It’s getting close to a hundred degrees outside. Heat like that begets air conditioning, air conditioning use begets power shortages, power shortages beget…people stranded in airports and trapped in subway tunnels. Yes, it’s a good old fashioned NYC summer brownout (good thing the internet is, like, indestructable). Try to conserve energy while checking out these links:
Call it Yahoo!’s Yellow Fever Even the Panama Canal hit a few snags on its way to full operation, and Yahoo!’s Project Panama seems to be no different. The engine had hoped to finish overhauling their paid search algorithm sometime in Q3, but they’re now pushing the ETA back to sometime in Q4. The news comes the same day Yahoo!’s stock took a dip in after-hours trading, resulting from lower-than expected earnings per share – this despite a 26 percent rise in revenue from last year (via PaidContent).
But where are the cute, media-friendly buzz phrases? When we heard that experts of both sides of the net neutrality debate were having a forthright, reasonable discussion about the idea’s pros and cons…well, we knew there weren’t any politicians involved. Yesterday, Google’s Vint Cerf and Carnegie Mellon’s Dave Farber (Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy) sat down at a moderated event hosted by the Center for American Progress and agreed that “Bumper Sticker” ideas were harming folks’ understanding of a complex and important issue. eWeek’s coverage illuminates the gentlemen’s’ differing views.
Oh totally. Wal-Mart is the gnarliest When discount retail giant Wal-Mart heard that some teens were dismissing MySpace as cheesy and played, they apparently thought, “Whoa, that sounds just like us!” How else do you explain Wal-Mart’s stab at creating a social networking site? AdAge has the gory details about “The Hub,” which wants to allow teens to “express their individuality” by making it impossible to send each other messages, screening anything they try to upload, and telling mom and dad when they join up. Oh, and it calls its users “Hubsters” (get it?), that is, if it has any real users. Asked one flesh-and-blood 14-year-old quoted for the article, “Are these real kids?”
“Would it have killed you to use a hyphen?” Many forays into the online realm have unintended consequences, even something as simple as choosing a domain name for your website. Remember to put some thought into how your site’s name is going to look as an address in a browser window, when it doesn’t have any spaces (we’re looking at you, “PenIsland.com”). The ten worst are compiled at WeirdTechNewsHub (thanks, Digg).
