In order to honour the number of online enthusiasts in the MTV generation, the music channel has announced plans to launch a drama which is only available over the internet. Being Victor is MTV’s first foray in to the world of web-only drama. (more…)

Three forward-thinking ‘citizen scientists’ have set their home computers to work to search the skies, resulting in the discovery of an astronomical object in the sky. (more…)

In a bid to enhance research and innovation, the European Commission has requested that people submit applications for research grants totaling 6.4bn Euros. This constitutes the largest sum of money dedicated for research, to date.
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Over seventy thousand blogs have lost their platform this week, following allegations that a blogger has been posting up terrorist links and information, and a list of al-Qaeda targets on a site. (more…)

A new manifesto has been released calling for every person with the UK of working age to be connected to the internet, by 2012. The ‘Network Nation’ movement has issued the manifesto to raise awareness of the exclusion of retired, unemployed and disadvantaged UK citizens from the web. Internet access is now considered to be a basic human right, as evidenced by the use of internet in prisons. (more…)

This week’s GP annual conference, in association with the British medical Association, has questioned the value of the NHS Direct online patient service. As part of the government initiative to reduce online spending, the NHS Direct service has been criticised as being unnecessary and detrimental to patient care. (more…)

Distance learning giants The Open University has this week smashed a world record for the amount of iTunes tracks to be downloaded. They are the first organisation to achieve 20 million downloads. iTunes U, the educational space used by universities globally to share and distribute educational material online, has reached massive download figures of around 250 million. (more…)

This week sees a number of changes to web domain naming conventions, heralding a more diverse future for URLs globally. Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers have now approved web domains which include Chinese characters. This new ruling will make it much easier for Chinese speakers to navigate the web. (more…)

Jon James, director of Virgin Media’s broadband, has issued a statement saying that broadband services will be enhanced with speeds of up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps)by the end of the year. Currently, Virgin Media provides broadband services to 70,000 customers across the UK, at a speed of 50Mbps. (more…)

France is the latest country to be drawn in to the Google data row, as officials continue to investigate whether the search engine giant obtained information about its users by contravening privacy laws. Google is accused of gathering and retaining sensitive data including passwords, when it was developing its Street View service. (more…)

Good news everybody, the tech recession is over. That’s according to industry analysts, Forrester who predict that technology spending in the US will grow by 6.6% this year taking it up to $568 billion. If this proves to be the case the upturn is predicted to have a knock-on effect across the world, particularly in the UK, the country whose economy matches the US system most closely.
Forrester are predicting 11.2% growth in Western and Central Europe whilst Pacific Asia and Latin America are also expected to do nicely with 7.8 and 7.8% growth respectively expected. (more…)

In November last year BBC Director General, Mark Thompson confirmed the BBC.co.uk will not be safe from cost cutting measures to be rolled out across the corporation in the coming years, earmarking 2012 for the start of the roll-back across the corporations online services. Now however, it seems that the cuts could be brought forward, with the BBC’s online activities expected to be a major part of the BBC strategic review – a report that is set to be published before the next general election. (more…)

James Harding, the Editor in chief of the Times newspaper, has revealed that his publication’s online arm, Times Online will begin charging for access to content in Spring 2010. According to Harding the prospective payment model will include two different methods of payment, a 24 hour pass, and a subscription model. Details are still sketchy but the one day pass is expected to cost about as much as a copy of the print edition which currently stands at 90p. (more…)

To cries of ‘surely not’ from men everywhere, a new survey has revealed that women are more practical when it comes to gadgets than men. The survey, conducted by the Gadget Helpline, found that women tended to be more practical when it came to gadget related problems than men, and were more inclined to simply read the instructions rather than rely on their supposed genetic ability to fix technological issues. (more…)