Firefighters are now cautiously optimistic that they have the upper hand on the wildfires in Southern California. Qualcomm Stadium is the San Diego Chargers home again - it is no longer a temporary home for evacuees. The L.A. Times has a fire damage database to help people find homes damaged or destroyed in the fires. There were over 2,000 homes destroyed because of the wildfires. SignonSanDiego.com says the death tolls from the wildfires is now 14. Even after these terrible fires Californians will have to keep their guard up because Santa Ana winds don’t peak until December. Here are some more California fire highlights from the blogosphere. FEMA faked a news conference about the wildfires with FEMA employees posing in journalists. They tried to claim it was because no journalists came to the conference but they only gave them 15 minutes warning that the news conference was going to happen. FEMA also gave journalists a phone number so they could call and ask questions but it was a listen-only line. They’ve been slamed for the fake press conference in blogs (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) as well as in the mainstream press. Zzzzzzzz: Vice President Dick Cheney took a snooze during a briefing on the fires. A Close Call. Part of the lawn at this house was burned but the house survived. The Firefighter blog has a post about a DC-10 Supertanker making a drop on the Arrowhead Fire. The post points to a video of the DC-10 Supertanker in action. NFL, Charges donations: “The National Football League is donating $250,000 to the Chargers Fire Relief Fund, and the Spanos family, owners of the San Diego Chargers, is donating $1 million.” Neatorama has a post about how some expensive homes have private firefighter protection. Some rare trees, butterflies and other wildlife may be snuffed out because of the fires. Green Sahm wants California homeowners to think about what they plant: “One of my hopes is that more homeowners will think about what they plant after this. In a place like this, drought resistant plants are a must. If it’s not too easily burned, so much the better. There are plenty of plants that do grow pretty well out here without constant watering. Some are quite pretty.” Twitter can be a useful tool. The Fast Company explains: “If you’ve ever been tempted to call Twitter useless, reconsider; the service is allowing thousands of Southern California residents to stay safe by receiving up-to-the-minute geographical information about the spreading fires.” Michael Roston at the Huffington Post writes that President Bush cut the fire preparedness budgets. “During Bush’s first year in office, the Forest Service’s State Fire Assistance program for wildland fire management was funded at approximately $56 million per year. But the President’s budget proposal for 2008 only requests $35 million from Congress, an 18% cut from what it spent in the current year, already well below the earlier levels.” 3,000 prison inmates helped battle the flames. They were paid $1 an hour. Some stunning photos from a Reuters photo blog in a post called Notes from a Wildfire. AOL Photo Talk also has some frightening images. The number of YouTube videos returned with a California wildfires search is nearly 4,000. This video shows the Santiago Canyon fire. A photograph of the wildfires from the International Space Station. (via The Marble). With fires still burning serious air quality concerns remain. San Diego has an air quality website than can be found here. AIRNow provides national maps. A more personal account of the bad air can be found here in a post by Queen of Spain - via Social Mom who has a post about the response to the fires. Bloggers are still calling Glenn Beck an idiot. A hippopotumus got loose and wound up in swimming pool that belongs to Steve Crosby, the San Diego Chargers special teams coach. Both the hippo and the coach were unharmed. Some resources for those who want to help: Califirehelp.com, CaliforniaWildfires.org and The San Diego Foundation. Hostess with the Mostess has a few more links in this post. Our past coverage can be found here and the California fire resources page is located here. Posted in 2007 California Wildfires Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Nr. 108: with special guest Dominik Eulberg - Dance Department - The Best Beats To Go!
The Best Beats To Go ! Nr. 33: with special guest Sasha - Dance Department - The best beats to go The best beats to go Nr. 102: with special guest Scumfrog -Dance Deparment - The Best Beats To Go […]

The Kremlin Wants to Control the Blogosphere
The Washington Post reports the Kremlin is seeking more control and influence on the Internets and in the blogosphere. The big downside of the Kremlin seeking to influence cyberspace is that they will pollute it with a one-sided pro-Kremlin point of view. In a lengthy article published online last fall, three Russian rights activists argued that a strident, vulgar and uniform pro-Kremlin ideology had so permeated blogs and chat rooms that it could only be the result of a coordinated campaign. Putin’s allies in the online world acknowledge that the Internet represents a challenge to the status quo in Russia, which has, since Soviet times, relied on state-controlled television to influence public opinion across the country’s 11 time zones. Kremlin allies are also buying up media website and blog portals. Allies of the Kremlin have also begun buying some of the companies that have helped make the Internet a bastion of free expression in Russia. Gazeta.ru, long the country’s most respected online newspaper, was sold in December to a metals magnate and Putin loyalist. And last October, Sup, which is owned by Alexander Mamut, a tycoon with ties to the Kremlin, bought the rights to develop the Russian-language segment of U.S.-based LiveJournal. The segment, with half a million users, is Russia’s most popular blog portal. “Mr. Rykov is pro-Kremlin. Mamut and Sup are pro-Kremlin. The social networks are all being bought by pro-Kremlin people,” Ruslan Paushu, 30, a popular blogger who works for Rykov, said in an interview. “Everything’s okay.” The Washington Post article also mentions the possibility that Russia is considering its own seperate Internet and that they are studying how China’s government censors ideas in cyberspace. Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, special adviser to the chairmen of the Internet Governance Forum, a group convened by the United Nations, said some Russian officials he has spoken to are considering a separate Internet, with Cyrillic domain names, and appear to be studying China’s Internet controls. It’s obviously fine to have government websites (like kremlin.ru) explaining the government’s positions but it is scary if the government is buying up web media properties and considering all kinds of nefarious methods in order to control cyberspace. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Blogging Halloween: The Aftermath
Halloween is officially over and the editors at our sister site ShoppingBlog.com have a Halloween Hangover. They carved the vomiting pumpkin pictured on the right yesterday. The pumpkin looks the way many people feel the day after Halloween. It’s sad that Halloween has passed already and now the holiday madness is going to start. What makes it even more depressing is that the writers’ stike is happening. This means bad things for tv shows, late night talk shows and movies. Hopefully, the strike will be short-lived. Here are a few final highlights from Halloween 2007. Make magazine is running a DIY Halloween Pool to find the best costume. CNET has a Halloween techie slideshow. Brandsizzle posts about an L.A. Times article that says more parents are giving healthy snacks instead of candy. Would kids really go door to door for healthy snacks? Bette Midler was in New York for her Hulaween benefit event. The event raised money for the New York Resoration Project (NYRP). usr/bin/mom refuses to let Thanksgiving be forgotten. Dick Cheney dressed up his dog as Darth Vader. CraftyPod is already starting to focus on Christmas: “These days, I’m always a little glad to have Halloween done with, so I can get on to the thing that really tickles me - the Christmas season.” There are only 53 shopping days - or decorating days - left until Christmas. San Francisco’s Castro district was relatively quiet. This Where the Wild Things Are costume is very clever. Leftover unwanted candy is something many are dealing with. Long, Slow, Beautiful Dance writes, “Everyone brings in their leftover candy to get rid of it-and it just sits there. Tempting everyone within sight.” Former Fat Guy suggests donating leftover candy to an outreach program in your city. You could also sell your candy to a Utah Dentist who is buying Halloween candy from kids. The pay is $1 per pound of candy. This guy went as a green roof. The Daily Intelligencer reports that Union Square was scary on Halloween but not in a fun way. Someone dressed up as the zombie kid from the popular “I Love Turtles” viral video. A tip from Candy Blog: “If you’re going to eat something, if you’re going to set aside your calories, please, for the love of all that’s good and tasty, eat something you like.” Paris Hilton appeared at yet another party - the Vegas Club LAX. This time she wore a skimpy military type of outfit. She gets paid lots for some of her partying. Britney Spears managed to find another unsexy outfit. Heidi Klum and Christina Aquilera had much better costumes. Links to more celebrity costumes can be found here. These news anchors were really scared when a group of zombies stormed in. Past Halloween coverage can be found here. Posted in Halloween Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Former CNETers Launch Political Base
TechCrunch reports that former CNET co-founder Shelby Bonnie and four other former CNETers (Mike Tatum, Ethan Lance, Dave Snider and Andy McCurdy) have launched a political website called Political Base. Political Base relies on a combination of blogs, wikis and database tools. Shelby Bonnie left the company he co-founded with Halsey Minor, CNET, just about one year ago. This morning he launches his next startup, PoliticalBase. The site, which focuses on local, state and national elections and other political matters, is timed perfectly to take advantage of the 2008 presidential elections and the estimated $4.5 billion that will be spent on advertising to promote candidates and issues. PoliticalBase is a structured Wiki that encourages research and debate. Users can edit most of the text but can’t change the underlying database structure. That allows the site to slice and dice data for comparison purposes (something that can’t be done with the free-for-all Wikipedia) but still gives the site’s community the ability to create and edit content. The site is broken down into interconnected categories, including money, people, issues, elections, etc. Clicking on, say Rudy Giuliani shows information on that presidential candidate, including the amount of money raised to date, his religion and party affiliation and biographical information. At the bottom of the page his position on key issues is also shown (for fun, register for the site and click that you do not support him - see how his picture changes). CrunchBase’s profile for Political Base notes that the website was launched “strategically before the 2008 elections to take advantage of the $4.5 billion election advertising market.” The Money Track feature on the Political Base shows political campaign contributions using data from the Federal Election Commission. The issues section lets you see where the candidates stand on the issues. You can even build your own customized grid of politicians and then match them up on specific issues. As of this writing they didn’t have any data about Keith Sprankle but he is a relatively unknown GOP candidate - although he does have a website and a Twitter. However, they do have a page on Steven Colbert who recently announced a plan to run as both a Republican and Democratic presidential candidate in South Carolina. Posted in Politics Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Own a Computer$ Need Extra $$$ .Price - 0.00
Earn what you are worth, without interruptingwhat you’re currently doing! You can […]

Friday is the Best Day to Read Blogs
We blogged recently about the Carnegie Mellon Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks study that found the 100 most informative blogs. Another interesting tidbit from this Carnegie Mellon study is that the researchers discovered that the very best day to read blogs - if efficiency is your goal - is Friday. Our framework also allows fractional selection of blogs, which means that instead of reading a large blog every day, we can read it, e.g., only one day per week. This also allows us to ask: what is the best day of the week to read blogs? In order to study whether fractional selection allows to achieve better benefit cost ratio, we split the blogs which had at least one post per day into 7 blogs, one for each day of the week. Fig. 7(a) shows, that by splitting big blogs, the population affected (PA) objective function increases for 12% over the setting where only whole blogs can be selected. Returning to the original question, we performed the following experiment: given a budget of 1000 posts, what is the best day of the week to read posts (optimizing PA)? We found that Friday is the best day to read blogs. The value of PA for Friday is 0.20, while it is 0.13 for the rest of the week. We consider this surprising, since the activity of the blogosphere (number of posts and links created) drops towards the end of the week, and especially over the weekend. You can read the entire paper in these two PDF files: here and here. The logic here might be that bloggers tend to blog less often on Fridays and so what they do end up posting might be more focused and more informative about what is going on in the blogosphere than what you see during the rest of week. That is providing they aren’t Friday Cat Blogging or blogging about their weekend plans. Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

INTERNET BASICS
Wed, 24 Oct 2007, 6:00PM - 8:00PM: Donnell Library Center, An introduction to the basic features of the Internet, such as using a Web browser, clicking on hyperlinks, using Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to access Web pages, and performi… Benefits to RSS Feeds […]

Slow Sales For Gawker Book
Mixed Media, a blog from Portfolio, reports that according to Nielsen BookScan data Gawker’s book The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media has only sold 242 copies since it went on sale earlier this month. Mixed Media says BookScan reports on about 75% of all book sales. Of course, the tracking service only accounts for about 75 percent of book sales, by its own admission, so you can add another 81 units to that total. Still, it’s probably somewhat fewer copies than Simon & Schuster’s Atria division was hoping to sell when it acquired the total in what I’m told was a $250,000 deal. Especially when you consider all the free promotion the book got on Gawker.com, to what was presumably its target audience. Books like Gawker’s book that are of interest only to those in the blogging and media industry probably only sell about 5,000 to 10,000 copies at best. It isn’t the kind of book that could ever sell 100,000 copies. Even so it is clearly underperforming for its niche. Maybe they will see a pickup in sales with this negative press. Posted in Blogging Industry News Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

Blogging Halloween Part II
Here are some more Halloween highlights from the blogosphere. This is the second part of our Halloween roundups - you can read Part I here. Happy Halloween! celebrity Costumes: Pleasant Morning Buzz has a roundup of this year’s hottest celebrity Halloween costumes. Pets Wearing Costumes: Most popular pet costumes | iReport pet costumes best of | Puplifedog | Croc eating a puppy | Princess Leia and Darth Vader | LOLCats | Good Housekeeping | Howloween Parade Eggs are for eating not for throwing. Some store owners are not selling eggs to minors until Halloween is over. Halloween Tax: Iowa slaps a tax on Pumpkins — unless you are going to eat them. More details here. Russia has banned Halloween - they think it is the “cult of death.” Halloween was also condemned by Mexico’s Catholic Church. Vampire electronics are sucking your energy. Some tips for stopping these vampires can be found here (via ecogeek) Here are some geek pumpkins. Still more geek pumpkins here. A lot of bloggers are linking to the dog in the iphone costume. Candy Blog says most people give out candy that they like: “The truth is that most people give out what they like at Halloween. So if you’re getting Mary Janes or Popcorn Balls, it’s probably because the giver likes them. This is pretty much true with ALL gifting, but especially with blind gifting. Consider that anyone who gives you something you don’t like is following the Golden Rule. They’re doing unto others as they’d like done to them. They’re giving you Smarties or Starlight Mints because they would want to get them. Smile and say thank you.” Moms are great. They can make just about any kind of costume. celebrity blogger Perez Hilton posted photos of people dressing up as him. San Francisco closed a popular area of the city to discourage a giant Halloween street party. Portable toilets were still ordered. Mashable has a list of twenty Halloween websites. The Scariest Costume at Google: ChannelWeb reports that Brad Fitzpatrick, who founded Livejournal before leaving for a job at Google - showed up at Google dressed as Facebook. You can see his Facebook costume here. Yesbutnobutyes has a list of Halloween logos. Another logo collection can be found at Smashing Magazine. Alt Search Engines has a list of ten Halloween search engines. Avoid the dancing skeleton game - it is malware. Play the silly Trick or Treat online game or one of several others found by Download Squad instead. Some creepy candy. One of them is called Lick Your Wounds - it’s candy made to look like scabs. (via Serious Eats) Etsy ran a costume contest which had some terrific entries. You can see the winners here. Some fake teeth called “Ugly Teeth” have been recalled. They were made in China and contain lead. Yvonne Strahovski appeared in a Slave Leai costume on the geeky spy show Chuck. The episode also featured a two-person Dune sandworm costume. President Bush joked that Dick Cheney was already wearing his Darth Vader costume. Halloween is one of the most popular words right now on Twitter. Posted in Halloween Permalink | Recent Headlines | WWFeeds.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2007 at 1:51 pm and is filed under Celebrity Information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.