Your World News

A Pennsylvania judge has offered three men who are facing possible prison time parole if they learn to read and write English. Also, in addition to learning English the men are required to get their GED and find a full-time job.

Luzerne County Judge Peter Paul Olszewski noted that all three men, Ricardo Dominguez, Luis Reyes and Kelvin Reyes-Rosario, had to use a translator when they showed up to court and pleaded guilty for criminal conspiracy to commit robbery.

According to the judge’s ruling the three men will have to return with their parole officers in a year to take an English test. What do you think about the judge’s sentence given to these three men? I personally feel that in the end it will benefit them.

After threatening to kill a criminal court judge, Joshua Beadle was held in contempt and ordered to serve 10 days in jail for every word after the judge ordered the man to stop with the threatening comments. The judge stopped counting at 70, which results in Beadle serving 700 days in jail.

That is not all to the story either. Beadle had to wear a special spit mask at the hearing on Monday because in January he spit at the judge. He missed the judge and hit a clerk’s computer. Beadle did, however, apologize to the clerk and said that his target was the judge.

ClipBlast, which is a very popular video search and discovery platform, announced today that they have partnered with KickApps, which is the leading on demand social media platform. Using this partnership KickApps is launching a new feature on Yuku that lets members search, play and share videos using ClipBlast technology.
Right now ClipBlast’s video index is the largest video content “library,” and will be a nice addition to KickApps’ new one-click embed feature that is available to Yuku members. This new feature will allow members to search and preview videos from ClipBlast’s video index and then easily embed the video directly to their posts and blogs.
“We’re delighted to provide Yuku members with an exceptional video experience,” said Gary Baker, ClipBlast! founder and CEO. “Yuku members can search the Video Web with ClipBlast!, then preview, post and share videos they’re interested in – all within the Yuku environment.”
FYI: Yuku, which is wholly owned by KickApps, “is profiles, image sharing, blogs and discussion boards all in one place.”

According to a press release, KCM Holdings Corp and GEENIUS, which is a Web 3.0 internet company developing a new social networking platform to bring revenue to its users, has signed an agreement, and gives GEENIUS the necessary funding it needed to launch thousands of subject specific communities.

GEENIUS is expected to bring about the “new Web 3.0 intellectual property sales economy,” which is going to take social networking beyond simple communications. With the tools already in place to allow users to build e-businesses and communities, GEENIUS will provide users with a way to sell their content.

“We have finally turned the corner from an Internet that is mainly static, to one that generates massive amounts of revenue,” says Ed Kang, COO of KCM. “Web 1.0 was all about eyeballs – there was no real revenue generating power. Web 2.0 was about user-created content, as is evidenced by YouTube and MySpace. Web 3.0 is where those same users creating content all around the world, can finally put a price tag on their content and sell it. GEENIUS turns every Internet user into an entrepreneur, and every idea into a profitable product – this is the cottage industry reinvented.”

No word yet as to when GEENIUS will get this new social networking concept going, but they are expected to become a publicly traded company by Q3 2008. I am certain more information will become available in the coming months, and when it does I will be sure to keep you informed.

Woopra is a fairly new web-tracking and analytics site that will work on any site; however, it is mainly targeted for small to medium websites that get anywhere from a few hundred page views a day to over ten thousand. This is a great tool for people who have a blog and are looking for detailed information about their site and their visitors

There are several features about this website analytics tool that give it an advantage over some others. These features include live tracking, rich interface, activity search, visitor tagging, instant messaging, real-time analytics, notifications and developer tools. With the developer tools users get a “full featured API that allows extracting a website’s data into several common application.”

Also, Woopra has a very nice graphical user interface, which gives you all the results you need about your website in graphs, charts and panels. Right now Woopra is in beta, but you can sign-up to try their service. I just signed up today and will post a comment on what I think about them in a few days.

A 22-month-old child died at a home in a local Orlando, Florida suburb as a result of a gunshot wound.  The wound is believed to be self inflicted.  Police officers arrived at the home to find family members holding the child.

The boy died at the scene, despite the best efforts of the responding emergency personnel.  Police stated that the father of the child stated that the boy had found a .38 caliber revolver and shot himself.  Investigators talked to all people present at the household and took their statements.  There have been no charges filed at this time, and police have stated that they are waiting on the autopsy results before such a decision will be made.  The names of the victim or his family have yet to be released.

Userplane, which is a communication platform for online communities, announced today that they are going to speed up the release of their new mediaplayer. Userplane Mediaplayer will support publishing, hosting, video uploading and is going to fill the void that VideoEgg left when they departed.

Userplane Mediaplayer will add software applications such as Webmessenger 2, Webchat 2 and Webrecorder to its current Userplane suite software. Using the new interactive mediaplayer, users will be able to upload videos, and website owners can view and confirm the content before publishing it. This will allow publishers to get in on Userplane’s ad sharing revenue program.

From the release:

The release of Mediaplayer solidifies Userplane’s brand as a complete social networking platform solution,” said Michael Jones, CEO of Userplane and senior vice president of AOL. “We look forward to assisting VideoEgg customers in making a seamless and painless transition to Mediaplayer.

Currently Userplane has over 220,000 publishers, which makes them “the leading white-label application provider for online communities.”