city of Jakarta, was in bed doing her usual ritual before falling asleep: updating her Facebook status and checking her friends' updates.
The European Commission handed down its ruling in a landmark anti-trust case against Intel Wednesday, fining the computer chip giant a record $1.45 billion for abusing its dominant position in the computer processing unit (CPU) market.
The European Commission found leading computer chipmaker Intel guilty Wednesday of violating European anti-trust rules and ordered that it pay a fine of 1.06 billion euros ($1.45 billion).
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move which analysts say could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.
Nip-tuck tourism is already well-ensconced in its ways, but technology used to give prospective clients a user-friendly yet professional virtual space to explore their options is starting to break the skin of the industry.
In the age of digital audio, what does good old-fashioned radio still have to offer?
The next time you go to throw away your old mobile phone, Gert-Jan van Breugel hopes you bury it in a garden instead of tossing it in a garbage can.
A CNN.com journalist has achieved his goal of "tweeting" the London Marathon.
The race will be hard enough without the rain that's in the forecast, but one participant in Sunday's London Marathon is challenging himself further by planning to "tweet" while he runs.
Lectures, slide shows and notes are often boring, but people are using technology to find entertainment in these unlikely places.
Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.
Online retailer Amazon has said a system error caused it to remove a number of gay and lesbian-themed books from its sales charts.
As the "B" in BRIC (one of the world's fastest-growing economies alongside Russia, India and China), Brazil may very well owe its force to an emerging business and technology district in the heart of Sao Paulo, centered around an upscale avenue called Luis Carlos Berrini in the neighborhood of Brooklin.
"Still Alice," written by Lisa Genova, is a novel about a 50-year-old Harvard professor's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. It's also a book, Genova was told, that nobody would want to read.
Some interesting "hyperlocal" Web sites have emerged in the past few years, the idea behind them being to provide news at an extremely local level. Prominent among them is EveryBlock.com, launched last year in Chicago.
Over the years digital signage in public places has become an increasingly common sight in shopping centers around the world.
Amazon's new Kindle 2 has a synthetic voice that can read aloud e-books, articles and blogs. Described as an "experimental" feature, it has surprisingly good command of nuance and inflection, but some people are voicing concerns.
Matthew Baron is one of those gizmo guys, the kind who covets all toys new and shiny.
Yume-Hotaru's first novel was a best-seller in Japanese bookstores, and he wrote it entirely with his thumbs.
So what's your list of top 10 mobile applications of 2008? Does it include Twitterberry, Facebook, MySpace, BioWallet, Locale? Or do you favor Super Monkey Ball, Koi Pond, iSteam, iBeer or iFart?
The question means little to millions living in poverty with neither electricity nor electronics. But there are also millions now weaving the Web 2.0 ever more tightly into their social fabric -- witness the booming popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites -- so the question seems worth asking.
Under fire from tens of thousands of users, the social networking site Facebook said early Wednesday it is reverting to its old policy on user information -- for now.
Users of social-networking sites such as Facebook risk losing control of their personal information because they are not fully aware of the implications for their privacy, a freedom of information expert warned Wednesday.
If it weren't for the Internet, Murong Xuecun might still be working as a sales manager at a car company in the southern Chinese city of Chengdu. That is what he was doing when he started writing his first novel on his office's online bulletin board system back in 2001.
Google launched the latest salvo in the cellphone wars Tuesday with the unveiling of the newest handset to carry its Android platform.
Cell phone makers Tuesday pledged to end one of modern life's chief frustrations --- and introduce a universal charger for handsets by 2012.
Natural disasters like tsunamis or floods will always claim lives, but in the near future some of those lives will be saved by cell phone warnings, thanks to increasing use of a technology called cell broadcast.
A Web site started by a student as a way of staying in touch with friends celebrated its fifth birthday Wednesday as a billion-dollar business and a global phenomenon.
When Shi Rui Huan was led through the back entrance of a China Mobile store on the first day of April last year, he had no idea that he was about to be at the center of one of the most significant events in the history of telecommunications in China.
The Twitter universe is getting complicated. Or, depending on your viewpoint, ever more useful.
Teachers are often portrayed as being clueless about technology, but ever more of them are putting that stereotype to the test.
In the early days of the Web, the mantra "information wants to be free" made the rounds. In music circles now, "music wants to be shared" seems to be the idea.
In the world of music-making, quirky new instruments tend to come and go. But one description-defying gadget from Yamaha, the Tenori-on, might prove to be more than a fad.
You've heard of give-and-take. How about give-and-show?
For some, "telemedicine" brings to mind remote-controlled surgery, or x-rays from Houston being read by radiologists in Bangalore.
This holiday season, it seems highbrow concepts are better off making their commercial debut in low-tech gadgets.
As our mobile devices get smaller and smaller, so are the screens on which we view our mobile content. At the same time, mobile content made for our cellular, podular devices is becoming more and more enriched.
The "semantic Web" does not sound like it's fun and easy to use, but it could make surfing Web 3.0 a more rewarding and interactive experience. Some believe it could even lead to a new form of artificial intelligence.
Who could forget the scene from Tsui Hark's 1997 B-movie "Double Team," where an imprisoned Jean-Claude Van Damme scrapes the skin off his index finger, attaches it to an impromptu mechanical contraption and booby-traps it to hit the scanner at precisely the scheduled time each morning, so that his captors don't notice his escape?
For many of us, our mobile phone is already a smart prosthesis. Not only does it connect us vocally to others, link us to networks of information and entertain us during downtime, it captures what we see and hear.
It's called "The Internet of Things" -- at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected.
As bioengineers continue to build things with the stuff of life itself, the rest of the world is slowly waking up to the power of synthetic biology.
In a new video game for cell phones set to launch in Japan, the point is simple: Roaming players must point their handsets in the right direction to score.
So the credit crunch means this year's six-figure bonus has been put on hold, but you still need to keep up appearances at the country club -- what to do? Why not join the growing number of people who are choosing to rent, rather than buy, life's little luxuries?
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