Slashdot 10th Anniversary
The Sputnik launch isn’t the only big anniversary this month; Slashdot is celebrating, too.
The influential “news for nerds” site famous for swamping unsuspecting websites with huge amounts of server crashing traffic turns 10 this month and Slashdot parties are popping up all around the country.
It all started in 1997, in a time before there was Gmail.
Slashdot founder and editor Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, wanted a non-college-affiliated e-mail address, so he simply registered his own domain name.
While he was at it, he decided to add a little humor and make the URL as unpronounceable as possible: “H, T, T, P, colon, slash, slash, slashdot, dot, org.”
What Malda didn’t expect was that Slashdot would become one of the most popular geek news sites on the web, overloading so many websites’ servers that the phrase “Slashdot effect” would be coined.
Twitter Now Offers Global Alerts
Twitter has unveiled a new global tracking option that allows you to get messages based on term rather than user.
For example, you can now subscribe to be notified any time anyone posts a public twit about “Laptops.”
At the moment the new feature only works through IM and text messaging, though the company says it plans to roll out the feature over RSS, e-mail and even in the API in the near future.
To use the keyword tracking you’ll need to set up your phone to use Twitter and then send a command like “track Laptop.”
Any time someone posts a public twitter using the word “Laptop” you’ll be notified. To unsubscribe the command is “untrack Laptop,” or to turn off all tracking send “track off.”
Presumably you can turn all your tracks back on with “track on” though the Twitter blog doesn’t explicitly mention this option.
To get a list of what you’re tracking send “tracks.”
The new features give Twitter users the ability to track topics somewhat similar to the way many use Technorati to tracks blog topics.
However, there are a number of things missing that I feel would make the new service much more useful.
A good example would be the ability to track terms by user.
In other words would only get notices when selected users post selected terms. Without that sort of fine-grained control the new features may well produce more noise than signal.
But despite some shortcomings, the new features add a whole other dimension to the service and make it significantly more useful.
Anywhere CD Closes Shop, CEO Accepts Blame
Even with the rise of open source code, blogging, and generally living life in public, there’s one notable exception to the culture of openness: rarely does a CEO want to talk about his failures.
This blog post by AnywhereCD founder Michael Robertson, who was also the founding CEO of MP3.com, is refreshing in not only doing just that, but taking the initiative to publicly analyze where he went wrong.
AnywhereCD will close its doors on September 30, 2007 the same day a court settlement decreed that AnywhereCD can no longer sell DRM-free tunes from Warner Music.
The Secret World of Food Coloring
What makes those canned peas so green? Chlorophyll, you say? Nope! It’s actually Green No. 3, one of the modern world’s most plentiful food colorings.
The COLOUR lovers blog gives the history of this and six other colorings, and it’s a fascinating peek into what we consume every day without knowing it.
I was surprised to learn how many popular colors are made, in part, from coal tar — a substance that causes cancer in rats.
Some of these colors have actually been banned by countries in the European Union.
I was also reminded of the urban legend surrounding Mountain Dew, which derives its unnatural hue from Yellow No. 5: no, it doesn’t shrink men’s testicles and wither their sperm, but some researchers have linked it to childhood attention disorders.
Ah, chemicals. Who knew that eating a bag of Skittles was such a daring thing to do?
Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day
Ahoy! It’s time fer Talk Like a Pirate Day again!
With that in mind, here’s a pirate joke my little brother told me:
So a pirate walks into the bar with a ships wheel attached to the front o’ his trousers. The bartender asks, “What the hell is that ships wheel for?” The pirate says, “I don’t know, but it’s drivin’ me nuts!”
Arrrgh! Shiver me timbers!
Me wants to know if you have any savvy pirate jokes to share?
What If You Spoke Like You Commented?
This video is for you, my personal friends and loyal Geek With Laptop readers and RSS Feed Subscribers who spend a ton of time daily in front of computers.
The more time you spend in front of your computer reading blogs, forums and online journals will have a direct effect to how funny you find this video:
I’m really looking forward to any comments that you might have on this video… so don’t be shy. Speak your mind.