alexa

We've seen stories on the dangers of DWT (driving while texting). But are we now facing the growing problem of WWT (walking while texting)?

Alexa Longueira,a 15-year-old from Staten Island, learned a painful lesson about the hazards of texting recently. While intent on text messaging as she walked on a sidewalk along the New York borough's Victory Boulevard, she stepped right into an open manhole, sending her several feet into the raw sewage below.

Suffering some cuts and bruises, Longueira was checked out at Staten Island University Hospital and released.

The manhole had been left open briefly … Read more

This story has been updated. See below for details.

Can you really take everything that's going on with movies, TV shows, music, Internet memes, and social media, and wrangle it all into an hour of live television? MTV believes it can--with some help from Twitter, Facebook, and a quirky British model-turned-TV-host named Alexa Chung.

The pop-culture cable network's new daily talk show, titled "It's On with Alexa Chung," premieres at noon on June 15 and expectations are high. The show is taking over the time slot once held by "Total Request Live," or &… Read more

MySpace announced Tuesday that MySpaceID, a service that allows any Web site to give users the option to link their MySpace profile with their favorite Web sites, is in limited testing on the Yahoo home page. The MySpace app is just one of several services Yahoo has started testing on its home page, but it will allow Yahoo users to connect to their MySpace network without going to the social network's home page.

MySpaceID also has some new improvements. According to the company, the service will display a member's full profile and stream all his or her activities … Read more

Google Trends, a service Google started two years ago to track searched-for keywords, has unveiled a new tool for inquiring minds looking to find out more on any given site. Like tracking services Compete and Alexa which use tool bars to grab user data, Google Trends now lets you pop in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site (or .tv, .biz, .net, and so on) using nothing more than organic user searches.

Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and related sites that … Read more

Did your site's Alexa ranking change overnight? That's because on Thursday, the chart-friendly Web analytics company announced an overhaul of its rankings system.

Alexa, according to a company announcement, now "aggregate(s) data from multiple sources" rather than just the surfing habits of those who'd installed its browser toolbar.

"Alexa toolbar users' interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our Web site," the announcement explained.

TechCrunch's Duncan Riley, for example, pointed out that … Read more

Mahalo launched a new Firefox extension last week at Gnomedex. It's called "Follow," and once installed, it does just that. It's a mix of a toolbar and sidebar that pulls up related search results from whatever page you're on. It's got a built-in Mahalo search box in an attempt to ween you off your Google and Yahoo search tendencies. It's also got a StumbleUpon-like function to recommend whatever page you're looking at to others with yes, no, and maybe buttons, along with a button to take you to a random Mahalo … Read more