I’m sure that nobody is unfamiliar with the internet giants like Yahoo, Google or YouTube, and in fact, most of you very probably visit these sites on a daily basis, but just how well do you really know these sites? Can you claim that you know their logos by heart? Take this small quiz here at guessthelogo.com to find out, and share your scores here. Remember only the first time truly counts!

A few years ago, a flash game called the ESP game popped up around the net. It was a brilliantly designed idea by students from Carnegie Mellon University in that it makes people want to do work for them for free. So what was the work? Tagging images on the internet with an appropriate tag.

The basic game idea was that two random players on the internet are hooked up together through the program and are displayed the same image without anything else. With no method of communication, both players were to try and type the same word into the text box to score points. The players are then rewarded with entertainment and satisfaction by getting more tags entered correct, while secretly behind the scenes, every image tagged by the players are named accordingly. This way, not only were the images guaranteed to be correctly named, they were done for free by thousands of willing people.

Fastforward back to the present, as in Google’s usual attention to web accessibility, they launched the Google Image Labeler game recently that performs more or less like the ESP game did. So if you have one and a half minutes to spare, and are willing to become free labour for Google, I highly recommend you to try out this image labelling game and ponder upon how clever people are to have thought of such evil ways of exploiting bored online souls.

You’ve got to appreciate the effort that Google makes towards revolutionizing Web2.0.

Last year, Google launched its personal homepage feature at http://www.google.com/ig, allowing you to customize your Google Homepage to include an assort of news, rss feeds and gadgets to your personal liking. In addition to reading your favorite blogs and getting your local weather, just a click to google.com can even allow you to send free sms messages to friends, translate that German word back to English, or enjoy your daily dose of Sudoku - all on one page. As a result, a lot of third party developers, including me, have contributed to its expansion by creating our own gadgets to be launched on our personal homepages.

However before today, all of these cool customizable content and features were limited only to the Google personal homepage. So you couldn’t put that cool PacMan module on your own website, but as of today, Google gadgets are freely exportable. Just copy the code and you can have them on any website you like.

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Or read the latest discoveries on New Scientist!