Digg used to be a very popular website

I would frequent the site constantly to check out the greatest news, what was popular today, everything.

Granted this was back in 2006 when the site was still relatively new, and I’ve been a Digger all way the way through 2008. However recently it seems as though Digg.com is taking a turn for the worst, and may need a lot of help recovering.

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HP’s Facial Tracking Software Doesn’t Recognize An African American

In this funny video Wanda (Caucasian) and Desi (African American) test out HP’s Facial Tracking Software.

And to their surprise the technology does not work with Desi’s face. The camera just stops moving. It picks back up when Wanda comes back into frame.

HP’s webcam software boasts a face-tracking feature that claims to keep facial images centered and proportioned on the screen.

It’s not much of an issue for HP. Both Desi and Wanda have a sense of humor about it. Although you would have thought they would have tested the software

HP is now aware of the glitch, Posted a public forum update saying that they’re investigating the matter.

Watch the video below

HP’s Response

“We believe that the camera might have difficulty ’seeing’ contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.”

I love the internet, I really do.

Today, I love the internet because I’ve been away from it for most of my day.

With in 5 mins I can catch up on what’s important to me and on my own time.

Now if you haven’t seen it. The iron man 2 trailer. It look great. Can’t wait.

Click here to watch IRON MAN 2 TRAILER

Considering the real time updates of Twitter and Facebook Google started offering real-time search.

I’ve read plenty about it but never saw it in action till now.

Looking for information on the Nexus One Google’s new phone I came across this

There we a couple of video results 2 websites and then this and it keeps scrolling unless you hit pause. As you can see it’s not just Twitter but other websites as well.

The Nexus One will, crucially, be sold unlocked, giving Google complete control over the hardware and software with no pesky carrier interference. Even the iPhone, which has had almost unprecedented autonomy in its functionality is still constrained by carriers: AT&T’s anti-tethering paranoia is a good example.

Although not yet officially announced, Google has coyly admitted that the phone is real and will be on sale early in the new year. In fact, it has provided the handset to its employees in order to test it out in the wild. The Google Mobile Blog explains, somewhat cryptically:

From the Google Mobile Blog

We recently came up with the concept of a mobile lab, which is a device that combines innovative hardware from a partner with software that runs on Android to experiment with new mobile features and capabilities, and we shared this device with Google employees across the globe. This means they get to test out a new technology and help improve it.

Unfortunately, because dogfooding is a process exclusively for Google employees, we cannot share specific product details. We hope to share more after our dogfood diet.

The phone is already in use. Nerdy John Gruber of Daring Fireball found this user agent string in his site’s logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/ERD56C) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

It makes sense to identify yourself as Mobile Safari, if only to get proper mobile Webkit pages served to you.

Characteristically, and in contrast to Apple’s secrecy, photos of the Googlephone are already being posted openly by Googlers, or being handed to their friends. The picture above, posted on Twitpic by blogger Cory O’Brien, shows the handset (taken on an iPhone and with a BlackBerry in the background). According to O’Brien, “Google Phone = iPhone + a little extra screen and a scroll wheel. Great touch screen, and Android.”

Read The Full Story on Wired.com

There’s a race of content creation.

I’ve talked about it before with AOL and Demand Media.

Their paying bottom dollar to create content factories.

Quick, Fast, and Cheap. About 4000 videos and articles a day.

How do you compete with such a model? They are creating this content with search engines in mind and rapidly. Mom and Pop blogs/sites may find it hard to compete with such a machine.

From TechCrunch

But for every link there are dozens of sites that outright steal our content with no attribution. Not just spam blogs, even the NYTimes does it. This isn’t a copyright issue – the stories are rewritten by actual people. But it’s far cheaper to simply take the news and rewrite it – if you can get away with it – than to hire people who do actual journalism. Over time, it becomes a competitive tax that is difficult to bear.

But even then, companies like ours can find a way to compete.

So what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy the mom and pop operations that hand craft their content today. It’s the rise of cheap, disposable content on a mass scale, force fed to us by the portals and search engines.

On one end you have AOL and their Toyota Strategy of building thousand of niche content sites via the work of cast-offs from old media. That leads to a whole lot of really, really crappy content being highlighted right on the massive AOL home page. This article, for example, is just horrendous. One of AOL’s own blogs trashes the company’s spinoff, rambles for miles without any real point, and adds a huge factual error to top things off (”the company is losing money”). Hiring a bunch of people who couldn’t keep their old media jobs and don’t have the stomach to go out on their own and then slapping little or no editorial oversight onto these masses of sub-par journalists leads to an inevitable conclusion – cheap, crappy content. And that crappy content is given a massive audience on the AOL portal.

Check out TechCrunch

Why would Apple buy Lala?

For the technology.

Apparently, Apple didn’t have the streaming technology down.

It’s not the first time they’ve done it.

They purchased SoundJam MP and turned it into iTunes.

This is a move that many have been waiting for Apple to make, as consumers move from purchasing to streaming. Spotify the wonder streaming has just moved a step down below iTunes.

From Wired:

This Lala acquisition could also help iTunes increase its revenue-per-user. Steve Jobs admitted in 2007 that the average iTunes user had only bought an average of 22 songs. By contrast, Lala CEO Bill Nguyen told us in October that its paying customers spend an average of $67 on Lala music, which is available both as 10-cent streams and normally-priced downloads (buying a stream is a down payment on the download).

Lala sells batches of credits for songs, saving it money on transaction fees.

LaLa also has technology that copies users’ iTunes music collections into the cloud servers, so that users can play back the songs on internet-connected devices. This feature would ease an Apple transition from locally-stored to cloud-based music. Wired

Interesting.

I’ve read a couple of articles on this approach.

You use an algorithm to catch trends and supply content to ride the wave.

AOL’s not alone Demand Media is using a similar approach.

The point is to drive inefficiency and editorial costs out of creating news and entertainment, while simultaneously drawing in viewers and thus advertisers. AOL, which has been consistently losing users and revenue, is being spun off from Time Warner back into a standalone company in December. Earlier this month it announced it would lay off about 2,500 employees.

But that leaves AOL with a thriving business of online, niche media sites, including PoliticsDaily, Love.com and popular blogs like Engadget and Joystiq. AOL is trying to become an online content empire, with many sites being standalone brands that readers don’t associate at all with AOL.

With this new system, Armstrong is betting that the future of media, and thus AOL, involves turning editorial functions over to algorithms and writing assignments to freelancers willing to work for pennies a word, according to WSJ.

Wired.com

Google Analytics, the world’s most popular website statistical analysis system, could be illegal in Germany. Government officials responsible for national data protection are attempting to ban Analytics on the grounds that it breaches privacy laws.

Collating detailed web statistics used to be a time-consuming task. Site owners either resorted to rudimentary page counters or web server log analyzers such as AWstats or WebTrends. Although these provide valuable data, the information is generally better suited for systems administrators rather than Internet marketers.

Google acquired Analytics from Urchin Software in April 2005. Although it was originally a commercial package, Google re-branded the system and permitted unlimited free use from 2006. Rather than analyzing log files, Analytics uses a JavaScript snippet which is placed on every page of a website. The code collects visitor data and sends it to Google’s servers for processing.

The success of Google Analytics causes concern for German privacy protection officials. Conceivably, Google would be able to track an individual’s movements throughout the web and collate information from websites that hold personal data, such as banks and insurance companies. In theory, Google could create profiles that include information about a person’s interests, career, lifestyle, wealth, health, political and sexual preferences. If that individual has a Google account, the company could match a profile against a known user.

Read More on Sitepoint

Put one of Apple’s new 27-inch Core i7 iMacs on your desk, and you run the risk of alienating yourself from your friends, co-workers and loved ones.

Sure, the sheer speed of the thing is amazing — the new Core i7 processor is outrageously fast — but it’s the massive screen that will turn your brain into a gob of HD-saturated jelly. Seriously. The iMac’s screen is so freaking huge, so bright and so crisp, it will render you dumb with child-like glee. You’ll just want to sit there and watch movies all day and night.

Don’t get us wrong, the guts aren’t so bad, either. The top-of-the-line iMac is stocked with Intel’s 2.8-GHz Core i7 “Lynnfield” quad-core processor. It’s not only ridiculously fast to begin with, but it has the ability to dynamically overclock itself when it needs an extra boost. (Intel calls this Turbo Mode.)

Read full story on wired.

View on Amazon for under $1800 Apple iMac MB952LL/A 27-Inch Desktop