Thumbalizr is a newish online image tool that allows users to take screen shots of web pages. Users can customize the dimensions of each screenshot taken, from standard sizes through to a custom option. Screen shots can consist of an entire page, or just a standard screen shot. To use Thumbalizr, users simply type the URL of the site they require a screenshot of, and hit the “thumb it” button. The image is then available for download in various sizes by pixel. Thumbalizer is a really good idea; I’m a regular creator of web page screenshots so to not have to manually take a screen shot, open it in Photoshop, crop it, resize it, save it then upload it appeals to me, as I’m sure it would to others who frequently create screenshots. There is only one significant problem with Thumbalizr: it regularly doesn’t work. It happily made screenshots of TechCrunch, but it failed on a range of other sites. Hopefully they will fix the issues shortly. → Read More
Holy Toledo, that’s a lot of storage for a desktop hard drive. Hitachi’s new Serial-ATA Desktar 7K1000 offers up a full terabyte of disk space (actually 931GB after some standard binary conversion trickery), 300MB/s transfer rate, 7200RPM spindle speed, and a monstrous 32MB cache. It’s not all that expensive, either — available now for just under $350. If you’ve got a hankering for pages and pages of benchmark scores, The Tech Report (link below) put the drive through its paces and it seems to have performed admirably. Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 hard drive [The Tech Report] via Ubergizmo → Read More
Comments are the greasy oil that keeps the blog machine running. Here are three great (and 100% unedited) comments recently posted by your fellow readers. → Read More
The creation of automated friends and general profile gaming has been a part of MySpace for a long time now. The general idea is that by creating more friends and more data you are more likely to gain traffic for what ever it is you are ultimately trying to sell. YouTube has been fairly immune from widespread gaming to date. YouTube Friend Adders have been around for a while, but given the nature of YouTube, adding friends doesn’t really deliver much in the way of tangible benefits. A new package, Tube Automator, hit my inbox yesterday. Tube Automator promises to deliver real traffic and results to uploaded YouTube videos by automating the YouTube friend creation process, commenting process and rating process. The theory is that to gain real interest for a video on YouTube, a video must hit the top lists on YouTube, which includes the most commented videos, most viewed videos and the top rated videos. According to the Tube Automator site [the]Built in account creator creates hundreds of YouTube accounts for you, all you need to do is type in the captcha Gets your video featured on the “Top Rated” and “Most “Discussed pages” at YouTube Once your video appears on these pages, it gets a large number of page views which makes it appear in the “Most Viewed” section automatically And just in case YouTube catches on, Tube Automater has the ability to post at random intervals “to make it look like real people have posted and voted” and “Supports proxies to make posts look like they came from visitors across the world.” I have no idea whether it works or not. In their product demo video (screencast below) they show high rated videos that are claimed to have been successfully promoted using their software; some rated so highly they appear next to videos from well known folks such as Chris Pirillo. YouTube fans can only hope that Google finds a way of blocking and cracking down on this style of YouTube gaming ASAP. As long as these sorts of packages continue to flourish, the validity of the top lists on YouTube is thrown into question. http://www.viddler.com/player/7071fe34/ CrunchBase Information YouTube Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Credit where it’s due: Rupert Murdoch’s online news properties are at least now being honest. This post admits that it has no news value other than to note that the MSM has further gone to the dogs…or cats as the case may be. “Meh watching yuz az a takeover target” perhaps? Will the new online honesty will policy extend to the News Corp owned MySpace: “yuz has yuk templates. ” and “Beware the Ides of Facebook.” Update: was asked by email why this is relevant. News Corp owns MySpace along with a pile of other web properties, including the just recently acquired Wall Street Journal. News Corp web properties play an increasing large role in reporting on our industry, as well as participating in it. → Read More
Danny Carlton writes a little known personal blog under the pseudonym “Jack Lewis” at jacklewis.net/weblog. But don’t try to visit it if you use Firefox, because he’s banned users of the popular browser from visiting his site. Firefox users are now redirected here. Why? Because he objects to the fact that some of those Firefox readers are using an ad-blocking extension to block ads showing on the site. To counter the problem, he’s thrown the baby out with the bathwater and kicked 13% or so of the Internet off his site. While Carlton is certainly enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame, in my opinion this is not a good strategy to build a blog. Users are solid gold. Even the ones that block ads. They sometimes write comments, which is free content. They link to you from their own blog. And they tell friends about your site. All that leads to more readers and, ultimately, more revenue. If a user wants to skip the ads and is willing to go to the trouble of installing ad blocking software, so be it. I still love ‘em. And I gladly hand them my content for free. Carlton doesn’t agree, apparently. Although I wonder why he continues to provide a full content feed, sans ads, at jacklewis.net/weblog/atom.xml (and it has been reposted here). Those users are “stealing” his content, too. What about them? Perhaps he’ll now turn his attention to the evils of RSS. The Internet will certainly be a less colorful place without Carlton’s passionate editorial. A perusal of his blog posts (via Safari) tells me he thinks Barack Obama is a communist and that “fourth graders can be lied to and told the Theory of Evolution is a fact.” The problem is, Darwin was right. Only the fittest survive. And Carlton just made his blog an endangered species. → Read More
Ooooh, that’s gotta sting! Hitting Microsoft right where it hurts. This is actually a pretty funny video. Rotary dial, Polaroid photos, lackluster battery life — it’s all here! zunePhone ad [YouTube] via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) → Read More
The Australian Prime Minister’s Office have been caught editing Wikipedia, the latest in a growing line of Wikiscanner entrapments. Staff from the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) edited Wikipedia entries that were damaging to the Goverment, including pages covering the Children Overboard Affair and Mandatory Detention. Other edits included deleting the nickname of “Captain Smirk” from the Wikipedia biography of Australian Treasurer Peter Costello, and a range of bizarre edits, including the addition of the line “Poo bum dicky wee wee” to a Wikipedia article on Bubishi, a book related to Martial Arts. Australia faces a Federal Election by November this year, and the edits have become major news locally. Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd accused the Prime Minister of directing public servants to change history to suit the Government and that the behavior was “odd.” Notably though, Rudd admitted that his own staff might have edited Wikipedia “for factual changes.” The truth I guess is in the eyes of the beholder. The Australian press also discovered that staff from the Australian Department of Defence were the most active Wikipeda editors among Australian Government Departments, having made over 5000 Wikipedia edits. DOD edits included changes to pages ranging from the 9/11 Truth Movement, the Australian Defence Force Academy and the Vietnam War-era Pentagon Papers. A Defence spokesman said that the Department would move to ban access to Wikipeda for all staff. → Read More
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how this is scientifically possible, take a moment to read the following quote: “The researchers say their findings could have practical applications, such as helping take video games to the next level of virtuality so the players feel as if they are actually inside the game.” Wow…so this is what Wii 2 will be like. → Read More
The New York Times took their personalized home page product out of beta today – see it here. The look and feel is about the same as it was a a year ago when it went into private beta – Think MyYahoo, Pageflakes or Netvibes, with the New York Times logo and without the widgets. There’s an argument that the product will bring customized home pages to the masses, although frankly Yahoo has already done a good job of this with well over 50 million users. This will be particularly useful for people who live, eat and breathe the New York Times, but others may find it a bit much. Users can also add pre-selected non-NYT content or their own favorite RSS feeds, and modules can be dragged around the page, just like every other customizable home page. → Read More
Gizmodo got a letter from Apple asking them to take down the images of the little fat Nanos we’ve been seeing all day, which in legal talk means blood will soak the halls of Cupertino tonight as the leakers are tortured long into the morning. [Update: Apple's lawyers came at us and demanded we remove the photo because it "violates Apple's copyrights". So we've replaced it with this hastily rendered mock-up of a spy shot that's sure to enter our inbox soon. -Matt] iPod Nano Spy Shots Confirmed as Real by Apple Legal [Gizmodo] → Read More
Social shopping site CrowdStorm has launched a beta trial for their new site revision. It’s been seven months in the making. CrowdStorm always had a social bent, with users supplying the listings and reviews for products listed on the site. However, the new version is a significant upgrade that incorporates content pulled from around the web with relevant reviews intelligently selected from other users. You can sign up for the trial here. Before, the site was entirely dependent on user submitted products and written reviews. The new site adds a host of other review sources, such as expert reviews (Cnet, TrustedReview, Stuff …), buyer guides, video links, and q&a sessions. Users can bookmark their own relevant product review content on the site. It also brings in new price search engines such as Amazon, eBay, and Shopping.com. CrowdStorm hopes not only pull content from the web, but also let you take your content with you. You can take your reviews and post them to other blogs, review sites, or online stores. The hope is that CrowdStorm will function as a hub for review content instead of a walled garden. The more significant change is how it takes advantage of user generated content. CrowdStorm has a new algorithm that ranks user reviews in aggregate and for each user based on the quality of reviews, the similarity between users, and social network relationships. The idea being that similar users closely linked to you have more relevant and trustworthy reviews. The algorithm can also generate a relevant crowd of experts you can ask questions. It’s very similar to what VibeAgent is doing with their travel review system. Analyzing the social network graph has become a sensible way to deal with the potential spammyness of user generated sites and I expect to see it incorporated into even more products. → Read More
Cameras on cellphones are as common as Herpes on a Hilton, and are generally used for home made porn capturing precious moments digitally. That being said, you’ll want to be careful what you keep pics of on there. In Vermont, a young man lost his cellphone. It was found and returned to the police, which was very a very nice thing to do. When the owner of the phone, Peter Ste. Marie, swung by the station to pick it up, he was arrested on charges of cultivating marijuana. Peter, you see, had taken pics of his grow operation with the phone. He left them on there and lost the phone. Oops. The cops tracked him down and arrested him. There’s a moral to this story, readers. Figure it out. Tipster, Cell Phone Photos Lead To Pot Bust [Caledonia Record, and thanks, tipster!] → Read More
As geeks (yes, you’re geeks), you’re likely eagerly waiting for the next season of ABC’s LOST to surface. We’re with you on that one. But did you know that LOST has a lot more in common with Gilligan’s Island than the word “castaways”? In fact, the first incarnation of Gilligan’s Island was as a dark, mysterious drama, just like LOST? It’s true, but sadly this was considered too dark and complex for the family-friendly 1960s viewers, so the show was re-tooled as a sitcom. ABC went back to the original idea for Lost on Gilligan’s Island as the basis for LOST. I know that’s a lot of italics, but stay with me. YouTube brings you the surviving clips from the show that could have been. As you’ll see, many of the recurring elements of LOST are demonstrated a good four decades before Locke and Sheppherd started locking horns. Enjoy. → Read More
Nuprin. Little…yellow…different. The Wii is just like Nuprin except that it’s white, not yellow. And also it’s a video game console, not an anti-inflammatory drug. Ten days ago, we reported that the Wii was catching up to the Xbox 360′s lifetime sales. It has now surpassed them. Nice work, Nintendo. Nice work. Nintendo Wii is market leader in home console business [Video Game Chartz] → Read More
Facebook has developed a book swap feature for its Marketplace application called Marketplace Book Exchange that enables users to buy and sell books from and to each other. Books are identified by buyers and sellers by their ISBN numbers, and curiously it looks as though there is no way to view all of the books offered in a particular network. On the one hand, this appears to be a smart move for Facebook, as college students are fed up with buying expensive textbooks from their college bookstores. The Social Graph certainly lends itself to buying and selling items from others within a localized market, such as a college campus. However, Facebook is not the first to try helping college students find better deals online. There are several websites, such as Campus Books and eCampus, dedicated to this purpose. There are even two applications developed on the Facebook platform – Swap Roll Book Exchange and Campus Book Exchange – meant to help Facebook users find books and other items that others currently own and are willing to sell or trade. While these Facebook applications have a combined total of less than a thousand users each, they may have experienced a surge of growth as students return to campus this Fall. Now that Facebook has developed its own application for book-swapping purposes, these independently developed applications don’t have a chance. Moral of the story for Facebook application developers: if the idea behind your application is any good, expect to see Facebook develop its own application to supplant yours. Don’t expect them to just sit on the sidelines and watch. Thanks for the tip Noah. → Read More
Running with the idea that there aren’t enough iPod docking solutions, let alone enough companies making iPod docking solutions, today finds a press release about the launch of a new company that makes iPod docking solutions, called Bexy. Rhymes with “sexy”. Not sure why. At first blush, the new iMirror dock looks a little nicer than some, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been done before. The think is Bexy seems to have figured ways around a couple issues that keep some docks from being perfect. The remote control, for example, docks with your iPod. Many docks have remotes with LCDs so you can see what you’re playing. The problem is they get the information wirelessly, so there’s quite a lag, especially when browsing. The iMirror syncs your playlists and library files with the iPod in the dock, mirroring the information on the remote’s memory. Thus the name, clever. We’re hoping this kind of subtle innovation becomes a trend with the new company, and wish them luck. Given how many iPod accessories there are, it takes something special to “wow” us. Here’s hoping Bexy can do that. Bexy Corporation Debuts with Innovative iMirror [Press Release] → Read More
According to the mystical Fat Nano Fairy, the following are facts about the upcoming Fat Nano: 1. The new, fat iPod Nano will likely come in 8GB and 16GB versions. 2. It will have video playback. 3. It will not be called “Nano” anymore. There will be a new product name. The Fat Nano Fairy isn’t sure what it’ll be called, though “Flower” is something to consider. What do you think it should be called? That’s what the comments are for, friends. We’re hoping they actually call it the Fat Nano, because that would rule so hard. That is all. → Read More
Say hello to the “world’s most power efficient x86 CPU” from VIA. It’s a 1-watt, 500MHz processor with a 400MHz frontside bus that can be paired with VIA’s CX700/M all-in-one digital media chipset to create a complete system that uses less than 10 watts of electricity. → Read More
Presumably the first two images you see in this video are the battery and some sugar and presumably you Sony or whoever made this video has no taste in music. Regardless, looks like it could be a useful addition to the future battery arsenal and it presumably won’t explode like most Sony batteries. HAR! via Engadget → Read More
