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Failblog, Engadget, and Joystiq Now Selling Video Ads Through Viddler AdWorks

Did you know that FAIL Blog serves up 22 million video views per month, and Engadget gets at least 2.3 million monthly views for its gadget videos, while Joystiq gets another 2 million? All three blogs use Viddler, which is now selling ads directly for its top content providers though its just-launched Viddler AdWorks. Advertisers can see a directory of the top three dozen video producers on Viddler and buy ads on their videos (overlay, pre-roll, and post-roll).

Viddler is selling ads against 30 million views a month collectively from those top producers, out of a total of 36 million views for all the videos uploaded to Viddler. FAIL Blog, which puts up videos of pratfalls and people acting stupidly, on its own accounts for 73 percent of Viddler’s video ad inventory, and is a big reason Viddler’s total views have gone from 10 million in January, 2009 to 36 million in August, 2009. After that, the most popular Viddler producers are Engadget and Joystiq, which are both owned by AOL, followed by niche video like WineLibraryTV (142,424 monthly views) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal marketing videos, which get only 27,070 views per month).

It quickly dwindles down to very small numbers per show, but Viddler is hoping to change that with its new ad network, and get more of its partners to put more of their best videos on Viddler instead of on YouTube or Blip.tv or Brightcove. As big as FAIL Blog is for Viddler, it streams even more videos directly on YouTube, where it has the 7th-most watched channel.

For ads that Viddler sells directly it is offering video partners ad rates starting at $3 per thousand views (CPMs) for overlays and $10 for pre-rolls. A video show that attracts a highly-focused, affluent niche audience like WineLibrary.TV can command a $10 CPM for overlays. These rates compare to about 80-cent CPMs that video producers currently get for the Google AdWords ads Viddler places in their videos today, and will continue to use for any inventory it can’t sell.

The other attractive element of Viddler’s AdWorks is that video publishers can choose to sell their own ads if they think they can get a higher rate than Viddler. In that case, they pay Viddler a flat $2 CPM for overlays, and $4 CPMs for pre-rolls. So if AOL’s (or Engadget’s) salesforce can get better than a $5 CPM for overlay ads, it is better off selling ads itself ($5-$2=the $3 CPM they would get from Viddler selling the ads).

Video partners also have the option to sign up for a business account, where they pay per gigabyte and can either opt out of ads entirely or participate in AdWorks to offset their subscription costs. So Viddler straddles the video hosting space between a free ad-supported model (like Blip.tv) and a hosted subscription model (like Brightcove). A video producer will have to weigh that flexibility and the guaranteed CPMs Viddler is offering against the broader reach of a YouTube or even Blip.tv, which is about twice the size of Viddler in terms of videos streamed and can now place ads in YouTube as well.

Viddler remains a niche player in the online video hosting industry, but it’s never taken VC money and seems to be carving out a nice little business for itself.

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Twitter’s New ‘Lists’ Feature Finally Introduces Grouping, Offers An Alternative To The SUL

Twitter has just announced a new feature that is sure to excite anyone who has been waiting for the site to offer an alternative to its Suggested User List. Appropriately called ‘Lists’, the new feature will allow anyone to make a list of other Twitter users and label it appropriately (for example, I could make a list called ‘TC Staff’), then share that list with other members. Twitter writes that the feature is still in limited testing, but that it will eventually be rolled out to all users.

By default any lists you create will be public, though you’ll also be able to hide them. If you choose to leave them publicly viewable, other Twitter users will be able to hit a button to “Follow this list” so they can add everyone at once. This is a big deal — until now the only convenient way to start mass following people on Twitter has been to use its own curated SUL. I won’t be surprised if we see some users vying to become the best ‘list makers’, offering comprehensive lists of celebrities, news portals, bloggers, and more. It will also be interesting to see if Twitter aggregates the most comprehensive Lists and includes them as part of the signup process (which would effectively just be the SUL in a different form).

Twitter’s post describing the new feature isn’t particularly detailed, but it seems like this may have a larger impact than just discovery — it could also potentially be used for Grouping, a feature that some third party apps have offered but that hasn’t been officially supported by Twitter. In short, this will let you group the people you follow into different list (say, one for News, one for close friends, and so on), and then quickly jump between them. Twitter will be supporting the new listing feature through its API, so we can likely expect this functionality to be extended to most third party applications that don’t already support grouping.

Also worth noting: a logical extension to grouping will be to support search within groups, which could help users weed out spam. Of course this is Twitter we’re talking about, so it could still be quite a while before we see this happen.

‘Lists’ may compete with sites like WeFollow that specialize in listing top Twitter users in various categories (on the other hand, these sites could actually become even more popular if they become the best places to find the most comprehensive Lists). It’s also likely going to replace TweepML, the open standard format for sharing groups of Twitter users.

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Gadget Deals of the Day

Sorry for the late deals today—it's been a hectic morning. Hopefully we can make up for our tardiness with some great deals, be sure to check out the 42" Samsung.

Top Deals:
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Computing and Peripherals:
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Personal Portables and Peripherals:
• Olympus Stylus 550WP 10MP 3X Digital Camera (Waterproof) for $139.00 plus free shipping (normally $119 - use coupon code: CAM9285).
• Klipsch Custom-1 Noise Isolating Headphones for $39.99 plus free shipping (normally $50).
• Nokia E75 Smartphone (Unlocked, Quad-Band GSM) for $244.99 plus free shipping (normally $369 - use coupon code: 07ZR$LVQP18BSZ).
• Nikon D5000 12.3MP dSLR Body for $585.99 plus free shipping (normally $636 - use coupon code: CAM9145).
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• Garmin nüvi 850 4.3" GPS for $165 plus free shipping (normally $250).

Hobomodo:
• Chex Mix Cereal for $0 (use this form).
• Subscription to Rouge Magazine for $0 (use this form).
• Sample Starbucks Oct. 2-5, get a coupon for a free tall coffee (in-store) for $0 (use this form).
• 3 1/2" LED Flashlight @ Harbor Freight w/ Coupon for $0 (use this form).
• Fable II: Episode 1 (360) for $0 (normally $29.99).
• ZOOZ Control Pro (iPhone) for $0 (normally $1.99).

If a deal looks too good to be true, investigate the store and see if it's a good, reputable place to buy. Safe shopping!

[Thanks TechDealDigger, Fat Wallet, GamerHotline, Cheap College Gamers, CheapStingyBargains and TechBargains.]

Twitter to Launch User Created Follow Lists

One of the challenges that new Twitter users face is finding interesting users to follow. There are several third-party tools to help you do it (like Lunch and TweepML), but we’d love for Twitter lists to come from the source — Twitter itself.

And soon they will. Twitter is about to rollout Lists, a feature currently in testing, that will allow you to create your own custom lists of Twitter users that others can then follow with one click.

Lists will be public by default, which means your creations will be available for the world to view. Even better is that developers will be able to tap into the functionality to add the official Twitter Lists feature into their apps. Pretty nifty, right?

Here’s an excerpt from Twitter’s post on the announcement:

“The idea is to allow people to curate lists of Twitter accounts. For example, you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.

Lists are public by default (but can be made private) and the lists you’ve created are linked from your profile. Other Twitter users can then subscribe to your lists. This means lists have the potential to be an important new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.

We started working on this feature because of the frequent requests we received from people who were looking for a better way to organize information on Twitter. Of course, that means not just twitter.com—the Platform team will follow up in a few days with information on the Lists API. This will allow developers to add support for Lists into your favorite Twitter apps.”

Update: Twitter has confirmed that they will release the Twitter Lists API on day one of the feature launch.

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Reviews: Twitter

Tags: Lists, twitter

Tags: twitter

Google Acquisitions and Investments Map Shows How Much Google Likes Buying Stuff

Google sure has a lot of money! And man, does it like to spend it! This map shows all of Google's acquisitions and investments, detailing just how vast and diverse Google's interests are. [Meet the Boss via The Awl]

If Your Twitter Followers Really Love You, They’ll Create a Fantar

Passionate fans go out of their way to share their enthusiasm with the world, sometimes even going so far as to alter their Twitter avatars to take on the likeness of or support their favorite artist, sports team, or social media site.

We’ve already seen sites like Twibbon allow users to rally around causes by updating their avatars, but a new service powered by Twitter photo sharing site, Tweetphoto, called Fantar, could prove be to be the easiest way for brands, bands, and celebrities to rally fan support on Twitter.

The premise is simple. Whether you’re Britney Spears or KISS, you can work with Tweetphoto to create a fantar that gives Twitterers a one-click way to transform their existing avatar into one that includes your branding and artwork. As a fan, you can instantly show you’re mad about that teen icon or your favorite Twitter app, no photo editing skills required.

The current selection of fantars is limited, but it does include lovable artists like John Legend, KISS, Demi Lovato, and Lenny Kravitz. There’s even fantars for the San Diego Chargers and Mashable. Depending on your selection, you could be presented with a plethora of different creative options to display your fan status to your Twitter followers.

Just find the fantar you want, login with your Twitter credentials, and voilà — a new Twitter avatar. Though, do note that in the process, Tweetphoto will send out an automatic promotional tweet in the process, which we’re not exactly fanatical about.

Will you use fantar to transform your Twitter avatar? Tell us why or why not in the comments.

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Reviews: Mashable, TweetPhoto, Twitter

Tags: fantar, twitter, twitter avatar

Tags: twitter

If I Had One Million Dollars I Wouldn’t Build This Awesome Batmobile Replica

I have to admit that this $1 million 700hp Batmobile, built over a 1973 Lincoln Continental chassis, looks amazing. Even without seeing its interior, which apparently is loaded with gadgets, from rear-view cameras to a plasma TV.

However, if I had $1M I would rather buy other things, like a house, 200,000 Shake Shack burgers, or a green dress. Or, if I was living in Sweden—like the crazy Swede who made it—I would buy a kick ass sailboat to take my friends around, and fish out mackerels. [Bilfeber via Geeky Gadgets via Dvice]

Nvidia Fermi Next-Gen Graphics Architecture Has 512 Cores for Radioactively Melting Faces

Fermi is Nvidia's new GPU architecture that's going to be the basis for all of its upcoming graphics cards. With 512 cores and 3 billion transistors, it will nuke Crysis.

The architecture really is a huge leap forward, according to people who've gone through it in-depth. Interestingly, the huge focus for Fermi is GPU computing. The first actual goods coming out using Fermi should be the GT300 series cards, which, besides the 512 cores sorted into 16 streaming processors with 32 cores each, uses a brand new GDDR5 memory setup.

PC Perspective has an epic write-up breaking down Fermi in detail that's worth a whirl, and of course Nvidia's got lots of fluff themselves all about Fermi. Strangely, they don't explain the name, which sounds like a sad little poodle. [Nvidia, PC Perspective, Anandtech]

Tablet Part Two: The true significance of the Tablet

Little hint: It ain't about technology.

OneRiot Believes It Has A Way To Monetize The Realtime Web With RiotWise

If you’re reading this, you clearly use the Internet. And if you use the Internet, you clearly know Google AdSense. It’s pretty much everywhere (even on this site in places). But as much as Google would like you to believe they are serving up ads that users want to click on because they are relevant, these are still ads, and most people do not want to click on them. OneRiot’s new product, RiotWise, has an interesting spin on relevant ads.

You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed.

The reason they would want to do this should be obvious: Clicks-throughs. Any content producer who is likely to use such a program undoubtedly already has a strategy in place to monetize their site. That is quite likely based around the traffic their site receives, and RiotWise’s goal would be to help the content producer increase that traffic. But more importantly, it would be to increase the traffic by sending highly-targeted readers whose intent is to find specific content being displayed on the page, OneRiot CEO Kimbal Musk tell us.

The obvious question is: How can OneRiot be sure this is relevant content and not just a spam blog looking for clicks? As a realtime search engine, OneRiot already devotes a large percentage of its team to spam prevention, OneRiot general manager Tobias Peggs says. And OneRiot’s engine is already doing the hard work of going through millions of pieces of content to determine what is relevant and what isn’t. With RiotWise, it’s just a question of taking the content from the providers who are using the service and pulling it out to highlight it.

So where will it be highlighted? Initially, RiotWise will roll out on OneRiot’s main site. This sponsored content would be housed in a right-hand column, separate from the main realtime feed, as you can see in the picture above. Yes, it looks a lot like AdSense, but it’s content. This aspect of RiotWise will be launching next week.

But the bigger picture for RiotWise is to include this sponsored content in the feeds that OneRiot sends to all of its partners. This means that third-party sites using OneRiot search results will eventually see RiotWise as well. Also, it means that places which pull in one OneRiot feeds, such a some Twitter feeds, will start getting these sponsored results as well.

Musk realizes that it’s important to be delicate when inserting ads into streams. He notes that just as with sponsored results, sponsored items in feed streams will be clearly labeled as such. He also notes that it’s important not to overload users with too many of these sponsored results in that setting. Ideally, OneRiots algorithms would be tailored to serve up just one sponsored result a day that a user would want to click on, he says.

The key to all of this is the realtime aspect of OneRiot. Because people are becoming more and more interested in realtime search, getting access to information that is going on right now, OneRiot has been seeing strong click-through rates on items and big numbers when it comes to users doing multiple searches, we’re told. And OneRiot’s RiotFeeds product, which sends OneRiot results surrounding certain topics over to Twitter has been gaining popularity, and is also seeing big-time click-throughs on its links.

A solution like RiotWise seems like the perfect idea for a new or second-tier blog that feels its content is good, but isn’t getting the exposure that some of the big guys do. As long as the content is good, OneRiot is happy to accept it, and strike a deal with the producer to take some fees on a CPC-basis, the majority of which would then be handed over to OneRiot’s partners that serve up its content.

“This is the way to monetize the real-time web,” Musk says.

As I mentioned above, the plan is to launch RiotWise on OneRiot first as early as Monday of next week. A couple weeks after that, the company hopes to roll out the sponsored results to its partners, letting the money sharing begin.

A month ago, OneRiot raised a new $7 million third round of funding.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google Wave: There Will Be Backlash

Have you gotten your Google Wave invite yet? Just kidding — they’re not out yet. The team (which is based in Australia) decided to push them out later today so they could be up to deal with issues surrounding the massive influx of new users. And judging from the response on the web, “massive” is also the perfect word to describe the anticipation for the service.

Ever since it was unveiled at Google I/O this past May, it seems that everyone wants to know everything about Wave. And yesterday, when it was revealed that a big roll-out to more than just developers was around the corner, interest spiked again. Since then, the term has not left Twitter’s Trend Topics area. But there is always a downside to so much hype, and I’m pretty certain we’re going to see it in the coming days and weeks with Google Wave too: Backlash.

Actually, some amount of backlash started immediately after it was first revealed in May. While we were wowed after a hands-on demonstration we got, writing that Wave “drips with ambition,” there were plenty in the press and general public who quickly jumped on the other side of the coin. Upon seeing the public demonstation, reactions ranged from “Wow” to “I don’t get it.” But the real test will come later today when many of those people actually get to use it for the first time.

We have been using Wave since Google I/O, and while it has been very buggy, the team has worked hard to iron out a lot of the kinks since then. Still, there will be plenty who begin using it today who will be disappointed. It’s a tricky situation for the Wave team. From the get go, they’ve said that the ultimate vision is for Wave to be a new communication platform for the web — meaning they hope hundreds, if not thousands, of other services are built with Wave as the backbone. But that’s a long ways out. Today, all we have to play with is Google Wave, the service, which is still very early in its lifespan.

It’s really Google Wave’s ambition that is a dual-edged sword. Because the team is trying to do so much with the product, there will be plenty of people who find it confusing and cluttered. And to some extent, they’re right. But anyone who labels it a failure at this point is either a curmudgeon or an extremely shortsighted person claiming to have foresight. It’s a nice thought that every product should be a taut bundle of execution with an easy path to monetization. But the web, and really the world, would be a much more boring place if that were the case.

Part of Google’s strategy with Wave, and part of the reason they’re putting it out there early, is to see what developers and the users make of it. In that regard, it’s not all that different from Twitter, which started as a simple status-update side project, and transformed into something much different thanks to its users and the third-party developer community around it.

Wave is much more complicated than Twitter, and that could well be a downside (remember, keep it simple, stupid). But there’s a difference between clutter and ambition, especially when you have the resources of Google behind you. Shooting for the Moon is a good thing, and Wave has a unique opportunity to do that.

I’m not saying Wave will be a success. Many of the most ambitious projects often crash and burn — it’s the nature of high risk/high reward. But we’re still way too early in its lifespan to make that call for Wave. I can see the backlash already, and I think we should give it a chance. The end result could well be something that greatly benefits us all, but getting to that point, if it ever does, will take time.

[images: Paramount Vantage]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Facebook’s Plan To Trounce Orkut In India May Be Working

With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up. But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August.

This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut.

There are a couple of key factors that could be attributed to Orkut’s recent drop in visitors. First, in India, Facebook has been pushing out an aggressive campaign on its social network to get users to import their friends from Orkut with a special Orkut import tool. It basically lets them find friends on other social networks, like Orkut, who are also on Facebook and makes it easy to send a friend requests to those contacts. The purpose of the tool is to make it easy for users to quickly find new friends and establish their social presence on Facebook. The social network offers this in the U.S. for Gmail, AIM and other contact platforms. But this new tool in India is for Orkut specifically. Facebook users are also seeing is the Orkut contact importer in Brazil, Orkut’s home base and stronghold where Facebook is clawing for market share.

Another reason for Facebook’s growth in India could be the recent launch of Facebook Lite. India was one of the original target markets for the lightweight version of the social network, since it is particularly useful in developing countries where high speed Internet connections are sparse or non-existent.

Facebook has been eying India’s huge market and steadily adding features that help the social network establish its reach in the growing country. For example, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam, in May of this year.

It’s plainly obvious that Facebook is growing fast in India and could quite possibly overtake Orkut in the next few months. Meanwhile, other social networks are dropping like flies in the race; with Yahoo shutting down SpotM and MySpace considering layoffs in India because of the its lack of traction among users.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Lunch’s Twitter Lists Help Find Who to Follow

One of the first problems new users have upon joining Twitter is figuring out who to follow. And even power users who’ve been using the service for a while appreciate being turned on to other Twitter users with similar interests.

Member-created review site Lunch is launching what could shape up to be a nice solution to this problem with “Twitter Lists,” a way for users to create their own lists of Twitterers in particular areas or topics and include editorial content about what makes them follow-worthy.

Think of it also as a more elegant way of handling Follow Friday — instead of a string of woefully incomplete @usernames because you couldn’t fit everyone in, just send a link to one of your Twitter Lists.

We wrote recently about TweepML which similarly provides the ability to group up Twitter users into contained lists as well (you can follow the Mashable team here). Lunch’s implementation lacks the ability to one-click subscribe to a whole list at once, but adds some other nice functionality and has an arguably more user-friendly user interface.

For one thing, you can easily import your entire Twitter following list to kickstart your process. Then you can sort and select from the list, order it, add individual comments about members of the list, and share it out on Facebook, Twitter, by email and more. You can even send out an @reply to the people on your list to let them know they were included.

Integration with the Lunch site adds further features to the lists by tapping into its Similarity Network to help put the creator of each list into context. Based on your own profile you can see how relevant the list creator is to you via the engine’s calculation of your shared interests and opinions.

Let us know what you think — will list-like tools save us from streams of undifferentiated lists on Follow Friday? Do you see making use of Twitter Lists to help find new tweeps to follow?

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: Lunch, Recommendations, TweepML, twitter, Twitter Lists, ugc

Tags: twitter

Is The Palm Pre Tanking?

Palm says that they sold about 810,000 Palm Pre units. However, that figure may be bogus, according to analyst David Eller. He says that this includes all units sold to resellers, not only activated Pres. This may spell t-r-o-u-b-l-e:

We have been perplexed by a disconnect between PALM's device units sold and our estimates of store level sell through. According to PALM's reported sell through, inventory increased by 13k units and since the ‘vast majority' of both the device units shipped and the device units sold were units of the Pre, there couldn't be an inventory problem. The gap between the two is only 13k.

However, since the company recognizes revenue on sell in to the channel and the company defines device units sold as units that have been shipped from Sprint (their primary customer) to either customers or second tier distributors, PALM could offer investors a high number of units shipped but still have a glut of inventory in the channel. We believe that channel inventory is currently about 11 weeks, which we believe will pressure reorder rates and make it more difficult to sell high ASP products going forward.

Eleven weeks of inventory in the channel is an staggering number. If true, that may explain the fast price cuts by resellers: First a $50 discount to $150 with a rebate, then slashed to $100 in Amazon, and then the all-mighty Walmart cutting it to a ridiculous $80.

It will also explain Sprint CEO Dan Hesse's less than enthusiastic comments about the Palm Pre, when he admitted in a Charlie Rose interview that the Pre couldn't play in the same league as the iPhone, "the Michael Jordan" of smartphones.

Eller notes that the investors are not aware of this: "We polled several of the investors who attended the Boston road show lunch and each was under the impression that sell through translated into customer activations. How can this be?"

Palm, however, claims that their number are clear. Talking to Digital Daily's John Paczkowski, they had this to say:

The sell-through data we post reflects carriers' sales to their customers. For example, Sprint customers include consumers who buy in a Sprint store, and Sprint retail partners such as Best Buy and RadioShack. We rely on our wireless carriers to provide us with sell-through data, and we note this fact in our 10Q.

So, is the Palm Pre tanking or not? Is it meeting the company's expectations at all? Could this be connected to the rumors about Verizon ditching the Pre? Only time will tell. [Digital Daily]

Facebook Just Made It Super Easy To Put Connect On Your Site

Facebook Connect launched to the public less than a year ago, and already it’s seen an incredible amount of traction. Unfortunately, for those people with little to no coding experience, implementing Facebook Connect has seemed like more trouble that it was worth. Today, Facebook has an answer: Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground.

Facebook writes that “you can now incorporate Facebook Connect into your site in 3 easy steps.” The process is simple. First, you enter the name of your site and its URL. Then Facebook asks you to download and then upload a special file to your site’s main directory. And.. that’s about it. Once you’ve done that, Facebook will present you with its Playground — a list of code snippets you can embed on your site to round out the functionality, including Login buttons, profile photos, publishing items to News Feeds, and rendering photos of a user’s friends.

Deciding to put their little wizard to the test, I tried to implement Connect on one of my personal sites (note that I’ve never tried to implement Connect before so I really didn’t know what I was doing). And to my surprise, it worked: I managed to have a very basic form of Connect up and running on my site within all of two minutes. It will obviously take longer to make sure the new icons and buttons play nicely with your site’s design, but it’s really surprisingly easy.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Navy’s Future Command Center Makes Star Trek a Reality

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SPAWAR) is the Navy's new command center designed to create an "unfair advantage" over enemy forces. And I'll be damned if they didn't set it up to look like the USS Enterprise.

Spaceship-like setups include a 135-inch viewscreen, huge multi-touchscreen desks and fancy equipment and screens being scattered all over the damned place. Essentially, it looks like the future.

All this stuff is designed to tackle things like network-enabled warfare and management and systems designs, somewhat boring stuff compared to laser guns and the like, but probably way more important in future conflicts. In any case, I look forward to the time when they put all this stuff on a spaceship.

[CNET via Fast Company]

NGC4522 Is Where God’s God Lives

The new camera in the Hubble keeps sending mindblowing desktop wallpapers to Earth. This is NGC4522, a massive galaxy in the massive Virgo Cluster, where galaxies orbit around at 6.2 million miles per hour. NGC 4402 is just as impressive.

Click on the image above to enlarge or download ultra-high definition version from here

Click on the image above to enlarge or download ultra-high definition version from here

According to astronomers—those lovely crazy people working in offices with the best views—the speed is so high that, that the galaxies rip apart the intercluster medium. This is a really thin gas but, when the galaxies race through it, it can cause enough pressure to push the galaxies internal material into the cluster itself.

I don't know about you, but looking at these I feel terribly small. Like Mark just said: "That's where God's God lives." [Discover]

DIY Google Street View Camera Lets You Infuriate Shut-Ins For Fun and Profit

Google's spent millions of dollars sending its Street View cars around the world, photographing streets so you can see them on the internet. And now you can replicate this for some reason.

Created for a class at West Point, Roy D. Ragsdale created his prototype setup using a laptop, $300 of off-the-shelf components and open source software. As he drives it around, it captures eight 1280x1024 jpegs that are then stitched together and uploaded to Google Earth.

It's certainly impressive, and I can see how one could want to make Street-View-like images of private property. But for most of us, I think letting Google do the heavy lifting is working out just fine. [IEEE Spectrum via Make]

Weebly Launches New Managed Site Builder For Educators And Students

School’s back in session, and Weebly, a startup that makes it super easy to build websites using a drag-and-drop interface, is looking to capitalize on it. Today Weebly is launching a new product geared directly at educators and their students, allowing schoolchildren who may not familiar with the basics of HTML or CSS to craft their own multimedia online blogs and reports with a minimal amount of effort.

The new product is similar to the normal Weebly editor, but with a few key differences. For one, Weebly has stripped out all of its monetization and retail features that wouldn’t be applicable to students. And more importantly, the site is letting teachers manage the accounts of all of their students. Because schools obviously wouldn’t want some of this content to be avilable to the public, teachers can elect to keep their entire class’s accounts set to Private, which means only the student and their teacher can see it.

There are countless potential uses for this, but the obvious ones are for personal blogs and for reports (you can see an example of what a Weebly report might look like here). Teachers can also create their own publicly available class websites, allowing students to easily upload assignments and giving parents a place to look to see what their children are up to at school.

At this point most of these features are pretty basic, but I see quite a bit of potential here. Imagine letting teachers build out individual student profile pages, where students would be greeted with photos, their recent grades, and maybe a personal note from their teacher (I imagine that would be more popular with younger kids). There are obviously some education products already out there, like Blackboard, but most of these are pretty spartan and data driven — Weebly would give teachers a new degree of customization and it’s more user friendly to boot. That said, schools are notoriously political, so Weebly may have some trouble getting its foot in the door.

Weebly is offering the product for free for teachers with up to 40 students, and then $1 per additional student account, purchased in packs of 10. Teachers can also sign up for Weebly Pro for $40/year, and all of the pro features extend to their students. There’s also a discount for teachers who refer each other.

As part of today’s news, Weebly has also announced that it has partnered with National History Day, a program held in schools across the country where over 500,000 students create a research project describing or reenacting a historical event. One option students have is to build a web site for their project, and this year Weebly will be the only officially sanctioned way to do that.

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Chumby Reborn As Chumby One, Now Less Beanbaggy

The original Chumby was soft, cuddly, and cute. The new Chumby One is uptight, all-business, and commercial. I hate it. The draw to the original Chumby was that there was nothing like it on the market two years ago. You could load it up with all sorts of pre-made widgets like YouTube, weather, news, or one you made thanks to the open source hardware and software. Sure, the upcoming Chumby One still has the original capabilities if not more thanks to the upgraded 454MHz CPU, but it doesn't have the same crazy beanbag form factor. It's missing the "cute."