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POPSHow Free is that Free Stock Photo? Free stock photography websites are very popular these days, and there are literally hundreds if not thousands to choose from. Besides selection, quality, and featureset the one factor that is critical in evaluating these websites is the image licensing or terms of use. It doesn’t matter how many images, or what quality the images being offered are if you can’t use them in your personal or commercial work (the way you want.)
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POPS 5 Most Unusual Airsoft Guns We've compiled a quick list of 5 unusual and odd airsoft guns that you'd most likely NOT see at your local skirmish or friends house. You won't find a single MP5, AK47, M4, or M16 in this list.
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POPS 6 YouTube Airsoft AK 47 Videos 6 videos from YouTube of Airsoft AK47's in action. From unboxing, to modding, to shooting to complete jackassery, these video clips don't disappoint. AK's from CYMA and UTG are featured.
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POPS Well R4 MP7 AEG Airsoft Rifle Overview of the R4 MP7 airsoft sub machine gun from Well. This compact AEG fires at 260 FPS and features a full metal gearbox as well as a foldable foregrip and extendable stock.
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POPSYahoo! Shopping is a Steaming Pile of Crap! Yahoo! Shopping is the absolute worst shopping portal online and the smart and taltented people at Yahoo! should be ashamed to have it online. The only redeeming quality is the newly announced Woot! tie in.
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POPSSPAM in Mahalo Possible? While browsing the Jesus in Food page on Mahalo I noticed a rather spam-like link referenced. Do spammers have a way of exploiting Mahalo using bait and switch techniques?
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POPSAmazon FPS System Lame? Whilst reading Hacker News at ycombinator dot com I came across the following piece from an experience Amazon FPS user. I have to say I'm not surprised, and mentioned briefly in a previous blog posting about how Amazon's success is still in limbo (at least in this category dominated by Auth.net and others) The requirement of an Amazon account is crazy, talk about a hurdle pre-checkout!
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POPSAdult Social Network Zivity Will Fail ... Miserably Web 3.0 Startup Checklist: 1. New Take on a Social Network: CHECK 2. Built With Uber Cool Rails: CHECK 3. Investment from Rich Web 1.0 Moguls: CHECK 4. Crazy Ass Business Model: CHECK The idea for Zivity is good, but the execution is not in line with the market, and I know a little something about the pron market. I mean who doesn't? According to VB, they want the photos to be "fine erotica" submitted by hot people where paid subscribers vote and follow these local hotty attention whores. Hmmm sounds a lot like MySpace ... which is free ... and prob has 1000 times more local hotties to stalk than Zivity has. Where do I sign up? Oh that's right I can't (it's in private beta) Pron is free all over the mighty Interweb. There are free social networks, free attention whores, free fine erotica photos and free adult blogs to keep everyone more than satisfied.
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POPSTripAdvisor Acquires Where I've Been; Are They Crazy? TripAdvisor is reportedly paying $3,000,000 for a free application, that runs on another free application (at the pleasure of the latter app). Are they crazy or does this make business sense? Hmmm, they now own the #1 and #2 apps in this category on Facebook and are displaying a new trend in tech spending.
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POPSSkype Outage Highlights Mahalo's Faults? No offense Allen but you're just plain wrong here. Yes Mahalo doesn't pick up "new" news as quickly as automated bots, again just like Alexa as long as you understand how the data is collected this shouldn't be a surprise. The important question here is; Will the Skype outage of Thursday August 16th 2007 really go down as a "newsworthy" topic? One that would warrant a complete page on Mahalo? The answer is No, of course not, the story barely belongs in Google's index as I'm sure it's already been resolved and 99.99998% of the population didn't even notice. As far as Mahalo using social news site to promote original articles I don't really take issue with that, Jason will just need to be careful not to focus too much on that sort of social baiting. As you can see from Digg, most social communities tend to boil down the the least common denominator as the audience exands.
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POPSFEEDJIT: The 10 Hour Internet Startup Via the *new* Hacker News I found FEEDJIT, a widget sort of thing that displays incoming and outgoing traffic including destination. The more important story here however was that this 'jit was created in only 10 hours. I could roll a startup out in less time than that, but it would have to include less functionality, maybe a mod of something in the can.
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POPSBebo Social Network Top in UK ... For Now I tend to think Steve isn't going out on a limb much here in predicting that Facebook will overtake both MySpace and Bebo to take the UK Social Networking crown. Bebo (design wise) looks very much like YouTube, and not knowing the history here I can't comment as to why.
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POPSShopify Marketplace; All Your Products Are Belong to Us I've always like Shopify's business model, and their product (although I've never used it). Mashable has the info on their new marketplace which I think is genius. Genius mostly because it's a similar idea I've had for one of the projects I'm currently working on. It's not a shopping cart product but a similar model with a hosted application that I think is perfect for a marketplace add on.
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POPSTC Thinks Alexa is Useless; I Disagree
I have to object with Arrington's analysis of Alexa and scold him for yet another blog article about how Alexa is inaccurate and needs a "re-work". Alexa is just a tool , no more no less. We all know HOW Alexa gathers data, and we all know the flaws. It should be used along with Compete and Comscore to gain an overall picture of where a webiste ranks in comparison to other sites in it's field. Just like your FICO score is calculated from 3 credit reporting agenncies, your overall website rank is the summation of different traffic and influence measurements. I can find flaws in any web service . How easy it is to show a bad rank order in Google? How easy is it to spot inaccuracies with the Technorati Top 100? Singling out tools and highlighting how inaccurate they are when you fully understand how it collects data is foolish. It also means that you can't discount a tool completely just because it isn't perfect. Will I post a blog article about how Google is use
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POPSMashable Marketplace; Sell Your Social/Web 2.0 Site Mashable is offering a free listing on their (somewhat bare) marketplace for the next 48 hours. Expect things to get crowded, but currently there are only 4 listings, so depending on the first update you could get some good exposure from this highly ranked blog.
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POPSPibb is Now Embeddable I'm on the fence when it comes to Pibb, but they are in the right area (and led by some smart people) with their new embeddable chat/thread code for WordPress blogs. I don't think I have enough audience to warrant using Pibb for my posts, but it would be a viable replacement for commenting. I wonder how it handles spammers?
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POPSSupermarket 2.0 I don't usually like to brag, or hate on blogs for being "late to the party" but I scooped CN on this video by about 4 months. Yay for me. It ran over at Oomny.
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POPStexty; Widgetizing Text and Images Even though this post from TC is rather rosy, and the response over at CenterNetworks is a little harsh, I'm going to come down right in the middle here and say that texty has a fighting chance ... albeit a very small one. The idea of creating content and being able to embed and manage it using a central system is very interesting. But as CN points out, many lame platforms like MySpace won't allow embeddable code and as more old media invests in new media we might see that trend increase. If you avoid the MySpace like you should, then texty could work for you and the popularity of embeddable widgets is booming right now.
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POPSWe Need Some Time Apart Facebook CenterNetworks is declaring a "time out" on it's coverage of all things Facebook. For 1 week they won't run anything related to "the company that shall not be named" on the CenterNetworks blog. I'm going to join CenterNetworks in this lame crusade for the same period, although I don't mention "the company that shall not be named" much anyway (let's hope they don't get bought or hacked this week)
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POPSVerizon Unleases new RAZR iPhone Killer, Or Not Verizon and Motorola have very quiet and very ignored for the last few months as the storm from the new iPhone is in full swing. Today comes the announcement of the next generation RAZR 2. Featuring an external display (amazing!) and touch sensitive keys and bluetooth support (didn't it already have that? or did they just de hobble it?) I'm underwhelmed. But maybe Verizon and the RAZR can grab people looking for a high quality "phone" that don't need to surf the 'web' and watch videos of dogs skateboarding.
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POPSGoogle Removing torrent Results, Open Source Search Engine Anyone? TorrentFreak has the story on Google censoring torrent search results. It's nothing new, as Google has been removing results for years on the requsts of various media companies like the RIAA/MPAA etc. Which brings me to my call for an open source, offshore (possibly) search engine that allows the community to determine what gets censored.
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POPSOn the 8th day Apple created iTunes Widgets, and There Was Much Rejoicing So Apple is getting on the widget bandwagon with 3 new 'gits that show various useless things about your horrid music taste. The more important issue here to me is whether or not "widgets" are truly the beginning (and defining tech) of "Web 3.0". ... I thought pause was needed to allow you to absorb what I just said. I know it sounds a little crazy, but widgets are absolutely everywhere now, with even the Web 1.0 "Portal" pages making a comeback (iGoogle) re-powered by widgets and social news (if the latest Netscape rumor is to be believed).
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POPSSomebody Call The Waambulance, Google Isn't Perfect Everyone is up in arms lately about Google's TOS and search robot lockout. People point to the hypocrisy of the situation citing that Google relies on 'openness" from other web properties for it's news service. Everyone in the blogosphere needs to get over it, and realize that Google is a typical competitive corporate establishment that doesn't always "do the right thing" and will aggressively look to protect and grow their business model. Why do you think they are crusading against paid links? ( Ad Words anyone)
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POPSComments The Next Generation I'm not really sold on the idea of Disqus from what I've heard. From what I've read it's a product that allows you to (if you are a publisher) install it on your "article" page and it will track comments and provide an external forum (wtf?) I think it also has some sort of global login dealy so that if a lot of blogs in your bookmark list use it you can use 1 login and it will track your history and "rep". I think the market is too small here, but I do think the idea is fairly solid and along the same lines as Open ID.
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POPSMy Point Exactly; Amazon Gets No Love Whilst reading the posts of CenterNetworks I came across this little diddy by Matt Harwood talking about media companies investing in web applications/services. His point was that these types of buyouts are needed as there are only a few large Internet properties that "do" this sort of thing. My previous post on Amazon and how nobody mentions them when talking about "serious online' players is distinctly demonstrated in Mat''s article below as he lists ... well I'll let you read it. I'm not picking on Matt, and his point is very valid. I think we all applaud investment in online business's by every industry. In fact that's pretty much what I do for a living now ;)
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POPSPowerPoint Replacement Online with Preezo preezo isn't really anything special. It's a replacement for PowerPoint that you use online RIA style. The site has Web 2.0 branding, a simple layout and the product looks solid (although I didn't sign up for the public beta) I absolutely hate PowerPoint. I don't know if it's my aversion to corporate America or my uber geeks disgust at most of the trash produced in PP I just can't stand it. All these online replacements are perfect, but won't do any good in making the quality of these (usually tragic) presentations any better.
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POPSVentureBeat says Forbes will Buy ClipMarks Holy crap! As I was browsing this AM looking for stories to clip+posts I see this on Techmeme>VentureBeat. There's going to be a lot of press and traffic to the CM site/service in the next few weeks. Let's hope they handle it well!
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POPSSpock is a Search Engine Made of People! The social search scene is great and all, and I'm sure there's a market there but I'm also sure there's lots of people who DON'T want to show up in Spock's results. What is the "opt out" feature like?
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POPSGoogle Not Going After Digg & Netscape ... Yet Mashable had the hot steaming news about Google's new commenting system for it's News service. Before you start getting all giddy it's only open to companies and organizations "related" to the news story. Beyond the editorial nightmare what surprised me was the restraint here by Google. They could have started the process of Digg/Netscape annihilation by bringing Social news to the "true" masses. Oh well, I'll give them 6 months.
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POPSThe Biggest Digg Whores Not exactly whores, but very popular on the front page of Digg. This little run down by Glen Allsopp shows the top 5 most Dugg blogs ever. I'd be interested in seeing the long tail on this, who makes up the stars in the minor leagues?