These days, taking a plunge into the world's waters can be dangerous, and it's not just because of jellyfish and sharks.

On Wednesday, the European Environmental Agency (EEA) launched with Microsoft a new Web site called "Eye on Earth" that shows the water quality scores of 21,000 bathing sites across Europe on a map, structure pollution data widely available for the first time in an easy format. Eye without ceasing Earth offers five languages: Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German and English.

The EEA and Microsoft have agreed to a five-year partnership to develop the site, which will eventually be expanded to show air pollution, biodiversity and national park information.

"It inclination be one complete picture of the state of the environment in a community," said Gülcin Karadeniz, EEA spokeswoman.

Oceans, rivers and lakes are increasingly in peril because of pollution caused by human activity. But a broad picture of which spots are good and which aren't has not been easily accessible, Karadeniz said.

The EEA keeps close track of the damage by collecting technical reports from the 27 countries in the European Union, but those reports are hard for lay people to interpret, although those reports are posted on the EEA's Web site, Karadeniz said.

"We always had a problem," Karadeniz said. "We do reach the media, we conclude reach the scientific community but we have never succeeded in reaching the beachgoers."

The water quality data is integrated with Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping program, which can show both maps and satellite shots of popular areas.

The complex technical data on the quality of the water has been distilled to a stop-light ranking system: Green means the water complies with E.U. standards, red means it falls below standards and yellow means the site hasn't been sufficiently tested.

rabble who call upon a particular spot can provide comments as well as their own lay ranking of the swimming site with either a thumbs-up icon, thumbs down or a parallel to the horizon hand indicating a "so-so" rank.

E.U countries are required to regularly collect and analyze sprinkle and calender samples. At the end of the dizziness season, the data is sent to the EEA. The data is then forwarded to the European Commission, which writes a report, Karadeniz said.

The EEA is using Microsoft's SQL server database to collect data, which has a geospatial feature that can take data from a particular area and plot it on a map, said Ludo de Bock, worldwide Microsoft director for the E.U. and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

The feature besides enables new data coming into the EEA to be uploaded to the Web site in real time, Karadeniz aforesaid. Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Portugal and Slovakia will be able to send 2008 data.

More countries are expected to be able to rapidly send up-to-date information. Historical data for some sites going back as far as 18 years will also be posted.

Microsoft has also built a desktop gadget to draw information from Eye on Earth, but users must esteem the Windows Vista OS.

So what should a person do if the EEA says the water is bad but a user says the water is fine?

"I contrive we would recommend you don't swim there," Karadeniz said.

The Internet is teeming by so much video that searching through it is becoming one of the biggest challenges on the Web.

Video search engines in the same state as Blinkx and EveryZing are among those racing search giant Google to try to solve the problem. Both use speech-to-text and other technologies to make video clips easier to search and view. There's a lot at stake. The video advertising market is projected to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011, up from $410 million in 2006, researcher eMarketer says.

Search technology be able to read and analyze text on a website, but the same technology is limited when it comes to video. If a website called "All About Dogs" also offers information about cats, a traditional search engine can figure that out. Not so for video.

greatest in quantity search engines make educated guesses about the contents of video clips based on the coding used to "tag" or identify them, or by the words other websites use to link to the clips, says Kevin Ryan, global content director for Search Engine Watch, a Web information site.

Google hopes to improve on that. The company has virtuous launched a test of a new video explore gadget for its YouTube politician channels. It uses speech-recognition technology to occasion searchable transcripts of videos. For instance, you can search on "health" to find a clip from John McCain, Barack Obama or many others, and even jump to where those key words appear in the video clips.

Other companies tackling video search:

Blinkx: 'Snackable' video

Video search engine Blinkx can take the audio from a video clip, break it down into the smallest distinguishable sounds in any language, and create a transcript of what is being said.

Blinkx also uses the text that appears on screen, such as scores or epochs displayed during a sporting end, to identify video.

"Video today is very packaged and very linear," says Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake. "There's no reason it has to be like that. It can be snackable."

Truveo: Crawling the Web

Truveo, a video search engine owned by AOL, focuses on "crawling" the Web for video clips. Crawling is the process search engines use to locate media files across millions of websites. Only when a search engine has found and built a list of video clips can users then search for what they want.

One of Truveo's advantages is that its crawling technology be possible to search for video clips on websites built with advanced Web technologies such as JavaScript and Flash.

While Truveo is also using actual social computing concepts (of the like kind as user-generated "favorites" lists) to provide relevant results for video searches, its focus is on building the most comprehensive index of video clips on the Web. "You can't do anything in video search if you don't have the video itself," President Pete Kocks says.

Mefeedia: 'Social discovery'

Some video pursuit engines are eschewing audio and video analysis in the short term over concerns about whether those technologies are ready for prime-time use.

Mefeedia relies on users to help sort through millions of video clips and TV shows. They have power to create "channels" or playlists of videos that others be able to watch or contribute to.

If one of your friends watches a clip on Mefeedia and enjoys it, the clip shows up in your account, letting you know that it might be worth viewing.

EveryZing: Any make inquiry engine

EveryZing, like Blinkx, analyzes audio from a video clip and turns it into searchable text. The main difference is that EveryZing focuses on professional content that its clients produce, and uses its technology to "wrap" video clips in data that include the whole written copy of the speech track. Other search engines can then search within the dialogue of video clips without having to invest in their own audio and video analysis technologies.

EveryZing chief revenue officer Stephen Baker says that his company's software have power to create transcripts of most professionally produced news programming at an accuracy level above 90%.

Baker believes that as computer processing power gets cheaper, deep video analysis will eventually go mainstream.

He envisions an investor being able to search for every instance of someone like Bill Gates from video clips across the Web in an instant - even if Bill Gates' name never appears in the title or information associated with the clip.

Journalists connecting to the Internet at the Beijing International Media Center (BIMC) are discovering that despite promises of an open reporting environment, China is still blocking access to some Web sites.

"I was at the BIMC this morning and I was unable to access Amnesty [International]'s site and a couple of others, including a Falun Gong site and Human Rights Watch," said Jonathan Watts, president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) and a correspondent for U.K. newspaper The Guardian.

"These Internet controls are contrary to the host's promises of a clear reporting environment, and they also contradict IOC assurances that reporters who come to Beijing will be expert to do their job reasonable as they were able to do so at previous Olympics. How can this be the case when they are unable to access many sites that are critical of the authorities," Watts said in an interview.

"Unfortunately this is an all too familiar continued for foreign journalists and other Internet users in China. Now thousands of visiting reporters will get to see first-hand the reality of Internet controls in China," he said.

Another reporter, speaking forward condition of anonymity, confirmed that those three sites were blocked, along with the Chinese-language sites for the Voice of America and the British Broadcasting Corp., and Hong Kong-based newspaper Apple Daily.

These observations confirm earlier reports that some sites were blocked at the BIMC, the headquarters in spite of accredited journalists for the Beijing Olympics, which begin August 8. IDG News Service in Beijing achieved the same results from a standard home Internet connection in any other portion of Beijing.

A representative from China Netcom, the official provider of broadband and other fixed-line telecommunications for the Olympics, including the BIMC, could not immediately be reached for comment.

China issued new regulations for foreign reporters on January 1, 2007, designed to create greater press freedom during the run-up to the Olympics. However, the FCCC said that between that date and July 8, it had logged 259 incidents of interference with reporting activities of foreign journalists in China.

In April, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) received assurances from the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) that it would allow unfettered Internet access. "We were satisfied by the assurances we received across a number of areas– media service levels, including Internet access, brand protection, environmental contingency plans for improved air quality, and the live broadcast take nourishment," IOC Coordination Commission Chairman Hein Verbruggen said at the time.

China routinely blocks access to Web sites it deems inappropriate, including those containing pornography, violence, magic and superstition themes, and especially anti-government material, such as those critical of the Chinese Communist Party or supporting independence for Taiwan, Tibet, or Xinjiang.

Google wouldn't be Google without its ownership of the estimated $10.4 billion annual search advertising market. But other ad-technology hopefuls are still angling for ways to take a few million or billion dollars off the top for themselves–just like Microsoft and Yahoo.

single such start-up, New York-based Clickable, is trying to build a lucrative business by selling advertisers a simple software tool to manage and improve their search-marketing campaigns with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Because it can be tricky and time-consuming for advertisers to keep track of multiple search campaigns, Clickable lures them with a self-described iTunes-like application that shows which ads are working and which aren't.

Since the company's limited launch in February 2006 and bigger push this spring, it has attracted about 400 customers, which spend an medium of $10,000 to $50,000 a month on search ad campaigns. (On the high end, Clickable makes a 5 percent cut of that spending and 3 percent with ad agencies.)

But it plans to step up growth this fall, thanks to a new round of financing. On Wednesday, Clickable will announce that it has raised $14.5 million in a Series B in circumference of financing from the Founder's Fund, as well during the time that its previous investors Union Square Ventures and FirstMark Capital. With this financing, the social meeting has raised a total of $22.5 million in the last year, including money from private investors former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and managing partner of the Founders Fund.

Clickable CEO David S. Kidder said that part of the growth plan in the next year will be to create a single "Clickable" interface for other types of Web advertising, including social media and display ads. Because the Founder's Fund is an investor, Kidder said that Clickable will be looking to create tools for many of the venture firm's other portfolio companies, such as Facebook or Twitter.

Advertisers on social networks, he said, could eventually benefit from a single tool that could trace how ads are performing by other types of media. "Once social media can get connected to search, flat to Google, advertisers can create a display ad campaign in Facebook and MySpace and connect that to a search campaign that converts (into a sale or action)," Kidder said.

In other news, publicly traded Internet advertising company Marchex will announce Wednesday that it launched a new platform called Marchex Connect 2.0. The technology, which updates its previous ad platform, lets local advertisers buy online search ads, 1-800 utterance call search ads, and a business profile Web page from one place. The assemblage hopes that it will help the estimated remaining 14 million small to medium-size businesses in the United States establish a presence on the Internet.

Maybe that will be key to capturing some of the expected $16 billion in search ad revenues by 2011.

In an apparent mistranslation of the concept of hospitality, Chinese authorities have ordered foreign-owned hotels to install Internet monitoring outfit to spy on hotel guests during the Olympic Games, U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, charged upon Tuesday.

"I am very disappointed that the Chinese regulation will not follow through on its promise to the International Olympic Committee to maintain an environment free of government censorship during the Games," Brownback said in a statement. "The Chinese government has put in place a system to spy steady and gather information about every guest at hotels where Olympic visitors are staying. This means journalists, athletes' families and other visitors power of determination be subjected to invasive intelligence gathering by the Chinese Public Security Bureau."

According to a news release issued by the senator's office, Chinese officials have ordered foreign-owned hotels to induct a software program and a hardware device to help the Public Security Bureau spy on hotel guests. Several hotel chains have reportedly confirmed the being of this order and provided documentation to Brownback.

A spokesperson for Brownback was not immediately available.

News service Reuters quoted one of the documents thus: "In order to ensure the smooth opening of Olympic in Beijing and the Expo in Shanghai in 2010, safeguard the security of Internet reticulated and the information thereon in the hotels … it is required that your company install and run the Security Management System."

Brownback said that the hotels have asked not to be named for anxiety of reprisals.

Chinese authorities have been accused of similar behavior before. In May, The Associated Press reported that Chinese officials may have covertly copied the contents of a U.S. government laptop computer that was left unattended during a visit by Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez.

Given that the U.S. National Security Agency has been monitoring Internet and telephone communications since warrantless wiretapping was authorized in 2001, there seems to be more resignation than outrage amidst potential visitors to China.

As one person commenting on Reuters' coverage remarked, "Bad enough I have the U.S. government snooping on my Internet and telephone activity. To heck with going to China to have them confer it to me too. Think I'll not including my money and blood pressure and just stay home and watch them on the TV."

Webon: DIY Web Sites, No Ads

While everyone was busily establishing accounts on Facebook or MySpace, the field of simple Web-site creation tools was pretty dormant. Lately, they've been making a comeback, as some the community decide they want more of an Internet demeanor than a profile page can provide. Webon, a division of Lycos, makes the whole process brain-dead easy, and even with a free account you be able to build a site without ads. Premium accounts start at $9 and allow you to employment your own domain and store unlimited song of photos. Webon officials say they'll have widgets to tie into popular social networks, too, but few were available when I tried the menial duties.

Pageonce: Super-Aggregator

Mint.com, the social network updates that services resembling Friendfeed provide, and even access to your Web mail account, and you have Pageonce. Give the site your log-on information for financial sites, frequent flyer accounts, and subscription sites like Netflix, and you'll see highlights of each of those accounts in a tabbed set of pages. I think that the free service tries to cram a little too much into those pages (why anyone would want to use Gmail through the Pageonce interface is beyond me), but it's still a useful way to get an overview of your online state of affairs.

WhereIStand: Digital Debate Club

If you still regret that your high school had no debate team, WhereIStand.com is the place for you. As a member, you can predicament your social rank on such issues as, "It is acceptable for celebrities to sell photos of their children to magazines." Members of the free site can–and definitely will–agree or disagree, and say why. They can also add the opinions of public figures. The ensuing dialogue ain't the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it's more sincere and arrogant than a lot of conversation on the Web.

New search engine Cuil seems to be off to a rocky start, associating some unrelated logos and photos with other content.

A search for Web site TechCrunch associates the news site through the logo for Google's Gmail Web-based e-mail service. A listing for "About TechCrunch" serves up a biography for one of the site's writers, but a photo that actually depicts Shanghai-based entrepreneur Sam Flemming of CIC Data, as noted by local site Shanghaiist. The biography is in fact for writer Mark Hendrickson.

On a "Companies and Products steady TechCrunch" page, the associated photo is for musician Tim Urban's album "Turning Home."

The actual pages do not portray any of the photos or logos associated with them in the Cuil search results.

"Being involved in the Internet and the Internet word of mouth industrial art, I know the efficiency of being mentioned on Techcrunch. I just wish it had not been a random mention, but rather a genuine article about my company," Flemming said in an interview.

Cuil launched Monday as a rival to Google, the former employer of president Anna Patterson, who started the troop with her husband, Tom Costello [cq]. The first day was also somewhat troublesome for Cuil, with more users unable to reach the index page or receiving error messages.

Cuil could not be reached immediately for comment on the errant results.

Dell on Tuesday introduced its smallest desktop, a stylish 8-inch consumer PC that's meant to paroxysm anywhere in the home.

The Studio Hybrid is available in multiple colors and can be stored either vertically or horizontally on a countertop, bookshelf, or entertainment center. The computer, which ships with Windows Vista, is available with one or the other an Intel Pentium Dual Core or Intel Core 2 Duo processor, up to 4 GB of memory, and 320 GB of storage.

The Hybrid is available with a combination Blu-ray/CD/DVD disc drive. The computer also has an HDMI video connector for linking up to a digital TV. In addition, the computer uses Intel's Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 and has the selection of built-in 802.11n wireless support, the fastest available Wi-Fi technology. The computer besides has five USB 2.0 ports.

The Hybrid is about the dimensions of a collegiate dictionary, measuring roughly 8 inches deep, 8 inches long, and 3 inches lordly. The device weights nearly 5 pounds. Available color sleeves, which are interchangeable, comprise bamboo, emerald, quartz, ruby, sapphire, slate, and topaz.

The Studio Hybrid is available through Dell's direct online sales channels. It's expected to reach select retailers in the fall. Pricing starts at $499.

Along with the Hybrid, Dell introduced two Inspiron PCs: a 13-inch notebook aimed at the back-to-school crowd and a desktop designed for everyday family multimedia activities. The Inspiron 13 laptop weighs less than 5 pounds and has several optional features, including built-in wireless networking, a Webcam, and Bluetooth connectivity. A "special configuration" of the notebook is scheduled to be available at Wal-Mart stores starting Aug. 3 for $699. Configurable systems will be available through Dell later that month.

The Inspiron 518 desktop includes Gigabit Ethernet, DX10 integrated graphics for casual gaming, an optional 500-GB hard drive and two easy-access USB ports for MP3 player synching. Pricing starts at $349, without monitor, and is available through Dell. A base configuration includes an Intel Pentium dual-core processor, Windows Vista, a DVD drive, 1 GB of memory, and a 250-GB hard drive.

The latest products reflect how Dell, like other PC makers, has been trying to attract consumers with stylish PCs and low prices. Consumers are no longer focused only upon the body speed with computers, but look for a machine that looks good and performs particular tasks suitably, such as video or photo editing, analysts say.

Facebook has removed the popular word game Scrabulous from its U.S. and Canadian sites after Hasbro sued the online game makers.

The social networking site said Scrabulous creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla and their company RJ Softwares made the decision after Hasbro said Scrabulous infringes in continuance its intellectual property by copying and threatening to diminish its Scrabble brand.

An online version of the original Scrabble board game is on Facebook, but members with U.S. or Canadian profiles who try to play Scrabulous get a message saying the game has been disabled for users in those two countries until further notice. The message allows users to click on a division to "stay informed." The link leads to an e-mail form for receiving updates from Scrabulous.

Hasbro filed its lawsuit in the Southern District of New York last week, claiming RJ Softwares, an offshore software and Web services provider, infringed on its intellectual property.

The lawsuit calls the online word game Scrabulous a "clear and blatant" infringement of Scrabble's intellectual possessions. It says Scrabulous uses "essential and original elements" of the famous board game and argues that the names "Scrabulous" and "Scrabble" are "confusingly similar."

Finally, it states that the defendants said, "It's not really different." Hasbro said the statement amounts to a concession that they copied the board game.

The company is seeking damages, legal costs, and the elimination of the online game.

Mattel owns the rights to the game in nearly 120 other countries.

Seventy-five percent of Web sites with malicious code are warranted Web sites that have been hacked, according to a new security report issued by Websense that covers the first two quarters of 2008. This represents a 50% increase over the previous six-month period.

Stephan Chenette, manager of Websense Security Labs, said that while security vendors differ on many things, they pretty much all consent that compromised legitimate sites currently serve most of the malicious code in circulation.

And it's not just unintellectual sites being subverted to serve malware. "Sixty percent of top 100 sites are either involved in or had malicious content in last 180 days," said Chenette.

Twenty-nine percent of malicious Web attacks include code that steals data, the Websense report says. Of those attacks, 46% steal data over the Web.

Ninety of the top 100 sites are either social networking or search sites, according to Websense. More than 45% of them support user-generated content.

The problem, said Chenette, is that so many Web sites give users to upload content, but they don't filter it carefully. He cited Google Page Creator Web pages and Blogger Web pages for the reason that "hosting a tremendous amount of malware."

"As more organizations and their employees are adopting Web 2.0 technologies for legitimate business reasons, users are given privileges such as directly editing Web content or uploading files — potentially causing more pledge issues as many organizations lack the adequate security technologies and practices to enable safe Web 2.0 use," the report says. "The increase in Web 2.0 applications has allowed hackers to target users and businesses using mash-ups, unattended collection of laws injection, and other military science providing yet another level of complexity for organizations and users that want to prevent data loss and malicious attacks."

Compounding the problem is the tendency of many Web 2.0 sites to focus more on size than on security. The Web 2.0 business model looks a portion like that pursued by the credit card industry, where high rates of fraud and payment defaults are tolerated to maximize the possible base of interest remunerative customers.

"If [Web sites] have more users, they are willing to take some of those security risks," said Chenette. "They find that the value of having more users is more valuable than [the put in peril of] having certain security flaws."

A further complication is that Web URLs are no longer a meaningful indication of the source of Web page content. Web pages now may include multiple iframes, what one. name out to servers that may not be apparent to the user to fetch content or code.

There is some good news, elect of. Twelve percent of Web sites with malicious code were infected using Web malware exploitation kits. That represents a 33% decrease since December 2007. Websense attributes the decline to a shift toward customized attacks as a way to avoid detection.