A new web tool that is considered by some experts to be ‘as important as Google’ is due to be made available to the public in May 2009.

Wolfram Alpha is a free ‘computational knowledge engine’ and will answer users questions directly, rather than display web pages as with current search engine results.

“Like interacting with an expert, it will understand what you are talking about, do the computation, and then present you with the results says Dr Stephen Wolfram the inventor of Wolfram Alpha.”

Watch this space!

There has been a lot written about Google and the power that it wealds. Like it is some sort of all powerful monster squashing everything in its path!

Latest complaints currently revolve around its ‘Street Views’ application. In the U.K. there has been complaints about, among other things, a picture of someone throwing up at the side of the road.

In my opinion some people are missing the point. Google is always adding apps to their free service, in the hope that it will keep our custom, their unchallenged position as number one search engine has allowed them to pioneer new ideas (with the financial backing for experimentation). Google has become an endless source of information.

Who hasn’t Googled to find out some trivial info, or where to go to visit x, y or z. Google is great at thinking outside the box and their primary goal is to stay popular. So you can always expect more from this inventive company.

Julian Wilkins

There has been a lot written about Google and the power that it wealds. Like it is some sort of monster squashing everything in its path.

Latest complains seem to revolve around its ‘Street Views’ application. In the U.K. there has been complaints about, among other things, a picture of someone throwing up at the side of the road.

In my opinion people are missing the point. Google is always trying to add value to a free service, in the hope that it will keep our custom. I, for one, think that Google is an endless stream of information.

Who hasn’t Googled Google to find out some trivial info, or where to go to visit x, y or z. I think Google is fab and maybe all they are guilty of thinking outside the box. Their primary goal is to stay popular. So you can always expect more from this inventive, if not always focused, group.

Julian Wilkins

Ever wondered what your potential customers are thinking?

Having a social media account can be useful for so many reasons. One aspect that we have found particularly useful has been the opportunity to talk to potential customers. Opening up lines of communication allows us to remove obstacles that interfere with potential sales.

Discussions with recent consumers have shown one of our clients needed more information about International postage.

Something that was highlighted and now gives the website another focus to meet customers needs.

Buyer information is one of the many advantages of social media.

Julian Wilkins

It’s that sudden moment of realisation that the copy and paste you’ve just done has over written a newer version of a file and you don’t have a backup! All you want to do is cry out loud but when you’ve have no backup no one can hear you scream.

This happened to me recently (I know; you should always work with a backup but I was just making a quick change and thought it wouldn’t be a problem) and I copied over a CSS file that contained site specific styling and subsequently lost the formatting that had taken a fair while to put together. I’d like to point out that this happened on our development server so no live sites were affected but the situation could very well apply.

I was stunned into silence for at least 20 seconds before coming to terms with my heinous error and getting on the internet to try and retrieve a cached version of the file from one of the many browsers on my machine. This is something that I remember doing in the past and was hoping it would help me out again. However my browsers had other thoughts and were proving to be less than helpful:

IE7 seems to be deleting my session cache once I close the browser down. I had already deleted the Firfox cache whilst making the CSS changes that I copied over. I was going to look at Safari as a last resort so turned to Google Chrome. This proved to be my lifeline as a quick trawl through the search pages returned for: “cached css files chrome” gave me this: ChromeCacheView.

The small exe file runs up and interrogates the cached indexing history for the browser and displays a list of all the content you have viewed, including Filename, URL, Type etc. From this (large!) list of content I spotted the CSS file I was after and using F4 copied the file to a location on my desktop from where I could view its contents. Although it was an out of date copy it did provide me with the much needed complex styling I was after.

So, after taking some time to reinstate the changes lost, I was able to recreate the CSS and the website was back to the way it was without anyone noticing.

Of course for the eagle-eyed amongst you the lesson for today is: Think twice before copying over a file and never, ever do anything without a backup.

April 7, 1969: The publication of the first ‘request for comments,’ or RFC, documents paves the way for the birth of the internet.

Picking the actual date in history when the Internet was first created is tricky, but April 7 is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net. On this day in history the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies discussing internet technology, the first time any evidence exists of the proposed creation of an interconnecting computer network system.

RFC documents provide a way for engineers and others to kick around new ideas in a public forum; sometimes, these ideas are adopted as new standards by the Internet Engineering Task Force. The coining of the term ‘internet’ was published in one such RFC in 1974.

Not wishing to be unpatriotic the Miromedia team we were glad to find that the British Post Office was behind the international packet-switched network service (IPSS) in 1978. The IPSS was developed from these RFC proposals and the network grew rapidly from Europe to the US and Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981.

January 1st, 1983 also has its supporters. On that date, the National Science Foundation’s university network was made live, providing an interconnected database and communications network for the US universities and beyond. It was this system that became a precursor to the World Wide Web we all use today.

Like all 40 year olds, the internet has swollen in size since its younger days. But now a multi-lingual 40 year old the internet is roughly 35% English, 65% non-English with the Chinese at 14%. Like many other 40 year olds the internet is also very busy at work, in fact recent figures suggest that the internet is just about to tip the 1.6 billion users mark! Google’s index now stands at more than 1 trillion pages at the last official count!

And what does the internet spend the majority of its time looking at, pretty young girls like other 40 year olds maybe? While using email and doing research are the still the main activities, getting info about products and services, and checking news, weather, etc. are ranked far, far higher when compared to pornography!

So all of the Miromedia Team raise their glass to the internet on its 40th Birthday!!