Tech Scrape

Microsoft’s new toy allows for a more seamless walk down an online avenue. New street-level imaging software developed by Microsoft could help people find locations more quickly on the Web. The software could also leave new space for online advertising.

Digital encoding could catch future informants. Attorney General Eric Holder’s new probe into Wikileaks’s posting of 91,000 war documents will likely find that tracing the path of the documents back through the Internet is next to impossible. But watermarks–if they were embedded in the files–could reveal the whistle-blower.

A malicious site can find out what social-networking groups you belong to–and then figure out your identity. People often get categorized by social group–jock, geek, soccer mom. The same is true for our online identities: If you have an account on Facebook or LinkedIn, you might also belong to several groups on each site.

Search engines get smarter at predicting when we’ll respond to a pitch. Bing users might not notice, but the Microsoft search engine tends to show fewer advertisements alongside search results than its rivals do. The reason might be that advertisers are drawn more to Google, but Microsoft says the difference also comes from an artificial-intelligence technique that aims to deliver only the most relevant ads.

The online encyclopedia is exploring ways to embrace the semantic Web. As a global resource built from the spare time of millions of volunteers, Wikipedia may be the epitome of Web 2.0. But the Wikimedia Foundation , a nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, among other projects, is now thinking about how to make it a linchpin of Web 3.0, or the semantic Web.

A proposed system would let cloud developers control the way their data travels across different machines. Cloud computing services have taken off in recent years. They give businesses flexible access to computing hardware and resources without all the burden of having to manage infrastructure themselves. But there are times when some customers might benefit a great deal from managing the underlying infrastructure.

Users can share information, but the network only sees encrypted data. Researchers at Microsoft have developed mobile social networking software that lets users share personal information with friends but not the network itself.

The government says tight controls are compatible with vibrant growth. China, with the most Internet users of any country in the world, has issued its first government whitepaper declaring an overall Internet strategy –one that advocates Internet growth while implicitly defending censorship policies amid global concern over online repression and China-based cyber espionage.

Can advertisers take advantage of users’ online social activities? Google seems to have nailed the online search advertising market, finding the magic formula to attract both advertisers and consumers. The Web is still wide open, however, for approaches to advertising that catch users at other points in their online lives, perhaps when they’re not actively searching for something. At TechCrunch Disrupt, a Web technologies conference in New York last week, there was a crowded field of companies hoping to provide new ways for brands to advertise online or to consolidate existing efforts to communicate through social media.

An open and free video format offers new opportunities for Web programmers. Google committed a substantial act of charity on the first day of its annual I/O developers’ conference in San Francisco this week, giving away a piece of intellectual property acquired just three months ago at a cost of more than $120 million.