Wired: Top Stories (14 unread)
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Age of Conan's Player-Vs.-Player Combat a Blessing, Curse
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 7:40pm EDT by Game | Life
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Your wait is over. Age of Conan delivers with a new combat system enabling player vs. player gaming.
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How to Geotag Your Photos
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 7:10pm EDT by How-to Wiki
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In photography, the location of a shoot can say just as much about the image as the subject itself. Give your photos that extra emotional weight by adding geotags, the bit of metadata that adds the "where" to the "what."
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Leaked Report: ISP Secretly Added Spy Code to Web Sessions, Crashing Browsers
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Threat Level
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A leaked report on a trial of ISP eavesdropping and advertising technology demonstrates that monkeying around with web traffic to increase ISP's profits can cause users to wonder if they have spyware on their computers.
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Review: Westinghouse LCD Offers Over 50 Inches for Under 2K
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Gadget Lab
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Westinghouse may be known for making light bulbs, but they're also capable of producing some damn fine LCD TVs. Their latest TV offers true 1080p HD resolution with over 50-inches of screen real estate and can be picked up for lest than 2 thousand bucks.
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In Appeal to Angry Clinton Voters, Republican Party Preps 'ClintonsForMcCain.com'
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Threat Level
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The Republican National Committee appears to be preparing to court supporters of Hillary Clinton with the registration of the Clintonsformccain.com domain.
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Checked-Bag Fee Could Be Tip of the Iceberg
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 4:00pm EDT by Autopia
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If European carriers are any indication, U.S. travelers should get ready to fork over extra cash for what have been, up to now, default features of air travel.
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Air Force Chief, Secretary Forced to Resign
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 3:08pm EDT by Danger Room
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The Air Force's top civilian and uniformed leaders are being booted out of the Pentagon. Blame a series of nuclear weapon mishaps -- and clashes with the Defense Secretary over stealth jets and spy drones.
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Wired.com's ASCII Art Contest: Enter to Win
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 11:29am EDT by Underwire
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Let your creative spirit run wild. Using only the symbols on your keyboard, create an ASCII masterpiece and enter our contest on Underwire. Details inside.
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Huffington Post Weighs Its Post-Election Future
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 10:45am EDT by Sophia Banay, Portfolio.com
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Subscribe to Portfolio magazineHuffington Post.com, the political blog community, is considering raising more money and has seen traffic triple since last year, but the big question now is how popular the site will be when the 2008 presidential campaign is over.
Founded in 2005 by author Arianna Huffington, the site was intended to provide a left-of-center audience with political commentary and analysis in the form of constantly updated blogs, penned by various talking heads and celebrities, and other members of Huffington's extensive social network.
In recent months the site has reaped the benefits of its strong partisan political tone and content, as a nail-biter of an election season nudged traffic from half a million visitors per month last August to a high of over 3 million in March (back down to 2 million by April), according to Compete.com, an internet analytics website.
In a common new-media discrepancy, the site's internal numbers, obtained via Google analytics, are even more impressive. "We're averaging 11 million to 12 million uniques a month and 100 million pageviews," says Betsy Morgan, HuffPo's C.E.O.
But a rising tide lifts all boats, and Huffington Post isn't the only website with a political bent to enjoy increased traffic in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. Sites such as Slate.com, Politico.com, and, to a lesser extent, TalkingPointsMemo.com and DailyKos.com, have all enjoyed steady increases in traffic between last April and this, the most recent period for which Compete.com has data.
While Huffington Post's growth has certainly been dramatic, detractors wonder if the site's political focus might become a liability next fall when the election is over and the nation settles back into business as usual.
Morgan doesn’t think so.
"We believe that there's no longer a historical political cycle. People are interested in politics 365 days of the year," she says.
Nevertheless, Huffington Post is making a conspicuous effort to expand its reach beyond the confines of Washington D.C. Last summer it rolled out several new vertical sites, including non-political topics such as media, business, and entertainment. Just last week the site introduced another new channel, green, which will focus on eco-news and trends. And Morgan says there are more on the way.
Also new? The site's tagline, "the internet newspaper," introduced in 2008. The line de-emphasizes politics in favor of a more neutral, newsy tone. According to Morgan, over half of the site's traffic is now for non-political stories.
Barry Parr, a media analyst at JupiterResearch, says Huffington Post is better positioned than most political websites to weather the transition to a post-election U.S., although he adds that a slight drop-off in the site's traffic after election fever subsides wouldn't be surprising.
A bigger concern, especially as the site navigates the wider waters of general news coverage—placing itself in the same category as newspapers and news sites that already exist—is the vulnerability of its advertising-driven business model.
"The challenge for anybody in the news business is that a general news audience is not a very desirable one to advertisers," says Parr. That's because news audiences, unlike those for beauty or sports sites, don't come packaged into convenient demographic bundles—18-to-34-year-old males, for example. And for Huffington Post, which isn't attracting the volume of visitors that sites like Yahoo or AOL do, the appeal for advertisers may be limited.
The answer to sustainability might lie in the site’s staking out more niche areas of credible coverage, as it has so successfully done with politics.
Parr thinks an obvious place to start is media, where HuffingtonPost has published relatively strong, although less prominent, content. "That's an area their audience is going to be interested in," he says. And with a dearth of mainstream publications focusing explicitly on the media business, and Huffington Post's roster of plugged-in contributors, the site stands a good shot of owning this area.
For now, however, the Huffington Post homepage is dominated by half-inch-tall red block letters, "…152 Days And Counting…" until November 4, 2008. That's the day of the U.S. presidential election, and quite possibly, the day the game changes for HuffingtonPost.
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Verizon Wireless to buy Alltel for $5.9 Billion
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 10:09am EDT by Associated Press
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Verizon agrees to buy Alltel for $5.9 billion, creating the largest cellular carrier in the U.S. With the assumption of Alltel's debt, the total cost is $28.1 billion. The new wireless behemoth would have more than 71 million subscribers; Alltel's 13.2 million subscribers are mainly in rural areas away from the coast.
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Labels Taunt Radio With Playlist Smackdown
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 9:41am EDT by Listening Post
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Major labels and big radio have locked horns in a public relations battle that's beginning to resemble a spat between bratty youngsters. The latest twist: a thematic playlist from the labels that taunts radio for being greedy.
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What is the Ultimate Apocalypsemobile?
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 5:00am EDT by Autopia
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When the world turns to crap and we're wandering the wastelands scrounging for food and fuel while fighting off zombies, what do you want to be driving? We'll be in a Honda CRX.
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Northeastern U. Study Secretly Tracked Cell Phone Users
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 1:28am EDT by Associated Press
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It would have been illegal to do it in the United States (Probably. We hope, anyway.) So Northeastern University commissioned a study to secretly tracked the movements of 100,000 cell phone users somewhere else. They won't say where it took place or what phone company cooperated in this first-of-its-kind survey.
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June 5, 1833: Ms. Software, Meet Mr. Hardware
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred
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1833: Ada Byron meets Charles Babbage. He designed an early computer, and she would write the first computer program.
Ada's father was the poet Lord Byron, but her parents separated when she was a month old. Her famous -- and poetically wild -- father went to Greece, and she never knew him.
Ada was 15 when she met the Cambridge mathematics professor Babbage 175 years ago today. Babbage had already received funding from Parliament to build a "difference engine" that could do mathematical calculations. While that project was still unfinished, he conceived in 1834 a new and broader idea: an "analytical engine" that "could not only foresee but could act on that foresight."
In 1835, Ada married William King, who inherited the title Earl of Lovelace in 1838, making her Countess of Lovelace. They had three children, but Ada's family and social responsibilities did not keep her from continuing her study of advanced mathematics.
Babbage, meanwhile, gave a seminar on the analytic engine in Turin, Italy, in 1841. Countess Ada translated an article about the presentation and showed it to Babbage. He was apparently better at conceiving things than explaining them (unheard of in a mathematician, eh?) and suggested that Ada expand the article with her own notes.
When published in 1843, those notes ran three times as long as the original article. Ada predicted that a computing machine could compose music, draw graphics and find application, so to speak, in business and science.
She also wrote a plan for the analytical engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. It's now considered the first computer program. The countess originated the idea of a loop in a program, which she likened to a "snake biting its tail."
Ada was also a friend to novelist Charles Dickens, scientist Michael Faraday, inventor Charles Wheatstone and David Brewster, creator of the kaleidoscope. She was an opium addict who had numerous affairs and gambled away a lot of her family fortune. She died of cancer in 1852, two weeks shy of her 37th birthday.
The Countess of Lovelace has attained recent fame through Betty Toole's 1992 edition of her correspondence, Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers and Lynn Hershman-Leeson's 1997 film Conceiving Ada, starring Tilda Swinton.
The U.S. Department of Defense named a computer language "Ada" in her honor.
Source: Betty Toole