links for 2008-09-25

When we first introduced you to Elgg two years ago, it was a new social networking platform whose focus was on e-learning. Since that time, the software has been rewritten and it has moved away from being strictly for educational use only. Today, the award-winning Elgg is one of the top open source social networking platforms available on the internet. A little over a month ago, Elgg 1.0 was introduced to the world. In this newest release, several years in the making, the software has been improved from the inside out. It has a more attractive UI and design, for starters. But under the hood you'll find more changes like better plugin support, RSS and OpenDD views, and a new database schema.

The Guardian's website maintained its position as the most popular website of the national titles audited monthly by the bureau with 23,111,862 unique users – a jump of 12.1 per cent from 20,622,063 in July.
Telegraph.co.uk posted a rise of 3,313,923 unique users (17.7 per cent) from July, when the site recorded a month-on-month drop, to 22,059,948 in August.

Jane Tranter, the outgoing BBC Fiction controller, has given the UK Web show market a major boost today by committing £1.3m for original online drama projects.

"As for the fee structure, MySpace explains: “There is no fee for you advertisement to appear on MySpace. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and visits your profile to learn more about your offer. We will keep showing your ad on MySpace until your campaign has reached its expiration date, or you have reached your spending limit.” There is however a $25 minimum for campaigns."

"I had the same reaction to the BBC when I visited last year to the one I had for newspapers. The BBC is about television, what it really should be about it video and distributing that video. And the two can be disconnected. I'm a big fan producing content and finding every possible way imaginable to deliver it and monetise it."

"This doesn't really seem to me to be the way forward at all. Somewhere they [the Telegraph managers and editors] seem to have forgotten, or jettisoned, the notion of publishing things that are interesting as opposed to iterative."

The new integration brings several Oracle products to the cloud, including the Oracle Database (11g), Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager. These products can be licensed and run on EC2 virtual server instances and customers can even use their existing Oracle licenses with no additional license fees. There are several Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) pre-bundled with Oracle products to make it easy to set up a virtual instance of Oracle (the AMIs include Oracle developer tools such as Application Express and JDeveloper).