Just wanted to say Happy Holidays to everyone – I greatly appreciate your support and contributions to the site this past year. I will be taking the next few days off from posting to celebrate the Christmas Holiday and to work on a new submission/contribution incentive program.

See you real soon

The U.S. Geological Survey have come up with a new way to track earthquakes via tweets. Normally Scientists have the tedious task of sorting through large quantities of data through recording stations, prior to finding out where exactly an earthquake has struck. Now Scientists can use filtering software to sort through tweets to help them get a rough idea, as to where the earth quake happened and how large it was.

Typically people begin to tweet there experience a few seconds after an earthquake to tell others what they experienced. Scientist realize this and have created a project based on this information.

Scientists have dubbed the effort TED for Twitter Earthquake Detection, which scans tweets in several different languages for the word earthquake. The software is said to filter out all variations of the word that may be misleading. Such examples word include words that refer to the Quake video game.

According to reports from the BBC News Dr. Paul Earle from the USGS explained that this is in no way hard scientific data but rather “It is a speed versus accuracy issue”.

“Because there is a lot of noise in this data and we don’t believe this system could ever be used to initiate a critical response such as shutting down a nuclear power plant, but what it may do is give us an initial heads-up in a region which doesn’t have a dense seismic network that further scientific evaluation is needed,” said Dr Earle.

(source: BBC)

It’s now official users of the popular Pandora Free Internet Music site can now easily post their songs and radio stations to Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook users will be able to listen to a quick thirty second preview of the post while tweeps will be able to send out shortened urls. These links will then take users to the feature page in question.

Users will have the choice to autoshare to their Facebook or Twitter accounts by adjusting their options under their account settings. But I would not recommend this if your friends are easily offended by autoposts.

To those who may be unfamiliar with Pandora its a nicely packaged web application that allows you to listen to free music online or while using an iPhone. Pandora currently allows you to create up to 100 radio stations based off of your personal listening preference. For each station you create, songs are generated based off of the …

Genome Project, the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical information ever collected. It represents over eight years of analysis by our trained team of musicologists, and spans everything from this past Tuesday’s new releases all the way back to the Renaissance and Classical music.

I hear a lot about this term nowadays largely due to the increase in popularity of the social media phenomenon Twitter. We have even received a couple emails asking if we knew what Twitter Patted actually means.

Basically twitter patted or twitterpated – as it is correctly spelled – is a term to used describe ones infatuation with someone or something.

This could refer to an romantic excitement, aroused excitement or just having an feeling of excitement when in contact with the object of affection.

The urban dictionary describes this term as

“An enjoyable disorder characterized by feelings of excitement, anticipation, high hopes, recent memories of interludes, giddiness, and physical overstimulation which occur simultaneously when experiencing a new love. These feelings take over without warning, usually at odd times (such as at a check-out line), with or without the partner present, and make it difficult to concentrate on anything but romance. They interfere with work and safe driving, but should be experienced at least once in every person’s lifetime.”

For users who have trouble viewing this video, the exact quote is a below.

The owl: “Yes. Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime. For example: You’re walking along, minding your own business. You’re looking neither to the left, nor to the right, when all of a sudden you run smack into a pretty face. Woo-woo! You begin to get weak in the knees. Your head’s in a whirl. And then you feel light as a feather, and before you know it, you’re walking on air. And then you know what? You’re knocked for a loop, and you completely lose your head!”

Hope this helps a bit…

Actor Patrick Swayze 57, died Monday after his enduring 20 Month battle with Pancreatic Cancer.

Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months,” [...] by his publicist, Annett Wolf.

False rumors were spread several months ago through various social media platforms, stating that he had already lost the battle with cancer.

More Details of this story can be found [here]

Google posted today that it added a little flair to the popular Google Docs application – by allowing you to translate your text into 42 different languages.

The translation process is overwhelmingly easy, after you are finished typing up a document, highlight the area you need translated. Next go to the “Tools” menu select the “Translate document” submenu and select your the new language. Google docs will then open a new document with the translated text and give you the option to save a copy or overwrite the original file.

While this new feature will certainly help a lot of people with friends and family in different parts of the world, it should be noted that it is not a perfect translation. Google also stated that they will be “improving translation quality over time”.

Twitter Study – August 2009 – Pearanalytics

A study was conducted by Pearanalytics with the initial hypothesis that Twitter was primarily used for Self Promotion. Their later findings concluded that 40% of Twitter Tweets are “Pointless Babble”, making it the most widely prolific type of Tweet sent. While conversation ranked number two in the study…

Related Story ( pdf file)

The saga continues where unsavory characters are exploiting Twitter to send unsuspected users to links that contain the Koobface worm. The end result being an attempt to gather sensitive data from your PC…

Related Story

Twitter: Project Retweet in Phase One Status

Twitter Announced Phase one of Project Retweet, where they plan to implement a Retweet button at some point; allowing developers to first work with the API…

Related Story

Facebook accidently rolled out invitations to several users of the service, asking them to try out a slender version of the Facebook application. The goal of this project is to gain more followers in areas that do not have high speed internet access…

Related Story

In the latest counts from comscore.com Facebook has beaten Twitter in terms of growth in the month of July. Facebook drew in 87.7 million unique visitors- up 14 percent compared to last month while Twitter has only seen a 6 percent growth with 21.2 million unique visitors…

Related Story

Must speculation has been made as to whether Facebook is challenging Google’s search engine, by including web search functionality into the popular application. It has also been stated that they are working on a payment system that may give paypal a run for their money…

Related Stories

Reuters

PC World

Google released a set of widgets for the iGoogle page that lets users add social widgets to their iGoogle page. With these widgets users would be able to play games together, share photos and more…

Related Stories

WebDoctus

CMS Wire

Google released a new search engine algorithm that will allow the search engine giant to serve up search engine results faster, include more sites in their search engine results pages and more…

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WebDoctus

The Register

Thursday sparked a world wide web storm as attackers focused their efforts on several prominent websites. Twitter apparently suffered the most, during the attack. ..

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As previously blogged about, Twitter is the focus point of an patent infringement suit, where the plaintiff insists Twitter has imposed on its IRIS system…

Related Story

News Corporation Posts a Loss on MySpace Charge

News Corporation has reported that only one of the several media outlets they own is doing well. And it is not MySpace or other web related services but rather cable networks…

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Back in 2006 Lori Drew, who was dubbed the MySpace Mom for creating a false entity on the net which attributed to 13 year old girls suicide. Is now back on a computer…

Related Story

Is Facebook Ruining Relationships?

A recent study by CyberPsychology & Behavior Suggests that the more time college students in relationships spent on Facebook, the more jealous they become of there partners…

Related Report [pdf file]

One of the most highly used and most popular iPhone apps “Facebook”, plans to have a new version up and running soon. The app will feature support for video, news feeds ability for users to “like” content and more…

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What’s on the Pentagon’s mind? Facebook

The Pentagon is in the process of studying social network sites in order to design appropriate policy around the web phenomena…

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The engineers at Google plan on doing routine maintenance on Saturday, August 8. So if you have an AdSense account- don’t be alarmed if you can not access your user interface. Google ensures us that all people running AdSense ads will still get credit for ad clicks and impressions will be recorded.

The planed maintenace schedule is as follows:

United States – 10am to 2pm PDT

London – 6pm Saturday

Athens – 8pm Saturday

Mumbai – 10:30pm Saturday

Kuala Lumpur – 1am Sunday

Melbourne – 3am Sunday

To find out more about scheduled maintenance go here…

Some of you may have attempted to login to your Twitter account earlier this morning, but instead of navigating to the page you requested you were faced with a network error message. According to a recent blog post, the Twitter Guru’s worked on getting the 30 million plus user site, back online from an earlier denial of service attack (DoS or DDos). While the site appears to be okay now, further investigations efforts are being made by the folks at Twitter.

Denial of Service attacks – in there most basic sense- work by sending a large amount of requests to a website via computers that are infected by a trojan or other means. These compromised computers, or zombies, then work together to create a botnet. The botnet then enables attackers to utilize an immense amount of processing power to complete their deeds. Many times the shear size of these botnets, enables attackers to quickly bring a website to it’s knees.

While it has not been stated where the attack came from, similar attacks were made earlier this year on US government and South Korea sites.

Well it’s official the microblogging master of the internet Twitter, is facing patent infringement charges from a Sugar land, Texas Company that specializes in mass notifications systems.

The Texas Based Company, TechRadium , claims to have several patents protecting the concept of mass notification.
Most notably is the Patent for IRIS™ (Immediate Response Information System) that is described on their website as

IRIS™ was developed as an intuitive, ease-to-use system and comes equipped with a comprehensive feature set. The mass communication system is a highly advanced, state-of-the-art program which is consistently updated and upgraded to best accommodate our clients’ needs.

Some of the main features include a web based application, rapid message delivery, conference calling and the ability to send text messages.

The federal suit was filed on Tuesday in Houston, Texas and the Plantiff seeks

… the fullest extent permitted by law, Plaintiff seeks recovery of damages for lost profits, reasonable royalties, unjust enrichment, and benefits received by the Defendant as a result of use the misappropriated technology, and any other damages to which it may be entitled in law or in equity.

(source bizjournals)

The webs largest Online Payment Service, Paypal went down yesterday from the hours of 1:30 EDT to 6:30 EDT missing approximately $36,000,000 in transactions from around the globe. According to the Wall Street Journal, PayPal spokesman Anuj Nayar said the cause was from an “internal network hardware issue” but was not sure how to deal with merchants that currently rely on the system.

While the issue appears to be resolved, there was no mention if PayPal plans to update their contingency plan to reduce another lengthy outage in the future.

(source Wall Street Journal)

Twitter the popular online microblogging site has begun to block links that contain references to malicious sites. F-secure Security Labs first reported this activity on their blog sometime after suggesting to Twitter that filtering traffic will help to reduce the spread of malware.

Since links are the majority capital on Twitter some misaligned users, will send out a tweet(s) that contains a URL reference to a malicious site. This message can then be quickly spread to other users unsuspectedly through retweets and false accounts.

When the unsuspecting user clicks on one of these malicious links they are taken to a site that attempts to elicit the user to purchase false virus protection software, place a trojan on the users computer, place a virus on the users computer, and much more.

Twitter has not publicly announced these efforts, and it is my guess that they are still in the alpha phases of the rolling this filter completely out. The is largely due to the fact that, at the time of this post, Twitter currently does not filter out shortened links.

Shorten links are usually created from a third party service such as is.gd or TinyURL. Shortened URLs basically mask larger link with a new shorter version. Theses url shorting services allow Twitter users to get more bang for their buck from twitter. Which as most of you know only allows 140 charaters per micro post.

While Twitter’s plans are not completely known at this time, it is good to know that Twitter is making some effort to getting rid of these negative types of URLs.

A new report has surfaced about the dangers of driving and texting from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. While most of us feel that this is a no-brainer – VTTI decided to take it a step further and get some numbers for us to ponder.

Their rational:

Given recent catastrophic crash events and disturbing trends, there is an alarming amount of misinformation and confusion regarding cell phone and texting use while behind the wheel of a vehicle,” said Dr. Tom Dingus, director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, in a statement. “The finding from our research at VTTI can help begin to clear up these misconceptions, as it is based on real-world driving data.

VTTI found that users driving heavy vehicles and trucks were at a 23.2 times higher risk of crashing or near crashing than those drivers paying full attention to the road.

Heavy Vehicle/ truck drivers were also at a 5.9 times higher risk of crashing while dialing a cell phone – but only 1 times higher when talking or listening on a cell phone.

Drivers in light vehicles or cars were at a 2.8 times higher risk of crashing while dialing a cell phone but only 1.4 times as high while reaching for an object that took there eyes off the road.

VTTI went on to recommend that:

• Texting should be banned for all drivers in while in or attempting to move a vehicle.
• That anything that takes the eyes away from the visual context of driving should be avoided
• That headsets are not really safer than “hand-held” devices, because they both require the operator to complete visual tasks such as dialing and answering. That only “true hands-free” phone systems pose a lesser risk – where the user can dial and answer the phone via voice commands.
• That all texting and cell phone usage should be completely banned for newly licensed teens.

Again while most of us guessed that cell phone usage and texting can lead to serious and even fatal consequences. Many times a report of this nature has to come to light in order for some sort of action to be taken by the powers that be.

My suggestion is simple, if you don’t have a voice activated cell phone system in your vehicle – stay off the phone! If it is an emergency and you absolutely have to use the phone – pull your vehicle over to a safe area.