Friday links

Ark is an online personal fundraising site which allows you to donate to your causes simply by using the web.

 

Here's a rather strange freelance researcher's project to make Skype open-source; as expected Skype have reacted strongly against it. 

 

We were quite amused with this news from Brand Republic about this new site for 'cool over-50's' called high50.com (tagline: 'age has its benefits'. Yes, you may laugh - we certainly did!!!). The article links to another site for grandmothers, backed by Mumsnet, called (surprise surprise) Gransnet. 

 

Google Apps will phase out older IE, Firefox, Safari browser versions in favour of Chrome and HTML 5 browsers on August 1st.

 

Apple is set to pay between $100 million and $150 million to big record agencies in advance of its launch of the iCloud, to help it along. 

 

I'm sure none of us who harbour a desire for an iPad 2 are as desperate as this kid from China, who sold his kidney to get one. 

 

ITV's chairman Archie Norman recently compared the broadcasting industry's dependence on ads to a 'faulty shower'.

 

Peer endorsement is all the rage this week as Klout launches the K+ button, Google adds the +1 feature to the Android market and across the web, and Twitter launches a 'Follow' button. 

 

Lawyer Michael Camilleri blogs about why he thinks Windows 8 is fundamentally flawed, while referring to John Gruber's post on the same issue. 

 

Yahoo, Google and Microsoft decide to make search listings richer through structured data, via schema.org.