Creeva’s World 2.0

10 New Years Res­o­lu­tions Every Geek Should Make

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 03:08 PM CST

It’s the end of the year — almost quite lit­er­ally. I’ve only got a few more hours to fig­ure out what my per­sonal goals list will be for next year, but I can at least pub­lish my geek goals so that I’ll have some pub­lic account­abil­ity as to whether any of these will be achieved in 2008.

Most of these are fairly open, too. My guess is that most of you will be able to adopt most or all of this list as your own. Let’s make it a year to remem­ber. Let’s actu­ally achieve some New Year’s resolutions.

01) Log-in to my social net­works more than twice a week.
Whether it is because of the copi­ous amounts of spam on MySpace, or the unend­ing piles of Pirate v. Ninja noti­fi­ca­tions on Face­book, I some­how can’t bring myself to log into either one of them more often than a cou­ple times a week. Inter­est­ingly enough, I’m find­ing that Twit­ter fills the gaps that I joined Face­book for in the first place. I wanted to be a part of Face­book so that I could com­mu­ni­cate with inter­est­ing folks in my indus­try, but as my Twit­ter net­work grows, I’m find­ing that it is much eas­ier to find folks I’m inter­ested in talk­ing to there, than wad­ing through the has­sle that is a web-based social network.

Still, there are ben­e­fits, like the cen­tral­ized apps and mini-feed views, that are afforded from Face­book that you sim­ply can’t get out of Twit­ter. Hav­ing one spot for pro­duc­tiv­ity and a quick glance at what my friends have been up to recently is some­thing I’m miss­ing out on.

02) Drink the Apple Kool-Aid
I got my first new lap­top com­puter in sev­eral years. Typ­i­cally, I’m the sort of guy who will buy a machine that’s a gen­er­a­tion or two back because I love bar­gains, and most of the time it is good enough for what I do daily. Since join­ing up at Mash­able and spend­ing lit­er­ally 12 hours straight on the com­puter every day, I fig­ured it was time to upgrade. I got a Black Fri­day spe­cial lap­top from Dell, a speedy lit­tle Vostro 1000. Unfor­tu­nately, it came with Vista, and I must say I’m slightly less than impressed with it.

On the other hand, folks with the Apple lap­tops are always express­ing their con­do­lences and telling me how super-great Leop­ard is. They’re finally start­ing to wear me down. I want to be one of the shiny happy peo­ple now. The Hare Krishna act has finally worn me down. At some point next year, I sup­pose I’m going to need to drink the Apple Kool-Aid, and hope the increased pro­duc­tiv­ity is worth the sack to my iden­tity as a PC guy.

03) Set up a spam bot for Ron Paul
Because as much as he con­cerns me with his asso­ci­a­tions with the Alex Jones’ of the polit­i­cal fringe, unfor­tu­nately he’s the one that most closely rep­re­sents my polit­i­cal desires (based on his Con­gres­sional vot­ing record). Addi­tion­ally, he’s prob­a­bly the most tech-friendly Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. I can vote for him, as I voted for Bad­narik last cycle, but vot­ing for the under­dog doesn’t always get the job done.

What does get the job done? Appar­ently set­ting up spam servers works. Got him all that cam­paign money. I’m tech savvy, it is the least I can do to help the old coot.

04) Get con­trol of my per­sonal brand.
Not only is my per­sonal web­site under con­struc­tion, but as I try out more social net­works and lifestream­ing util­i­ties, I’ve spread my per­sonal brand all over the Inter­net. I’ve got pod­casts, domains, writ­ings, tum­blogs, linkblogs and RSS feeds scat­tered all over the inter­net bear­ing my name. I need to find one or two good util­i­ties and a slick look­ing for­mat with which to con­sol­i­date it all in a use­ful, user-friendly manner.

05) Invest in the next Google.
I see and pro­file, what, twenty, thirty star­tups a day? I should be able to spot the next win­ner out of this bunch. I wanna be a Web 2.0 bil­lion­aire (or what­ever we end up call­ing the buzz­word du jour next year).

06) Get my cal­en­dar­ing orga­nized.
This is the one area of my life I’m still really suck­ing at get­ting migrated out to the cloud. I still man­age my cal­en­dar­ing with a local exchange server that syn­chro­nizes with a copy of Out­look on my local machine, which syn­chro­nizes with my ancient Asus WinCE unit and my wife’s video iPod. I really like Google’s cal­en­dar­ing, and I know that sites like Upcom­ing and oth­ers are great. I just haven’t found the one cal­en­dar­ing site that man­ages all my task list and todo needs as well as syn­chro­niz­ing with my ancient mobile devices.

07) Travel to more con­fer­ences.
I enjoy net­work­ing. I enjoy learn­ing. I enjoy show­ing myself off as an expert. I even enjoy trav­el­ing. I should go to more conferences.

08) Fix my gram­mar errors.
I’m sure the reg­u­lar Mash­able read­ers can back me up here. Word­Press doesn’t have gram­mar cor­rec­tion like desk­top based word proces­sors, and thus many dan­gling par­tici­ples and silly “its-it’s” errors often slip past me. Word­Press either needs to imple­ment gram­mar into the SpellChecker, or I need to get more atten­tive to these errors. I don’t care which one hap­pens, but I’m tired of Suezanne always call­ing me out on my gram­mar errors, I know that much.

09) Make the next block­buster online video pod­cast.
It has been a minute since I’ve done any work in video pod­cast­ing. My last valiant efforts were before the ram­pant invest­ment in video mon­e­ti­za­tion firms. With YouTube mon­e­tiz­ing, Revver pay­ing out $30 CPM, and BlinkX boast­ing upwards of $60 CPM, now is the time to make some­thing happen.

10) Get my email under con­trol.
As I write this, I have 2551 unread mes­sages sit­ting in my inbox. Aside from the 500 emails a day into the Mash­able inbox that are for­warded to me, I’ve also got Word­Press for­ward­ing me everyone’s com­ments and track-backs, as well as a 10 year old email account that sends me a hun­dred or two pieces of Bacn a day. Add to that noti­fi­ca­tions from my social net­works and the occa­sional email from some­one I can actu­ally cor­re­spond with, and it’s a mon­u­men­tal task to deal with. I need to set up more advance fil­ter­ing and make more lib­eral usage of the delete button.

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New FAA rules limit bat­ter­ies in checked and carry-on baggage

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 12:45 PM CST

Plan­ning on pack­ing plenty of spare bat­tery power to that New Years party? You might run afoul of new air travel rules that go into effect on Jan­u­ary 1, 2008.

Read More…

The Show­down: Street Fighter IV in action… good or bad?

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 11:58 AM CST

Hot off the heels of their last debate, Frank and Ben square off again: this time about the newly-released footage of Street Fighter IV and where the series may be going.

Read More…

Top 10 Busi­ness Deba­cles Of 2007 [Top 10]

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 09:47 AM CST

Maybe we’re just get­ting bet­ter at the job but it seems like the deba­cles this year were big­ger and more scan­dalous than last year. Every time we turned around, there was another deadly prod­uct or breach of con­sumer rights or act of malfea­sance. Here’s our roundup of the top 10 worst moments in busi­ness this year…

10. Ver­i­zon­FiOs Set­ting People’s Houses On Fire

Verizon’s new fiber optic cable net­work is blaz­ingly fast, but their tech­ni­cians can’t be accused of the same swift­ness as they keep drilling through customer’s elec­tri­cal lines and gas lines, lead­ing to small fires. In an effort to put out the PR blaze, the Ver­i­zon Pol­icy Blog always seemed to find a way to spin each story into a tale of how won­der­ful and in-demand their new net­work is. The phrase goes, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” yet Verizon’s PR mavens felt they could rein­vent physics and claim that the smoke at some of the inci­dents occurred in the absence of fire. (Link to sto­ries)

9. Com­cast Throt­tles Bit Torrent

Though long sus­pected on tech-oriented sites, the inter­nets went into a frenzy after the AP proved that Com­cast was dis­rupt­ing the traf­fic of cus­tomers using pop­u­lar file-sharing pro­gram Bit­Tor­rent, pre­vent­ing its use. Though often used to trade pirated movies and music, the soft­ware is used by pop­u­lar online game World of War­craft and open-source groups to dis­trib­ute new ver­sions of their soft­ware, and in the AP’s case, the decid­edly non-copyrighted Bible. Com­cast denied dis­rupt­ing Bit­Tor­rent traf­fic, but said that they reserved the right to man­age their net­work. (Link to sto­ries).

8. E.Coli In The Meat Kills Topps Meat Company

Late 2007 saw an extremely high num­ber of meat ship­ments recalled for e.coli con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. At Topps Meat, the recall was so mas­sive that the com­pany went bank­rupt car­ry­ing it out. Insid­ers say the USDA’s inef­fec­tu­al­ity and meatpacker-friendly loop­holes have lead to higher tol­er­ances for e.coli at plants. When the meat tests too high for e.coli, meat­pack­ers only have to slap a “Cook Only” label on to and still get to sell it with­out report­ing it to the USDA. Quoth Fast Food Nation, “There’s shit in the meat.” Medium-rare no longer looks so appe­tiz­ing. (Link to sto­ries).

7. Best Buy Caught Steal­ing Porn From Customer’s Computers

Fol­low­ing up on insider tip-offs of sys­tem­atic porn pil­fer­ing, The Con­sumerist rigged a com­puter to make a video of itself, loaded it with porn, and it took it Best Buy. On video, we caught one of the techs pur­loin­ing porn from our com­puter. The video went viral and Best Buy con­ducted a nation­wide inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion, out­sourced to ex-cops. Kids were inter­ro­gated. Kids were fired. Store hard drive were searched and seized. Pants were shat. Accord­ing to some reports, most of the worst “porn caches,” com­mu­nal com­put­ers where employ­ees swapped porn, movies, music, and doc­u­ments taken from cus­tomer hard­drives, some­how man­aged to escape being hooked up for remote review. (Link to story).

6. Stu­dent Loan Scandal

Attor­neys Gen­eral sued and fined promi­nent banks and uni­ver­si­ties after uncov­er­ing wide­spread col­lu­sion and con­flicts of inter­est between the two to sell col­lege stu­dents on high-priced stu­dent loans. One of the tech­niques was to give stu­dents a “pre­ferred lenders” list, which is to say, the pri­vate insti­tu­tions the uni­ver­sity pre­ferred you to use because it meant kick­backs, gifts and expense-paid trips for them in refer­ral rewards. While they were being shut­tled into expen­sive pri­vate loans, the stu­dents were often not informed of the array of Fed­eral loans that should be exhausted first. Seems some uni­ver­si­ties slept through their own Intro to Ethics classes. (Link to sto­ries).

5. Jet Blue Pas­sen­gers Stuck On The Tarmac

A win­ter storm swamped dis­count air­line Jet Blue’s oper­at­ing capac­ity, with planes grounded, pas­sen­gers stuck on the tar­mac for over four hours, flights can­celed, call cen­ters jammed, and thou­sands of pas­sen­gers unable to resched­ule their flights. The CEO ini­tially won kudos for mak­ing an online video apol­ogy, but that, and his sub­se­quent apolo­gies upon apolo­gies weren’t enough to save his job. The air­line has devel­oped con­tin­gency plans for future fias­coes, includ­ing new “strand­ing poli­cies” for pas­sen­gers, which includes pay­ing pas­sen­gers if they’re stuck inside a metal tube on a run­away for upwards of four hours and not given any food or allowed to dis­em­bark. The deba­cle helped gal­va­nize a grow­ing passenger’s rights move­ment and spurred pro-passenger leg­is­la­tion in New York, leg­is­la­tion which the air­lines then quickly moved to scut­tle. (Link to sto­ries).

4. TJMaxx’s Largest Data Breach In His­tory Of The Universe

Unse­cured wire­less sys­tems at TJ Maxx lead to the largest data breach in the his­tory of the uni­verse, with mil­lions of credit card num­bers com­pro­mised. As is typ­i­cal, the credit card com­pa­nies and banks tried to keep every­thing as hush as pos­si­ble and most cus­tomers only were curi­ous as to why they and all their friends were get­ting their credit cards forcibly replaced. The issue high­lighted how retail­ers have been quick to adopt the con­ve­nience of wire­less infor­ma­tion sys­tems with­out tak­ing the secu­rity mea­sures to make sure they weren’t also con­ve­nienc­ing poten­tial thieves. Who would have thought you could con­duct the world’s great­est bank rob­bery with­out a note, gun, or even leav­ing the park­ing lot? (Link to sto­ries).

3. Menu Foods Kills Pets With Fake Pet Food

Before there was lead, there was the coun­ter­feit pet food. Menu Foods of Canada was found to be sell­ing pet food tainted with fake pro­tein. Swap­ping out the cheaper ingre­di­ents lined their and their sup­pli­ers’ pock­ets, and the intesti­nal tracts of their customer’s pets with poi­son, leav­ing dozens of pets dead. Con­sumers were livid. A mas­sive recall ensued, and read­ers got their first glimpse into how Chi­nese ingre­di­ent mak­ers get their con­tracts approved, only to later replace cer­tain key ingre­di­ents with cheaper and some­times fraud­u­lent com­po­nents, a prac­tice that would come to be at the cen­ter of the mas­sive lead recalls that were to come later that year. (Link to sto­ries).

2. Mattel’s Lead-Tainted Toy Recalls

Wor­ries about chil­dren con­sum­ing lead were largely con­fined to jokes about avoid­ing eat­ing paint chips on old houses, until Mat­tel was forced to con­duct the largest toy recall ever after it was found a num­ber of their toys con­tained lead well above the fed­er­ally allowed tox­i­c­ity lev­els. As par­ents, agen­cies, advo­cacy groups, and other man­u­fac­tur­ers began scru­ti­niz­ing prod­ucts and sup­ply chains, scores more prod­ucts were recalled for high lev­els of lead. Con­gres­sional hear­ings were held and the story became a sta­ple of local and national news broad­casts. It may not be until 20 years from now that we know the true impact, when we start won­der­ing why national IQ lev­els have dropped 45 points. (Link to sto­ries).

1. Sub-Prime Mort­gage Meltdown

Hous­ing prices stopped going up and banks stopped refi­nanc­ing houses, pulling out the bot­tom blocks of the giant Jenga tower that was the hous­ing frenzy. In fact, it was Jenga tow­ers upon Jenga tow­ers, with the mort­gages being carved up and reshuf­fled until they looked like sen­si­ble invest­ments. Now banks are wash­ing out bil­lions upon bil­lions of losses, and home­own­ers across the coun­try are wor­ried about los­ing their homes. Every­one in the con­fed­er­acy of dunces; home­own­ers, loan offi­cers, credit agen­cies, banks, invest­ment firms, stand to lose. Who will get stuck hold­ing the hot potato? (Link to sto­ries).

(Photo: jgod­sey)

Most Book­marked TechCrunch Posts of 2007

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 09:37 AM CST

Okay, final list for 2007. Here are the top-25 book­marked or shared posts from the year, as deter­mined by peo­ple who used the “Add This” book­mark but­ton at the bot­tom of each post (see also our other year-end lists: Pop­u­lar, Head­lines, Launches, Deals, Dead­pool):

Crunch Net­work: Mobile­Crunch Mobile Gad­gets and Appli­ca­tions, Deliv­ered Daily.

TorrentFreak’s Most Mem­o­rable Quotes of 2007

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 07:48 AM CST

Some of the quotes are pretty straight­for­ward, oth­ers might not make that much sense with­out con­text if you’re not a reg­u­lar Tor­rent­F­reak reader. You can always sub­scribe to our feed if you want to stay stay up to date in 2008.

Happy New Year!

The quotes…

The MPAA after they were caught infring­ing the copy­right of Patrick Robin’s blog­ging soft­ware “For­est Blog”:

“The blog was only ever used for test­ing purposes.”

Bit­Tor­rent Inc. co-founder Ash­win Navin on iTunes DRM:

“iTunes DRM Inspires Peo­ple to Pirate Content.”

The Pirate Bay’s Got­tfrid Svartholm about his favorite anti-piracy orga­ni­za­tion:

“The MPAA can most accu­rately be described as rabid, obsessed lunatics.”

Medi­ade­fender CEO Randy Saaf when we found out about Miivi:

“This is really fucked.”

Mark Cuban to Bram Cohen, in a rant about the new Bit­Tor­rent movie store:

“But where are they ? Not just the cus­tomers Bram. The con­tent? I searched for Prison Break. Lots of tor­rents. None of them Legal. Is this what Fox had in mind when they signed up with you?”

Pres­i­dent Basescu (Roman­ian Pres­i­dent) on copy­right infringe­ment:

“Piracy helped the young gen­er­a­tion dis­cover com­put­ers. It helped Roma­ni­ans improve their cre­ative capac­ity in the IT indus­try, which has become famous around the world … Ten years ago, it was an invest­ment in Romania’s friend­ship with Microsoft and with Bill Gates.”

Shaw, Cana­dian ISP gives advise on how to con­fig­ure Bit­Tor­rent:

“Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”

MPAA’s Dean Garfield about Pirate Party politi­cians:

“There’s noth­ing about what the Pirate Bay does or what the Pirate Party does that is legitimate.”

P2P virus to its vic­tims:

“Ah, I see you are using P2P again……if you don’t stop within 0.5 sec­onds, i’m going to kill you!”

Scener about Feds that try to stop the Scene:

“No mat­ter how hard the Feds try to stop the scene there are always peo­ple smarter than them out there. What they should be doing is leav­ing us to it and catch­ing pedophiles, rapists and psy­cho­pathic killers rather than wast­ing resources on a few geeks.”

The Pirate Bay about the Caribbean pirate Jack Spar­row:

“Hol­ly­wood is try­ing to ridicule us pirates by por­tray­ing us as crazy but sym­pa­thetic adven­tur­ers. Not far from the truth, but in the 21st cen­tury real pirates are rid­ing other tor­rents than that of the ocean”

Bit­Tor­rent admin about Leaseweb:

“It looks like we’re not going to be very safe any­more on Leaseweb, we are putting back­ups in place on another loca­tion, just in case.”

Demonoid explains why they were offline for almost a week, and moved from The Nether­lands to Canada:

“We had a sys­tem prob­lem which will force us to restore every­thing from backup. The disks are pretty much empty right now and until we are able to upload the backup and set up every­thing up, we have to close down.”

IsoHunt’s Gary to Brokep from The Pirate Bay:

“You are either illit­er­ate and don’t check the front­page of sites you are point­ing fin­gers at, or you are a com­mu­nist. Or both. What makes you think you have rights to con­tent you didn’t pro­duce? People’s rights vs. copy­right hold­ers’ rights? Please. I will laugh at you when you are marked a ter­ror­ist and US armies hunt you down. Not that I like the whole anti-terrorist thing from the US but I digress.”

Marnie stern about her Bit­Tor­rent addic­tion:

“Since I’ve been here I have downloaded…I mean I feel I’m going to jail– well, I dis­cov­ered the tor­rent– but I feel I’ve down­loaded, I would say, hon­estly 40 or 50 movies, which I hear isn’t that bad, you know, for jail. But I mean, because I’ve pretty much been stay­ing in the stu­dio and a lit­tle bit with Zach [Hill], I have all of this time to just sit….”

MPA to “Christ­mas” movie Pirates:

“We can say this to all the pirates out there: you’d bet­ter watch out, you’d bet­ter not try”

Pirate Bay admin Brokep on US politics:

“The US gov­ern­ment is los­ing pop­u­lar­ity every day in Europe, and peo­ple don’t want to see us give in to them.”

NiN’s Trent Reznor about OiNK after it was raided:

“I’ll admit I had an account there and fre­quented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s great­est record store. Pretty much any­thing you could ever imag­ine, it was there, and it was there in the for­mat you wanted.”

TorrentSpy’s Just­ing Bun­nel on the power of the enter­tain­ment indus­try:

“Unfor­tu­nately many com­pa­nies use their power and influ­ence to halt and pun­ish inno­va­tions they can­not think of ways to make money with. The monop­o­lies tried to stop the VHS, DVD, and MP3 player, but thank­fully failed when they took it to Court. Now Imag­ine for a sec­ond all the amaz­ing prod­ucts they did man­age to squash…”

Dave Peters, front­man of “Throw­down” on sup­port­ing musicians:

“If you wanna really sup­port a band, “steal” their album….help bury the label….and buy a tshirt when you show up at their show and sing every word.”

“A for­mer music buyer writes to the CRIA:

“The music indus­try itself needs to rec­og­nize that they are to blame for sag­ging record sales. For years, they have been mar­ket­ing recy­cled crap, and peo­ple are get­ting tired of it.”

Com­cast to its cus­tomers:

“Com­cast does not block access to any appli­ca­tions, includ­ing BitTorrent.”

(but we do slow it down)

Researchers on the effect of file­shar­ing on CD sales:

“We esti­mate that the effect of one addi­tional P2P down­load per month is to increase music pur­chas­ing by 0.44 CDs per year.”

Noël St-Hilaire, head of copy­right theft inves­ti­ga­tions of the Cana­dian police on piracy:

“Piracy for per­sonal use is no longer tar­geted. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it,” he added.

Tor­rent­F­reak coun­cil in an open let­ter to the Dutch anti-piracy orga­ni­za­tion BREIN:

“Your “news release” is pep­pered with inac­cu­rate infor­ma­tion, cal­cu­lated to mis­lead and intim­i­date the mil­lions of legit­i­mate users of the many peer-to-peer file­shar­ing ser­vices that are in com­mon use through­out the world.”

50 Cent on file­shar­ing:

“What is impor­tant for the music indus­try to under­stand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

Eric Wilkin­son, the pro­ducer of the inde­pen­dent film “The Man from Earth”, wrote an email to RLSlog in which he thanks them for the free pro­mo­tion they gave him:

“In the future, I will not com­plain about file shar­ing. When I make my next pic­ture, I just may upload the movie on the net myself!”

New Years Eve, Live On The Net

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 04:38 AM CST

Another year has passed us all, and 2008 beck­ons tomor­row. For those not out and about this New Years Eve, here’s a few places you can join the expe­ri­ence online:

Video Stream­ing Sites

Sites such as Ustream, Kyte, Justin.tv and oth­ers will have many users live stream the new year from where ever they are.

Twit­ter

Twit­ter will pro­vide a rolling text ver­sion on NYE around the world. The first off the mark are two new Twit­ter friends I met today, Eli and n8duke, who are both located in Antarctica.

I did a brief inter­view today with Eli, one of the two most remote Twit­ter users on the planet:

how long have you been down there?

I’ve been liv­ing (and work­ing) at McMurdo Sta­tion (on Ross Island) for 3 months, and I’ve got about 6 more weeks to go before the end of the sum­mer sea­son.

How long have you been using Twitter?

my first tweet was posted on 07/07/07 and i’ve really loved it from the very begin­ning.

Do you find Twit­ter helps nar­row the dis­tance to the rest of the world?

def­i­nitely. i have friends all over the planet (US, Europe, etc) using twit­ter right now and it makes it so easy to stay in touch. it is espe­cially help­ful for me down here because the inter­net con­nec­tion is pretty ter­ri­ble, so it’s nice to just hope on to twit­ter, type a few char­ac­ters, and be done with it.

What are you doing for new years eve? will you be watch­ing oth­ers on the net?

well, it’s 10:45pm on new years eve for me right now, so in a few min­utes i’m going to suit up in me ECW (extreme cold weather) gear and hike to the top of Obser­va­tion Hill with some friends. there’s about 6 inches of snow on the ground (in the sum­mer!) and it’s still snow­ing. we’re going to bring in the new year in true antarc­tic fashion!

There’s also live stream­ing cams as well.

Earth­cam is stream­ing NY NYE live, –5 GMT. MSN is promis­ing a live NYE feed as well, but just don’t try to open the link on a Mac, or not in IE…ouch.

If any­one else has some NYE live links let us know in the comments.

Update: BlogTV has a live zone here.

Crunch Net­work: Crunch­Board because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Top 10 Web Tech Sto­ries of 2007

Posted: 31 Dec 2007 04:06 AM CST

2007 was an event­ful year in Web Tech­nol­ogy, with the rise of Face­book, some fren­zied acqui­si­tions from the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and of course the iPhone. To round out the year (and put an end to the Decem­ber lists!) here is a look at what we think were the 10 biggest Web tech sto­ries of the year. They’re ordered in terms of tech­nol­ogy impact and inno­va­tion — how­ever it’s a sub­jec­tive list, so let us know in the com­ments what you think should be in there.

This post dou­bles as the final Weekly Wrapup of 2007 — it’s been a great year and all the best every­one for 2008! Here’s look­ing for­ward to more Web inno­va­tion and startup suc­cess in ’08!

1. iPhone Launch

On Jan­u­ary 9, 2007 Steve Jobs announced at Mac­world “three rev­o­lu­tion­ary new prod­ucts”: an iPod, a phone, an inter­net mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tor. But turned out it was all one device: the fabled iPhone. This is our num­ber 1, because it finally made the Mobile Web real for the influ­en­tial US mar­ket (and the geeks who bought it in Amer­ica, then took it over­seas and unlocked it! cough).

2. Face­book Announces Platform

Much has already been writ­ten about this announce­ment on May 24, but suf­fice to say that it ush­ered in a new era for social net­works — where out­side com­pa­nies could deploy advanced func­tion­al­ity inside the Face­book site.

3. Google Acquires Dou­bleClick for $3.1B

On April 13 Google acquired online adver­tis­ing com­pany Dou­bleClick, which set off a frenzy of acqui­si­tions in this space — notably Microsoft’s $6B pur­chase of aQuan­tive. The Google/DoubleClick deal con­firmed that online adver­tis­ing was in a bub­ble period.

4. Google Announces OpenSocial

At the end of Octo­ber Google launched OpenSo­cial, a set of com­mon APIs for build­ing social appli­ca­tions across the web, in a bid to cut off Facebook’s momen­tum with third party devel­op­ers. Per­haps the biggest part of this news was the world’s largest SNS MySpace join­ing OpenSo­cial the day after.

5. Ama­zon Launches Kin­dle eReader

Despite mixed reviews of this e-Reader device with inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity from Ama­zon, the Kin­dle promises to shake up the e-commerce giant’s core busi­ness model — by deliv­er­ing books elec­tron­i­cally instead of the famil­iar brown box.

6. CNN/YouTube Debates

On July 23, eight Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial hope­fuls took the stage in South Car­olina — a cru­cial early pri­mary state — for a debate spon­sored by CNN and YouTube in which all of the ques­tions were sub­mit­ted by users of YouTube. The Repub­li­cans got their chance in Sep­tem­ber. In the same vein, 2007 also saw the MySpace/MTV Can­di­date Forums and the rise of web 2.0 tools in politics.

7. Google Announces Android

On Nov 5, Google announced an open-source mobile oper­at­ing sys­tem called Android. This could sig­nif­i­cantly change the way that Mobile Web appli­ca­tions are developed.

8. Steve Jobs’ open let­ter against DRM

On Feb 6, Apple CEO Steve Jobs posted his Thoughts on Music in the ‘Hot News’ sec­tion of the Apple web­site. In it he out­lined why DRM should be abol­ished by record com­pa­nies. And Jobs’ pleas seemed to be heard by the record indus­try, with first EMI and then later Uni­ver­sal and Warner on AmazonMP3 ditch­ing DRM.

9. Face­book Bea­con Saga

Late this year Face­book announced a new adver­tis­ing sys­tem that used retail data col­lected from its users. But after howls of pri­vacy protests, Face­book had to back off some and make the sys­tem opt-in. It’s also worth men­tion­ing here another Face­book story that just missed this list: in Octo­ber Microsoft invested in Face­book at a $15b valuation.

10. Adobe AIR

On June 10, Adobe offi­cially unveiled Adobe Inte­grated Run­time, or Adobe AIR for short. For­mally called Adobe Apollo, it is a cross-operating run­time devel­oped by Adobe that allows devel­op­ers to cre­ate Rich Inter­net Appli­ca­tions for the desk­top. It was a close call between this and Google Gears (the offline browser plug-in), or Microsoft’s Sil­verlight (a Flash-like plug-in) — both of which were also launched in ’07.

What have we missed? What were your top Web tech sto­ries of 2007?

BBC Cen­sored Bhutto’s Reports that Bin Laden Was Murdered

Posted: 30 Dec 2007 11:30 PM CST

When a news orga­ni­za­tion as ven­er­a­ble as the BBC cen­sors the reportage of a story as impor­tant as the assas­si­na­tion of Ben­zir Bhutto –a highly vis­i­ble critic of Bush/British pol­icy with regard to the “War on Ter­ror­ism” et al –it is fair to ask: who is the BBC pro­tect­ing? Are they cov­er­ing up the motive for her murder?

Wor­ship Your Plas­tic Heroes in <cite>The DC Comics Action Fig­ure Archive</cite>

Posted: 30 Dec 2007 11:00 PM CST

Wor­ship your plas­tic heroes in The DC Comics Action Fig­ure Archive.

Win­ning Even When You Lose

Posted: 30 Dec 2007 07:33 PM CST

* April 1, 2004: Gmail launches in a pri­vate beta and starts to offer 1 GB of free stor­age.
* May 13, 2004: Yahoo increases the free stor­age from 4 MB to 100 MB. In 2005, Yahoo Mail’s free stor­age grows to 1GB and now it’s “unlimited”.

* August 25, 2005: Google Talk launches. “Built to sup­port indus­try stan­dards, Google Talk enables Google users to con­nect to the Google Talk ser­vice and exchange IMs using any client that does the same, includ­ing Tril­lian, Adium, iChat, GAIM, and Psi.“
* Octo­ber 12, 2005: “Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. today announced a land­mark agree­ment to con­nect users of their con­sumer instant mes­sag­ing (IM) ser­vices on a global basis. The industry’s first inter­op­er­abil­ity agree­ment between two dis­tinct lead­ing global con­sumer IM providers will give MSN Mes­sen­ger and Yahoo Mes­sen­ger users the abil­ity to inter­act with each other, form­ing what is expected to be the largest con­sumer IM com­mu­nity in the world, esti­mated to be more than 275 mil­lion strong.”

* July 2007: To bid for the 700MHz spec­trum in the US, Google asks four con­di­tions, the most impor­tant being to allow peo­ple to use any appli­ca­tion and any device (these two con­di­tions were accepted).
* Novem­ber 27, 2007: Ver­i­zon Wire­less announces “that it will pro­vide cus­tomers the option to use, on its nation­wide wire­less net­work, wire­less devices, soft­ware and appli­ca­tions not offered by the company”.

* Novem­ber 2, 2007: Google launches OpenSo­cial, “a set of com­mon APIs that make it easy to cre­ate and host social appli­ca­tions on the web”.
* Decem­ber 13, 2007: Face­books opens its appli­ca­tion plat­form. “Now we also want to share the ben­e­fits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our plat­form archi­tec­ture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Face­book Plat­form meth­ods and tags to other platforms.”

At the end of the day, it’s not impor­tant if your prod­uct doesn’t win when your offer­ings can make changes for every­one.