ghstomahawks - Slashdot User

Submission + - Thoof reviewed by Read/Write Web (readwriteweb.com)

Submitted by

Sanity

on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @10:16AM

Sanity writes: "New social news website Thoof is reviewed by Josh Catone of Read/Write Web. "It's a bit like Digg meets Findory with a wiki flavor ... Thoof relies on a story personalization algorithm to analyze the links you've clicked and attempts to deliver links based on your interests." In addition to the collaborative filtering aspect, the site is also different in that users can propose changes to stories which other users can vote on before they are applied. This means that rather than just complaining about poorly written story summaries, users can just fix whatever problems they see."

Submission + - iPhone Media Blitz: Letterman, Leno, The Works! (appleinvestornews.com)

Submitted by

Frankc23

on Monday July 02, 2007 @03:06PM

Frankc23 writes: "Last week's iPhone media coverage will go into the record books of product public relations. The volume of press coverage has been truly staggering. A web check shows the following:

1. The iPhone blanketed network TV last week with coverage on all the network morning shows and evening newscasts. Jay Leno joked about it and, of course, David Letterman's Friday Top 10 List was "Top Ten Things Overheard In Line To Buy The iPhone."

2. A Google News search of iPhone headlines (at midnight PT Sunday) showed 17,126 articles.

3. AppleInvestorNews.com's database of stories with iPhone in the headline almost tripled for the week ending Sunday, July 1 (actually 2.8 times) from the week before.

4. Four of Digg's Top 10 most popular technology stories on Sunday night were iPhone related.

It got so big that some media started apologizing for repeatedly covering the story. Many reporters also referenced other media coverage as part of the story. This is a sure sign that coverage is peaking. So iPhone media mania will likely recede from broad-based consumer press over the next two weeks.

Apple took a PR risk orchestrating such an enormous media frenzy. The iPhone marketing was riding the good will of the iPod's cultural impact. If the iPhone was not as well received this past weekend, Apple might have squandered much of its golden image. That could still happen as the media — who love to raise something up, then watch it fall — will be on the lookout for negatives in the coming weeks. But if those negatives don't show up, the upside could be even more dramatic. That's what Apple is banking on.

Apple is in rare air right now, even for Apple."

Submission + - Preparing 4 Digg / Slashdot Effect: Beyond Caching (njection.com)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Friday June 29, 2007 @02:41AM

Anonymous Coward writes: "When preparing for an onslaught of traffic to your web site, the smallest mistake can turn your servers one time chance for fame and fortune into an overly-expensive brick sitting in a collocation cabinet. A great example is MeetMoi.com that, when it was profiled on Fox News as an mobile dating service, was almost unreachable."

Submission + - Kevin Rose launches Pownce, it's pretty sweet! (centernetworks.com)

Submitted by babooo404 on Thursday June 28, 2007 @09:01AM

babooo404 writes: Kevin Rose of Digg fame has launched his latest startup. Check out the first video review of Pownce. It's like Twitter, only better. It combines IM, file sharing and event planning into one tool. The reply feature alone makes it 100x better than Twitter.

Submission + - whogets - digg similar online game show (whogets.com)

Submitted by

Enam

on Thursday June 28, 2007 @01:16AM

Enam writes: "It is hard to describe whogets.com. In the semi-final, its users can enter contests to win products (most under $100). After a week or so, seven finalists are selected. The community then votes on which of these finalists gets the product. whogets.com claims that no spam or other annoyances will be generated as a result of participation."

Submission + - U.S.' net access not all that speed (usatoday.com)

Submitted by

Ant

on Tuesday June 26, 2007 @05:16PM

Ant writes: "USA Today reports that United States of America (U.S.A.) trails other industrialized nations in high-speed Internet access and may never catch up unless quick action is taken by public-policymakers, a report commissioned by the Communications Workers of America warns. The median U.S. download speed now is 1.97 megabits per second — a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan, says the report released Monday. Other speedy countries include South Korea (median 45 megabits), France (17 megabits) and Canada (7 megabits). Seen on Digg. It also shows a chart of Internet on-ramp speeds by each state. Bah at #36. #1 and #2 are surprises to me."

Submission + - Social news site ranks stories on reads, not votes

Submitted by Stony Stevenson on Monday June 25, 2007 @11:43PM

Stony Stevenson writes: Spotplex on Monday announced a new content-aggregation site that it said will provide Digg.com-like rankings of Internet content — with a twist. Instead of requiring users to rank content, Spotplex will automatically rank it based on the number of people reading it.

Unlike Digg, content is not submitted to Spotplex by the community, rather is automatically indexed by inserting Spotplex's proprietary code within your site. The stories that get to the front-page of Spotplex aren't the ones that readers vote for, rather are the ones that the code tells the service got the most page views on your site. So much for community-powered news aggregation and promotion.

Spotplex provides internet users with real-time ranking of blog articles based on actual impression count. In other words, you can find what is the hot news today, this week, or this month in real time at Spotplex. This is not a list of articles people recommended or voted for, but a list of articles read most in a given timeframe.

Submission + - Digg.com users launch new revolt over comments sys (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by Hot Diggity Dog on Friday June 22, 2007 @03:23PM

Hot Diggity Dog writes: Digg users wish they could be more like Slashdot! "The complaints starting rolling in within a few hours after the comment system was launched Thursday evening. By Friday morning, the volatile Digg.com users — they had staged one of the first online revolts against a social networking site last month — had "Dugg" almost 5,000 comments that they wouldn't be "force-fed" the new system."

Submission + - Web 2.0 Media: Digg For SEO Only! (media-sight.net)

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Thursday June 21, 2007 @06:22PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "There are thousands if not millions of web pages, articles, blogs, and news sites that discuss and share tips and advice, but for the first time here you can find the first Digg like site but only for SEO. great place to learn a lot about how to promote your web site or blog in search engine. take a look!"

Digg.com Attempts To Suppress HD-DVD Revolt 1142

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @11:26PM from the toothpaste-back-in-the-tube dept.

fieryprophet writes "An astonishing number of stories related to HD-DVD encryption keys have gone missing in action from digg.com, in many cases along with the account of the diggers who submitted them. Diggers are in open revolt against the moderators and are retaliating in clever and inventive ways. At one point, the entire front page comprised only stories that in one way or another were related to the hex number. Digg users quickly pointed to the HD DVD sponsorship of Diggnation, the Digg podcast show. Search digg for HD-DVD song lyrics, coffee mugs, shirts, and more for a small taste of the rebellion." Search Google for a broader picture; at this writing, about 283,000 pages contain the number with hyphens, and just under 10,000 without hyphens. There's a song. Several domain names including variations of the number have been reserved. Update: 05/02 05:44 GMT by J : New blog post from Kevin Rose of Digg to its users: "We hear you."

Submission + - Hard drive snafu has NBA star suing, fuming

Submitted by

coondoggie

on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:55PM

coondoggie writes: "All basketball player Bruce Bowen wanted was his hard drive fixed. What he got apparently is an invasion of privacy and a big mess. The Smoking Gun Website says the San Antonio Spurs forward hired a Texas company to fix but instead the repair company removed the machine's hard drive and sold the item — which contained confidential personal and financial information — to another customer. Bowen is now seeking over $2 million in damages from Computer Nerdz, the San Antonio company used to repair his Gateway computer. http://www.networkworld.com/community3/?q=node/147 53"

Music Decoded From 600-Year-Old Carvings 243

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:55PM from the rosslyn-motet dept.

RulerOf writes "Musicians recently unlocked a 600 year old mystery that had been encoded into the walls of the Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, the one featured in The Da Vinci Code. The song was carved into the walls of the chapel in the form of geometric shapes that a father-son team — both are musicians and the father is an ex-Royal Air Force code breaker — finally matched to so-called Chladni patterns (see the Wikipedia article on cymatics). The recovered melody was paired with traditional lyrics (translated into Latin) and recorded; the result can be heard in this video (also linked from the musicians' website). The video also gives a visual representation of how the engravings match up to the cymatic patterns." From the Reuters article: "'The music has been frozen in time by symbolism... [The carvings] are of such exquisite detail and so beautiful that we thought there must be a message here.' The two men matched each of the patterns on the carved cubes to a Chladni pitch, and were able finally to unlock the melody."

Long Block Data Standard Finalized 199

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:23PM from the 30-years-later dept.

An anonymous reader writes "IDEMA has finally released the LBD (Long Block Data) standard. This standard, in work since 2000, increases the length of the data blocks of each sector from 512 bytes to 4,096 bytes. This is an update that has been requested for some time by the hard-drive industry and the development of new drives will start immediately. The new standard offers many advantages — improved reliability and higher transfer rates are the two most obvious. While some manufacturers say the reliability may increase as much as tenfold, the degree of performance improvement to be expected is a bit more elusive. Overall improvements include shorter time to format and more efficient data transfers due to smaller overhead per block during read and write operations."

Censoring a Number 1046

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @03:44PM from the you-can't-copyright-that dept.

Rudd-O writes "Months after successful discovery of the HD-DVD processing key, an unprecedented campaign of censorship, in the form of DMCA takedown notices by the MPAA, has hit the Net. For example Spooky Action at a Distance was killed. More disturbingly, my story got Dugg twice, with the second wave hitting 15,500 votes, and today I found out it had simply disappeared from Digg. How long until the long arm of the MPAA gets to my own site (run in Ecuador) and the rest of them holding the processing key? How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" How long before the magic 16-hex-pairs number shows up in a comment here?

VeriSign To Offer Passwords On Bank Card 158

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @02:59PM from the third-factor dept.

Billosaur writes "Imagine the PayPal security tool embedded on a credit card. VeriSign is announcing that a deal is in the works to provide credit cards with one-time-use passwords. By placing the technology directly on the card, it becomes more convenient and provides an extra layer of security for online credit-card transactions. A cardholder would type in their information as normal and then would be prompted to enter the passcode displayed on the card. This means a user would need to have the physical card in hand in order to use it, thus thwarting identity thieves who steal credit card information but do not possess the card itself. VeriSign said it expects to announce a major bank using its cards in May."

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