Digital Culture
Twitter has jumped the shark for the digerati attending South by Southwest here in Austin. Daniel Terdiman at CNET points out what everyone trying to follow the #sxsw tweets has discovered — there are just too many of them. It seems that, while Twitter's hardware can scale for the many millions of people who have joined the community, the actual service cannot. Twitter is still up and running, but the idea of generating a real time picture of what folks are doing, and extracting relevant information from that picture, is kind of like trying to pick out your grandma at the Washington Mall on the satellite image taken during President Barack Obama's inauguration.
New York and other Northeast states lag in dropping landlines. Surprisingly, Oklahoma and Utah lead in going wireless
Craigslist's chief executive has fired back at an Illinois sheriff who is suing the popular website for promoting prostitution with free classified ads for "erotic services." ... Buckmaster maintains that Craigslist had "very positive communications" in 2007 with the Cook County Sheriff's Office, explaining the legality and intent of the classified-ad website's Erotic Services section. Craigslist says it has since instituted new measures to prevent the website from being used as a tool in the illegal sex trade and implemented an anti-abuse plan endorsed by attorneys general in Illinois and 39 other states.
Cathay Pacific has apologized for embarrassing a customer whose anguish after missing her flight was captured on video by an airline employee and posted on the Internet. The Hong Kong airline said in a statement to The Associated Press on Thursday that the worker who filmed the video has been disciplined but that another person posted the footage on YouTube, a video-sharing Web site.
An innovative and easily implemented technique in which nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces could soon open doors to dramatic improvements in the data storage capacity of electronic media.... "The density achievable with the technology we've developed could potentially enable the contents of 250 DVDs to fit onto a surface the size of a quarter...."
Scientists from the Universities of York and Warwick now believe they have been able to pinpoint the necessary expertise to make this possible, in a project called 'Towards Real Virtuality'. 'Real Virtuality' is a term coined by the project team to highlight their aim of providing a 'real' experience in which all senses are stimulated in such a way that the user has a fully immersive perceptual experience, during which s/he cannot tell whether or not it is real.
A virtual reality helmet that recreates the sights, smells, sounds and even tastes of far-flung destinations has been devised by British scientists. The device will allow users a life-like experience of places such as Kenya's Masai Mara while sitting on their sofa. They can also enjoy the smell of flowers in an Alpine meadow or feel the heat of the Caribbean sun on their face. [And, uh, about what most folks look for on the web...?]
said the pump at the By-Pass Deli and Conoco service station at Stevens Drive and the Highway 240 Richland bypass registered only $26 for the fuel. But somehow the transaction was recorded on his debit card as totaling $81,400,836,908.... called customer service for PayPal, which is where he established the debit account.... "Somebody from a foreign country who spoke in broken English argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes.... Did you get the gas?' he asked. Like I had to prove that I didn't pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!"
A White House decision to use a generic flash video player for hosting President Barack Obama's latest weekly video address on WhiteHouse.gov is being seen by some as a sign that the executive office is responding to previous concerns about the use of embedded YouTube videos on the site. The White House has denied that its use of a generic player signals any change in policy on using videos from YouTube and other third parties on WhiteHouse.gov.
The e-mail begins, "Racism still exists in this country." Attached to it is a photo of a window display at a bookstore in Coral Gables, Fla., featuring eight neatly placed tomes about President Obama and his family. Smack dab in the center of the display is a book titled "MONKEYS." The author of the e-mail then encourages a boycott of the store.
...60 percent of the world's citizens own a cell phone ... due in large part to cell phone growth in poor, developing countries. ... By the end of 2008, there were an estimated 4.1 billion subscriptions globally, compared with roughly 1 billion in 2002, ... Approximately 23 percent of the population uses the Internet, up from 11 percent in 2002. Still, poor countries are far less likely to surf the Net....
The team that ran the most technologically advanced presidential campaign in modern history is finding it difficult to adapt that model to government. WhiteHouse.gov, envisioned as the primary vehicle for President Obama to communicate with the online masses, has been overwhelmed by challenges that staffers did not foresee and technological problems they have yet to solve. Obama, for example, would like to send out mass e-mail updates on presidential initiatives, but the White House does not have the technology in place to do so. The same goes for text messaging, another campaign staple. Beyond the technological upgrades needed to enable text broadcasts, there are security and privacy rules to sort out ...
In response to user feedback, Microsoft has made numerous changes to the Windows 7 user interface as it readies the operating system -- viewed by many as a make-or-break product for the software maker -- for formal launch later this year or early next year.
A Seattle-area PC seller will offer free Windows 7 upgrades to customers who buy new Vista-powered machines starting next week, beating Microsoft Corp. and its biggest hardware partners to the punch by months.
we have to recognize that the way people (young, old, and in between) are communicating is evolving rapidly. Ten years ago, Twitter didn't exist, cell phones weren't ubiquitous, and email was recently crowned king of business communications. ... For kids, MySpace, Facebook, and even just IM are certainly about creating an online identity, but are much more simply about talking to each other. Remember when 3-way calling and call waiting were a big deal? Screw call waiting. Now kids can have synchronous or asynchronous, private or shared, in-depth conversations with all of their friends at once. Remarkably, they manage the data quite well. ...
Google's web-based email service, Gmail, has crashed this morning, leaving millions of users from Britain to Australia unable to send and receive messages.
Social networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users, an eminent scientist has warned. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centred. [Yeah, sure. Think of the children! Think of the childreennnnnn!]
[Two great lines in this article:] If you ever put any content on the Internet, expect it to stay there. [and] fighting the Internet is as futile as trying to wade into the ocean and control the tides.
Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, has been officially announced, and promises to change, among other things, the one problem keeping Linux from world domination: the poop-colored desktop theme.
In addition to Boxee, Hulu also has pulled its content from the CBS-owned TV.com, sparking a push-back from TV.com, which doesn't want to say good-bye so quickly. Could the moves by Fox and NBC-owned Hulu be the first in a war over digital distribution of television content?
A 14-year-old Wisconsin girl who refused to stop texting during a high school math class was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct,
With an understanding of how each operating system treats windows and of how the Taskbar has evolved, it becomes clear that the Windows 7 Taskbar is very much a descendant of its predecessors, and not a Dock clone.
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea
Zune users, particularly of the 30-GB version, have been waking up to find their music players are part of an apocalyptic meltdown. The Microsoft devices have been freezing after loading up, leaving users with a picture of the Zune icon and a loading bar. The reports seem to have started coming in at around midnight Tuesday and have continued to mount.
Internet service providers have not focused much effort on rolling out Web connectivity to some of America's more rural areas. IBM and International Broadband Electric Communications plan to address that by providing service via existing power lines. The project could finally bring the Web to more remote locations, but the technology is unlikely to soon become a competitor to more traditional means of Internet service.
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