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Hands-on reviews and news about online software and new Web communities, from Webware.com.

Report: Comcast usage monitor coming in JanuaryToday

DSL Reports has gotten word that Comcast will soon be offering its Internet subscribers a bandwidth usage meter as early as the first week of January. With the new system users would presumably be able to see how much bandwidth they've used, akin to cellular service providers offering estimates to keep customers from going over their allotted limit. Such a tool for Internet bandwidth would let customers adjust their usage habits accordingly.

Back in October the communications company imposed a limit on user downloads to 250 GB a month without providing any monitoring tools of its own short of installing special software. Additionally, customers are only given one verbal warning before a one-year service suspension if they go over that limit.

Oddly enough when the cap was first announced, we had gotten a confirmation that Comcast would indeed be offering a bandwidth tracking tool of its own. This was later recanted by a Comcast spokesperson who said "there are numerous free or fee-based meters

On the record: New overseer for TechMeme robotsToday

The algorithmically generated tech news aggregator TechMeme now has a human editor, TechMeme founder and developer Gave Rivera revealed in a blog post today. The new overload to the TechMeme robots: Megan McCarthy, formerly of Valleywag and Wired.com.

Megan McCarthy, when she worked for Valleywag

(Credit: (c) Brian Solis, used with permission)

I talked with McCarthy about her new role. She describes her job as, "really, just to see all the things coming in, to make sure everything is current and relevant." The site posts about 140 to 150 items a day, she said. Her role is to make sure that erroneous items that the TechMeme algorithm flags aren't posted, that items are grouped appropriately, and that the most important items receive the highest billing on the site. The service still uses algorithms and link analysis to cluster stories, but McCarthy now has the final say and can modify the site's default story lineup and clustering.

TechMeme also runs the sites WeSmirch,

Point-and-click search on the iPhoneToday

A company called Proximic says it has developed an easier way for consumers to do complex searches from their cell phones.

While Apple's iPhone has helped make surfing the Web from a mobile device easier, it's still difficult to type in complex search queries. But Proximic has introduced a new application called Promixic Agents for the iPhone that will help. The new technology, which is language-independent, uses point-and-click technology to highlight bits of text. This means that users don't have to type in a long string of search terms.

Search results from a Proximic search.

(Credit: Proximic)

Unlike other search engines, which rely on keywords to find results, the search technology from Proximic looks for patterns in the text to see where these patterns overlap. It then delivers relevant results based on these patterns.

Proximic co-founder and CEO Philipp Pieper believes that conducting searches in this manner provides more contextualized and relevant search results and also makes conducting complex searches much easier.

"Mobile phones today lack ease of use when it comes to complex searches," he said. "But with our technology users can click on a paragraph or a whole Web page and get ot

New Firefox extension turns Amazon.com into illegal free-for-allToday

A new Firefox extension called Pirates of the Amazon lets users download movies, games, TV shows, and MP3s free of charge by cross referencing Amazon's product pages with torrent files from the Pirate Bay.

If the content can be found on the Pirate Bay's search index it shows up as a "Download 4 Free" link on the top of the Amazon product page. This links directly to the hosted .torrent tracker file, letting the user avoid having to make a purchase from Amazon in place of acquiring it illegally via BitTorrent.

The extension developer's site, along with the link to download the software is currently offline. The extension made the front page of Digg a few hours ago, which is likely what took the site out (not legal intervention). I've contacted Amazon to see if the company is making any efforts to block the extension but have not heard back yet. As it stands, the extension still works, albeit without the "Download 4 Free" thumbnail, which is hosted on the developer's servers.

As blog Torrentfreak notes, this is a really bad time for such an extension. Piracy continues to be a huge problem for movie

Google, Hallmark Channel team up for TV adsToday

Google and the Hallmark Channel announced Wednesday that they have formed a partnership that will make Google TV Ads the channel's exclusive advertiser. All of the ads will be placed on both the Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movie Channel.

According to Hallmark, many of the advertisers it's now trying to attract through Google's TV Ads platform are new to the television platform, so it will provide more in-depth viewership data to help advertising partners make "real-time adjustments" to campaigns.

Google TV Ads are unique in the television advertising business. Instead of employing conventional techniques for television advertising, Google takes its online model and applies that to the medium. The company aims to provide greater relevancy by using proprietary targeting tools and an auction-based pricing system, which only costs advertisers when impressions are delivered to their ads.

Hallmark and Hallmark Movie Channel now join Google's growing list of TV advertising partners, which includes Sci-Fi, MSNBC, CNBC, and Bloomberg Television.