2008 August 13 | money news blog

13 08 2008

Facebook: Filter your News Feed even more

Posted by: admin in Social Media and Tech

You can now filter the items in your Facebook News Feed depending on what you’re hoping to check out, thanks to a cool new drop-down menu. Previously, you could sort the list by a few Facebook mainstays: status updates, photo-related updates, and “posted items.”

The filter additions, originally reported late last night by TechCrunch, …

13 08 2008

The economic picture has improved?

Posted by: admin in Investment News

The jobless claims are accelerating. unemployment is accelerating. commodities prices improving is due to euro weakness and the notion that the economy is NOT improving, for, if it were improving, commodities would be rising on demand concerns. the markets are hilarious now. they go up because commodities are falling but commodities are falling because the economic […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

Fore more visit Source: [webware]

13 08 2008

Yahoo’s Fire Eagle geolocation service now open to all

Posted by: admin in General News

Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s formerly experimental geolocation platform, is officially opening up to all users, and several companies are announcing products that work with it.

A refresher: Fire Eagle is a storehouse for personal location information. If you tell Fire Eagle where you’re, or have applications or devices that can do so on your behalf, then other applications can grab that info (with your permission) and provide you geo-related services or social network features.

Tom Coates launches Fire Eagle at Yahoo's Brickhouse technology incubator.

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

One of the most interesting parts of Fire Eagle is its variable privacy feature. Even if Fire Eagle knows precisely at what address you’re, you can set it to only release more general information, like the city, to certain apps or certain groups, or you can restrict location reporting by time. There’s also a “hide me” button you can press if you want to close down location reporting for a period of time.

At the Fire Eagle launch event this day, Yahoo highlighted three companies using the service:

• Pownce, the Twitter-ish nanoblog service. Having location available in this type of product really does change how users interact. See also Twinkle, a Twitter-compatible nanoblog service for the iPhone.

• Movable Type. The blog platform will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service. It wasn’t discussed at the launch but one assumes the new social network products will also get support.

• Outside.in, a local news and community site. It will use Fire Eagle to automatically find the info that’s relevant to your location.

Other companies announcing services that work with Fire Eagle include: Brightkite, Dash, Dipity, Dopplr, ekit, Lightpole, Navizon, Loki, Outalot, Plazes, Spot, and Zkout. These companies are primarily location service providers or rudimentary social networks. I’m looking forward to seeing major social nets (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed) and other data and news sites (Google Maps, Digg, CNN, Eventful), add Fire Eagle support.

The business
Asked what was in this initiative for Yahoo, there are two official answers. Yahoo co-founder David Filo told me, “We really wanted this functionality for Yahoo services. But by opening it up for the rest of the Web, consumers are more likely to adopt it.”

Fire Eagle czar Tom Coates also said that there are possible direct revenues from the service, if Yahoo at some point decides to create a business version of the service for heavy users, like advertisers.

Yes, advertisers. While Fire Eagle won’t be advertising-supported, marketers could create location-based programs that use the service. The Yahoo team is adamant that Fire Eagle will be permission-based, though, so users won’t end up giving their location away to services without their knowledge.

Previous coverage:
You are here, sort of.
Fire Eagle geolocation service: Halfway there.
Fire Eagle’s missing apps.

13 08 2008

Measuring social networks’ popularity by region

Posted by: admin in Social Media and Tech

Performance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently.

The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in very special users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock …

13 08 2008

On2 Technologies Announces Rescheduled Date for Second Quarter Financial Results Release and Conference Call

Posted by: admin in Investment News

On2 Technologies Announces Rescheduled Date for Second Quarter Financial Results Release and Conference Call TARRYTOWN, N.Y., Aug 13, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ — Schedules Investor Conference Call for 5:00 p.m. ET, Thursday, August 14th On2 Technologies, Inc. (ONT), a leader in video compression solutions, today announced that it will report financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2008, after […] For more visit Source:www.investment-blog.net

13 08 2008

Measuring social networks’ popularity by region

Posted by: admin in Social Media and Tech

Performance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently.

The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in one-of-a-kind users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom selected instead to look at how much of a proportional lock …

For more visit Source:[green.yahoo]

13 08 2008

Is recycling a myth in my hometown and yours?

Posted by: admin in Investing World

A few weeks ago, the superintendent of my New York apartment building chided me for not diligently separating all my paper waste into the appropriate recycling bin. He was right, and since then I’ve been absolutely scrupulous about keeping track of it and astonishing myself by just how much paper passes through my relatively humble life.

Here in New York, we’ve been recycling “intensively” for nearly 20 years, separating glass, plastic, metal, and paper for recycling. We got up to the 20-percent level of waste recycled before budget cuts shrank the program for a few years. Now we’re back on track.

First pitched as both a profit center and a necessity given that the city was about to run out of its own landfill space, recycling is still questioned by skeptics who have spent years wondering if the whole huge project isn’t just a big phony scam designed to make liberal do-gooders feel superior about throwing away their garbage.

In fact, a memorable 1996 New York Times article concluded that, “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”

The city has been trying to recover from that article ever since, most recently on its website, where it bends over backwards to explain how recycling works, who’s contracted to do it, how everyone gets paid, and how the financial side works. It makes for fascinating reading.

At the same time, the NRDC environmental group has its own page devoted to the glories of New York’s recycling program, perhaps in an attempt to make sure no one considers slicing the budget again.

I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing since 1986. I don’t have a choice anyway. Recycling is the law, and the sanitation cops are more than eager to hand out tickets when the wrong trash goes in the wrong pile.

How is recycling doing in your hometown?

Don Willmott’s blog posts are provided by LifeWire, a part of The New York Times Company.

13 08 2008

Salon launches blogger ‘tipping’ system

Posted by: admin in Social Media and Tech

So you liked that blog post you just read–why don’t you toss the writer a buck or two?

That’s the rationale behind new-media outlet Salon’s latest initiative. Members of its “Open Salon” user-generated content community can now “tip” one another with real-world money if they like what …