20 Worst Things about iPhones

While everyone are talking about the new cellphone by Apple, selling over 500,000 units over a week, iPhone.

Here is a list of iPhone disadvantages or what iPhone are not capable of, check them out (from Jiunjie.com):


1. Bluetooth is ONLY good for connecting a headset. That’s it.

2. There is no file browser on the device at all. Data must be organized (if at all) in the appropriate application.

3. The camera is a simple application that has ONE button: the shutter. Pictures come out okay on the device, but nothing too fancy on a monitor, especially if it was an attempt at a macro shot.

4. SIM card is damn near impossible to open, if at all. I didn’t look into it extensively.

5. Web browser is slow, even over WLAN. Even the simple OneList web app that was created takes around 20 seconds to load over WLAN. You can not highlight, cut, copy, or paste and text from a website, and you can not save any images you find from a website either. The only nice thing about it is the tabbed browsing, which crashed on me when I went to Engadget and YouTube on two tabs. This is the only application that allows you to use the keyboard in landscape mode.

6. The keyboard sucks. It gets slightly better after the iPhone “learns” you, as the employees said, but even then, it’s not a device you can use with one hand comfortably, much less without looking.

7. You can only send one picture at a time in an email.

8. No custom ringtones (yet, as we were being told) and the alert tones can not be changed whatsoever.

9. The default ringtones are incredibly lame.

10. The only form of customization outside of a lame default ringtone is the wallpaper, which you’ll only see when you need to unlock the device or when you get a phone call.



11. “Picture pinching” or using two fingers to zoom on any content is certainly fun to play with, but not practical whatsoever. This operation depends solely on using the device with two hands.

12. No document editor or native viewer. You can not store documents on the device to be viewed, they can only be viewed as attachments when they’re sent to your in an email.

13. Visual voicemail is laggy and reacts about the same way as pushing the fast forward and rewind buttons on traditional voicemail systems. The only advantage is for those that get that many voicemail messages a day that they need to sort them according to priority.

14. NO games. None.

15. No voice dialing.

16. No speed dialing (which can be made up by the “quick list”, but getting to that quick list isn’t as fast as holding a single key on a real keypad).

17. No video.

18. No MMS.

19. It’s still <4GB for $500 and <8GB for $600

20. It only takes around 2 hours to explore every menu without any options for expandability except to scrounge around for new web apps that will load slowly and nowhere near as smoothly as the native apps.

Read also iPhone For Dummies by Edward C. Baig and Bob LeVitus and be sure it's not dust.

25 FREE Security Programs

Use it, you are welcome!

AVG Free - antivirus

Avast Home Free - antivirus

AntiVir PersonalEdition - antivirus

BitDefender Free - antivirus

ClamWin - antivirus

CyberDifender - Internet Security Suite

Ad-aware - anti-spyware

Spybot: Search & Destroy - anti-spyware

Windows Defender - anti-spyware

SpywareBlaster - anti-spyware

Spyware Terminator - anti-spyware

Tootkit Reveaker - rootkit detection utility

Winpooch - system protection

HiJack Free - system protection

HighJackThis - hijackers detector and remover

Kerio Personal Firewall - firewall

Sygate Personal Firewall - firewall

ZoneAlarm - firewall

AxCrypt - file encryption

Simple File Shredder - securely delete files

PuTTy - SSH client

KeePass - password manager

LockNote - password manager

nPassword - password manager

Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer - identify security misconfigurations

Read more: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Also you can get your own copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition [DVD] (with free shipping) with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gate's signature emblazoned in silver on the front cover of your product case and be sure it's not dust!

15 and 1 Tech Headlines Which Have Been Proved to Be Nonsense

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible. (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895)

Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics, 1949)

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943)

I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processings is a fad that won't last out the year. (The editor in charge of business books for Prentice-Hall, 1957)

There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. (Ken Olsen, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977)

But what...is it good for? (Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip)

The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. (Western Union internal memo, 1876)

No imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular? (David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urging investment in the radio in the 1920's)

Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? (H.M. Warner about using the sound in movies, Warner Brothers, 1927)

Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy. (Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859)

Airplanes are interesting toys, but they are of no military value whatsoever. (Marechal Ferdinand Fock, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre)

Everything that can be invented has been invented. (Charles H. Duell, Office of Patents, 1899)

Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction. (Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872)

640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates, 1981)

100 million dollarsis too much of a price for Microsoft. (IBM, 1982)

Do you want to know which is the 16th one? Here you are:

The whole 20.000-copies edition of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition [DVD] won't have been sold by the end of January!

Sincerely yours, Dustman.)))

Bill Gates's Autograph Costs $259

For only $259 (with free shipping) you can get your own copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition [DVD] with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gate's signature emblazoned in silver on the front cover of your product case.

Quantities are limited to 20,000 orders and the product will not ship until the official release of Vista on the 30th of this month.Amazon.com gift-wrap is available, so now is the perfect time to make up for that Neowin staff member who was forgotten on your Christmas list.

How to Make Your Software Development Easier (13 advices from Joel Spolsky)

Why doesn't anybody make a schedule? Two key reasons. One, it's a real pain. Two, nobody believes that it's worth anything. Why go to all the trouble working on a schedule if it's not going to be right? There is a perception that schedules are consistently wrong, and only get worse as time goes on, so why suffer for naught?

Here's a simple, painless way to make schedules that are actually correct.

1) Use Microsoft Excel.

Don't use anything fancy like Microsoft Project. The trouble with Microsoft Project is that it assumes that you want to spend a lot of time worrying about dependencies. A dependency is when you have two tasks, one of which must be completed before the next one can begin. I've found that with software, the dependencies are so obvious that it's just not worth the effort to formally keep track of them.

Another problem with Project is that it assumes that you're going to want to be able to press a little button and "rebalance" the schedule. Inevitably, this means that it's going to rearrange things and reassign things to different people. For software, this just doesn't make sense. Programmers are not interchangeable. It takes seven times longer for John to fix Rita's bug than for Rita to fix Rita's bug. And if you try to put your UI programmer on a WinSock problem, she'll stall and waste a week getting up to speed on WinSock programming. The bottom line is that Project is designed for building office buildings, not software.

2) Keep it Simple.

The standard format I use for schedules is so simple you can memorize it. You start with just seven columns: Feature, Task, Priority, OrigEst, CurEst, Elapsed and Remain.

If you have several developers, you can either keep a separate sheet for each developer, or you can make a column with the name of the developer working on each task.

3) Each feature should consist of several tasks.

A feature is something like adding a spell checker to your program. Adding a spell checker consists of quite a few discrete tasks that the programmer has to do. The most important part of making a schedule is making this list of tasks.

4) Only the programmer who is going to write the code can schedule it.

Any system where management writes a schedule and hands it off to programmers is doomed to fail. Only the programmer who is going to do the work can figure out what steps they will need to take to implement that feature. And only the programmer can estimate how long each one will take.

5) Pick very fine grained tasks.

This is the most important part to making your schedule work. Your tasks should be measured in hours, not days. (When I see a schedule measured in days, or even weeks, I know it's not real). You might think that a schedule with fine grained tasks is merely more precise. Wrong! Very wrong! When you start with a schedule with rough tasks and then break it down into smaller tasks, you will find that you get a different result, not just a more precise one. It is a completely different number. Why does this happen?

When you have to pick fine grained tasks, you are forcing yourself to actually figure out what steps you are going to have to take. Write subroutine foo. Create dialog such and such. Read the wawa file. These steps are easy to estimate, because you've written subroutines, created dialogs, and read wawa files before.

If you are sloppy, and pick big "chunky" tasks ("implement grammar correction"), then you haven't really thought about what you are going to do. And when you haven't thought about what you're going to do, you just can't know how long it will take.

As a rule of thumb, each task should be from 2 to 16 hours. If you have a 40 hour (one week) task on your schedule, you're not breaking it down enough.

Here's another reason to pick fine grained tasks: it forces you to design the damn feature. If you have a hand-wavy feature called "Internet Integration" and you schedule 3 weeks for it, you are doomed, buddy. If you have to figure out what subroutines you're going to write, you are forced to pin down the feature. By being forced to plan ahead at this level, you eliminate a lot of the instability in a software project.

6) Keep track of the original and current estimate.

When you first add a task to the schedule, estimate how long it's going to take in hours and put that in both the Orig[inal] Est[imate] and Curr[ent] Est[imate] columns. As time goes on, if a task is taking longer (or shorter) than you thought, you can update the Curr Est column as much as you need. This is the best way to learn from your mistakes and teach yourself how to estimate tasks well. Most programmers have no idea how to guess how long things will take. That's okay. As long as you are continuously learning and continuously updating the schedule as you learn, the schedule will work. (You may have to cut features or slip, but the schedule will still be working correctly, in the sense that it will constantly be telling you when you have to cut features or slip). I've found that most programmers become very good schedulers with about one year of experience.

When the task is done, the Curr Est and Elapsed fields will be the same, and the Remain field will recalc to 0.

7) Update the elapsed column every day.

You do not really have to watch your stopwatch while you code. Right before you go home, or go to sleep under the desk if you're one of those geeks, pretend you've worked for 8 hours (ha!), figure out which tasks you've worked on, and sprinkle about 8 hours in the elapsed column accordingly. The remaining time field is then calculated automatically by Excel.

At the same time, update the Curr Est column for those tasks to reflect the new reality. Updating your schedule daily should only take about two minutes. That's why this is the Painless Schedule Method -- it's quick and easy.

8) Put in line items for Vacations, Holidays, etc.

If your schedule is going to take about a year, each programmer will probably take 10 to 15 days of vacation. You should have a feature in your schedule called vacations, one for holidays, and anything else that consumes people's time. The idea is that the ship date can be calculated by adding up the remaining time column and dividing by 40 -- that's how many weeks of work are left, including everything.

9) Put debugging time into the schedule! Debugging is the hardest to estimate.

Think back to the last project you worked on. Chances are, debugging took from 100% - 200% of the time it took to write the code in the first place. This has to be a line item in the schedule, and it will probably be the largest line item.

Here's how it works. Let's say a developer is working on wawa. The Orig Est was 16 hours, but so far it has taken 20 hours and it looks like it needs another 10 hours of work. So the developer enters 30 under Curr Est and 20 under elapsed.

At the end of the milestone, all these "slips" have probably added up to quite a bit. Theoretically, to accommodate these slips, we have to cut features in order to ship on time. Luckily, the first feature we can cut is this great big feature called Buffer which has lots o' hours already allocated for it.

10) Put integration time into the schedule.

If you have more than one programmer, inevitably, there will be stuff that two programmers do that is inconsistent and needs to be reconciled. They might both implement dialog boxes for similar things that are unnecessarily inconsistent.

Somebody will have to go through all the menus, keyboard accelerators, toolbar tools, etc., cleaning up and organizing all the new menu items that everybody has been adding willy-nilly. There will be compiler errors that show up as soon as two people check in code. This has to be fixed, and it should be a line item on the schedule.

11) Put buffer into the schedule.

Things tend to run over. There are two important kinds of buffer you might want to consider. First: buffer to account for tasks that took longer than originally estimated. Second: buffer to account for tasks that you didn't know you would have to do, usually because management has decided that implementing wawa is SUPER IMPORTANT and cannot be left out of the next release.

You may be surprised to find that vacations, holidays, debugging, integration, and buffer time add up to more than the actual tasks do. If you're surprised by this, you haven't been programming for long, have you? Ignore these at your peril.

12) Never, ever let managers tell programmers to reduce an estimate.

Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.
If your manager makes you reduce an estimate, here's what to do. Create a new column in the schedule called Rick's Estimate (assuming your name is Rick, of course.) Put your estimate in there. Let your manager do whatever she wants with the Curr Est column. Ignore your manager's estimates. When the project is done, see who was closer to reality. I've found that just threatening to do this works wonders, especially when your manager realizes that they've just gotten into a contest to see how slowly you can work!

Why do inept managers try to get programmers to reduce estimates?

When the project begins, the technical managers go off, meet with the business people, and come up with a list of features which they think would take about 3 months, but would really take 9. When you think of writing code without thinking about all the steps you have to take, it always seems like it will take n time, when in reality it will probably take more like 3n time. When you do a real schedule, you add up all the tasks and realize that the project is going to take much longer than originally thought. Reality sinks in.

Inept managers try to address this by figuring out how to get people to work faster. This is not very realistic. You might be able to hire more people, but they need to get up to speed and will probably be working at 50% efficiency for several months (and dragging down the efficiency of the people who have to mentor them). Anyway, in this market, adding good programmers is going to take 6 months.

You might be able to get 10% more raw code out of people temporarily at the cost of having them burn out 100% in a year. Not a big gain, and it's a bit like eating your seed corn.
You might be able to get 20% more raw code out of people by begging everybody to work super hard, no matter how tired they get. Boom, debugging time doubles. An idiotic move that backfires in a splendidly karmic way.

But you can never get 3n from n, ever, and if you think you can, please email me the stock ticker of your company so I can short it.

13) A schedule is like wood blocks.

If you have a bunch of wood blocks, and you can't fit them into a box, you have two choices: get a bigger box, or remove some blocks. If you thought you could ship in 6 months, but you have 12 months on the schedule, you are either going to have to delay shipping, or find some features to delete. You just can't shrink the blocks, and if you pretend you can, then you are merely depriving yourself of a useful opportunity to actually see into the future by lying to yourself about what you see there.

Read more: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Also you can get your own copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition [DVD] (with free shipping) with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gate's signature emblazoned in silver on the front cover of your product case and be sure it's not dust!

Espresso machine: now serving more than just coffee

Cross a hedgehog with a snake, train it and get two metres of alive barbed wire! This is the way On Demand Books Company followed.

As CNN Money reports, buying a book could become as easy as buying a pack of gum. After several years in development, the Espresso - a $50,000 vending machine with a conceivably infinite library - is nearly consumer-ready and will debut in ten to 25 libraries and bookstores in 2007. The New York Public Library is scheduled to receive its machine in February.

The company behind the Espresso is called On Demand Books, founded by legendary book editor Jason Epstein, 78, and Dane Neller, 56, but the technology was developed six years ago by Jeff Marsh, who is a technology advisor for New York City-based ODB (ondemandbooks.com).

The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes, including full-color laminated covers. It prints in any language and will even accommodate right-to-left texts by putting the spine on the right. The upper page limit is 550 pages, though by tweaking the page thickness and type size, you could get a copy of War and Peace (albeit tough to read) if you wanted.

Neller says that future versions of the machine will accommodate longer works with fewer hassles. Prices for the finished product will vary depending on locations, but the production cost is about a penny per page. (At right, FSB's interpretation.)

Some 2.5 million books are now available - about one million in English and no longer under copyright protection. On Demand accesses the volumes through Google and the Open Content Alliance, among other sources. Neller predicts that within about five years On Demand Books will be able to reproduce every volume ever printed.

Epstein says that the larger obstacles are consumer preference - the machine can't make you a latte - and convincing skeptics in the industry. But some early adopters are already sold on the idea.

Niko Pfund, a publisher at Oxford University Press, says the evolution away from traditional bookstores is only natural. "For hundreds of years the industry was unchanged," Pfund says. "Then audio came out. Now it's time for digital."

Read more: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. You also can get your own copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition [DVD] (free shipping!) with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gate's signature emblazoned in silver on the front cover of your product case - and be sure it's not dust!

27 Proven ways to lose your domain name(s)

...were cited on DnForum.com. Here they are.

1. Do not keep a list of all your names and the respective registrars

2. Rely on the registrar reminders when renewal comes due

3. Do not renew until the last day or better yet after the name has expired

4. Attempt to transfer the name when it has already expired

5. Make sure your whois info is not accurate and up-to-date. In particular use a free E-mail account as registrant contact. Accounts like hotmail have low quotas so incoming mail will bounce or be purged after a certain amount of time. Your account will be disabled if you don't use it often enough so you will be unable to read important registrar notifications or reminders.

6. Never ever register for more than one year in advance

7. Do not use the auto-renew featured offered by the registrar. If you do, make sure your credit card info is not current or use a card number that is maxed out.

8. Do not register the names yourself, you have better things to do than bothering with such lowly things as your virtual estate. Delegate the task to your ISP or hosting provider instead. The advantages are numerous:- you need to beg every time you need to make changes to your domain parameters like DNS or change of ownership- they will charge you a fee for doing so on top of their inflated registration fee- you will pay way more than if you did register them yourself- if you are lucky, high staff turnover will result in the company losing oversight of the names and they will eventually drop, yet they continue to charge you so you don't notice your names are gone- in case of billing disputes your names will be held hostage

9. Do not the park your unused names. So you have no idea of traffic or do not notice drops in traffic which may reveal domain/DNS issues. Do not take advantage of parking & PPC revenue on your unused names.

10. Register names that suck so you will regret it within minutes of registering them. You won't want to renew them anyway.

11. Do not ask for appraisals from other people so you have no idea of which names are worth keeping.

12. Register names that blatantly infringe on well-known trademarks. TM Lawyers for the fat cat corporation need to justify their fees so they will be happy to take your names away from you or have you delete them (for a fee).

13. Do not check TM databases or search engines when considering the registration of a domain name.

14. Register names in restricted TLDs that you are not eligible for or that leave you open to disputes. Good examples include .ca, .fr, .com.br

15. Never check the whois on your newly-registered domain names. Registrations are always successful at the first attempt. Period !

16. Do not use the REGISTRAR-LOCK on your domains. Make sure this option is disabled by default for newly-registered domains.

17. Use the most expensive registrars like R****.com or N****S****.com

18. Use dirt-cheap registrars like R****.com or O******.com. Hey thousands of customers can't be wrong !

19. Use a shady, fly-by-night reseller rather than dealing with an ICANN-accredited registrar direct.

20. Use registrars which only accept exotic payment methods like cash, wire or DumbPay™. Paypal and credit cards are best for other purchases.

21. Use registrars that do not have strong security policies. Pretend you have lost your login information and ask for it by E-mail. Customer-focused registrars will readily provide you with the information requested without any cumbersome security checks. Why would someone want to hack into your registrar account ?

22. Never read the fine print. It's always nice being charged $200 for an outgoing transfer or $30 when somebody serves you with an UDRP on your name.

23. Use your names for illegal contents like warez or otherwise objectionable purposes.

24. Register names that are of no use or that no-one will remember, including you. ROAD2-F0RTUN3.com is really cool and smart.

25. Do not read the registrar reviews on domain names forums. Do not pay attention to repeated complaints about certain registrars.

26. Use a weak registrar password that is open to brute force attacks or can be easily guessed. By the way use the same passwords for all your logins. It's way more convenient.

27. Do not use anti-virus software. Do not check for spyware/trojans on your computer. Anti-virus software is only for the noobs.

Read more: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Also you can get your own copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition [DVD] (free shipping!) with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gate's signature emblazoned in silver on the front cover of your product case - and be sure it's not dust!

Bloggers' Top-Cited Wikipedia 2006 Entries:

New York, N.Y., Dec. 13, 2006 - Did somebody say Wikipedia? Yes, and then some, according to word-of-mouth measurement firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which identified Wikipedia - the online encyclopedia anyone can edit - as one of popular words and resources of 2006.

According to Nielsen BuzzMetrics, the term "Wikipedia" was cited in blogs nearly 29,000 times in November 2006, up 54% from 2005. In addition, the use of highly indicative phrases - "according to wikipedia" OR "wikipedia says" OR "says wikipedia" - rose 200 percent versus last year. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, another VNU research affiliate which tracks Web usage, Wikipedia's unique audience grew, concurrently, 112%, from 17.8 million in November 2005 to 37.8 million in November 2006.

The top three Wikipedia entries that bloggers linked to in 2006 were "Web 2.0", Steve Irwin (the late Australian animal lover, and the "Mark Foley Scandal".

"Despite occasional controversy over the accuracy or neutrality of its entries, Wikipedia continues to attract and retain a passionate user base while facilitating broader discussions across the Internet," said Jonathan Carson, chief executive officer, Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Blog references to Wikipedia now eclipse virtually every other encyclopedia brand, and Wikipedia outranks mentions of the term "encyclopedia" by a 6-to-1 margin. Wikipedia today is mentioned 28% more than the standalone term "wiki."

?The growing frequency of the word "Wikipedia" versus "encyclopedia" also underscores the ubiquity and utility of the brand, not unlike other brands that often represent their categories, such as Xerox, Kleenex, Google and iPod,? said Carson.

The top cited Wikipedia entries - from Jan. 1 through Dec. 10, 2006 - reflect the service?s heavy embracement by Internet, political and entertainment enthusiasts. Many of the top-cited entries also tend to reflect the most remembered pop-culture events and topics of 2006.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Top Wikipedia Entries By Author Citation
Jan. 1, 2006 - Dec. 10, 2006

1. Web 2.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 206

2. Steve Irvin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Irwin 161

3. Mark Foley Scandal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Foley_scandal 142

4. Blog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog 147

5. Ajax http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX 133

6. World War II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II 143

7. Snakes on a Plane http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_on_a_plane 126

8. Meme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme 132

9. Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki 129

10. RSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format) 122

11. Podcasting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting 127

12. George Bush http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush 129

13. Podcast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast 111

14. Net Neutrality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality 100

Top Blogs Citing WikipediaAs for mentioning the term Wikipedia, certain bloggers demonstrate undeniable affinity with the site. Bloggers most likely to mention Wikipedia include popular and influential authors, as well as ad-supported blogs maintained by established niche-publishing networks.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics
Top Blogs Mention 'Wikipedia'
Jan. 1, 2006 - Dec. 10, 2006
Rank By Links to
Author URL Wikipedia

1. http://www.boingboing.net/ 90

2. http://seehere.blogspot.com/ 87

3. http://www.micropersuasion.com/ 77

4. http://tcal.net/ 71

5. http://www.smartmobs.com/ 64

6. http://www.gadling.com/ 61

7. http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger 56

8. http://www.lifehacker.com/ 55

9. http://ask.metafilter.com/ 53

10. http://www.gothamist.com/ 53

11. http://www.2blowhards.com/ 51

12. http://www.spikemagazine.com/splinters 50

13. http://www.chrisabraham.com/ 50

14. http://slashdot.org/ 50

15. http://www.unmediated.org/ 50

MethodologyNielsen BuzzRankings reached its conclusions after carefully analyzing buzz and consumer-generated media across more than 38 million blogs in 2006. The company applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover real-time insights in the blogosphere, including buzz trends, conversation mapping, blogger profiles and search among other functions. The company hosts and offers as a to the entire online community a free blog-search and analytics tool, called BlogPulse (www.blogpulse.com).

About Nielsen BuzzMetrics

The Nielsen BuzzMetrics service, marketed by BuzzMetrics, Inc., is the global standard in measuring consumer-generated media and word of mouth. Nielsen BuzzMetrics helps more than 100 leading global companies strategically leverage the buzz surrounding them—clients like Canon, Comcast, Ford, General Motors, HBO, Kraft, Microsoft, Nokia, P&G, Sony, Target and Toyota, as well as 15 of the top 15 pharmaceutical concerns. Partners include the world's largest marketing-services firms, and innovative new-marketing agencies. The company has also collaborated with distinguished research organizations such as the Pew Internet and American Life Project. BuzzMetrics, Inc. is an affiliate of VNU, owner of such renowned research names as ACNielsen and Nielsen Media Research. For more information, visit http://www.nielsenbuzzmetrics.com/.

Read also Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms and be sure it's not dust.

For only $259 (with free shipping) you can get your own copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate UPGRADE Signature Edition [DVD] with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gate's signature emblazoned in silver on the front cover of your product case.

Business 2.0: Secrets of the Leaders Success

CNN Money portal has summed up the business-year results by asking a number of leading american companies top-managers to tell about their success secrets. Under the title "Business 2.0" there were published opinions of media companies directors, famous technics manufacturers etc. Here I've sited large Internet projects managers.

Kevin Rose (Founder, Digg.com):

Letting users control your site can be terrifying at first. From day one we were asking ourselves, "What is going to be on the front page today?" You have no idea what the system will produce. But stepping back and giving consumers control is what brought more and more people to the site. They have a sense of ownership and discovery at the same time. If you give users the tools to spread and share their interests with others, they will use them to promote what is important to them.We have 17 employees, and we have 4,500 submitted stories a day. We could hire more staff, but that's not what the site is about. It's about allowing users to define the site and police the site themselves.

Stewart Butterfield (Co-founder, Flickr):

One of the biggest lessons I've learned is that there has got to be a reason for what you're doing. You actually have to care about what you're doing. The business has to be about something. Whatever the point of it is does not have to be inconsistent with making money, but usually if that's the sole reason, it is not very successful. Because you have to have confident employees, happy customers, and reliable suppliers to run a company as much as profits. I am still here to win. All the people on the Flickr team are committed to what we're doing, which is to be the eyes of the world. Otherwise, I would say fuck it, go back to the beach, and get in shape.

Craig Newmark (Founder and Chairman, Craigslist):

As part of my job, I put in at least 40 hours a week on customer service. I'm just a customer service rep. My two biggest projects are dealing with misbehaving apartment brokers in New York and lightly moderating our discussion boards.

We are a very open, very democratic site, which means we get all sorts of people. We do get some bad guys who are a few fries short of a Happy Meal. So we have to enlist the aid of our community to help us. The lesson implicit in this is that people will help you out and behave in a really good way. If you trust them, they will respond to that trust.

American corporate culture seems to devalue customer service in a big way. I say, go the other way. Do it right. Trust your customers. Give them power to do things right. Service costs will drop, and customers will become more devoted to your products and services. This ain't rocket science.

Chris DeWolfe (Co-founder, Myspace):

The key is to be true to your community's norms and values. You can't just force yourself on people and try to sell them something they don't want - that's good advice for marketers generally, but particularly on community-driven sites like MySpace. You have to find ways to add value to your members' lives while being consistent with your brand's identity.

Brad Garlinghouse (Senior VP for communications and communities, Yahoo):

It's certainly not a simple thing to keep our 350 million users happy. The first thing is you have to fundamentally understand what users care about the most. Too often businesspeople try to deliver the coolest, most whiz-bang widget they can that will appeal to 1 percent of users. You have to understand what the mainstream users care about the most. I think it helps that I am from Kansas.

Chad Hurley (Co-founder, YouTube):

Give Your Startup a Fighting Chance

1. Test first. Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

2. Seek outside feedback. As you start building the product, don't assume that you know all the answers. Listen to the community and adapt. We had a lot of our own ideas about how the service would evolve. Coming from PayPal and eBay, we saw YouTube as a powerful way to add video to auctions, but we didn't see anyone using our product that way, so we didn't add features to support it.

3. Give partners what they want. Approach your business partners with concepts that they can get their heads around, and try to respond to their needs. An interesting example is what we've done with the music labels. With Warner and others, we saw an opportunity to protect the labels' rights and create a new market. Now we can do things like add music to people's travel videos. It allows users the freedom to create and to do it legally.

Sergey Brin (Co-founder, Google):

Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it's very difficult. Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing.

We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.

All these people take part in work of the most popular resources used by millions of users every day. Their opinions have to be considered. So, just read this article again while thinking of a new project.

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STEREO Sends Back First Solar Images

Physorg.com reports NASA's twin Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories (STEREO) sent back their first images of the sun this week and with them a view into the sun's mounting activity.

One image shows the first coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by STEREO's Ahead spacecraft, taken Dec. 9.

The other two images show the sun's super-hot atmosphere. They were taken on Dec. 4, the first day of imaging observations for the Ahead spacecraft. The false color images show a number of bright magnetic active regions, including one on the far left edge of the sun which later produced a series of high energy flares and CMEs.

"We're absolutely thrilled. We've been looking forward to STEREO's unique vantage point for over 10 years now and the community couldn't be happier with these first views," said Michael Kaiser, STEREO project scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

"Now we're holding our breath to see what the next big CME looks like in 3-D, so we can really start to answer some interesting questions."

After a successful launch on Oct. 25 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., STEREO spent the first few minutes separating from its stacked configuration aboard the single Delta II rocket. Shortly afterwards, mission operations personnel at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, (APL) Laurel, Md., monitored the two observatories as they traveled in an elliptical orbit from a point close to Earth to one extending just beyond the moon.

"STEREO is the first mission using the moon's gravity to redirect multiple spacecraft, launched aboard a single rocket, to their respective orbits," said Ron Denissen, APL STEREO project manager. On Dec. 15, 2006, mission operations personnel at the laboratory used lunar gravitational swingbys to alter the spacecraft orbits, redirecting the "A" observatory to its orbit "ahead" of Earth. The "B" observatory will swing past the moon a second time on Jan. 21, redirecting it to an orbit "behind" Earth. The two will orbit the sun from this perspective, separating from each other by about 45 degrees per year. Scientists expect the two to be in position to produce 3-D images by April 2007.

"Our ultimate goal is seeing solar flares and coronal mass ejections in 3-D to better understand their origin, evolution and determine whether or not they're a threat to Earth," said Russell Howard, principal investigator for SECCHI, the imaging instrument suite aboard both observatories. Howard and his staff are a part of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC.

Coronal mass ejections, - giant clouds of plasma shot out into space by the sun and X-ray emitting solar flares are the largest explosions in the solar system and can pack the force of a billion megaton nuclear bombs. They are caused by the buildup and sudden release of magnetic stress in the solar atmosphere above the turbulent active regions we see as sunspots.

When directed at Earth, CMEs can produce spectacular aurora and disrupt satellites, radio communications and power systems. Energetic particles associated with these solar eruptions permeate the entire solar system and may be hazardous to spacecraft and astronauts.

Each STEREO observatory has 16 instruments. The PLAsma and SupraThermal Ion and Composition (PLASTIC) team, housed at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, N.H., started receiving data from its two instruments in early December. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, saw solar wind measurements from some of its In-situ Measurements of PArticles and CME Transients (IMPACT) instrument suite Nov.1. SWAVES the radio astronomy experiment, STEREO/WAVES, led by the Meudon Observatory in Paris, France obtained measurements just two days after launch on Oct 27.

“An integral part of exploration, heliophysics is the system science that unites all of the linked phenomena in the region of the cosmos influenced by a magnetically variable star like our sun,” said Madhulika Guhathakurta, NASA STEREO program scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington. The STEREO mission represents the most significant upgrade and expansion to this system science as it will not only provide a rich package of upgraded sensors, but it will travel to new vantage points.”

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