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Last.fm, the social music site that CBS Interactive purchased last year, will be seeing closer integration into one of the media conglomerate’s other properties very soon. According to a joint announcement Tuesday, Last.fm and CBS Radio will be sharing audio content on the Web to provide online editions of CBS’ radio stations to Last.fm users and free streaming music to CBS Radio listeners.

CBS Radio’s 140-plus radio stations are now in the process of being introduced to Last.fm in a “staggered rollout.” In addition to music, news, talk, and sports stations will also be available on the social network.

A collaboration with CBS Radio has been rumored since the Last.fm acquisition was first announced last May.

In what Last.fm co-founder and CEO Felix Miller said was “the first of what we hope to be many collaborations (with) CBS Radio,” streaming versions of all the company’s radio stations–including New York’s WCBS, Los Angeles’ KROQ, and Chicago’s WXRT–will be available on Last.fm. In return, listeners using CBS Radio’s player on the Web will be able to listen to full songs on Last.fm. The partnership is a simple one: basically, it’s designed to create crossover and brand awareness between the two CBS divisions.

Ars Technica has a detailed writeup of the technology involved, while PC World
talked to Elizabeth Cochran, one of the lead scientists on the project. You can download the program (currently
Mac-only, with a Windows version to come soon) at the QCN Web site.

Based on the same software as the popular SETI@Home project, the Quake-Catcher Network uses your laptop’s down time to record and send data to a central repository for analysis. Aside from gathering data, the network also has a significant educational component that’s designed to help students better understand earthquakes.

In a project that’s grabbing headlines this week, researchers at the University of California, Riverside and Stanford University are recruiting laptops to help them monitor seismic activity. The Quake-Catcher Network is a distributed network of laptops running software that takes advantage of a built-in accelerometer to monitor and report seismic activity. (The accelerometer’s primary purpose is to detect a fall or shock to the chassis in time to stop the hard drive from spinning, though it’s been a key element in several fun hacks, including the Smackbook [video] and SeisMac.)

Presumably users would have it installed on both platforms to make the most use of it. When added on your desktop computer it adds contextual options on a system level so you can clip text, links, or other items and send them to your widget sandbox. Like Shifd, a cross-platform notes tool I use, this is handy way to port it around.

The service is currently in private beta and requires a software installation on all three platforms.

The example given was a recipe widget on your computer that tells you how to make something, and if you don’t have one of the ingredients you can bookmark it. This information gets ported over to a shopping list widget, which you can then access on-the-go via the iPhone application.

(Credit:
Tingz.net)

There are already a ton of services that have this cross platform data sharing, and panelist Digg.com’s Kevin Rose pointed out these tools are invariably at odds with the built-in widget platforms found on OS X and
Windows Vista. The one thing I think it has going for it is the built-in payment platform where you give Tingz your credit card credentials and and developers can let you pay for services via their widgets. This was shown off for something like buying movie tickets.

Tingz is a new widget engine whose big feature is cross platform data sharing. At the TechCrunch50 conference it was shown off on a
Mac,
iPhone and Windows Media Center PC, with various widgets pulling together the same data set.

The Windows Media Center app might have been the most out of place, as it was advertised as being large and eye friendly but the text still looked incredibly small. It runs as an application within Media Center, which could make it useful for getting some Web video widgets to run right on your TV.

Tings has widgets that share data across multiple platforms, starting with three popular ones.

Now, the company says, it has come up with a modular design that also enables it to build mini power plants. Such plants are faster to install, smaller, and less expensive to construct than most solar power plants, the company says. eSolar adds that its modular technique can scale, creating power plants that produce anywhere from 25 megawatts of electricity to more than 500 megawatts.

Solar power start-up eSolar has raised $130 million in funding, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

The Journal says one of eSolar’s investors is Google, which announced last November that it would begin investing in alternative energy companies in an effort called RE

Pasadena, Calif.-based eSolar has plans to build large solar-thermal plants using the heliostat design, which utilizes an array of flat mirrors that direct sunlight onto a water tower, turning the water inside to steam, which then turns a turbine to make electricity.

Customize XP’s common dialog boxes
To add new folder shortcuts in XP dialogs, click Start > Run, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter to open the Group Policy applet. Navigate in the left pane to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Common Open File Dialog. Double-click Items displayed in Places Bar in the right pane, check Enabled in the resulting dialog box, and enter the folder paths in the five text fields below it.

A quicker way to customize the Places Bar in XP’s common dialog boxes is by using the free Tweak UI utility in Microsoft’s PowerToys collection. Simply open the program, choose Common Dialogs under Explorer in the left pane, check Custom places bar, and enter the folder paths, or select one of the folders on the drop-down menu. (Note that with Tweak UI, you can choose “none” on the drop-down menu without breaking anything, so you needn’t enter five locations.) Click OK when you’re done.

You can save time by writing down the paths to the five folders you want to add before opening Group Policy, and then keying them in one by one. Another catch: You have to enter five folder paths, or Windows adds a placeholder icon for each blank field that leads nowhere and can cause problems. Once you’ve entered paths in all five text boxes, click OK and exit Group Policy.

Add custom shortcuts to Open and Save dialog boxes in Vista
Adding folders to the Favorite Links list in Vista common dialog boxes is straight-forward. Start by opening Windows Explorer and navigating to the Links folder in your user profile. It’s likely located at “C:Users\your name\Links.” Right-click in the right pane, choose New > Shortcut, and either enter the folder path, or click Browse, navigate to and select the folder, and click OK. Then click Next, give the shortcut a name (or accept the default folder name), and click Finish. A faster way to create the shortcuts is to simply click and drag the folder’s icon into the right pane, and release it.

This part is a little tricky, because if you don’t know the path, you have to select the folder in Windows Explorer, copy the path in the address bar, and paste it into the Items displayed in the Places Bar Properties dialog box’s text fields one at a time. The problem is, as soon as you navigate away from that dialog box, it closes, so you have to double-click the entry in the Common Open File Dialog again to reopen it each time. (You can also find the folder path by right-clicking a shortcut to the folder, choosing Properties, and copying the path in the Target field.)

To access one of the folders on your custom list of shortcuts while in one of Vista’s Open and Save dialog boxes, click More under Favorite Links, and choose the folder from the drop-down menu that appears.

Create a shortcut to your favorite storage location in the Links folder of your user profile to add it to the Favorite Links in Vista common dialogs.

Add the paths to your favorite storage folders to the Common Open File Dialog in Windows XP's Group Policy applet.

Tomorrow: Get started faster in Ubuntu.

Use Microsoft's Tweak UI PowerToy for Windows XP to customize the shortcuts on the Places Bar in common dialog boxes.

A few weeks ago I complained that I couldn’t figure out how to change the default location when opening or saving files in Windows’ great little Paint imaging utility. That one still eludes me, but I came up with an alternative approach that’s almost as fast: Put shortcuts in common dialogs to your favorite folders via XP’s Places Bar and Vista’s Favorite Links.

Select "More" under Favorite Links to view and select your custom folder locations in Vista's common dialog boxes.

I recorded W3C President Tim Berners-Lee’s press conference at this week’s WWW2008 conference in Beijing.

I will write about the contents later. Click here for the audio and then click on the olive-colored play button.

Update: I was having a glitch while linking to the podcast URL. It should work now. Or copy and paste http://gwbstr.podomatic.com/entry/2008-04-23T01_42_40-07_00 into your browser.

Please forgive the mediocre sound quality; I record for my notes, and not primarily for broadcast. I came in a few seconds late as Berners-Lee was being introduced in alternating Chinese and English. The remainder of the press conference, including questions and answers, is in English.

Other posts from WWW2008 are here, and I’m Twittering here.

Facebook's new chat feature

(Credit: Facebook Blog)
After the launch of Facebook Chat was promised last week, Facebook is finally rolling out the feature. Even though the release is limited at this time, Inside Facebook was lucky enough to get a look. It appears that the rollout is on a per-network basis, with reports coming in that many of the Ivy League schools and Stanford are among the first to have access.

Unfortunately Facebook Chat has not yet rolled out in my network and I’m sure that a lot of you are in the same boat, but hopefully we will get to join the party soon. Who is seeing Facebook Chat live right now?

The chat feature is present on all of the Facebook pages and an IM window pops out when someone messages you. Conversation history is also integrated with Facebook Chat, but can be deleted if you choose to do so. Facebook has said that they are working on pulling other features of the site into Chat, such as having relevant mini-feed stories embedded into conversations.

While it is disappointing that Facebook Chat does not integrate with other IM services, it’s a smart move for Facebook. This will draw on Facebook’s huge user base and get a lot more people on their chat service. I wouldn’t be surprised if people tend to spend more time on Facebook as a result of the introduction of this new feature. Users may tend to keep a Facebook window open just for the purpose of sending and receiving instant messages. Instant messaging is already an overcrowded market, but I think that Facebook Chat adds a decent amount of value to the site.

(Credit: Inside Facebook)

Facebook Chat is the third prong of communication on Facebook, adding to the already existing Wall and Message features. Unlike most IM clients, it is built directly into the web page and is not a separate application. This is really comparable to the chat feature that Gmail has had for awhile, except it is exclusive to Facebook and does not integrate with third party instant messaging services.

“I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20 percent project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined,” Fitzpatrick said. (Google permits engineers to spend 20 percent of their work time on pet projects.)

Check Fitzpatrick’s post for details on the roadmap and what he thinks is necessary to make Perl a full-fledged part of App Engine.

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it’s not really an official project.

Google plans to add new languages to App Engine, but hasn’t yet said which. Perl ranks fourth on the list of desired App Engine languages, after Java, PHP, and Ruby.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he’s not a member of the App Engine team, and Google isn’t promising Perl support, he said. By going public with the project, he hopes to intercept other Perl fans’ work in the area.

“Here at Google…it’s not one of our big languages so I don’t get to write as much Perl as I used to. I’d still like to run my personal Web apps on App Engine, though, and I’d like to write them in Perl,” he said.

Other product news this week included rumors of new Sony notebooks and an actual announcement of the Panasonic ToughBook CF-U1. Also announced were laptops to incorporate AMD’s Puma platform: the HP Pavilion dv5z and a raft of Toshiba Satellites.

In little-laptop news, we waited in vain for the MSI Wind, which was supposed to start shipping today but didn’t. However, the Intel Atom-based Eee PC 901 did show up–am I the only one who’s losing track of all the Eee PC’s variations? Colleagues at CNET Asia reported on two Atom-based tablets from Kohjinsha that are popping up in Japan. Also in Japan, Mouse Computer announced the awesomely named, 10.6-inch LuvBook U100.

Finally, as part of his summer road trip, CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman discovered that your busted Toshiba laptop is likely to be repaired by UPS..

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Aside from launching new laptops, Dell also made headlines by briefly extending the deadline for ordering a system with Windows XP. Now that the deadline’s passed, though, you’ll have to pay $50 for the XP downgrade option. Buyers can take solace in the fact that Dell’s upgrades are still cheaper than Apple’s, according to the super-sleuths at CNET U.K.

Have a great weekend!

The week belonged to Dell, which finally confirmed one of the worst kept secrets in laptopdom, the Studio line of laptops. Somewhere between the budget Inspiron line and high-end XPS line, the Studio 15 and Studio 17 are available with a variety of colors and lid imprint patterns; buyers–whom Dell describes as “today’s digital nomad”–can also snap up optional color-coordinated accessories. But how do the new laptops perform? Read our Dell Studio 15 review for the full scoop.

Also worth reading: a California company has developed a mobile fuel cell that can power a rugged laptop; Engadget has “in the wild” photos of the oh-so-shiny Voodoo Envy 133; Newmarket Technology acquired Everex, manufacturer of the CloudBook, from its Taiwan-based parent company; and the U.S. Congress debated the issues of searching citizens’ laptops when they return to the country from abroad.

Activity Streams works with 75 services now, and MT’s creators said they have plans to add more services. MT users need to be running version 4.1, and have the plugin installed. There are already a handful of examples of Activity Streams in action on MT blogs, ranging from an entire page to a blog’s sidebar. You can check out the examples here, here, and here.

(Credit:
CNET Networks / davidrecordon.com)

If you do want to share, the service is designed to work with other MT users contributing to the same blog. It’ll break up each action by user, and by each set of actions by day. You can see an example of it in action over on Movable Type’s team blog.

Six Apart is releasing a new plugin for Movable Type this morning called Activity Streams that let MT users create a news feed and add it to their blog. Similar to the FriendFeed, which I checked out back in October, MT users can plugin their various affiliations with other social services and present all the information in one place where they are already publishing content–their blog.

Add a news feed to your blog, now a standard feature on Movable Type.

MT’s creators said the plugin is different from services, such as Plaxo Pulse, because you host it, not a third party company. Hosting it yourself keeps your login information in your hands. MT also added privacy options, similar to Facebook’s news feed, letting you hide stories you don’t want to share entirely, or on an ad hoc basis.