Full FeedTrade shares of blogs with BlogShares
It looks like another web 2.0 product has emerged from the darkness, they seem to be coming out of nowhere with various different ideas and solutions for getting attention of the buzz world. You’ve all heard of fantasy football and probably more recently fantasy politics. Now there is fantasy blog share trading from BlogShares, you get fake money to trade shares of various blogs across the network. It has the entire atmosphere of a self contained little community about trading shares of blogs.
So far there doesn’t look to be a whole lot to it except the bare bones idea of holding shares of blogs and getting bloggers to register various blogs in order for them to have a large directory of blogs as well as a medium to have the top 100 blogs (and more) based on share price.
It is a pretty ingenious way to get people to register their favorite blogs though, it seems like it is mostly about marketing on the back end and on the front end gives bloggers a place to talk and live there bloginess (I coined the term blogginess, remember that) ideals.
Although it appears they are working towards reasons to have shares of a blog that make a little more sense there is a bit of a hierarchy to the web site that gives the bloggers that visit a reason to compete between themselves and not just web sites competing for the number one spot.
The web site has karma points that you get from suggesting web sites, categorizing web sites and other wise feeding them with marketing data. They have yet to have a way to spend your chips and karma points that really make any sense. But if you are a competitive person it gives you a place to be just that in the blogging community.
RelatedNews Corp. in acquisition talks with Digg?
It looks likes rumors are going around the Internet about the possibility that Digg.com could be bought out by News Corp., or at least they are in acquisition talks. It seems that our current Web 2.0 Bubble is nearing its end and about to pop with all of these big names buying up these buzz word based startups. So far it looks like the biggest buys have been News Corp. and their purchase of MySpace and Googles buyout of YouTube.
It’s hard to say who will be next in this round, there are only a few contenders left to be bought and the big names are on the prowl to buy them. Hopefully we will not have to see Digg commercialized to that point, their current advertising framework is perfect and I can easily see Mr. Murdoch and his marketing team turning Digg into an advertising engine. Not to say MySpace was god awful before News Corp. purchased them, it just seems to have gotten worse.
Rumors have it that Digg is asking a minimum of $125 million according to Mike Arrington, who has been on top of all the board-room-rumor-mill-news lately. It seems that his crack team of insiders feed him with some of the best breaking merger stories available. We will follow this story and see if it turns into BS or into full on Bubble 2.0.
Read [TechCrunch]
RelatedBlogging company, Performancing, is entering the advertising market
Performancing, the popular blogger portal, is now offering an all new services to add to its existing line of services that include job board, blog posting add on for Firefox and a forum for people to discuss blogging at large. They are now set to offer advertising through their existing web site. They appear to be setup to compete directly with companies like AdBrite, which is currently a major player in that same role.
The only thing that seems to be a little different is their reward system, currently they are paying blogger 70% of the advertising revenue while keeping the rest for themselves. With Performancing’s loyal blogger base it looks like they could really come out well from the deal by some of the lower traffic web sites. I’m sure we will see some casinos try to buy out all of the lower traffic blogs to increase link backs.
It would be a quick and easy way to just make the search engines like your web site just a little better if not get a few clicks out of the advertisements alone. At any rate, the advertising market seems to be getting a little more saturated as more and more companies try themselves out in the market. Google AdSense led the way in the most recent surge and now AdBrite, BitVertiser, Performancing, FM Publishing, PayPerPost and others are trying to pave their own way to the bank in gold.
RelatedSamsung announces their hybrid hard drive lineup
Samsung’s hybrid hard drives as most of you know, are a mix between flash memory which has faster read/write speeds then traditional hard drives and regular hard drives. They are being added as a buffer to replace the previous 2MB of cache that most of today’s drives have. The new drives will have 128MB or 256MB of buffer to allow for faster transfer of data between the processor, memory and hard drive.
The new HHDs are supposed to appear on the market by early 2007, about the same time that Windows Vista is released to the public market. Conventional cache is volatile memory that is erased when the drive is turned off. HHDs will add a new layer of cache consisting of Flash memory that is non-volatile which can be used faster when the drive is powered on of course.
Aside from the new buffer that is being added to the drives, nothing new has yet been released about how big the magnetic part of the hard drives will be yet. We can only hope they will all be TB level drives, but of course they will probably start out being just your typical 120GB and 250GB models.
Samsung is also still reportedly working on solid state hard drives (SSHD) that will be composed of completely flash memory which would allow for a huge jump in transfer speeds within the computer. It would almost eliminate the need for separate memory and hard drive storage space. You could realistically use virtual memory and it would transfer just as fast as traditional DDR RAM.
Read [TFOT]
RelatedMcDonalds asks, “Would you like fries with your spyware?”
McDonalds recently ran a contest for winning a free MP3 player for text messaging a code. It appears that 10,000 people won an MP3 player and couple free songs. What they didn’t account for was winning some free spyware with their player. It seems that McDonalds didn’t think to carefully when choosing the vendor that supplied their McDonalds branded MP3 player. The MP3 player when plugged in, automatically installed the spyware QQPass that sends password information to a web site as well as other information. It also opens up the computer for backdoor access that can cause even more problems for the infected computers.
We all heard about the Sony rootkit issue with playing Sony CDs and them restricting users from burning to CD as well as opening up the computer to a new vulnerability which spawned even more viruses that compromised the infected computers.
This new McDonalds spyware causes even more problems including the user/password sending to a set server for collection from the developers. This issue is becoming increasingly worrisome for regular computers users, it seems that the playing field isn’t as clear as it used to be. Not only do you have to worry now about playing games online, downloading anything from anywhere or attempting to listen to a CD but you have to worry about what you plugin to your computer and risk losing by doing such.
This story is early in its bad media cycle so it will be interesting to see how badly it gets spun and how McDonalds will deal with the issue.
Read [New Launches]
RelatedPanasonic announces 100GB Blu-ray discs that last 100 years
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co, parent company of Panasonic, has developed a Blu-ray disc that is able to store 100GB of data on a single peice of plastic. The new discs are the first of their kind and allow for four layers to be on a disc, each storing 25GB worth of data. One of the most surprising bits of information to come out of all of this is that they believe the discs will last 100 years. The durability levels of a disc of this kind if unbelievable and go far above and beyond the abilities of even traditional hard drives in size and life expectancy. Panasonic hasn’t yet announced when they will be able to mass produce these new discs or even when they expect to start selling them on any level.
This amazing announcement comes at a time when storage limits are being broken constantly and everyone is searching for the new standard in media storage devices. These new CDs actually look like they have a real ground for competition depending on their read/write speeds. I’m still confident that NAND flash memory will probably come out the victor after all is said and done, but making a hard statement like that is difficult when technology advances as fast and radically as it does.
Read [Nikkeibp]
RelatedHactivismo develops TorPark based off of Firefox
TorPark is a new browser that has been developed by an activist group for human rights and privacy called Hactivismo. The new browser is based on securing user privacy. It works off of the network of Tor servers referred to commonly as “Onion Servers.” The Tor servers mask your identity by rerouting your web traffic through any number of different Tor services based all over the world. The biggest difference with the new Torpark is that it randomizes the servers that are used to more efficiently mask your web traffic.
One of the other large benefits of using this new browser is that it is based off of Firefox and is a stand alone program. So you can store it on your flash drive and take it anywhere you want without worrying about your location being compromised in any way. Torpark is nearly 10 MB so it takes up a little space but not enough to really make a difference. The program runs quickly (slower then Firefox), but still works just as well which is always handy.
TorPark will also display your current IP address to let you know what you are broadcasting to web sites that you visit. It allows you to manually change servers if the one you are using is running too slow or if you feel the random need to use a different one.
They also have a sister project, called Torbird, that allows you to send email from the same network of Tor servers that the TorPark software uses. This feature almost seems geared towards spammers and may be abused. Hopefully they implement some kind of prevention mechanism in the future to ensure that spammers aren’t abusing Torbird.
Read [Techfilter]
Related
Experience what it’s like to download at unlimited speeds from a massive collection of over 800 Terabytes of user uploads. You’ll max out your Internet connection downloading a file in… Continue Reading »
Black Friday 2009
Black Friday is almost here! Gadgetell's got you covered with all the latest news on who's offering the best deals. Dangerous crowds? You're on your own.
Palm Pre Information & Updates
Palm just introduced their next-gen smartphone, the Palm Pre, and next-gen operating system, Palm webOS. Gadgetell's got the latest Pre and webOS information and news for you right here.
