August 11th, 2010
Here are some places that Mashable gathered for those who want to help raise money for good causes–either as a giver or an organizer–using internet speed and social media. Either way, you’re a philanthropist!
Facebook Causes - “Whether you are an activist who wants to stop genocide or a nonprofit that promotes literacy, Causes can be your platform. It is a tool to help people go from caring about issues to doing something to make change.”
Razoo - Non-profits can have their own page, and can also build project specific pages for events or fundraising drives. Razoo’s widget allows non-profits to port their fundraising initiative to other social sites, and also enables donors to share on their Facebook and Twitter networks.
Twitpay - and its RT2Give platform, designed specifically for everyone’s favorite 140 character-based social network, Twitter, focuses on the viral nature of Twitter, creating donations based on re-tweets — and of course, re-tweets equate to more visibility.
Crowdrise- is a grassroots fundraising service that creates fun ways for your network to go and promote, including contests, giveaways and promotions. Kate Olsen of Network for Good said they “are enamored [with their] fun approach…and kitschy call to action messaging on social media outposts’”
ChipIn - A simple widget allows a non-profit to have complete control of funding via PayPal. Non-profits embed the ChipIn widget on a variety of websites or create their own ChipIn page. The widget does integrate a wide variety of social network portability beyond the big two (Facebook and Twitter), including Digg and Delicious.
Ammado - Based in Ireland, ammado’s big differentiator is its international reach, with more than 30 currencies accepted. Individuals can create their own grassroots pages, provide recurring donations, and share their donation or fundraising project via the most popular social networks.
Tags: Internet Speed, Social Networking
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August 6th, 2010
Part of the magic of the internet is how the oddest things seem to spread like wildfire, with internet speed. It’s called “going viral”, since we all know how quickly computer viruses can spread, but this tends to be more fun. Case in point: Double Rainbow Guy.
It was just another YouTube video posted by a nature-loving guy, until late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel tweeted the link. Know Your Meme.com says, “A little over an hour later, Bill Simmons retweeted the previous tweet on his own board. On July 4, a short article was posted on The Huffington Post promoting the video. On July 5, the Youtube.com user RayWilliamJohnson posted a video that highlighted the Double Rainbow video. On July 6, the user schmoyoho (popular for “Auto-Tune the News”) created an Auto-Tuned version of this video.”
Jimmy Kimmel said on his show that from only 800 views when he found it, it took less than two weeks for it to have almost 7 million views. That’s viral.
When that happens, people on YouTube begin making their own versions. Know Your Meme.com lists a bunch of items relating to the Double Rainbow Guy’s original video as does Huffington Post. And Fast Company tries to figure out “what it means” (since the Double Guy Rainbow guy asked…) in terms of their Influence Project, which studies the phenomena to try to make it happen on purpose, we suppose. They ask questions like, “Is Vasquez just another popular, soon-to-be-forgotten YouTube star? Will he ride the wave of “success” across the Web, like a unicorn atop a rainbow? Does Vasquez now have influence? Is “influence” even the right term to use?”
Only time will tell if The Double Rainbow guy will continue to influence the world, or fade into obscurity.
Tags: Internet Speed, Viral Video, YouTube
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August 4th, 2010
Digg and Reddit are both sites that let users submit links to be voted on by other users. When lots of people like them, they get featured on their home pages.
TechCruch’s Crunchbase tells us that Kevin Rose came up with the idea for Digg in the fall of 2004, found programmer Owen Byrne through eLance and paid him $10/hour to develop the idea, and in December of 2004, launched his creation to the world through his blog. He really saw “the power of breaking stories before anyone else” in 2005 when Paris Hilton’s cell phone was hacked and shared with internet speed.
Digg has been a force ever since. Ranking in the top 100 most trafficked sites according to Alexa.com.
Reddit launched in 2005, Crunchbase tells us, as the product of two University of Virginia grads in the Y Combinator program, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. Conde Nast, owner of Wired and other magazines/websites, acquired Reddit in October of 2006.
TechCrunch shared the results of a two-week, 24-hour-a-day comparison of the two sites sent in by a reader. It’s presented in full color graphics at TechCrunch, but here are the basics:
Of the top 10 users submitting links on each site, the Digg users seem to be busier, posting 3 – 4 times as many links, at any hour of the day, with the peaks being 9am and 1 -2am.
The distribution of the top 10 links that make the homepage are pretty even on Digg. While the same sites appear on Reddit’s homepage too, the distribution is much less heavily weighted (over 50%) to imgur’s images, Reddit.com itself, and YouTube.
Interestingly, the number of links that appear on Reddit first before being posted to Digg are almost 4 times higher than the other way around.
Tags: Internet Speed
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August 2nd, 2010
The phrase “15 minutes of fame” is an expression that became popular after Andy Warhol said in 1968 that, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” It’s been used to describe people that aren’t celebrities, but celebrities-of-the-moment, who are everywhere in the media, and then fade back into obscurity quickly.
Now YouTube gives everyone the chance to get their 15 minutes with the help of internet speed, because they’ve extended the time limit on their video uploads from 10 to 15 minutes. Of course, uploading a video doesn’t ensure fame, but they’re giving everyone a boost with their promotion – a contest called, appropriately, “15 Minutes of Fame.” Here’s the lowdown from YouTube’s blog:
Imagine that this video is all the world will ever know about you: what would you want to communicate? Tag your video with “yt15minutes,” upload it by Wednesday, August 4, and we’ll select a handful of people to truly gain their 15 minutes of fame by featuring them on the YouTube homepage in a future spotlight.
In the same blog post, Joshua Siegel, Product Manager for Upload and Video Management, explained that they can increase the time limit now because they’re confident that their Content ID system protects them from people who try to upload copyrighted content.
The New York Times BITS blog also adds that, “People’s behavior in uploading and watching video online is changing too. When YouTube was started in 2005, its founders thought people would use it to make short profile videos about themselves and predicted that people’s attention spans would be too short to watch long videos online, said Chris Dale, a YouTube spokesman. That has obviously changed with the popularity of sites like Hulu and long videos on YouTube…”
Tags: Internet Speed, Web TV, YouTube
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July 30th, 2010
Sometimes we like to get back to basics and go over exactly why high speed internet is such a big deal. We found this great article about the need for internet speed and the basics of broadband, and we thought we’d share its insights with you.
If you don’t know or remember what sounds dial-up modems make as you’re waiting, hoping to be connected, check out this YouTube clip.
Broadband is the always-on gateway to internet-based services delivered at lightning-fast speeds to homes and businesses. Think of it as a pipe — many times bigger than a dial-up connection — that carries information to your home or office. A bigger pipe means that you can receive lots of information quickly — enabling fast downloads, streaming audio/video, fast uploads of large files (e.g. pictures) and more.
Broadband also offers a fast-growing number of entertainment choices:
• Online games that marry cutting-edge technology to the magic of movies, animation and audio
• On-demand news and other information that is tailored to your interests and needs
• Audio sound that is as sharp as any CD
• Digitized video images that are crystal clear
• Interaction lies at the heart of the Internet — interaction with friends, family and work through e-mail, Web surfing, audio, video, online games, you name it. Broadband gives you the power to make that interaction faster, richer and easier to use.
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Speed comparison chart
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File Size
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High-Speed Internet
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Dial-up
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|
Downloading 10 MP3 music files
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30MB
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1 minute
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1.6 hours
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|
Uploading 30 digital photos
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80MB
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9 minutes
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10 hours
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Downloading one DVD movie
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20GB**
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12.5 hours
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48 days
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Uploading 100 web pages
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3MB
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19 seconds
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22 minutes
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*Typical DSL/average cable speed = 4Mbps, High-Speed Internet upload speed = 1.3Mbps (DSL), speeds are rounded.
**Typical DVDs run 20-30GB.
Tags: High Speed Internet, Internet Speed, YouTube
Posted in DSL Speeds, Download Speed, connection speed | No Comments »
July 28th, 2010
You may have already heard of Stieg Larsson, the author of the international bestsellers known as the Millennium Trilogy, which is comprised of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Girl Who Played with Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”. The author who delivered the manuscripts shortly before his death in 2004 has now become the first to sell over 1 million Kindle books, with the convenience of internet speed.
Amazon has created a new “Kindle Million Club” (with a current membership of 1) to recognize future authors whose entire body of work has sold over 1 million copies in the Kindle Store.
“Larsson’s books have captivated millions of readers around the world and ignited a voracious interest in the lives of its main characters Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomqvist,” said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. “It’s been exciting to have been a part of introducing so many people to these great books.”
The books are crime mystery thrillers in which Lisbeth is an intelligent, eccentric woman in her twenties with a photographic memory and poor social skills. Blomkvist is an investigative journalist, and a celebrity in his own right (with a history not totally dissimilar to Larsson’s own.)
According to Wikipedia, Larsson was the second best-selling author in the world in 2008, behind Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini. By March 2010 his Millennium trilogy had sold 27 million copies in more than 40 countries. They’re still New York Times and international bestsellers. Larsson, who lived in Sweden, was the editor in chief of the magazine Expo and a leading expert on antidemocratic right-wing extremist organizations.
Tags: Digital Books, Internet Speed
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July 26th, 2010
Facebook’s “Like” feature has seemingly taken over the web. A month or so ago, Mashable reported that the Typepad bloggers who installed the widgets on their sidebars got a 50% boost in traffic. As of that time, 1,500 TypePad bloggers had installed the “Like” buttons on their blogs in the first month. Then Typepad made it possible to add the Like button to each post. 2,400 bloggers added that version of the feature, and Typepad says they got a 200% boost.
Then the Like feature was available for any website. Mashable says, “They were on 50,000+ websites within one week after launch, on 100,000+ sites in less than a month, and are now on 350,000+ sites.” But for people who like to Like sites to share with their Facebook friends, it can be frustrating that not all pages have the button. They can relax now though, because there’s an extension called “Facebook Like” from Greasemonkey that places a “Like” bar on the top of any webpage you visit (with the exception of Facebook.com itself). It was built by Facebook Engineer Matt Kelly as a personal project during a company Hackathon. (Companies have Hackathons?)
Facebook Like works with Firefox as long as you have the Greasemonkey add-on installed, and allows you to Like, make Recommendations and add Activity Feed features on any Firefox page you visit. It also works with Google Chrome, since includes native support for Greasemonkey scripts, while Safari requires GreaseKit.
So get it, and then utilize internet speed to zip along the information superhighway in a hot rod with the top down and wind in your virtual hair, singing new lyrics to an old tune: “Oooooh…Like to Like You, Baby!”
Tags: Facebook, Internet Speed
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July 23rd, 2010
A security company called Eset reported that there are two new types of malicious software to look out for, and try to protect yourself against. PC World explained via Yahoo news that both of them “exploit a vulnerability in the way Windows processes .link files, used to provide shortcuts to other files on the system.”
The first targets computers made by Siemens that run a specific type of software: industrial control system management software. First exploited by the Stuxnet worm, which was discovered on computer systems in Iran last month, the worm steals supervisory control and data acquisition project files. I guess you’d know it if you had such files. We’re told that “Siemens issued a Security Update for its customers on Thursday, but Microsoft has yet to patch the Windows bug that permits the worm to spread.” Still, the newer version looks simpler. Almost as though it had been copied by what the article calls “a bottom feeder” who seeks to record keystrokes in order to steal people’s passwords.
“The other variant could be used to install one of several different pieces of malicious software. As each new variant of the attack pops up, it adds pressure on Microsoft to patch the underlying vulnerability. Microsoft’s next set of security patches is due Aug. 10, but if enough customers get infected, the company may be forced to rush out an emergency patch for the issue. Microsoft has already posted a temporary workaround to the problem and says it is working on a patch.”
Eset has a list of suggested security precautions, that you can take with internet speed, on their website at www.Eset.eu.
Tags: Internet Speed, Malware, Viruses
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July 21st, 2010
We talked about MMORPGs in our earlier post, but there are also online games that are played in the first person. Instead of having you role play with an avatar representing you, the adventure unfolds from your own point of view. On the large end of the scale you’ll find MMOFPS or Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter games. If you don’t want to play against twenty or more people at a time, there are smaller combat groups as well, like six versus six or “6v6”.
GameBattles.com is one place to find opponents who want the same kind of experience that you do. Their website explains:
“GameBattles is the largest online destination for competitive console and PC gaming. Featuring tournaments, ladders, forums and more for all the latest and hot titles, GameBattles is home to over 3 million gamers worldwide, and over 800,000 teams looking to compete in their favorite Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS and Sony PSP games. Recognized as a world leader in online gaming competition, GameBattles also hosts over 500,000 gamer profiles, heavily trafficked forums with over 22 million posts, video game news, reviews, previews and media with a focus on online multi-player games and community based content.”
A site called MMO Hut.com has a bunch of free games and offered up a list of the Top 10 Best MMOFPS Shooters.
So there you have it! If you want to shoot imaginary people with your friends in other locations connected with internet speed, we’ve given you just enough information to get started!
Tags: Internet Speed, Online Gaming
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