Cody Taylor

Miracle Jones writes “As Amazon struggles to re-list and re-rank gay, lesbian, and adult books on their website after massive public outcry against the secretive partitioning process, they are claiming that the entire situation was not the result of an intentional policy at all, are not apologizing, and are instead insisting that the situation was the result of ‘a glitch’ that they are now trying to fix. While some hackers are claiming credit for ‘amazonfail,’ and it is indeed possible that an outside party is responsible, most claims have already been debunked. How likely is it that Amazon was hacked versus the likelihood of an internal Easter weekend glitch? Or is the most obvious and likely scenario true, and Amazon simply got caught implementing a wildly-unpopular new policy without telling anyone?”

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Just as children love hunting for Easter eggs, we love finding virtual Easter eggs in software and Web apps—those intentional hidden messages, features or jokes built into the software that users in the know may stumble upon at some point during their experience with the application.

Twitter Web might not be safe anymore and users may want to consider only tweeting and surfing through third-party applications for the time being. Yes, I know, there are all kinds of issues with using a third-party anything. And while I use and love TweetDeck and many are raving about Seesmic Desktop, you still need to give your Twitter user cred

This post is a showcase of 45+ Excellent Examples using Character Illustrations in Web Design. The list below are showing some of the coolest sites where character illustrations are put into action.

Gmail is perhaps the greatest web app ever developed, it is very popular (over 100 million users), has 2GB of free storage (very few will ever use this), and very, very easy to use. It is certainly powerful, but is it powerful enough? With Firefox Addons you can take your inbox even further…

Hugh Pickens writes “The British government’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT), a 200-strong Home Office unit created 18 months ago, has said in meetings it wants to ‘flood the internet’ with ‘positive’ interpretations of Islam and plans to train government-approved groups in search engine optimization techniques, which it is hoped will boost their profile online and battle radicalization. A Home Office spokesman confirmed search engine optimization training is part of the government’s anti-radicalization strategy. ‘In order to support mainstream voices, we work with local partners to help develop their communication, representational and leadership skills. This support could include media training, which can help make their voices heard more widely, and support the development of skills which allow communities to be more effective in debate.’ However the effectiveness of search engine optimization in reducing traffic to extremist websites has been dismissed by academics. A report produced by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) said young Muslims were much more likely to be directed to extremist material online by web forums and offline associates than by Google or other search engines. ‘Tweaking the results for supposedly extremist terms would be largely ineffectual, not least because it is unlikely that any but the most callow wannabe terrorist would use a mainstream search engine to find banned material.'”

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Anonymous writes “Two graduate students at the Ivy League’s Brown University built a P2P system to use abandoned wiki sites to store data. The students were stealing bandwidth from open MediaWiki sites to send data between users as an alternative to BitTorrent. There was immediate backlash as site operators quickly complained to the University. The project appears to be shutdown, but many of the pages still remain on the web. The project homepage was also taken down and the students posted an apology this afternoon.” The same submitter links to two different forum discussions on the project.

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