Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Latest from Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Twitter: Here’s a Half Billion Dollar Idea
I’ve been watching the controversy and community panic around the Tr.im shutdown and re-emergence with a bit of bemused detachment. The problem stemmed from the fact that Tr.im couldn’t seem to think of any way to make money with their URL shortening service, despite the fact that they’re pulling in close to a million monthly ...
Paul Buchheit: ‘Friendfeed Won’t Die (Anytime Soon)’
Following the announcement that Friendfeed had been acquired by social network giant Facebook, panic immediately spread throughout the existing community that the original service would go by the wayside. Robert Scoble even quipped in a recent podcast that “Friendfeed is dead.” Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble just released a video over at Techcrunch in which ...
Bleeding Edge: Scalable Optical Processing
More from the “Moore’s Law Can’t Die” department today from Ars Technica’s Chris Lee: One of the main barriers to reducing the size of optical components is the wavelength of light. Visible light has a wavelength of around 500nm, so devices that manipulate light, like lenses and waveguides, must have comparable sizes. At least up ...
YouTube as a Potential Indicator of the Future of Healthcare Reform
David Burch posted some interesting data (as he often does) at the Tubemogul blog analyzing a particularly hot topic through the lens of YouTube’s rating system. Since the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, the administration has been posting videos to YouTube quite regularly. When the President went on his campaign to implement his ...
Twitter Crusades Against Paid Whuffie [uSocial]
Are you ready for another round of holier-than-thou technology pundits to tell you how much better they are than certain other unnamed Twitter users? Do you miss the blogosphere beat-downs of companies like Izea, but you’re just tired of hearing the alliterative term “pay-per-post?” Do you love being preached at and warned not to do ...
I’d Appreciate It If You’d Stop Calling My Tweets ‘Pointless’
I keep seeing this study performed by Pear Analytics bandied about the blogosphere as if it were some sort of gospel handed down by the Lords of the Internet that conclusively proves that 40% of all Twitter missives are pointless babble. I’m surprised no one picked up on this at any point in their analysis, ...
Stickam Quietly Turns Off Private Video Chat
Stickam, one of the major players jockeying for the title “YouTube of Live Video,” has quietly turned off one of their major features in an attempt to curb incidences of a troubling nature on their service. One of the blogs I’ve followed over the years has been Trench Reynold’s MyCrimeSpace, a site built around chronicling ...
Bleeding Edge: DNA Origami Process Chipsets
In almost literal bleeding edge news today, a Reuters report says that IBM is utilizing the very building blocks of life to engineer future chip designs. "Basically, this is telling us that biological structures like DNA actually offer some very reproducible, repetitive kinds of patterns that we can actually leverage in semiconductor processes," IBM research ...
Do Certain Citizens Deserve More Online Privacy?
Over a portion of last year, I closely covered the story of a website launched to track and rate the activities of uniformed peace officers. The site is called RateMyCop, and it’s a sort of Yelp for police officers. The controversy around the site began around March 10th back in 2008, when the Tempe, Arizona ...
176 Newspapers Line Up to Jump Off a Cliff Like Lemmings
Andy Plesser has constructed a wonderful headline this morning that was so rife for a re-write that I simply couldn’t resist. The original headline was “Journalism Online has 500 Newspapers Lined-up for New, Paid System, Report.” In the actual post, he explains that the company Journalism Online has signed 500 letters of intent from online ...
