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Twitter Ends List Service After Liberal Favoritism Exposed
Twitter will finally end their list service that blatantly favors liberal politicians while excluding conservative ones.
The list service in question provides new Twitter users with lists of users they might like to follow — like say…other liberals.
It should be very disturbing to all Americans that powerful companies like Google and now Twitter constantly show favoritism and shill for left-wingers.
Google is in bed with the Obama administration and now Twitter is trying to influence political races. It’s outrageous.
It’s inconceivable to me how a successful company based in California can honestly want liberal democrats elected to anything. It’s bizarre. California is in total collapse after decades of leftist economic and environmental policies. Taxes are driving business out of the state at record numbers.
But for some reason companies like Google, Twitter, Apple, etc. want more of the same. They want to give more of their profits to the federal government. They want more environmental regulations to squeeze their businesses. They want to lose more freedom.
I just don’t get it. Are they just ideological Kool-Aid drinkers or is it something else? What am I missing?
Video: New ‘Taser X3’ Can Take Down Three Targets Without Reloading
Notice the very petite girl they nailed with this thing in the video. If she can take it then people need to quit crying about taser use. It’s the most effective non-lethal device being used today.
Come to think of it, we should have used a taser for interrogations at Gitmo — that’s right, I said it.
(hat tip Breitbart TV)
Video: The Ultimate Vehicle For Liberals
Obama Forced To Give Up Blackberry When He Takes Office
It never occurred to me that Barack Obama would have to surrender his Blackberry and give up email when he takes office. Given the way his campaign was run and the extent to which he himself uses technology day to day, I assumed that would continue in the White House. Surprisingly, nothing could be further from the truth.
American presidents are simply not allowed to use email or carry electronic devices such as cell phones or Blackberrys. The security risk is just too great. With today’s technology there’s just no way to be sure a president’s email is 100% secure. One of the things President Bush is looking forward to is sending emails again once he leaves office — as he hasn’t sent one in 8 years.
Even though President Obama isn’t gonna be firing off emails or blogging on MySpace, he will to his credit be the first President to use a laptop in the oval office.
As a certified Blackberry addict and Internet junkie myself, I cannot imagine being unplugged for years at a time.
-Chris Jones
Video: AT&T’s Super DVR Records 4 Shows At Once
Karl Rove Launches Website
Karl Rove has finally launched a website. You can find his columns, Fox News appearances, election coverage, and even book him for an appearance.
Ex-Google Engineers Launch New Search Engine
Ann Patterson was an engineer at Google until she left the company in 2006. Now she’s back and planning to take over the search engine industry. Patterson believes she and her team have created a search engine that not only indexes more sites than Google, but searches that index more efficiently.
The new search engine is called ‘Cuil‘ and it’s pronounced ‘cool.’ The company is backed by a $33 million dollar venture capital investment and officially came online today.
Video: Death Row Inmates Blogging From Behind Bars
Video: The F-22 Raptor Can Do Amazing Things
Immunotherapy Cures Skin Cancer Patient
A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed.
Google Co-Founder Planning Space Trip
Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, is planning a trip to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket in 2011. A company called “Space Adventures” takes wealthy explorers to the ISS, and Brin invested $5 million dollars in the company which will serve as his deposit for the planned trip.
Death By Blogging?
From The NYT:
SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves — and are being well-compensated for it.
“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”
“This is not sustainable,” he said.
It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands.
The emergence of this class of information worker has paralleled the development of the online economy. Publishing has expanded to the Internet, and advertising has followed.
Even at established companies, the Internet has changed the nature of work, allowing people to set up virtual offices and work from anywhere at any time. That flexibility has a downside, in that workers are always a click away from the burdens of the office. For obsessive information workers, that can mean never leaving the house.
Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.
There are growing legions of online chroniclers, reporting on and reflecting about sports, politics, business, celebrities and every other conceivable niche. Some write for fun, but thousands write for Web publishers — as employees or as contractors — or have started their own online media outlets with profit in mind.
One of the most competitive categories is blogs about technology developments and news. They are in a vicious 24-hour competition to break company news, reveal new products and expose corporate gaffes.
To the victor go the ego points, and, potentially, the advertising. Bloggers for such sites are often paid for each post, though some are paid based on how many people read their material. They build that audience through scoops or volume or both.
Some sites, like those owned by Gawker Media, give bloggers retainers and then bonuses for hitting benchmarks, like if the pages they write are viewed 100,000 times a month. Then the goal is raised, like a sales commission: write more, earn more.
Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures, and some entrepreneurs in the field have built mini-empires on the Web that are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. Others who are trying to turn blogging into a career say they can end up with just $1,000 a month.
Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.
“There’s no time ever — including when you’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,” Mr. Arrington said.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we said no blogger or journalist could write a story between 8 p.m. Pacific time and dawn? Then we could all take a break,” he added. “But that’s never going to happen.”
All that competition puts a premium on staying awake. Matt Buchanan, 22, is the right man for the job. He works for clicks for Gizmodo, a popular Gawker Media site that publishes news about gadgets. Mr. Buchanan lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn, where his bedroom doubles as his office.
He says he sleeps about five hours a night and often does not have time to eat proper meals. But he does stay fueled — by regularly consuming a protein supplement mixed into coffee.
But make no mistake: Mr. Buchanan, a recent graduate of New York University, loves his job. He said he gets paid to write (he will not say how much) while interacting with readers in a global conversation about the latest and greatest products.
“The fact I have a few thousand people a day reading what I write — that’s kind of cool,” he said. And, yes, it is exhausting. Sometimes, he said, “I just want to lie down.”
Sometimes he does rest, inadvertently, falling asleep at the computer.
“If I don’t hear from him, I’ll think: Matt’s passed out again,” said Brian Lam, the editor of Gizmodo. “It’s happened four or five times.”
Mr. Lam, who as a manager has a substantially larger income, works even harder. He is known to pull all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco — hours spent trying to keep his site organized and competitive. He said he was well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.
“I’ve got a background getting punched in the face,” he said. “That’s why I’m good at this job.”
Mr. Lam said he has worried his blogging staff might be burning out, and he urges them to take breaks, even vacations. But he said they face tremendous pressure — external, internal and financial. He said the evolution of the “pay-per-click” economy has put the emphasis on reader traffic and financial return, not journalism.
In the case of Mr. Shaw, it is not clear what role stress played in his death. Ellen Green, who had been dating him for 13 months, said the pressure, though self-imposed, was severe. She said she and Mr. Shaw had been talking a lot about how he could create a healthier lifestyle, particularly after the death of his friend, Mr. Orchant.
“The blogger community is looking at this and saying: ‘Oh no, it happened so fast to two really vital people in the field,’ ” she said. They are wondering, “What does that have to do with me?”
For his part, Mr. Shaw did not die at his desk. He died in a hotel in San Jose, Calif., where he had flown to cover a technology conference. He had written a last e-mail dispatch to his editor at ZDNet: “Have come down with something. Resting now posts to resume later today or tomorrow.”
By Matt Richtel
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