WordPress is a powerful content management system, and its popularity as a portfolio solution is enticing to many. There are a lot of themes out there that claim to do the job, but if you're as picky as me you'll find some pretty annoying flaws in many of them.

In my search for the best of the bunch, I installed about 30 offerings (out of the hundreds I looked at) and after trying them out and changing my mind a couple of times I finally settled down with a theme. This took me months, so I'm going to save you the bother and present the five free Wordpress portfolio themes that made my own particular shortlist.

SimpleFolio The Best All-Rounder

Despite being a tricky free WordPress theme to set-up, SimpleFolio by Omar Corrales is worth the hassle. For your troubles you'll get a clean and easy-to-navigate theme with a separate portfolio section (with the option to exclude portfolio posts from your blog) and a home screen to die for.

The home screen includes a JavaScript front-page slider to exhibit portfolio entries, which does a great job of making your work look awesome with its smooth transitions. There are a further three widgetized areas on the home page, so adding a contact form or Twitter plug-in is as easy as pie.

If you like the look of this theme and fancy giving it a go, then you're going to need a little help. There's a fantastic little guide over at WordPress Handyman which guides you through the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining your new portfolio. As always with WordPress, you can edit the style.css file to suit your personal tastes.

Vikiworks Infinity For Social Media Types

For an aesthetically pleasing, majorly customizable portfolio that's plugged in to Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, look no further than Infinity by Vikiworks. The free WordPress theme follows a three-fixed column style, and whilst not being widget ready could probably be modified with some serious Notepad'ing.

There are two PSD files to download as well as the theme, which makes customization in Photoshop that little bit easier. Blog posts themselves are presented in two thumbnail cover-style columns to the left of the page, so if you're not bothered about separating your work and your blog then this one's for you.

For the more courageous there's a sister theme called Mashup based on Infinity, only with widgets and a style switcher. The developer has appealed for help in completing it, and needs guinea pigs willing to give it a go. If you're not averse to beta testing, you can download Mashup here.

FolioGrid For Speed-Freaks, Designers, Photographers & Artists

This sharp looking offering from FrogsThemes has a little something for everyone. Utilising the tried-and-tested grid layout, the theme comes in a variety of colours and is easily altered with some handy CSS. All the styling is done through the theme's stylesheet, meaning you really can open up and customize this one.

The menu lives at the top of the page, and is always accessible from anywhere on the site, making it a cinch to navigate. There's some lovely use of jQuery for slick transitions, and the theme is widget-ready. For a fast and lightweight WordPress portfolio, FolioGrid does the job.

Fullscreen For Style-Conscious Photographers & Videographers

If photos are the order of the day then you may want to pay close attention. Fullscreen is a portfolio package developed by Graph Paper Press that delivers nothing but a menu and blog posts (represented by just images). It all makes for a very sexy looking clean interface, with some fancy JavaScript image rollover effects for added garnish.

One thing to look out for is some issues with the menu not displaying correctly in older versions of Internet Explorer, though some of you won't really care (and those that do can customize, of course).

Images can be implemented into posts using the WordPress media gallery, which makes for easy posting. If you want your photo or video work to be the main focus of your site, then this theme will honour your wishes.

Contrast The Black Sheep

SmashingMagazine once hosted a typographic layout competition for WordPress and Tumblr themes, and Paul Linder's Contrast didn't win. But that doesn't matter, because it's awesome all the same.

Using nothing but XHTML and CSS, it's lightning quick and beautiful to look at. Presenting you with a straight-up black and white home screen, Contrast is designed to be left as a portfolio rather than a blog as well.

As the focus is on text, many writers, copy-editors or web designers may find this appealing, though the minimalist design could suit anyone. It's bold, unique and quick.

Have you used any of these free WordPress themes? Got another favourite we've not featured here? Spread the word in the comments! Are you a photographer? Check out our very own photography PDF manual by Bakari The Essential Guide To Digital Photography.

• How To Use A Self-Hosted WordPress Blog For Project Management (23 comments)
• Create A Professional Photography Portfolio Online In 5 Minutes With Pullfolio (7 comments)
• 3 Reasons To Keep Twenty-Ten Theme On Your New Wordpress Blog (4 comments)
• [Google Picasa 101] Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (9 comments)
• [Google Picasa 101] Master The Special Effects In Picasa (18 comments)
• [Google Picasa 101] How To Edit Your Photos (17 comments)
• WordTwit Slick Wordpress Plugin For Twitter Integration (4 comments)
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Many artists have used pencils to create beautiful pieces of work but only one creates stunning masterpieces on the tip of one. Microscopic artist Dalton Ghetti spends up to two-and-a half years painstakingly crafting each handmade piece on the graphite of a pencil.

The New York Times reports

Mr. Ghetti, who owns about as many possessions as a monk, is aware how unusual his craft is. He started carving tree bark when he was a child and experimented with everything from soap to chalk before settling on graphite. It's second nature now, and for 90 percent of his work, all he needs is a sewing needle, a razor blade and a carpenter's or No. 2 pencil.

The pencil tip is great; it's like a pure, very homogenous material,' he said. It cuts in the same direction, not like wood, which has a grain. But when I tell people how long it takes, that's when they don't believe it. That's what amazes people more, the patience. Because everything nowadays has to be fast, fast, fast.'

It is really remarkable niche in the art world. There have been artists who use pencils as part of their craft, but none use the smallest and most fragile part: the pencil lead.

via & via

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The site has grown at an incredible rate since its inception, and it's always struggled to keep up (technically speaking) with user adoption. Ever since its userbase spread beyond the tech elite to more mainstream social media users, the site has been subject to a seemingly unending string of growing pains.

In response to a wave of failures last month during the World Cup, Twitter engineer Jean-Paul Cozzatti posted that the company's network was improperly configured, leading to downtime and trouble with features.

Cozzatti claimed that the company had doubled the capacity of its internal network, improved its monitoring and rebalanced its traffic to prevent future downtime.

For much of 2009, Twitter's biggest challenge was coping with our unprecedented growth (a challenge we happily still face), he wrote. But as this week's issues show, there is always room for improvement.

Apparently, the improvements made last month were not enough to keep up with user growth and their demands on the service.

Cozzatti posted again today to address Twitter's issues Monday, comparing the engineering team's work on scaling the app to riding a rocket. To give you an idea of how fast that rocket is soaring through the social media universe, we reported in April that the service had 105 million users. In his post today, Cozzatti said Twitter now has 124 million registered users.

Scalability and uptime are the team's top priority; in fact, Cozzatti noted, other projects are being put to the side until these problems can be thoroughly solved. He stated that Twitter's engineers have made more than 50 performance and optimization tweaks since the site's World Cup woes, including doubling throughput to the database that stores tweets, improving how the app uses memcache and improving page caching of the front and profile pages, which helps to reduce page load time.

Nevertheless, There are still times when we run into problems unrelated to Twitter's capacity, Cozzatti admitted.

Monday's issues serve as a perfect example. During the database malfunction and restart which covered a 12-hour period users were unable to login, sign upor update their profile information and design. In the end, wrote Cozzatti, this affected most of the Twitter ecosystem: our mobile, desktop, and web-based clients, the Twitter support and help system, and Twitter.com.

While Twitter is getting its own data center this fall and is actively recruiting more engineering talent, the company clearly needs to implement the long-term solutions we're reading about. To have the cultural cachet of a web service such as Google search, Gmail, Facebook or any of the apps we rely on for day-to-day work and life and we have the distinct impression that Twitter does, indeed, hope to be part of that cadre it must first and most importantly achieve an acceptable uptime ratio. All the partnerships, revenue and media buzz in the world can fall a bit flat when the app itself doesn't work.

That being said, we're certain Twitter can and will make the needed improvements for scalability, and growing pains are good pains to have.

Are you confident that Twitter can become reliable and stable in the near future? Or do you foresee more significant downtime from this service? What will it take for Twitter to grow as quickly as its users require?

More About: developers, down, downtime, engineering, scalability, twitter

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Just because being the most corrupt organization in the world was not enough, the SEC decided, courtesy of Donk (aka Frankendodd), that it is beyond accountability to anyone, even the constitution, after it was recently made public that the world's most incompetent and bribed regulators will continue watching kiddie porn, instead of regulatoring, only do so in complete opacity from now on, as in the future the SEC would be exempt from FOIA responses. And with retail investors saying "no more" to trading stocks in a rigged casino that shares the same level of integrity as its regulator, and is programmed to generate profits for the house and the computers on 99.9% of trades (except of course for those newsletter and subscription peddlers who catch every single inflection point ever, and can predict what the market will do not only tomorrow but a week, a month and a year from now) the market will soon be a ghost town. Recent attempts by Senator Kaufman to bring some honesty to stocks have so far been met with failure as the Sisyphean task is far too great for any one individual. Which is why we are glad to learn that Ron Paul has joined those few who still hold the long-forgotten dream that the market should be fair and impartial for all (and yes, that means eliminating discount window access for the chosen few Bank Holding Company hedge funds out there) and has introduced the SEC Transparency Act of 2010 (HR 5970), a bill designed to force greater transparency in the Securities and Exchange Commission. Little by little, every single "intervention" by the world's two most corrupt politicians is being overturned: first the rating agency accountability provision which nearly destroyed the shadow market with a complete lockup of all new ABS issuance, and now the SEC's exclusion from that simple concept known as "checks and balances." Soon FinReg will finally be exposed for the fraud it has been since its inception - the much touted Obama financial regulatory reform is nothing but a scam designed to allow Wall Street to steel what middle class wealth remains faster, bolder and in ever greater amounts, as the point where the system breaks is now months away, and the Wall Street-DC joint venture is all too aware. As a result all must be done to allow theft to be bigger than ever, all the while the "regulator" is no longer held responsible for looking the other way.

From Ron Paul:

Congressman Ron Paul yesterday introduced the SEC Transparency Act of 2010 (HR 5970), a bill designed to force greater transparency in the Securities and Exchange Commission. The bill is designed to repeal the amendments made by section 929I of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act relating to the confidentiality of materials submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Recent news reports have publicized the little-noticed provision in the recently-passed financial reform package that the Securities and Exchange Commission has used to deny requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act. Paul's bill would repeal the provision in the newly-passed legislation the SEC has used to deny FOIA requests.

It is unfortunate, yet not unexpected, that legislation touted as fixing problems with the banking system actually makes them worse and provides more cover and power for organizations that failed us like the SEC and the Fed, Paul said in introducing the bill. I expect in the coming weeks and months that many more harmful provisions like this will come to light and it will take quite a bit of work to undo the damage from this massive and misguided legislation.

What is unclear is whether the Ron Paul law prohibts SEC staffers to spend 40 hours per week to browse porn on the taxpayer's dime, while sending out their resumes to assorted HFT outfits, where they will participate in the same bid stuffing crime first hand, instead of just looking away from it when the latest bribery check clears.

By now, many of us have seen the video of YouTube user Hungrybear9562 (a.k.a Paul Vasquez) freaking out over a super pretty rainbow there are been remixes, interviews with Bear and even an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live (Kimmel helped Vasquez rocket to stardom after tweeting a link to the vid at the beginning of July). Yup. This video certainly was meme-tastic, and now it has a country rock cover befitting the soundtrack of some awesome '70s movie about love and loss, like Harold and Maude.

This isn't the first time Fallon has given a viral vid the Young treatment he covered Pants on the Ground (remember that classic jam?) back in January. And now, for your Fridaze listening pleasure, here's both of those jams. Fallon should seriously cut an album his comedic skills are questionable, but I would totally listen to a disc of viral covers if I had a truck and nothing but the open road before me.

Double Rainbow

Pants on the Ground

More About: double-rainbow, humor, jimmy fallon, pop culture, television, viral video, youtube

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Y Combinator put on a tour de force Thursday. After five impressive years' worth of molding fresh batches of startups, it packed 150-odd people with money into a room and schooled them in the art of giving its companies funding. The incubator's second Angelconf, held at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. today, packed the room with people with an interest in breaking into the frothy angel investing space a mix of people from recently successful tech startups as well as those from outside the industry.

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham

In the Y Combinator world, as formulated by co-founder Paul Graham, the young, visionary, technical startup founder is king. And after YC graduates' oversubscribed funding rounds, promising products, and increasingly frequent acquisitions by Google and Facebook, Silicon Valley seems eager to remake itself in Y Combinator's image.

Archangel Ron Conway, who said he's put money into 500 companies over the last 12 years, kicked off the day with an optimistic and generous recruiting speech: He said he believes every entrepreneur who has the guts to start a company should get funding, and added I believe the more angels we have in Silicon Valley the better.

Conway, along with well-known angels such as Ariel Poler, Mitch Kapor and Naval Ravikant, spoke of the joy of enabling smart and passionate founders to build great things. You listen to those people tell you what it's going to be like in the future, said Conway, speaking of early meetings with the founders of Google, Facebook and Twitter. I'm completely addicted to it.

Be All You Can Be

The angels' testimonials depicted a world of investing that anyone could break into with the right mix of smarts, humility and luck. Five years ago, I was a washed up enterprise software guy from Austin, Texas, said Mike Maples of Floodgate, now one of the most active and influential superangels. After he moved to Silicon Valley and spent 90 days sharing meals with the smartest people he could get meetings with, Maples landed his first investment in Odeo, the company that eventually gave birth to Twitter. And it all flowed from there.

Even Greg McAdoo, of the legendary VC firm Sequoia Capital (which is closely affiliated with Y Combinator) fluffed the egos of would-be angels, saying two-thirds of his firm's early stage investments include angels. He encouraged angel investors to contact him, take him out for coffee, and talk about the industry or potential deals early on in the process. (While McAdoo said he would pick up the tab for this hypothetical coffee date, he wasn't quite so generous as to give out his email address, instead inviting those present to get introduced to him by a Sequoia portfolio company founder.)

Engineering a New Kind of Funding

Graham took the session in a practical direction, proposing that the seed funding deal of the future would take on a new structure to better suit startup founders. The way of the future, Graham said of funding rounds, is no fixed amount, no fixed closing date, and no lead. He said the best Y Combinator companies are already taking funding on a rolling basis, because it requires less reliance on a lead investor, takes less time out of product development, and gives investors less room to drag things along or collude.

The meta-trend is founders are going to be more powerful than investors, said Graham. If you want to know what the future of investing is going to be like, think what would the founders want it to be like.

Startup lawyer John Bautista, a partner at Orrick who works on many Y Combinator deals, attested that he's already seeing many startups closing rolling funding rounds, and that these convertible debt deals are structured favorably to angels, giving them the right to earn a return on their shares if the company is sold or update their terms if more money is raised later.

Are Talent Acquisitions Evil?

Thankfully, Y Combinator is not a cult, and it brought in Michael Arrington of TechCrunch as a counterpoint early in its program to rant about dipsh*t Y Combinator companies that sell out early, denying the world and investors the chance to be true game-changers. For good measure, he called out superangels for being complacent with their small successes and making companies like Facebook stronger through talent acquisitions.

But Arrington left shortly after his talk, giving 10 more angel investing believers such as Maples and Aydin Senkut the chance to convert the wannabe angels gathered. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail who himself was brought to Facebook with its talent acquisition of his company FriendFeed, said in response to Arrington's critique, Talent acquisitions are very controversial, but all of [the ones I've invested in] got a 2, 3 4 or even 5x return. I can live with that. Besides, acquisitions of young companies tend to be better for everyone involved, as compared to later-stage deals, said Geoff Ralston, who recently sold Lala to Apple. Integrations of billion-dollar companies almost never work, he said.

Loopt CEO Sam Altman, speaking on behalf of his Y Combinator peers, got the last word. He warned the angels-in-training: It's important that you pick the winners, but it's absolutely necessary that the winners pick you.

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham today offered an overview of how he has seen the angel and startup world evolve in the last year. Among other trends, he argued that the traditionally structured venture round is becoming irrelevant.

Speaking at AngelConf, the angel investing event hosted at Y Combinator's office in Mountain View, Calif., Graham compared the traditional venture model to the classic children's book Are You My Mother? Startup entrepreneurs raising funding are like baby birds, asking every venture capitalist, Are you my lead investor?

Now, however, more venture rounds aren't really being led by a single investor, and they don't have an official close date or amount, Graham said. There may be an official lead investor, but they're the lead in name only, and don't dominate the process like they used to. This benefits the startups because the lead investor has less power to screw them over. Even if well-intentioned the startup isn't held back by if the lead isn't moving fast enough to raise money. And rather than distracting itself with intense fundraising, a startup can keep raising money in the background as needed.

Graham said this is part of a larger trend where founders have more power than investors, a trend that incubator Y Combinator has been based on since the beginning. Entrepreneurs who have had difficult dealings with VCs may be skeptical that this power shift is really occurring, and even Graham acknowledged that the fundraising model the described isn't happening for every startup yet. But that's how the best ones are raising money.

If the best startups are doing this, what do you care what the other ones are doing? he said.

Companies: Y Combinator

People: Paul Graham

WordPress is a powerful content management system, and its popularity as a portfolio solution is enticing to many. There are a lot of themes out there that claim to do the job, but if you're as picky as me you'll find some pretty annoying flaws in many of them.

In my search for the best of the bunch, I installed about 30 offerings (out of the hundreds I looked at) and after trying them out and changing my mind a couple of times I finally settled down with a theme. This took me months, so I'm going to save you the bother and present the five free WordPress themes that made my own particular shortlist.

SimpleFolio The Best All-Rounder

Despite being a tricky free WordPress theme to set-up, SimpleFolio by Omar Corrales is worth the hassle. For your troubles you'll get a clean and easy-to-navigate theme with a separate portfolio section (with the option to exclude portfolio posts from your blog) and a home screen to die for.

The home screen includes a JavaScript front-page slider to exhibit portfolio entries, which does a great job of making your work look awesome with its smooth transitions. There are a further three widgetized areas on the home page, so adding a contact form or Twitter plug-in is as easy as pie.

If you like the look of this theme and fancy giving it a go, then you're going to need a little help. There's a fantastic little guide over at WordPress Handyman which guides you through the ins and outs of setting up and maintaining your new portfolio. As always with WordPress, you can edit the style.css file to suit your personal tastes.

Vikiworks Infinity For Social Media Types

For an aesthetically pleasing, majorly customizable portfolio that's plugged in to Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, look no further than Infinity by Vikiworks. The free WordPress theme follows a three-fixed column style, and whilst not being widget ready could probably be modified with some serious Notepad'ing.

There are two PSD files to download as well as the theme, which makes customization in Photoshop that little bit easier. Blog posts themselves are presented in two thumbnail cover-style columns to the left of the page, so if you're not bothered about separating your work and your blog then this one's for you.

For the more courageous there's a sister theme called Mashup based on Infinity, only with widgets and a style switcher. The developer has appealed for help in completing it, and needs guinea pigs willing to give it a go. If you're not averse to beta testing, you can download Mashup here.

FolioGrid For Speed-Freaks, Designers, Photographers & Artists

This sharp looking offering from FrogsThemes has a little something for everyone. Utilising the tried-and-tested grid layout, the theme comes in a variety of colours and is easily altered with some handy CSS. All the styling is done through the theme's stylesheet, meaning you really can open up and customize this one.

The menu lives at the top of the page, and is always accessible from anywhere on the site, making it a cinch to navigate. There's some lovely use of jQuery for slick transitions, and the theme is widget-ready. For a fast and lightweight WordPress portfolio, FolioGrid does the job.

Fullscreen For Style-Conscious Photographers & Videographers

If photos are the order of the day then you may want to pay close attention. Fullscreen is a portfolio package developed by Graph Paper Press that delivers nothing but a menu and blog posts (represented by just images). It all makes for a very sexy looking clean interface, with some fancy JavaScript image rollover effects for added garnish.

One thing to look out for is some issues with the menu not displaying correctly in older versions of Internet Explorer, though some of you won't really care (and those that do can customize, of course).

Images can be implemented into posts using the WordPress media gallery, which makes for easy posting. If you want your photo or video work to be the main focus of your site, then this theme will honour your wishes.

Contrast The Black Sheep

SmashingMagazine once hosted a typographic layout competition for WordPress and Tumblr themes, and Paul Linder's Contrast didn't win. But that doesn't matter, because it's awesome all the same.

Using nothing but XHTML and CSS, it's lightning quick and beautiful to look at. Presenting you with a straight-up black and white home screen, Contrast is designed to be left as a portfolio rather than a blog as well.

As the focus is on text, many writers, copy-editors or web designers may find this appealing, though the minimalist design could suit anyone. It's bold, unique and quick.

Have you used any of these free WordPress themes? Got another favourite we've not featured here? Spread the word in the comments! Are you a photographer? Check out our very own photography PDF manual by Bakari The Essential Guide To Digital Photography.

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On this day back in 1953, our favorite singer/bassist - Gary Lee Weinrib (aka Geddy Lee) - was born in Willowdale, Toronto. That makes Geddy 57 years young today! Happy birthday Geddy! May you have many more. Today is also the 36th anniversary of Neil Peart joining Rush! Also, 36 years ago tomorrow Rush bought equipment for their first tour at Long and McQuade Music in Toronto, including Geddy's black Rickenbacker, Alex's Gibson Les Paul Deluxe and Neil's Slingerland kit.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims Paul the octopus, who correctly guessed the outcomes of eight matches of the World Cup, is a sign of decay of Western culture.

"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.

That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.

Sponsor

"I Googled It"

During the study, one of the researchers asked a study participant, "What is this website?" The student answered, "Oh, I don't know. The first thing that came up."

That exchange sums up the overall results from this study: many students trusted in rankings above all else. In fact, a quarter of the students, when assign information-seeking tasks, said they chose a website because - and only because - it was the first search result.

Only 10% of the students made mention of the site's author or that author's credentials while completing tasks. However, in reviewing the screen-capture footage of those respondents, the researchers found that even in this supposedly savvy minority, none actually followed through to verify the identification or qualifications of the site's authors.

Google was not the only search engine used in the study, but it was one in which the students put a lot of trust. The students felt emotionally tied to the service in some cases, noting how much they loved it and depended on it. (Those who used Yahoo! said they merely "liked" it.)

Regardless the choice of search engine, though, the first step in information-seeking was always the use of such a service, which was typically referred to as a verb. And yes, in addition to "google it," some even said they would "yahoo it."

Wikipedia Not Trusted as Much

Another interesting finding from the study involved the use of Wikipedia. Perhaps because of teachers' insistence over the years that the user-generated encyclopedia is not a credible source of information, only a third of the students used Wikipedia to search for answers when given particular tasks. This is a drop from earlier studies (like Raine & Tancer, 2007) which showed Wikipedia use at 46% among students.

Other popular trusted sources included SparkNotes (a study guide site), WedMD, Planned Parenthood, CNN, BBC, Microsoft (specifically Encarta and Office-related resources) and those sites with a .gov or .edu extension. Some students even thought that .org domain name meant a site was inherently trustworthy - they weren't aware that the .org extension can be freely registered just like .com and is not for nonprofit use only, as may have originally been intended.

Students Need Media Literacy Education

While the size of the study was only 102 students, the demographics of the group were both ethnically and racially diverse, reaching a representative sample of first-year college students at the University of Chicago.

In summary, the findings showed that students are not always turning to the most relevant clues to determine the credibility of online content, said the researchers Eszter Hargittai, Lindsay Fullerton, Ericka Menchen-Trevino and Kristen Yates Thomas. Further initiatives that help educate people in this domain are needed, they claim.

Image credit in original article: flickr user Paulo Fehlauer

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seven security experts have been entrusted with the key to reboot the internet in case of a global catastrophe.

The security experts have been given a key that can help them rebuild the DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) system of trust for the internet if a catastrophe takes it down. The experts would have to physically carry the root key to a secret data center in the U.S. in order to reboot the internet. They essentially carry the ability to recreate the internet's Yellow Pages database of web addresses.

The experts include Paul Kane, head of CommunityDNS; Norm Ritchie of Canada, Jiankang Yao from China; Moussa Guebre of Burkina Faso; Bevil Wooding from Trinidad and Tobago; Ondrej Sury of the Czech Republic; and Dan Kaminsky, chief scientist at Recursion Ventures in the US. They have been dubbed the Seven Horsemen of the Web Apocalypse or the Fellowship of the Ring.

Kaminsky became famous in 2008 for pointing out a major security flaw in the Domain Name System, the protocol used to route traffic to the correct addresses across the internet. DNS had vulnerabilities that would allow hackers to hijack web traffic and redirect it to malware sites. The entire security industry got together to patch the flaw in DNS, before Kaminsky made the flaw public. But it was a temporary bandage, while DNSSEC was closer to the real solution.

DNSSEC is 15 years old but has had trouble getting adopted. ICANN, the internet's governing body, threw its weight behind DNS earlier this year and now the world's server operators are expected to migrate to the more secure protocol over time. In the meantime, if something catastrophic happens, these seven researchers hold the key. More trusted individuals will be given the key in the future.

We're in the midst of a security revolution that started 18 months ago, said Kaminsky, speaking on a panel at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. The amount of resources necessary to get DNSSEC operational are enormous. It's only going to get better.

Rod Beckstrom, chief executive ICANN, said on the same panel that DNSSEC represents the kind of fundamental new technology that will help make the internet more trustworthy.

Within six months to a year, more corporations and governments will implement DNSSEC and thereby make the internet much more trustworthy.

It's becoming clear that Google is getting ready to launch a social networking platform to challenge Facebook. Most recently, The Wall Street Journal reported last night that the big social gaming companies that dominate Facebook are in talks with Google to launch on its platform, too.

Can Google get social? For many years the tech community has said Google just doesn't get it and doesn't stand a chance moving beyond search and into social technology. Too many failed attempts have left people feeling cynical. This latest effort might be different, though. We asked five of the smartest people we know in social technology if they thought Google could pose a viable challenge to Facebook.

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It's a Stretch...

Scott Beale, founder of Laughing Squid and long-time geek gadfly

"It seems to me they are very different systems: Google open vs. Facebook closed. Or is the thought that Facebook will be eventually as open as Google? Posting photos to Facebook is like sending them down a black hole. It would take a major shift for that [Google effectively challenging Facebook] to happen. Google is a utility: email, search, video, etc."

Above: Beale and Thurston, photo from Laughing Squid

Buzz is Closer Than You Might Think

Iain Dodsworth, founder of desktop social stream reader Tweetdeck

"I think Google can and will effectively challenge Facebook. Perhaps in part around Buzz - a product which is far from on its last legs and has great potential with a few tweaks -probably around the positioning of the service rather than the functionality."

Neither Company Has the Right Culture for Social Technology

Kaliya Hamlin, co-founder, Internet Identity Workshop

"A ceratin kind of social 'way' of being inside the company is informing what gets built and that healthy social systems are not driven by 'fight.' It works for now, but I don't think it is a viable model for choosing how to design 'social software' in the long run.
That's not just at Facebook, either though. The culture of agression is pervasive in Silicon Valley, including at Google."

Right: Hamlin, by Doc Searls

Gaming May Be the Wrong Approach

Ben Metcalfe, leading product design consultant and iconoclast

"Looking at how many of these companies make money, I also think it will be a bumpy ride for Google's 'don't be evil' mantra. ?Google are the masters of context-advertising around text and now video, but in games there is no context - which is why there is still crappy subscription and lead-gen monetization going on by many companies in this space. I don't know whether Google has the authority in that space nor whether it is in line with Google's wider values. "

Google Won't Kill Facebook, but Something Will, Someday

Baratunde Thurston, Web Editor at The Onion and international smart guy

"I put the odds of Google overtaking Facebook at 30 percent. However, I put the odds of Facebook eventually going the way of Friendster, Myspace and Pointcast Networks at 100 percent. No one stays on top forever. No one."

It's becoming clear that Google is getting ready to launch a social networking platform to challenge Facebook. Most recently, the Wall St. Journal reported last night that the big social gaming companies that dominate Facebook are in talks with Google to launch on its platform, too.

Can Google get social? For many years the tech community has said Google just doesn't get it and doesn't stand a chance moving beyond search and into social technology. Too many failed attempts have left people feeling cynical. This latest effort might be different, though. We asked 5 of the smartest people we know in social technology if they thought Google could pose a viable challenge to Facebook.

Sponsor

It's a Stretch...

Scott Beale, founder of Laughing Squid and long-time geek gadfly

"It seems to me they are very different systems: Google open vs. Facebook closed. Or is the thought that Facebook will be eventually as open as Google? Posting photos to Facebook is like sending them down a black hole. It would take a major shift for that [Google effectively challenging Facebook] to happen. Google is a utility: email, search, video, etc."

Above: Beale and Thurston, photo from Laughing Squid

Buzz is Closer Than You Might Think

Iain Dodsworth, founder of desktop social stream reader Tweetdeck

"I think Google can and will effectively challenge Facebook. Perhaps in part around Buzz - a product which is far from on its last legs and has great potential with a few tweaks -probably around the positioning of the service rather than the functionality."

Neither Company Has the Right Culture for Social Technology

Kaliya Hamlin, co-founder, Internet Identity Workshop

"A ceratin kind of social 'way' of being inside the company is informing what gets built and that healthy social systems are not driven by 'fight.' It works for now, but I don't think it is a viable model for choosing how to design 'social software' in the long run.
That's not just at Facebook, either though. The culture of agression is pervasive in Silicon Valley, including at Google."

Right: Hamlin, by Doc Searls

Gaming May Be the Wrong Approach

Ben Metcalfe, leading product design consultant and iconoclast

"Looking at how many of these companies make money, I also think it will be a bumpy ride for Google's 'don't be evil' mantra. ?Google are the masters of context-advertising around text and now video, but in games there is no context - which is why there is still crappy subscription and lead-gen monetization going on by many companies in this space. I don't know whether Google has the authority in that space nor whether it is in line with Google's wider values. "

Google Won't Kill Facebook, but Something Will, Someday

Baratunde Thurston, Web Editor at The Onion and international smart guy

"I put the odds of Google overtaking Facebook at 30 percent. However, I put the odds of Facebook eventually going the way of Friendster, Myspace and Pointcast Networks at 100 percent. No one stays on top forever. No one."

On the Internet, nobody knows you're an expert. PeerIndex hopes to change that.

A decade and a half after the Web became a mass medium, people still don't trust what they read online. Yet social media is clearly shaping consumer behavior, and companies would like to know who the real authorities are, to better target their marketing. That's why startups like PeerIndex have sprung up to mine publicly available data from social networks to identify the Web's new pundits.

PeerIndex, a London-based startup backed by a host of European angels, unveiled its website Wednesday morning. Cofounder and CEO Azeem Azhar gave VentureBeat a sneak peek earlier this week. PeerIndex's algorithms mine data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs to rate people on their authority, activity, and audience.

Azhar said he hopes to charge businesses for custom analyses and deeper access to PeerIndex's data. The company hasn't unveiled specifics about pricing, but Azhar said he expects his products to have enterprise pricing not hundreds of dollars, but not tens of thousands of dollars.

Authority measurement is an increasingly crowded space. Klout, a San Francisco-based startup which has raised $1.5 million and has 14 employees, currently tracks Twitter, as do Twitalyzer and Twitter Grader. (Twitter, the popular microblogging service, has discussed charging businesses for advanced data analytics, too.) But Klout CEO Joe Fernandez told VentureBeat he plans to expand Klout's analytics to other social networks soon.

The challenge for these companies will be to come up with lists of experts that match users' expectations a search for broadband experts should turn up GigaOm's Om Malik, for example while simultaneously providing surprise, a sense that the algorithm is uncovering new people to talk to. Klout's lists feel random and unruly compared to PeerIndex's well-ordered rankings. PeerIndex's profile of venture capitalist and commentator Paul Kedrosky, putting him in the top 1 percent of influencers, feels closer to the truth than his Klout score:

The first consumers of PeerIndex are likely to be the vainest people online: bloggers, social media marketers, and other would-be experts seeking another ranking to validate them. If Azhar's algorithms are as clever as he is, they may be disappointed to find that their signal is less than their noise. But if he's able to track the Kedroskys of the Web, and give them the grades they deserve for quality of output, not just quantity, businesses may start to deem him influential, too.

Tags: authority measurement, influencer marketing, Social Media

Companies: Klout, PeerIndex

People: Azeem Azhar, Joe Fernandez, Paul Kedrosky

Sumo stable in Tokyo, Japan: you don't need to be a superstar to use the Superstar Effect.

The following is a guest post by Cal Newport, MIT Ph.D and all-around whiz on competing against the odds.

His discussion and suggested uses of the superstar effect and corollary are mirrored in what I tell first-time start-up founders:

Most of the time, it's not enough to be better. You need to be different.

Enter Cal Newport

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Earlier this year, just 2,300 of 32,000 applicants to Stanford University were accepted a rate of 7.2%, the lowest in the school's history.

The students who survived this screening are phenomenally accomplished. A quarter had SAT math scores higher than 780, and over 90% had high school G.P.A.'s above 3.75, which works out, more or less, to straight A's over four years of schooling. And these weren't easy A's: the average applicant to a top-tier university takes an overwhelming volume of demanding AP or IB-level courses. (Not surprising, considering that the Stanford admissions departments ranks the "rigor of secondary school record" as "very important" in their decision.)

If you eliminate recruited athletes and the children of the rich and famous from this pool categories that receive special consideration these numbers become even starker. In short, for the average, middle-class American high school senior, applying to Stanford is like playing the lottery.

Which is why Michael Silverman proves baffling.

When Michael, a student from Paradise Valley, Arizona, applied to Stanford, his G.P.A. put him in the bottom 10% of accepted students. His SAT scores fell similarly short. "Standardized testing isn't my strong point," he told me. Perhaps more surprising, Michael avoided the crushing course load that diminishes the will of so many college hopefuls, instead taking only a single AP course during the dreaded junior year. He kept his extracurricular schedule equally clean joining no clubs or sports and dedicating his attention to no more than one outside project at any given time.

Michael's rejection of the no pain, no gain ethos surrounding American college admissions is perhaps best summarized by his habit of ending each school day with a 1 2 hour hike to the summit of nearby Camelback Mountain. While his peers worked slavishly at their killer schedules, Michael took in the view, using his ritual as a time to "chill out and relax."

Despite this heretical behavior, Michael was still accepted at Stanford. To understand why, I will turn your attention to a little-known economics theory that changes the way we think about impressiveness. To get there, however, we'll start at an unlikely location: the competitive world of professional opera singers.

The Opera Singer and the Valedictorian

Juan Diego Florez cemented his reputation as a top operatic tenor during a 2008 performance of Gaetano Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment. Among professional singers, Donizetti's masterpiece is known as "the Mount Everest of opera"; a reputation due, almost entirely, to a devilishly tricky aria, "Ah! Mes amis, quel jour de fete," that arrives early in the first act. The aria demands the tenor to hit nine high C's in a row a supremely difficult feat. To avoid embarrassment, most performers resort to the far easier natural C.

Not Florez.

In his 2008 performance of Donizetti, at the Metropolitan Opera House, Florez hit all nine notes. The acclaim was so overwhelming that he was summoned back to the stage for an encore, overturning the Met's long-standing ban on the practice.

As a top opera singer, we can assume that Florez does well for himself financially (likely on the order of 5-digit paydays per performance), but not lavishly well. Put another way: he's well-off but not wealthy.

Then there are the superstars.

In 1972, a young tenor by the name of Luciano Pavarotti also made a name for himself performing Donizetti at the Met. Like Florez, he too hit the high C's. But there was something extra in Pavarotti's voice. The audience at the Met in 1972 did more than demand an encore from Pavarotti, they weren't content until he had returned to the stage seventeen times! In writing about Florez's 2008 performance, the New York Times noted: "If truth be told, it's not as hard as it sounds for a tenor with a light lyric voice like Mr. Florez to toss off those high C's[I]n the early 1970's, when Luciano Pavarottilet those high Cs ring out, that was truly astonishing."

In other words, both Florez and Pavarotti are exceptional tenors, but Pavarotti was slightly better the best among an elite class. The impact of this small difference, however, was huge. Whereas we estimated that Florez was well off but not wealthy, when Pavoratti died in 2007, sources estimated his estate to be worth $275 to 475 million.

In a 1981 paper published in the American Economics Review, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked through the mathematics that explains why superstars, like Pavarotti, reap so many more rewards than peers who are only slightly less talented. He called the phenomenon, The Superstar Effect.

Though the details of Rosen's formulas are complex, the intuition is simple: Imagine a million opera fans who each have $10 to spend on an opera album. They're trying to decide whether to buy an album by Florez or Pavarotti. Rosen's theory predicts that the bulk of the consumers will purchase the Pavarotti album, thinking, roughly: "although both singers are great, Pavarotti is the best, and if I can only get one album I might as well get the best one available." The result is that the vast majority of the $10 million goes to Pavarotti, even though his talent advantage over Florez is small.

Once identified, The Superstar Effect turned up in a variety of unexpected settings, from the sales of books to CEO salaries. It was found to apply even in settings that have nothing to do with financial transactions. In a particularly compelling example, a researcher named Paul Atwell, publishing in the journal Sociology of Education in 2001, studied the Superstar Effect for high school valedictorians.

Atwell imagined two students both with 700s on their various SAT tests. The first student was the valedictorian and the second student was ranked number five in the class. Rationally speaking, these two students are near identical the difference in G.P.A. between the number one and number five rank is vanishingly small. But using statistics from Dartmouth College, Atwell showed that the valedictorian has a 75% of acceptance at this Ivy League institution while the near identical fifth-ranked student has only a 25% chance.

In other words, in many fields, it pays disproportionately well to be not just very good, but the best.

Hacking the Superstar Effect

Taking a step back, we likely agree that it's an interesting finding that being the best has a hidden advantage. If reaping this advantage, however, requires becoming class valedictorian or honing a brilliant singing voice both staggeringly difficult feats it's doesn't seem all that applicable.

This is where Michael Silverman reenters the picture.

The details of his story reveal a crucial addendum that makes the power of the Superstar Effect available to most people. I call this addendum The Superstar Corollary, and it's here I turn your attention next.

I discovered The Superstar Corollary in an unlikely setting: the extracurricular lives of high school students. I was researching a book on students, like Michael, who get accepted to outstanding colleges while still living low-stress and interesting lives. During this research, I kept noticing the same trait in these teen-aged lifehackers: they had accomplishments that triggered The Superstar Effect, but which revealed on closer examination to not require a rare natural talent or years and years of grinding work.

For example, consider the details Michael's story. Starting as a freshman, he focused all of his extracurricular energies on a serial string of environmental sustainability projects. He started by submitting a model of a green house to a competition. This led him to discover that a local energy company offered a grant program for local high school students. He won a modest grant, and used it, with the help of a retired engineer from his hometown, to retrofit a golf cart to run on biofuels. Leveraging this success, he earned another grant which he used to install solar panels on his school's maintenance shed. This earned him press coverage, and the resulting Superstar Effect helped wow the Stanford admissions department into overlooking his borderline scores.

Notice that nothing about Michael's rise to stardom required a rare natural talent or overwhelming work load. His projects required, on average, less daily time investment than participating in a varsity sport. Yet, he was the best at what he did among all applicants to Stanford, and the resulting Superstar Effect earned him a disproportionate reward.

Michael wasn't alone in his success at hacking The Superstar Effect. Consider, for example, Maneesh Sethi (featured recently inTim's lifestyle design case study competition), who got into Stanford on the strength of having written a popular computer programming book, or Steve Schwartz, who got into Columbia by taking on the role of press officer for a student-run environment advocacy group. Both found uncontested niches that required only a reasonable amount of effort investment to conquer, but still triggered the full impact of The Superstar Effect.

I formalize this idea with the following corollary:

The Superstar Corollary
Being the best in a field makes you disproportionately impressive to the outside world. This effect holds even if the field is not crowded, competitive, or well-known.

In other words, becoming valedictorian or a sustainability guru both generate the same Superstar Effect, but the former is much harder than the latter.

The Superstar Corollary and Lifestyle Design

Let's move beyond high school students and broaden the applicability of this powerful idea. The Superstar Corollary hacks the neural circuity responsible for producing feelings of respect and impressiveness, yielding a huge return on effort invested. As detailed below, this makes it a perfect tool for lifestyle design.

For the employee seeking liberation

Triggering The Superstar Effect in your employer provides a valuable bargaining chip when trying to inject mobility and flexibility into your work schedule. Employers don't mind upsetting hard workers, but they fear losing stars. The Superstar Corollary gives you an efficient route to this workplace stardom.

Imagine, for example, a programmer in a web development shop. The Corollary might inspire her to become a top contributor to some new, up and coming, open source technology. Becoming known as a world expert yields more impressiveness than if she had invested the same hours into simply working overtime on her existing projects.

To give another example, imagine an entry-level employee at a non-profit. By taking on responsibility for tracking the organization's web site visitors, and then mastering enough Google Analytics to present beautiful analyses to the board, the employee will be seen as the technology guru of the organization a star who is helping them understand their audience in new ways. This aura of stardom outstrips what's achievable if he had instead invested his efforts only into being a conscientious, efficient, hardworking, and replaceable employee.

For the owner of a muse looking to increase his rewards-to-effort ratio...

For the post-liberation, muse-owning lifestyle entrepreneur, The Superstar Corollary provides a powerful tool for ramping up returns without ramping up the work invested.

Writer Chris Guillebeau, from The Art of Non-Conformity blog, provides a perfect example of the Corollary at work in a lifestyle business. Instead of starting yet another site offering generic lifehacking hints, Chris found an uncontested corner of his field to conquer. Specifically, he set out on a mission to visit every country in the world. The scope of this quest transformed him into a star among travel/lifehacking bloggers, and his site quickly become a lucrative success.

Applying The Superstar Corollary

Applying The Superstar Corollary in your own life can be tricky. Here are some ideas to facilitate this effort.

Idea #1: Sloganize.

To sloganize is to transform your conquest into an easy-to-describe and immediately interesting quest. For example, Chris Guillebeau, mentioned above, sloganized his conquest of the adventure travel writing by focusing on the catchy goal of visiting every country in the world. Similarly, in my above example of a web programmer mastering a new open source technology, she might sloganize her efforts by writing a definitive eBook on the subject. To say that she literally "wrote the book" on the technology gives the expertise extra power.

The power of sloganizing is clear: it maximizes the superstar impact of your conquest.

Idea #2: Apply the $1000 Wager Test.

Two years ago, I had a series of conversations with my friend Ben Casnocha about the possibility of writing an eBook. Both Ben and I had written and published successful books on the side, and we were exploring the idea of a guide on how successful part-time authors manage to juggle their full time job with their writing. Ultimately, we abandoned the idea. The problem: there wasn't enough to say. The part-time authors who have the easiest time writing books tend to be those who know enough about the industry to be confident in the success of their project. This confidence is what allows them to keep finding time in their schedules to write; fancy scheduling rules and productivity systems prove irrelevant.

This same observation carries over to the quest to conquer an uncontested niche in your field. To follow through you need confidence in your success; otherwise, your efforts will diminish over time, regardless of the complexity of your productivity systems or the fervor of the inspirational quotes you read. Here's a simple rule: If you're not willing to bet $1000 on your success within 6 to 12 months, then either your goal is quixotic or you don't know enough about the field yet. In both cases, you're not ready for the project. A blind adherence to the flawed idea that getting started is the most important step is best left to cheesy motivational speakers winners make plays with confidence.

Idea #3 Follow Steve Martin's Brand of Diligence

In his memoir, Born Standing Up, the comedy superstar Steve Martin provides insight into his rise to prominence. I've written in-depth about his method, but perhaps the most important concept is Martin's redefinition of "diligence." He notes that diligence was crucial in his rise to comedic fame, but he's quick to redefine the term away from it's standard definition of "hard work applied consistently over time." To Martin, the key to diligence isn't the work applied to your pursuit, but instead the work you don't apply to other pursuits. He succeeded in reinventing comedy because he kept his focus on comedy, even when other, more shiny and interesting side projects presented themselves.

The same concept applies to The Superstar Corollary. When conquering your uncontested niche, it can be tempting to divide your attention. Here is where Martin's diligence is key. The bonus reward you get for being the best far outweighs any small benefit that a shiny new side project can provide. On the large scale, therefore, maintaining a relentless focus on your conquest maximizes your total overall reward.

Concluding Summary

We're wired to be disproportionately impressed with someone who is the best at what they do. This effect, however, is blind to the competitiveness of the pursuit. The writer who is traveling to every country in the world, for example, can earn as much attention as the Rhodes Scholar with a PhD in international relations.

Is there's an uncontested corner in your own working life where you could apply the Superstar Corollary to gain a huge return on investment?

About the Author:
Calvin Newport is author of How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get into College by Standing Out. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 2004 and earned a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2009. Newport's work and findings on student success have been featured on ABC, NBC, and CBS.

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Odds and Ends: Birthday Give-Back Results and Winners

You all are amazing human beings and should be so, so proud. The birthday give-back experiment raised more than $45,000 in a little over three days, which means $90,000+ to schoolkids in need, since I'm matching. This means you impacted more than 9,300 kids, and together we will impact closer to 20,000.

Check this image out to put things in perspective, that's about 20,000 people. Holy $#%&!

If you donated by midnight on Sunday, you should have received the following e-mail from Donorschoose.org:

Subject line: Gift from Tim Ferriss

Wow!

Thank you so much for celebrating Tim Ferriss's birthday by supporting a classroom on DonorsChoose.org. This short email contains a gift, so please read all the way through.

Thanks to you, students will have the opportunity to take interesting field trips to amazing places, including sea research vessels and Shakespearean plays! The students you helped will have access to reading activities, word games, listening centers and most important books for improving literacy skills. Through the Great Give-Back Birthday, you have brought valuable resources to more than 8,600 kids [Tim note: this has since increased] incredible!

Not only are you passionate supporters, but, as you know, Tim Ferriss has agreed to match your donations, bringing even more supplies to high need schools. But here's the cool part: he wants to give it back to you! You get to decide where to put Tim's money, whether in your hometown elementary school or into music programs across the country.

So please use the below $50 gift code from Tim Ferriss to select a classroom project of your choice on DonorsChoose.org. Just find a project that speaks to your heart and enter the code when you checkout. Your gift code expires on September 30, 2010, so don't forget to fund a great classroom!

[UNIQUE CODE]

On behalf of all the students and teachers you have touched with this gift, thank you very much!

Your friends at DonorsChoose.org

P.S. Here is a note from Tim:

You rock!!!

It's hard to describe how amazed, overjoyed, and touched I've been by you all, and your selfless contributions to kids who need it most in our schools. PLEASE use your gift code! I suggest you either use it today (it just takes a few minutes), or put it in your calendar for this week so you don't forget. It makes an incredible gift as well.

Just don't forget to use it! Chances are, if you don't use it this week, you will forget. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed this incredible experiment. Wow.

All the best to you and yours thank you, thank you, thank you,

Tim

And that's the damn truth.

But let's not forget out prize winners (though I hope you all feel awesome after the experience, which you should):

The lucky winner of the round-trip ticket is Brian Brereton. Please contact amy-at-fourhourworkweekdotcom when you know your timing for the trip!

For the Maui Jim gift card and glasses, the winners are Ty Kroll (VIP gift card), Douglass Lodmell, and Jesse Walters. Please allow a week or so for them to arrive.

This has been the most wonderful birthday I could ask for. Thank you all.