wePapers, designed as a document upload and sharing service for students and educators in the education industry, aims to create the largest study group on the Web.

After you signing up for wePapers, you’re entitled to upload your paper to the community in a variety of formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, rich or plain text file, or Open Office format, with a maximum file size cap at 50MB each. The robust wePapers uploading interface allowed you to entitle your paper easily, with tag or appropriate category given, help other members to search your paper as easy as possible. On wePapers, you can search or navigate the site for the type of papers you want, via simple keyword search such as paper name, or members, courses name and even with the paper key (wePapers will assign each paper uploaded a unique little ID called paper key). You also can filter the paper you want to search with the language setting. However, it seems that most of the papers available now is in English. For the paper you like, you can add it to favorite, or bookmark it for future references. Perhaps you want a copy, you even can download it to your hard drive or embed it to your blog or Web site. Still, the flexibility is there for the members, you can flag or comment on any shared document you found on wePapers.

wePapers also fully integrate its Q&A section with Yedda. In other words, if you have any question about the paper, you can seek help or the answer through the “Ask the Community” with the collaboration of Yedda platform. However, as far as copyright concern goes, I’d like to see wePapers collapse the “Same Author” sidebar column which I found most of the papers uploaded by members are not the same author that cited in the papers.

wePapers, went live in November 2008. It is created by two Israeli students Hanan Weiskopf and Ehud Zamir with the assistance of Dr. Richard Jaffe, an associate professor at Columbia University.

Yesterday, while all the Chinese throughout the world have celebrated the 2009 Chinese New Year, which is the year of the “ox”. I’ve noticed that almost all of the major search engines have done a small redesign of their logos. From all the logos I listed in below, each of these search engines generally looks a bit “ox” than before.

1) Google

This logo shown on the Google search engines in Asia-Pacific region. If you’re using the Asian version of Google, you’ll notice it, but now the logo has disappeared completely after 24 hours of the first day of 2009 Chinese New Year.

2) Yahoo! Home Page

3) Yahoo! China Home Page

4) Baidu

5) Qihoo

6) Sogou

7) Soso

Youdao

9) Qiandu

10) Soo56

Lastly, to all the Chinese, Happy Chinese New Year 2009!

As one of the leading open source blogging platforms, WordPress has launched a WordPress.tv channel. This WordPress.tv will feature video tutorials and slideshow presentations, all taught or made by the well-known WordPress gurus. What’s more, is this offering not only allowed you to watch all the know-how videos, but also a single place for you to find all the WordCamp footages that are scattered across the Web.

Currently, all the content found on WordPress.tv are in English, but an official WordPress.tv blog entry informed us that it will not limit the content to this language, in an attempt to response to the fast rise of WordPress users from other non-English speaking countries. However, all the video tutorials uploaded and shared on WordPress.tv seems to be catered to the basic needs, but WordPress.tv will be adding their video tutorials for the more advanced needs in near future, offering some reasons to lure in viewers beyond the basic WordPress skills and techniques. Nevertheless, watching some of the video tutorials on WordPress.tv is a great fun, while offer lot of tricks for basic WordPress features, also prepare one for getting started her WordPress journey.

Joomla, is one of the popular open source content management systems among the users nowadays. There are many sites being built with this Joomla. Some used Joomla to build their small business sites, some used it for corporate site purposes, bundled with a lot of third-party extensions such as poll, blog, shopping cart, i.e. VirtueMart, CRM, and etc.

Most recently, there is a new tool namely JomSocial dedicated to everything Joomla for the Joomla users in their efforts to build a Joomla social network/community. JomSocial was developed by Azrul, subtly coined himself as the Joomla expert and released it to the Joomla community as a paid extension which charge $149 for the Professional version. For users to install and use it in their Joomla sites, their Joomla must be version 1.5.7 and above. In terms of functionality, there’s a ton of features if you’re using this JomSocial, you’ll get a custom user profile, private messaging system, friend-buddy system, activity stream, etc. To get a grasp on it, you can visit this JomSocial development site.

For years, Joomla users when they developed their community sites with Joomla, they can use the free modules available such as Community Builder, GroupJive, and Fireboard. Although these three (3) extensions can easily help to create a best Joomla social networking possible, but integrate these three is always a pain and one might wondered how much custom work is under the hood.

Does Joomla social networking have a steep learning curve? Yes, but it seems the goal of JomSocial is to be a killer extension to have in Joomla with an aim to help users to build their social networks with much less time and work.

Internet users are increasingly like the 3-D Web interface in terms of viewing photos, slideshows or finding information with a lot of colorful pictures. For the Flickr users, there are many free tools or mashups that help to browse and enjoy all the photos in a crazy way, but if you’re looking for a 3-D way to browse the Flickr photo, here’s the one.

With Tag Galaxy, now you can explore all the Flickr photos in a cool 3-D mode through the tag search. From the tag you’re entering on the search bar, Tag Galaxy will then render an interface with a chain of planets and each planet represents a certain number of photos available to be viewed from it.

One of the nice things about Tag Galaxy is that when you find one of the photos you’re interested with, you can click on it, so the photo will be showed in a much bigger size. To know more about the photo, you even can click on the Flickr page and it will send you off to the original Flickr page where it stores the photo.

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Video sharing and uploading has became a basic social phenomenon in today’s world. In terms of popularity, the universal instinct for most people when they searching for a particular song, video clip or a piece of news in video format is go to YouTube. In fact, YouTube is way ahead of many other video sharing sites without quoted the site names here, and even in certain scenario, for instance, if you’re looking for a newly released song, someone on this planet has uploaded to this video sharing site before it was announced in a press release.

I have personally saw some video clips have been removed due to terms of use violation in some YouTube users’ profiles. I know the fact that YouTube is indeed very quick in pulling down the relevant video clips after demand from the copyright holders, provided the video clips have been uploaded by someone without the proper permission from the respective parties. Critical questions to be asked here:

- How long the videos was up and running before taken down?

- Whom filed the complaint?

For this reason, you should got to a MIT Free Culture’s research project called YouTomb. On this site, you’ll find all the videos removed by YouTube, including the unauthorized copyright music. The most recent video clip that removed will be listed in the front page, and the basic information such as stats, i.e. how many people have watched the video before taken down will be shown transparently. Visiting the YouTomb summarized stats page also found out that there are currently 289011 videos being monitored, 15912 videos taken down are because of the alleged copyright violation and 53152 videos are taken down for other reasons.

From what I see on this YouTomb, it’s obvious that YouTube is increasingly proactive in building a positive and effective video sharing platform.