Filed under: Tech, Websites, Lists

Sometimes I burn through hours just clicking deeper into rabbit holes on the internet. At what point do they take away my keyboard and jack me into a pod with a USB cable at the back of my neck?

Here they are, the 15 Most Addictive Websites Ever as determined by Urlesque -- a list comprising of wikis, blogs, gaming sites and more. We tried to focus more on individual sites providing unique content, but we just couldn't leave out a few aggregators that allow us to cherry pick fun stuff from millions of places throughout the web.

Everything Is Terrible

It's not hard to find soul-crushing video content on the web. But you won't find a single source that so carefully curates hilariously bad video clips that you haven't already seen a hundred times on Everything Is Terrible. I am consistently amazed at how many infomercial weirdos and bizarre Christian kids shows they're able to dig up every week.

Why it's addictive: The so-bad-they're-good videos bleed together for marathon rubbernecking sessions.

Ffffound!

Ffffound is an image hosting platform like Flickr but cooler. It dynamically recommends photos you'll like as you browse. It's invite-only, which prevents a bunch of social media dorks dorking it up with stupid photos of what they ate for dinner that day.

Why it's addictive: Hey look, it's a picture of a man wearing a wearing a bird's nest on his head. And look over there, a mosaic made out of candy corn. And so on.

Digg & Reddit

Content aggregators like Reddit or Digg make it easy for you to find the stuff that everyone's talking about. These communities have developed distinct personalities, going beyond just recommending stuff and actually help each other out and engage in weird collective pranks.

Why it's addictive: The content is so rapidly refreshed that you could easily just read interesting new stories indefinitely. Plus, you'll want to argue with or rally the community.

Failblog

Will we, as a society, ever get tired of watching each other fail? People falling! Bad parenting! Bad spelling in signage! It's always the same dumb crap, but we can't get enough of it.

Why it's addictive: Just look at those YouTube screenshots as you scroll down the page. The teaser images will entice you till you're pages deep.

FML & MLIA

FML (or F*** My Life) is a site made up of user-submitted disappointments such as

Today, I daringly tried that fish bath thingy (the one where all the fish come to you and eat all of your skin's dead cells). I submerged into it and after 15 minutes of being a human buffet, 20 of the fish died. FML

And then, MLIA (My Life Is Average), which celebrates life's mundane moments:

Today, I renamed my iPod "This ship" just for the pleasure of seeing the phrase "This ship is syncing" MLIA

Why it's addictive: Sort the responses by popularity and spend hours marveling at other people's problems.

Gifsoup

Bloggers and forum dwellers have revived animated GIFs in a huge way over the last few years. Gifsoup allows users to create their own gifs from existing YouTube footage, and also hosts a huge gallery of embeddable GIFs.

Why it's addictive: If scrolling through endless galleries of twitching, squirming animations wasn't enough, it's easy to make your own.

Know Your Meme

Know Your Meme is a wiki for memes. Anyone can submit information about a particular meme, and the good stuff rises to the top. It's also carefully curated and peppered with insightful videos explaining some of the more complex memes. You can easily burn a few hours tumbling down a rabbit hole of interrelated memes.

Why it's addictive: Each entry contains links to other memes, so even if you've found your explanation of the meme about which you were curious, you'll inevitably learn about a ton more.

Wikipedia

Because it's so comprehensively cross-referenced, it's inevitable that looking up a quick data point on Wikipedia turns into an hours-long aimless graze of information. If that's not addictive enough, there's a game for iPhones and iPads called Wikihunt that challenges players to navigate from one random Wikipedia page to another in as few clicks as possible.

Why it's addictive: Look at all those underlined words that are waiting to be clicked. Even if you came here for a specific reason, it's guaranteed you won't be able to leave without learning about something else worth sharing at the water cooler.

TV Tropes

If you have any interest in pop culture or creative writing, you WILL spend hours absorbing the storytelling cliches at TV Tropes. Every plot element or characterization is documented exhaustively, with as much weight given to some dumb Anime as to Citizen Kane.

Why it's addictive: Because a lot of the tropes are built on top of several other tropes, you end up having to dive four or five pages deep to figure out what anything means.

Kongregate

There are many browser-based gaming sites, but this one's the best. On top of hundreds of games offered, there's also a meta-game, wherein you win points and earn badges for accomplishing certain in-game goals.

Why it's addictive: The impulse to make numbers go up is rarely so cleverly manipulated.

Facebook

Who among us hasn't found ourselves awake at 3:00 AM staring slack-jawed at an ex's Facebook wall or flipping through photos of people you don't know? According to Mashable, one third of women between the ages of 18-34 check Facebook first thing in the morning.

Why it's addictive: Facebook is explicitly engineered to keep you clicking, from its annoying games to its lure of keeping tabs on crush objects.

YTMND

YMNTD, or You're The Man Now Dog (A Sean Connery quote from Finding Forrester) is a simple site that allows users to upload an image or animated GIF, a caption and a sound file. What results is a fertile meme farm that churns out hundreds of ridiculous intertextual pages each week. (See: Some of the most classic examples)

Why it's addictive: Each entry is an easily digestible chunk of a pop culture artifact. So they're perfect for consuming in huge, irresponsible amounts.

ONTD

Oh No They Didn't is one of the only thriving blogs on Livejournal because it's one of the smartest celebrity gossip blogs out there, and its use of user-generated content allows it to scoop a lot of big gossip sites like TMZ or Perez Hilton.

Why it's addictive: It's alluring in the same way that all gossip rags are, but this one does it the best. Not to mention the endless hilarity encompassed in the members' avatars and use of animated gifs in the comments.

Meme Hall of Fame: Double Rainbow [Nerve]

LEGOS with Tattoos [Flavorwire]

Candy Colored Crochet Bike [Crushable]

New Thor Trailer Owns the Web [Geek Sugar]

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Shared by phillip
Hadn't heard about this incident. I knew about this foundation because they sponsored Citizendium.

On July 20, 2010, Byron Williams of Groveland, CA, was pulled over by Californa Highway Patrol officers on suspicions of drunk driving while en route to the San Francisco offices of the Tides Foundation and engaged in a shootout with the officers.^[1] Described by police as "heavily armed," and equipped with body armor, a rifle, a handgun, and a shotgun, Williams told relatives that he aimed to "start a revolution" by destroying the left-wing Tides Foundation, which he believes was "a socialist plot." ^[2][3]

Several Progressive political observers have suggested that recent Fox News coverage of the Tides Foundation may have provided some of the motive for the attacks.^[4] In particular, Glenn Beck mentioned the Tides Foundation in 29 separate episodes of his show, referring to it as "a socialist conspiracy" which was "assembling an army."^[5]

While it's been exciting to track the #NewHotmailHere sightings and from what we can tell from the comments on Twitter and here on this blog, most of you are pretty excited about the new Hotmail. For some, however, things aren't going so well.

On the Windows Live Solution Center, there are some 650 responses at the time of this posting to the forum post Issues With New Windows Live Hotmail. While some complaints are about confusion with the new look, etc., which probably can be expected with any change of any kind, a number of far more serious problems are being reported.

Scanning the forum posts, there seem to be problems on a number of fronts: using certain older browsers, using Qwest, ActiveX issues, along with some more general problems with performance and certain features not working. Some people are using Mac OS X 10.4 and can't upgrade to the recommended Safari 4.x (sorry don't know much about Macs or why this isn't possible), but others seem to be using more current browsers and are still having problems, here's a quick sampling:

• I can now barely log in, cant delete any messages, cant compose messages, signing out takes forever. I do not want social networking message options, or ultra rich test clipboards to type emails on i just want to be able to check my email and send messages.
• the exact issue is ever since the upgraded, when i sign in to my hotmail account I see that I have messages and can see who they are from, but cant view them. Mycomuter hangs up or says NOt Responding.
• I see the following message above my Inbox/email: "We can't connect to Windows Live Hotmail from Qwest right now. Please try again later"
  I use Windows Internet Explorer 7 & 8.
• Was using IE8. Dowloaded Safari to see if there would be a difference, but although it allowed me to access my hotmail, it works ever so slowly, and is still doing some very weird things like flickering of icons, and sporadic access to different hotmail folders. Methinks this is a Hotmail problem rather than a browser problem. Smooooth move!

A number of posters have mentioned a problem with Hotmail from Qwest, apparently they are not able to get to their email, no matter what browser.

Responses from Microsoft personnel seem to be few and far between, but one workaround concerning ActiveX was posted:

For Browser freeze issues in IE, please try these steps and let us know if that helped or not:
In IE go to Tools > Internet Options > Security > Custom Level... >
Deactivate ActiveX objects.
Log back into Hotmail inbox - then go back and set the security to Default level.
For customers who arent able to access their emails at all in any of the browsers/computer, please try accessing your emails using a mail client as a workaround till we fix these issues for you.
For instructions, go here:
http://windowslivehelp.com/solution.aspx?solutionid=a485233f-206d-491e-941b-118e45a7cf1b

Older browsers seem to be a big problem, with a Microsoft poster offering a suggestion for the older Safari issue:

yes we fully support Safari 4.x. You could also try downloading the newest version of Firefox, which we also support. Sorry you haven't had a great experience with the new Hotmail so far, but it should be much better once you get upgraded.

Of course at least some of the forum posters are resorting to their own workarounds, by switching to Yahoo! or Gmail. Someone even started a Facebook Group, I Hate the New Hotmail, albeit currently with only 77 members. Still 650 responses to just one thread on the support forums (which aren't all that easy to find we have a link on our Wiki page if you're looking for it) and over 30,000 views since just last Thursday are some fairly sobering numbers. Are you having problems with the new Hotmail? Have you been able to fix them? Are you using the support forums? Let us know in the comments.

(via a comment from User55, hope you get your issues resolved soon)

Simon Rogers / Guardian:
Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet Key incidents from the Wikileaks Afghanistan war logs selected by Guardian writers. As a spreadsheet, with co-ordinates Get this data INTERACTIVE: These key incidents mapped Glossary of military terms

Shared by whenelvisdied
An interesting discussion of the role of "traditional media" in the wikileaks Afghanistan journal

That WikiLeaks went to the press with the Afghanistan war logs shows old-fashioned news organisations still have a role to play

Of all the questions raised by the Afghanistan war logs, perhaps the most intriguing is this: why would an organisation as independent-minded and disdainful of the traditional media as WikiLeaks seek out those very media as partners rather than going it alone?

My necessarily speculative answer is that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who's made a speciality of revealing embarrassing governmental secrets, learned something important earlier this year. That's when he briefly caused a sensation by releasing video of a US Apache helicopter firing on Iraqi civilians, killing (among others) a Reuters photographer and his driver.

The lesson: shocking material and a flair for public relations may be enough to get you noticed. But if it's credibility you want, then old-fashioned news organisations still have something to offer.

WikiLeaks made some 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan available to the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel a month ago, giving professional journalists time to sort, vet and craft narratives from jargon-laden field reports compiled by US officials.

The documents add sickening details to the broad outlines of what we already knew: that major elements of Pakistan's intelligence forces are in bed with the Taliban; that chaos and confusion in Afghanistan has led to civilian casualties; and that among the burdens the Afghan people must bear is a corrupt and ineffective government.

The Obama administration has lambasted WikiLeaks for releasing the documents, arguing that the situation has improved since 2009, when the most recent of the official reports were compiled. But no one has questioned the authenticity of the documents themselves, even if the reliability of the information contained therein appears to be of variable quality.

In effect, Assange chose to act as Daniel Ellsberg, the insider who leaked the Pentagon Papers the US government's own secret history of the Vietnam war to the Washington Post and the New York Times. But it was just a few months ago that Assange tried out the role of Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post executive editor who published those papers.

In April, you may recall, WikiLeaks uploaded two versions of the Apache helicopter video. One was an edited, 18-minute version that it titled Collateral Murder, which begins with a quote from George Orwell: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind." The other, 39 minutes long, was raw footage with no commentary.

The American secretary of defence, Robert Gates, denounced the video as having been taken out of context. No surprise there. But as Raffi Khatchadourian notes in a profile of Assange published in the New Yorker, the media turned Gates's way within days of the release. And in fact, when you watch the video and listen to the Americans on board the helicopter, you can see that the crew members believed, rightly or wrongly, that they were firing on a legitimate target.

Even the comedian Stephen Colbert, in an interview with Assange, dropped his rightwing-blowhard persona momentarily to make a serious point, calling the edited version "emotional manipulation" and telling his guest: "There are armed men in the group. They did find a rocket-propelled grenade among the group. The Reuters photographers who were regrettably killed were not identified as photographers. And you have edited this tape, and you have given it a title called Collateral Murder. That's not leaking. That's a pure editorial."

(An aside for British readers not familiar with Colbert and thus puzzled at my quoting a comedian: it is a sad but undeniable reality that the two most incisive American media critics today may well be Colbert and his fellow fake anchorman Jon Stewart.)

Around the time that the video was released, hubris among the WikiLeakers was thick. In the New Yorker piece, we hear from a friend and supporter of Assange's, a Dutch hacker named Rop Gonggrijp, who smugly says that "we are not the press" and "the source is no longer dependent on finding a journalist who may or may not do something good with his document".

Yet here we are, several months later, and Assange is acting very much like an old-fashioned source, seeking out journalists even as he uploads the raw source documents to the web.

In the felicitous phrase of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, WikiLeaks is "a stateless news organisation". But as the New Yorker piece makes clear, Assange and his fellow activists are less interested in news than in making a political impact. And it is an organisation only in the loosest sense of the term. Given those realities, it makes sense for them to work with journalists rather than to posit themselves in opposition to the media.

"WikiLeaks was soaking, drowning in data," Rosen's NYU colleague Clay Shirky tells David Carr of the New York Times. "What they needed was someone who could tell a story. They needed someone who could bring accuracy and political context to what was being revealed."

What I am suggesting is not that old media have triumphed over the new. Rather, I'm simply pointing out that each has its place in the media ecosystem.

WikiLeaks, with its singleminded focus on casting about for whistleblowers and protecting their identity through encryption and secrecy, can obtain material that eludes established news organisations. And professional journalists can vet, make sense of and impart credibility to that material in ways that not all new-media ventures (at least not WikiLeaks) can.

The result is a powerful indictment of the war in Afghanistan and a major challenge to Barack Obama.

Back in character, Colbert asked Assange: "What is the purpose of letting the public know? It's like you're saying it's better to know than not to know. Have you not heard ignorance is bliss?"

It's way too late for that now.

There was time when not having comments on your blog was a cardinal sin. You weren't transparent, open or social. Starting a blog today is much easier today than it was even a few years ago, especially if you count microblogging in the mix. But today everything has commenting, blogs, videos, presentations and thinks to services like Diigo and Google SideWiki (is that still around?) people can leave comments about any site on the internet on the site itself.

The ability to criticize, critique and respond to something is only a tweet away. You don't need comments turned on to do this.

Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText and board member for SlideShare has an interesting post responding to criticism placed on Pfizer mostly for turning off comments on the their newly launched SlideShare account.

It's encouraging to see regulated companies like Pfizer move further and further into the social space, even if it's baby steps.

Ross points out the additional difficulties that a regulated business has, but something he didn't reference was that Pfizer is not the first to take a no comments allowed approach. Several big companies with corporate blogs don't allow comments including Google and Microsoft. Apple doesn't even have a blog to turn comments off of.

The trade off of turning comments off is the obvious lack of engagement which makes it more difficult to build readership and reach.

Regulations aside, managing comments can reach a point of diminishing returns (depending on your goals).

Seth Godin was the first person I remember to turn on comments (when they had been off), decided he didn't like it, found it too distracting and then turned them back off. People got upset but then everything returned to normal.

Years ago the highly popular blog, Boing Boing had to disable comments because the amount of traffic they were getting was crashing their site. Once they could afford better more reliable hosting they turned them back on. Recently the major tech blog, Engadget turned off comments earlier this year because of reader unruliness and then turned them back on when they implemented a more moderated system.

When I start a YouTube account for clients, depending on the nature of the channel, I often recommend clients to default to comments off because YouTube can attract some of the worst trolls out there and YouTube's moderating system is horrible.

If your goals are reach and awareness of your messaging, turning off comments can stunt the growth of that channel but I believe is can be an acceptable approach.

But if your goals are to build a community and engage with your readers comments are an important part of that.

Disclosure, Microsoft is a client.

Photo credit By Balakov

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

WikiLeaks, the crusading anti-secrecy organization that just published 90,000 pages of secret government documents about the war in Afghanistan, has gotten a lot of attention for its campaign to become the world's repository of whistle-blowing and embargo-busting information, and leader Julian Assange has become the star of the political talk show circuit. But the most interesting thing about WikiLeaks and the release of the secret Afghan documents isn't the details of the U.S. campaign it's what the incident says about the evolution of a truly distributed and dis-aggregated new media ecosystem.

Shadowy sources have been disclosing secret information of all kinds to newspapers and magazines for decades, ever since Watergate made it seem like a public service to do so. But in this case, there was a middleman in the process, and one with a considerable amount of power far more than any other source in a similar situation. WikiLeaks didn't get the documents directly, but was given them by another unnamed source (possibly Bradley Manning, who was the source of an earlier secret video of a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq). The site then proceeded to broker a deal with the New York Times, The Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel, whereby the media outlets could have access to the documents and publish stories based on them simultaneously. Columbia Journalism Review has a detailed step-by-step account of how it happened.

Not everyone thinks WikiLeaks represents a fundamental transformation of journalism in the Internet age, mind you. Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Globe and Mail newspaper, said on Twitter that Wikileaks gave us the War Logs scoop in same way the brown-envelope industry gave us Pentagon Papers or parking garages uncovered Watergate (although he later conceded that WikiLeaks was a useful vehicle). But comparing WikiLeaks and what it was able to accomplish to a source with a brown envelope in a parking garage as Deep Throat was for the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s misses the larger point.

As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has noted, even after it provided the documents to the media outlets, WikiLeaks still maintained the ultimate control over them including the ability to publish all 90,000 of them at the same time that the stories based on them appeared in the NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel. This, Rosen says, provided an almost unprecedented check on the traditional media, since any gaps or omissions from their stories would become obvious. Typically, sources cut exclusive deals with a single outlet, and that entity has the final say over what appears but WikiLeaks has altered that traditional balance of power.

You can get a sense of how shaken up this new arrangement has made some traditional journalists, by looking at the response from the NYT reporter who worked with WikiLeaks on the documents, and from NYT editor Bill Keller. The latter defended the newspaper's decision not to link to the full storehouse of WikiLeaks documents, and also said that he felt compelled to pass on to the group the government's displeasure at the publication of U.S. government informants' names and other information, which Keller said he did at the request of the White House. Meanwhile, reporter Eric Schmitt seemed to recoil at the idea that the incident was any kind of partnership between the newspaper of record and the shadowy info-hacker organization:

I've seen Julian Assange in the last couple of days kind of flouncing around talking about this collaboration like the four of us were working all this together but we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He's making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that's not what it was.

Regardless of whether Schmitt or Keller are comfortable with the existence of what Rosen has called the world's first stateless news organization, however, the fact remains that the Internet not only allows an entity such as WikiLeaks to exist, but gives it far more power than any previous non-journalistic organization when it comes to affecting the news cycle. The fact that sources with secret data can now go to an entity that doesn't have to answer to any state or even international authority gives WikiLeaks a leg up on even the New York Times, which has made questionable decisions about significant news stories in the past (such as the lead-up to the war in Iraq, for example) for a variety of reasons. As Steve Myers at the Poynter Institute put it:

In inserting itself between source and publisher, WikiLeaks has shifted power away from the monoliths that once determined what is news and toward the people who, before the Web, would have been stopped in the newspaper lobby before they could see a reporter.

Media writer David Carr of the New York Times called the WikiLeaks case an example of asymmetric journalism, in which the source of information is also a publisher, but also works together with traditional media to make secret data public for society's benefit. C.W. Anderson at the Nieman Journalism Lab called it a classic case study of the new ecosystem of news diffusion:

from new fact-gatherers, to news organizations in a different position in the informational chain, all the way to the Twittersphere in which conversation about the story was occurring in real-time, back to the bloggers, the opinion makers, the partisans, the politicians, and the hacks. This is how news works in 2010.

British journalism professor George Brock calls what happened with WikiLeaks and the two newspapers and magazine a mutualisation of journalism a term that has also been used by The Guardian to describe the newspaper's approach to modern media, which includes an open platform that allows developers to re-use its content, and blog plug-ins that allow bloggers and The Guardian to share content. And WikiLeaks has in mind its own kind of plug-in: an embeddable disclosure and upload form that would allow newspapers to solicit secret documents and then hand them over to WikiLeaks for safe-keeping.

The New York Times and other traditional media entities may not like it, but it isn't just the business model of journalism and the media that is changing; it's the fundamental structure of the industry and how it functions. And they had better get used to it. Yes, WikiLeaks needed the Times and The Guardian and Der Spiegel to draw attention to and filter some of the information deluge it had on its hands, but the balance of power between source and publication has clearly been altered, and journalism will likely never be the same.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd): What We Can Learn From the Guardian's Open Platform

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users New Media Days, Menage a Moi and Yan Arief

Here in the America, the CIA's drone program targeting extremists in the tribal areas of Pakistan is the subject of heated debate. The CIA calls it a uniquely valuable and precise counterterrorism tool. The Obama administration, which has stepped up the program significantly since taking office, considers it legal under the 2001 congressional Authorization to Use Military Force. The human-rights community, along with many security experts, fear that the program will create more terrorists than it kills due to anger at civilian casualties.

Pakistanis, however, think the drones are sorry; huh? What are you talking about? Did you say clones?

That's according to a new Pew poll on Pakistani attitudes (PDF) that's filled with surprises. Top of the list: Just over one-in-three Pakistanis (35%) have heard about the drone strikes. Apparently, Pakistanis barely know this program even exists. Forty-three percent say they've heard nothing at all about the drones. You can hear the champagne corks popping at Langley.

But it's not exactly time for bottle service. Amongst those Pakistanis who have heard of the drones, opinion skews predictably negative. Ninety-three percent say they're a bad or very bad thing. Ninety percent say they kill too many innocent people. While some researchers claim that if you limit your pool of respondents to the tribal areas, support for the drones actually goes up, 32 percent of overall respondents think they're a necessary measure. (Although perhaps that's a robust total of people saying a foreign government should shoot missiles at their fellow countrymen.) And almost half of Pakistanis believe the fiction that the drone strikes occur without Pakistani government approval.

That's not all the poll found: Pakistanis are freaked out about their economy; highly anti-American; and less concerned about terrorism than they used to be although that latter part might not be such a bad thing.After a $7.5 billion aid package passed Congress last year to bolster Pakistan's civilian government and reeling economy, here's what the U.S. has to show for it: Pakistanis exhibit as much anti-American sentiment as any populace on earth. According to Pew, 59 percent of Pakistanis consider the U.S. an enemy, and only 17 percent consider the U.S. a friend. Pakistanis give the U.S. its lowest ratings among the 22 nations included in the spring 2010 Pew Global Attitudes survey, the poll notes. You have to go to Egypt or Turkey to find similarly negative views of the U.S. in Pew's findings a fact, perhaps, that helps contextualize why the Pakistani intelligence apparatus funds U.S. enemies in Afghanistan, as WikiLeaks reminded us this week. Still, 64 percent say they want better relations with the United States.

Then there's Pakistani attitudes on terrorism, something the poll considers ominous. As Pakistani forces continue to battle extremist groups within the country, nearly all Pakistanis describe terrorism as a very big problem, it warns. However, they have grown markedly less concerned that extremists might take control of the country. Specifically, 69 percent worried in 2009 that the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated groups might rout the government. Now only 51 percent feel that way. Is that necessarily bad?

Haider Mullick, a Pakistani scholar at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University recently returned from a wide-ranging trip surveying Pakistani military development during the army's 18-month campaign against the Tehrek-e-Taliban, or TTP. The effort brought Pakistani troops into tough battles in South Waziristan. In his view, it's natural for Pakistanis to be less concerned about an enemy that they see their army battling, especially considering that last spring, the Taliban were entrenched barely 60 miles from the capitol city of Islamabad.

TTP lost major territory in Swat, Buner, Shangla, Bannu, South Waziristan. That's very signficant, Mullick says. Also, historically speaking, once an insurgent group becomes weak, popular support for reconciliation goes up. And the fight against the insurgents still has popular backing: 49 percent of Pakistanis support it, far more than the 20 percent who oppose it, though 30 percent register mixed feelings.

The Pakistani military effort in the tribal areas is a mixed picture. By January 2010, the United Nations Refugee Agency accommodated 114,000 refugees from the fighting in camps it set up in the Northwest Frontier Province, with nearly a million more living in nearby host communities. The military is apparently holding territory in Swat and South Waziristan, though there's not much of a civilian government presence there. Militants have been making their way to the Punjabi heartland of the country and the military has yet to advance into North Waziristan, the remaining safe havens of al-Qaeda, the TTP and their allies. But the campaign has won persistent accolades from generals David Petraeus and Jim Mattis, who note as did the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S. this week that more Pakistani troops have died fighting Taliban than NATO troops have in nine years.

Paradoxically, the military's fight against the Taliban may have impacted Pakistani sentiments toward extremist groups. Fifteen percent of Pakistanis rate the TTP favorably, though, and 18 percent have favorable views of al-Qaeda. Both are higher than last year's 10 and nine percent favorables, respectively. But Pakistani perceptions of both groups are still down from 2008 levels, when a roughly a quarter of Pakistanis expressed approval of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. And the negative ratings for both groups are high, although the TTP's 65 percent unfavorable rating outstrips the 53 percent antipathy Pakistanis record for al-Qaeda.

Still, no matter how you dissect the poll, what comes through is Pakistani dissatisfaction. President Asif Ali Zardari has an approval rating of 20 percent, more than 40 percent lower than when he took office. The economy has been hit hard by the global downturn, and about half of Pakistanis expect things to get worse, while only 35 percent were pessimists last year. Corruption, economy, energy, inflation trumps the threat from terrorism in many places, says Mullick. See? We're not so different after all.

Credit: U.S. Air Force

See Also:

• WikiLeaks Drops 90000 War Docs; Fingers Pakistan as Insurgent Ally
• Pakistan's Blocking Binge: First Facebook, Now YouTube; Others
• 3 GIs Killed in Pakistan. Now Can We Start Treating This Like a
• Report: U.S. Drone Goes Down Over Pakistan. Again.
• State Department Flies Mercenary Air Force Over Pakistan
• G.I.s Slain in Pakistan: Psyop Sergeant, Two Nation-Builders

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.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

The scientists on the project ranked having low-quality relationships with friends and family as equivalent to frequent substance abuse (that is to say, 15 cigarettes a day or heavy alcohol consumption) but worse for a person's health than not participating in exercise and being obese.

Timothy Smith, project leader from Brigham Young University (BYU), in Utah, claims that "the importance of having a network of friends and good family relationships is comparable to quitting smoking and exceeds many risk factors of mortality such as obesity, physical inactivity."

"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

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U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton decided Wednesday that SB 1070's most controversial bits, such as requiring immigrants to carry papers wherever they go, will have to wait until the courts can sort out the mess. As written, the law, which was set to take effect Thursday, would restrict the liberty of lawfully-present aliens, the judge said.

The judge agreed with the view that federal immigration law trumps SB 1070.

AP via Google:

But for now, opponents of the law have prevailed: The provisions that most angered opponents will not take effect, including sections that required officers to check a person's immigration status while enforcing other laws.

The judge also delayed parts of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and made it illegal for undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places a move aimed at day laborers. In addition, the judge blocked officers from making warrantless arrests of suspected illegal immigrants.

Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully-present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked, Bolton, a Clinton appointee, said in her decision.

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Dale Zak has been a long-time volunteer developer on the Ushahidi platform. He created the Windows Mobile app, and has been helpful connecting and working with our other friends and partners at places like The Extraordinairies and FrontlineSMS. His work is always top-notch, and he's widely respected within the mobile app dev circles in our non-profit space as one of the best around.

Dale has been an influential member of the Ushahidi community, dedicating many hours of his time to release top quality code for the rest of us to use, and working with the others in the dev community to get things done.

It's because of that latter trait that we started talking to Dale and asked him to join the Ushahidi team in a part-time role as Mobile Project Manager. In this position he'll be working not only on the WinMo app, but also coordinating and helping the others around the world who are contributing to the Android, iPhone and Java apps.

If you're interested in taking part on the mobile apps, start with these links, and then get in touch with Dale.

• Ushahidi Mobile on our Wiki
• Ushahidi's Github code respository

Welcome aboard Dale!

Take one look at the newly launched Facebook Questions feature and it's clear that things are about to change dramatically on the world's largest social network. Take a second look and it's also clear that the feature isn't working very well yet - but it will be fixed and is going to be a very big deal.

A few million people have been given access this afternoon to Facebook Questions, a social Question & Answer feature built under the leadership of Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox browser years ago and now an employee at Facebook. Questions may come closer than anything else has yet to founder Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a connector of people around the world, a force for empathy and world peace. I think it's going to be a very important and enjoyable part of the site.

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It might be tempting to assume that Facebook Questions is going to end up a cesspool of idiocy, harshness and partisan tyranny of the majority. But look at it this way: The most successful social software company in the history of the world hired the creator of the Firefox browser who worked for months to build an effective Q&A service and you think it's going to turn into a YouTube dumb-fest? That's not the outcome I'd bet my money on.

Facebook as Empathy Engine

Why do people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio? Because they are idiots, right? Wrong, according to Grant Fisher, a grad student at St. Mary's University School of Law in Texas. Fisher offered a lengthy, intelligent, insightful and sympathetic answer to that question on Facebook today and his answer has been voted to the top of the page for that question. Fisher says people listen to Limbaugh because he has decades of experience researching politics, because he articulates to conservatives what (he believes) liberals are thinking and to liberals what (some) some conservatives are thinking and because many people believe he has a good track record of predicting what's going to happen in politics. And because he's entertaining.

That's a good, informative answer and one that has already changed my shallow thinking about Rush Limbaugh fans. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I would pass judgement on a huge group of people so thoughtlessly and callously, but I know I'm not alone. And neither is Fisher alone in offering a high-quality answer to a controversial question on Facebook.

There are going to be some very interesting questions and answers about peace in the Middle East, the Pro Life vs Pro Choice debate, drug policy, race, gender, the environment - you name it.

Because Facebook Questions are open to the whole world and because answers are voted on, we're going to learn a whole lot about other peoples' perspectives. Most of the Facebook newsfeed is filled with Farmville updates, baby pictures and misspelled drunken rambling. That will never bring me closer to the personal thoughts of a woman in Indonesia, a young boy in Egypt or a Candian Mounty who rides through the snow-covered hills on a horse all day, thinking about why on earth people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. But the public, voted-on Questions feature will.

Early users of the service are offering long, thoughtful answers. That will change in time, but answers that aren't helpful will not be voted up. Will obnoxious partisan answers be voted to the top in a tyranny of the majority? Even if such an answer were to be at the top, the next one below it would likely be more informative, empathetic and useful. There will be individual Questions that get nothing but terrible answers - but in aggregate, due to the scale of the humanity doing the voting, I think the Questions experience will be on balance strong.

I think we're going to see some really good discussions on Facebook. These conversations aren't going to be like YouTube. They aren't going to be like Wikipedia. They aren't going to be like Yahoo Answers, with millions of questions asked again and again, with no legacy knowledge retained and developed over time. They are going to be like Stack Overflow, and those are some really good conversations.

People will have their hearts and minds changed about controversial matters after using a well-designed social Q&A feature on a sprawling world-wide social network like Facebook. This will be a net win for the human experience. I don't think that's an exaggeration at all.

I think millions of people will end up spending hours browsing through Facebook Questions, learning things. I think it's going to be great. As soon as they fix it and make it work better.

Facebook's worst-kept secret is finally ready for its closeup: the company is starting to roll out Facebook Questions, a Q&A service that allows users to poll all of Facebook. Facebook has been inviting users to apply to join a sneak peek of Questions for months now, so we've seen much of this before, but this marks the first time that it will begin rolling out to users who didn't apply for the beta program. Facebook says that this is intiitally rolling out to 3-5 million users, with plans for a broader rollout down the line.

The motivations behind the launch are clear: millions of people already use Facebook status updates to poll their friends it's only natural that the site would offer a dedicated mechanism to do this (and it's also likely to be a boon for page views, especially once Questions are syndicated to search engines). But if you were hoping the new product would incorporate Facebook's extensive privacy settings, you'll be disappointed: everything in Questions is shared with everyone else on Facebook, and every question you ask is tied to your real name; likewise, anyone who answers will have their response tied to their account.

Of course, having all questions set to public does have one nice side effect: you'll be able to poll from Facebook's massive audience of 500 million users. Facebook obviously isn't going to ask your question to everyone else on Facebook; instead, its system is going to try to analyze a user's interests to determine who would be best able to answer your question. The service will also show the question to some of your friends, so ideally you'll receive answers from a healthy mix of friends and experts (we'll see how well it actually works).

You'll be able to ask a question from a few places: the Questions tab that appears in the site's left navigation area, the publisher that appears at the top of the page (where you typically post things like status updates), and, most interestingly, the search box. When you start typing a question into Facebook's search box, the site will start displaying a list of similar questions that have already been asked on the site. If yours doesn't pop up, or you really want to re-ask the same thing, you can ask it directly from the search field.

Questions can include photos and polls, and you can also tag questions with topics. If you come across someone else's question that you'd also like to know the answer to, you can opt to follow it. And the site also supports keyboard shortcuts, which should make the soon-to-be Questions addicts happy.

This could be a big, big deal for the site. Given its size, it won't take long for Facebook to build up a massive amount of data if that data is consistently reliable, Questions could turn into a viable alternative to Google for many queries. Facebook will also be integrating Questions and their answers into the Community Pages that launched in April, which already include content from Wikipedia and Facebook user status updates. Finally, this is a big SEO opportunity for the site, though a Facebook spokeswoman said that there are no plans to include the content in search engines yet.

Of course, some of this success will lie in how well Facebook's matching algorithms work, and how good typical answers are I'm not going to use this at all if the quality is on par with Yahoo Answers. Facebook will be competing on this front with Quora, a Q&A service that was cofounded by Facebook's former longtime CTO, and has been widely praised for the quality of its content (though whether or not it can maintain that quality as the site scales remains to be seen). Still, even if the quality isn't quite up to par, the massive built-in userbase means Facebook Questions will be a success regardless.

One other thing to note: Facebook does not offer any way to ask a question anonymously (remember, everything is tied to your name). While I see the benefit in forcing responses to include a user name (you can better tell if the person answering knows what they're talking about), I'm less sure that this is a good policy to enforce on the people asking the question. There may well be times when you may have a question that might appear a bit less than professional (Best place to get my friend hammered for his bachelor's party?), or perhaps a little embarrassing to admit to your peers (Why does my microwave popcorn always start smoking?).

Everyone should know at least one woman who can code her way out of a wet paper bag.

While women developers, computer programmers and hackers of all stripes are by far outnumbered by men in their field, they're hardly nonexistent. They blog, they tweet, and they do fantastic work to keep the Internet afloat. We've chosen to highlight 15 reader-recommended tech women here; if you know of others who should be on our radar specifically women with coding skills please do let us know about them in the comments section.

Some of the women on our list are Internet famous. Some, less so for now at least. Some have worked at big tech companies like Google and Apple and Adobe. Some are startup employees or fly solo. Some are hardcore hackers, some are web design-focused. We've even got a hardware geek on our list.

With a big hat-tip to all our friends on Twitter who recommended these women, here are 15 technically skilled women (in no particular order) to follow.

1. Pamela Fox

Pamela Fox is a graduate from the University of Southern California Computer Science Department, where she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees with minors in 3D animation and linguistics. She lives in Sydney, Australia and works for Google as a Wave API Developer Advocate.

2. Jeri Ellsworth

This woman is a self-taught computer chip designer and expert electrical and mechanical engineer. She taught herself to program as a kid by reading Commodore 64 manuals. Ellsworth lives in Oregon, works as a consultant, and has a serious penchant for pinball machines, of which she owns 60 or so.

3. Emily Chang

Emily Chang lives in San Francisco and works at Ideacodes, a web dev/design shop she co-founded with husband Max Kiesler. She's a nationally recognized expert in user experience and interaction design. In addition to her Twitter account, we also recommend her personal blog.

4. Hilary Mason

This data-loving lady is a computer science professor with a thing for machine learning. Mason does research at Johnson & Wales University and also works as a scientist for Bit.ly. She occasionally posts code on her personal website.

5. Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is the Wikimedia Foundation's CTO. She's also a huge open-source advocate; in fact, she's affectionately known as The Open Source Diva in certain circles. She worked for the Peace Corps, on the floor of a stock exchange, and even at a law firm before making the move to tech, where she began at Apple in 1991.

6. Leah Culver

Leah Culver is a software engineer specializing in web apps and Django development. In 2007, she co-founded Pownce, a social networking site, and sold it in late 2008. These days, she's a freelancer in San Francisco, where she cranks out applications and speaks on a number of topics relevant to web devs and designers. Culver is also an open-source advocate; we recommend checking out her blog.

7. Amanda Wixted

Amanda Wixted is a game programmer and an iPhone tech lead at Zynga. In fact, she's the one responsible for FarmVille for iPhone. Before she went to Zynga, she was a lead programmer for Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man for iPhone. And how's this for street cred: Each of the iPhone games Wixted has worked on has been in the Top 10 Free Apps in the App Store.

8. Sarah Allen

Sarah Allen has helped to develop such products as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video and OpenLaszlo, a development framework for web apps. Formerly an employee at Apple, Adobe and Macromedia (pre-dotcom crash), she now acts as CTO of mobile startup Mightyverse, does some consulting on the side, and reaches out to women in the Ruby on Rails developer community. You can keep up with Allen's goings-on via her blog.

9. Jenn Lukas

Jenn Lukas says she loves three things in life: Coffee, kittens and XHTML. Judging from her website, we'd guess that unicorns are a close fourth. She's done web design projects for such big names as ESPN, Johns Hopkins University, United Healthcare, ABC Sports and Microsoft. Lukas lives in Philadelphia and works at Happy Cog, a web design and UX consultancy.

10. Nicole Sullivan

As a performance engineer and international evangelist for Yahoo, Nicole Sullivan does as much communication and research as she does actual app building. She's an engaging, readable, and regular blogger, and a CSS expert to boot. Sullivan lives in Menlo Park, California.

11. Laura Thomson

Laura Thomson is an Internet engineer, a self-applied job title we don't see thrown around too often. But given her position as a senior software engineer at Mozilla, makers of Firefox, we can't argue with the description. She's a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) advocate, and she wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. She's an Australian who lives in Maryland.

12. Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer was one of the first 20 engineers at Google; in fact, she was hired in the same month that Google got its first round of funding. Currently, she's the company's VP of search product and user experience, which means she basically green-lights every product that gets released to the general public, including Gmail, Google Earth, Google Maps and many other apps and features.

13. Sara Chipps

This software developer is one of the minds behind Girl Develop IT, a low-cost program for women who want to learn how to code. Chipps posts regularly on her personal blog, including code samples, and she's particularly skilled in .NET development. She lives in New Jersey and works on contract.

14. Alison Gianotto

Alison Gianotto has been blogging for 15 years, give or take that means she started out before blogging was called blogging. She co-authored a few books on PHP/MySQL, too. Gianotto is currently working in New York City as the director of information architecture at a creative agency.

15. Gina Trapani

Gina Trapani is a programmer, but she's perhaps best-known for founding Lifehacker, a blog that we at Mashable like to read, ourselves. She tapered off her Lifehacker leadership in January 2009 and recently wrote a thorough guide to Google Wave. She's currently developing ThinkTank, a web-based platform for crowdsourcing insights via social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. Trapani resides in San Diego, California.

BONUS: Women Developer Lists on Twitter

Fifteen geeky, nerdy, technically talented women not enough for you? Check out these Twitter Lists of women developers and engineers:

• Terri Oda's Technical Women
• Anita Borg Institute's Women to Follow
• Grace Hopper Celebration's 2010 Speakers
• Nicole Sullivan's Grrl Geeks
• Jolie O'Dell's Coding With Ovaries
• @DevChix's Dev Chix

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[img credit: johncarney, briansolis, 4nton, adactio, allaboutgeorge]

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