A couple weeks ago Greenpeace had a naming contest name a whale. Well of-course the internet being what it is, tubes and pictures of cats with ill-formed grammatical statements, there was an overwhelming push to have the whale named “Mr. Splashy Pants”. And after the final voting, out of 30 possible names and 150,000 votes, Mr. Splashy Pants took home 78% of the vote.

Now since the internet has chosen a name for the whale, it is time to save him. So lets in an effort to try to keep the Japanese from hunting and killing these amazing creatures, sign the petition, and donate a little money if you support the cause.

Last Monday, the popular college social site, facebook, made a change in how the data was presented. When I logged in, I was pleasantly surprised to see a “NewsFeed” that displayed all of my friends activity over the last several hours/days. But I quickly noted that it seemed not as many people were happy about this new feature as I was. Groups such as “I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK” were beginning to form, and by the middle of the week, one group had amassed over 700,000 members! They called the new features ’stalkerish’ and did not like that they took up so much room. Over and over I repeated to myself, “What are these people thinking? All of the data was already there, now it is just consolidated! Web2.0 people!”

So on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg posted an open letter apologizing to the community, and said that they had hoped for a more positive response, but after two straight days of coding, new privacy controls are in place. Techcrunch posted their unbiased opinion on the whole matter.

I personally agree with Michael Arrington from Techcrunch,

“If this feature had been part Facebook since the beginning, their users would be screaming if Facebook tried to remove it.”

Alwell, Facebook is growing, and at least it is listening to its members.

So says Ed Whitacre from AT&T. He supposedly believes that there should be more of a business than just ISPs providing ‘free’ access to websites and services. Everything can be commercialized, and this makes it better right? WRONG.

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors. These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

WE as an internet community need to stand up and tell these companies that they can not do this. Please go to SaveTheInternet.com and write your congress men to tell them they need to support Net Neutrality. Don’t let big business kill the internet.

More information about Net Neutrality.

-Tom

Well, first senator Ted Stevens makes himself look like an idiot, in front of all of Congress, now we have another idiot among the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, Comedy Central has some funny shows, and I’m sure that Steven Colbert can be funny at times, but this is just annoying. Colbert told the audience to find the Elephant article on Wikipedia and to change it to falsify information. He calls being able to change information to suit your reality ‘Wikiality’. All I have to say to him is, you are certainly a large douche. Thanks for trying to destroy what millions have worked hard to build. At least the antivandalism bots caught him, and the rest of the idiots trying to change the page. Not to mention, Colbert got banned.

Other tech news today includes someone who put a cellphone into a rotary phone case. Not really sure why, other than the ‘what the heck’ factor. It is completely portable, after all. And someone wrote some software that mimics a wiki, but works like notepad. So you can supposedly write pages of notes, and the program will be able to collect popular terms, (such as bach, in their example) and you can find all of the entries that match up to those tags. Sounds pretty slick to me.

-Tom

Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis are going at it with remarks about each others sites. Just goes to show you how passionate these guys are.

Jason has offered to pay the top 10 ‘diggers’ from digg to find and post stories on Netscape. This has upset Kevin, and a lot of the rest of the digg community, since digg.com has always been about community submitted material. There are no ranks, labels or special rewards for digging the most, or submitting tons of stories. Honestly, that’s what I think makes it so good, and is part of the magic formula that makes digg function the way it does. Leo Laporte gives a recap of all of the stuff that has been going on in his article. Hopefully this will all end without bloodshed.

Post Edit: Here is another link that discusses the hot topic of paying content submitters of community based sites. (Should Community-Edited News Sites Pay Top Editors?, Mark Glaser)

By the way, if you haven’t switched to Firefox yet, it truly is an amazing browser. Not to mention, free. If you have switched, convince someone else to do the same. They’ll be happier with out ActiveX and virii destroying their system!

-Tom

“Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you’ve made is worth the misery of having to review it.” -Federico Fellini

Well, two days ago, Apple had a press conference to show off the new products. Lots of hype was circling the convention, and Apple flew people in from many parts of the country just to see these ‘new’ products. Images surfaced on the internet about 2 weeks ago that were supposedly leaked from the Apple factory showing a full sized iPod video. Later then, a video showing someone creating the ‘image’ with photography and Photoshop. However, there were discrepancies between the actual image and the image in the video, so this gave new hope to the image actually being a leak. Then the day before the Apple announcement, AOTS admitted to creating the video of the faked image, and I believe the original also… “Way too meta…”

Well, the new products Apple did actually announce included the iPod HiFi, and the Leather iPod Case, and I suppose most importantly the Intel iMac and Intel Mac mini. For me, these didn’t really live up to the hype (that was mostly created by rumors). Besides, Apple’s jump into the iPod accessories market is about 3 years too late, and the products that were introduced, IMO are overpriced and not original.

As of today however, Apple has filed for a wide laptop touchpad patent from the US Patent office, Apple has a way of filing for patents that have anything to do with touch or interface. All we can hope for is a touchable iPod…

And for the last bit of Apple news the Mac II computer is 19 years old today. You could buy one of these in 1987 for $5,498 (1 MB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a 40MB SCSI hard disk).

FOTP: Digg.com and Wikipedia.org

Digg: “If you like tech news, you’ll love Digg.com”

Digg was created as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom play an active role in the management of the site. This site is a where members choose what news stories belong on the front page by “Digg”ing a story. The more diggs, the story will stay on the front page.

Wikipedia: “The Encyclopedia for the Internet, if you haven’t used it, you need to.”

If you can think it, it’s probably on here (Example: Digg). This is the definition of Wikipedia, from Wikipedia, hence all of the links. Wikipedia is a multilingualWeb-based free-contentencyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an Internet connection.

-Tom