The Digg Townhall Webcast Held on February 26, 2009 5pm PT/8pm ET
The fifth Digg townhall meeting, hosts Kevin and Jay answered questions about power users, customized Digg pages, and dupe detection. Also present was the special guest Anton Kast, Digg's VP of Research & Development.
More info on the embedded video is available on Digg Townhall.
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digg,
Digg Townhall
Since Google introduced Follow your Favorite Blogs within the blogger account setting, there have been multitudes of people adding their favorite blogs and being displayed using the Google Friend Connect! I have used the widget on one of our Blogs and seem to be working very well albeit only three followers so far!. But today Google Blog Announced that Blooger has joined the Open Network of Friends Connect.
Following Video should give you an idea, "How to follow a blog";
Official Google Blog: Blogger connects to Google Friend Connect
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Google Friend Connect
SF Weekly is reporting about Assemblyman Tom Ammiano's proposal to help alleviate fiscal problems of California by legalizing pot. It might actually alleviate more than fiscal problems. San Francisco may take over from Amsterdam from being the weed capital of the world. What ever the Dutch do, they can't grow Marijuana like Californians!
Quintin Mecke, Ammiano's press secretary, confirmed to SF Weekly that the assemblyman's 10 a.m. Monday press conference regarding "new legislation related to the state's fiscal crisis" will broach the subject of reaping untold -- and much-needed -- wealth from the state's No. 1 cash crop.
Mecke said Ammiano's proposed bill "would remove all penalties in California law on cultivation, transportation, sale, purchase, possession, or use of marijuana, natural THC, or paraphernalia for persons over the age of 21."
Assemblyman Tom Ammiano will announce legislation on Today to legalize marijuana and earn perhaps $1 billion annually by taxing it.
Well I am ready for a few laughs!
SF Weekly
Labels:
Legalize marijuana
If you were worried about your local news paper dying of vanishing over night, fear not. According to an article I read over at John Battelle's blog, Patch which is beta now ready bring you your local news by local journalists.
The important part of this is the fact that many ties the demise of newspapers to Google, Google Advertising somehow. And who is supporting this Local News Startup? Google's vice president of advertising, Tim Armstrong. As John noted, the about page of patch lists this under the Investor;
"Polar Capital Group, Tim Armstrong's private investment company, is an investor in Patch. Polar invested in Patch because Tim believes that Patch should be in every community in America, and wants Patch in his town. He wants to read local news stories done by journalists, make sure that local government is transparent and accountable, see all the ways he can give back to his community, and have his town be as interesting and alive online as it is offline. Tim is also a believer in American ingenuity and knows that products like Patch will help deliver a commercially viable way for communities to support the important work of local journalists, institutions, governments, and businesses. Tim works at Google and his family lives in a Connecticut patch."
Google folded it's news paper advertising and radio advertising recently.
Do you belive news papers will die? In either case, you can join and create your own Patch!
John Battelle's blog post
Patch Beta
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Local News,
Newspaper
Scientists with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will offer government organizations and website operators a more intelligent computer tool to discover pornography and lewd materials on Internet.
Last December, Zhang Quan and his colleagues at the CAS Institute of Acoustics developed a system of comprehensive Chinese character recognition, which could identify porn contents on Websites not only by key words but also by syntax and other language index.
"The system functions as a search engine. You input a website address, and it will automatically open every page on the site and examine words, sentences and paragraphs for pornographic materials," Zhang, chief scientist of the program told Xinhua on Thursday.
"It is smarter than keyword-based search engines, because it can discern articles which are critiquing porn materials from those which are merely talking dirty," he said.
The system could also pick up ambiguous paragraphs which it could not comprehend for examiners to scrutinize, he said.
The CAS official website and some of its institutes' websites have already adopted the system for trial use.
"We anticipate that many government organizations and website operators will find it useful," said Zhang, "and we will soon put the software into the market."
Scientists also established a database of "pornographic like" words working as a "searching standard" for the examination.
The software could be used by supervision watchdogs or websites themselves for a real-time supervision on the web contents.
However, Zhang admitted that the new invention could only sniff out "pornography in written form", and could do nothing about images or audio-visual materials.
"We have yet to find an effective way for audio-visual examination, which needs further advanced technology," Zhang said.
In early January, seven government departments including the State Council's Information Office and the ministries of Public Security and Culture, jointly launched a nationwide crackdown campaign on porn websites. As of Tuesday, a total of 1,911 porn websites were shut down.
It later extended the campaign to mobile phone games, online novels, blogs, videos, radio programs, mobile phone websites, chatrooms and instant messenger groups.
Min Dahong, a senior mass communication fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said the government crackdown campaign would help build a much healthier web environment for Chinese youth. (From Xinhua)
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porn,
Social Sciences
In an amateurish email blunder we all have committed at least once, putting bunch of email address in CC field instead of BCC field, Wikileaks have inadvertently released partial list of their donors. But trying to be open, they have posted the complete email online. But as far as I know, I guess the spamers got a few more address'
Wikileaks partial donors list, 14 Feb 2009
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Wikileaks
The websphere is awash with facebook / ConnectU case and what the court papers revealed. Mark Zukerberg is still the winner and Divya Narendra and Cameron and Tyler Winklevossare the losers even after winning.
ValleyWag has done a nice bit of calculations to show how the triplets lost.
Yahoo has a twitter account, twitter/yahoo and so does a whole bunch of people, entities from Yahoo. All of them are invading Twitter. Is it a prequel to what?
Pehaps it was due to this PEW report that says 11% of Americans used service similar to twitter.
I have been a GPS fan for a very long time. Geo tagging was a part of my life even before the digital cameras became part of daily like now. But those day (even Now) most people carry a GPS device, Camera (Or GPS enabled Camera) and record their trails or photographic wanderings. Then they come home and plug the device into a computer and do bunch of things to merge data with map services like Google Maps.
But Now, with My Tracks for Android based phones, can do these things in a much simpler way. All these could be done via an Android based phone, like T-Mobile G1. Too bad I cannot run it on my iPhone. But I have another program on iPhone that performs similar task, GPSlite.
The above trails were created by Sandor, a software Developer at Google
Official Google Blog: Happy trails with My Tracks for Android-powered phones
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Android,
Google maps,
iPhone,
My Tracks
As you can see from the image above, I am on the Google's recently announced Book Search Mobile site. I value books a lot and I have read a lot, a lot more than an average person (but it seems that it has not helped me in writing!) and I have a section of the house, yes you can call it a study, dedicated to books. There are thousands of books and I feel like I am in the center of imaginary and real world at the same time.
I have browsed through Google Books, found books that I have not read or seen before. But now I can take my study where ever I go. I was more than thrilled to see all those titles on the Mobile book search site and I am sure I will spend more time there. Since iPhone gives me constant connection, I will be walking through all those books more often. I think more than those iPhone games now!
Inside Google Book Search: 1.5 million books in your pocket
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Google Book Search Mobile
