The Gaming News Show made for you, by you, by us. GameZombie, your friendly neighborhood forum lurkers, scours the Internet in search of the best posts to the hottest gaming news topics of the week. In this Episode: 1. Publisher Activision has recently acquired developer Budcat Creations. 2. The "Make Cliffy_B more Badass" contest is over, and the winners are 3. The developers behind Sonys LittleBigPlanet have been pulling level designs from servers that have references to existing TV shows or games. This has caused much agitation to players. Featured Users: ManekiNeko of Kotaku bassmaniac2005 of GameSpot cliffy_b of Twitter Tofur of Twitter bearded OTP of GoNintendo ceedot of PSXExtreme Executive Producer Spencer Striker Starring Chelsey Matrix Keetin Marchi Sam Sher Writer John Quick Senior Producer Adrienne Thiery Technical Producer Pat Boyle Director Andrew Benninghoff Associate Producer Ron Osgood Technical Director Pat Boyle Audio Chris Bates Ed Whang Original Score Chris Bates With Burning Up the Boards featuring a remix of Gerard Marino's 'Persian Combat' cut from the 'Chains of Olympus' score. Studio Engineer Stephen R. Parker Camera Alex Chod Chris Impicciche Stan Sevostyanov Jib Troy Engelhardt Set Design & Lighting Troy Engelhardt Andrew Benninghoff Gabe Goldstein Scott Gill Alex Chod Stan Sevostyanov Chris Impicciche David Burkart Yun Lu Sam Sher Prompter Andrew Verteramo Graphics Andrew Benninghoff Leetal Halamish Editor Austin Reedy

Auteur : gamezombie
Tags : buttonmashers gamezombie.tv spencer striker video games news cliffyb twitter gamespot gonintendo gamezombie cliffy ps3
Envoyé : 03 décembre 2008
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Remember how “bad” those Microsoft commercials were?  If you thought those were odd and slightly off-putting, you obviously haven’t seen the most recent ads from Ask.com, which are now making the rounds with commentarians asking the same questions they asked about Jerry Seinfeld: “Why?”

“Why is their marketing so random?” asks Harry McCracken.

“Why is their marketing so creepy?” asks SAI’s Dan Frommer.

“Why is the music so sad? Why is she obese? More important: why is she BRITISH?” asks VideoGum.

Harry did accurately observe that the base message being conveyed in the most recent Ask.com commercial is more or less the same as what they started with back in 1996 with AskJeeves, the original moniker for the site.

While I think that the Jerry Seinfeld Microsoft ads could be arguably groundbreaking, in that they were more like sponsored entertainment content rather than traditional advertisement, I have a hard time defending these Ask.com ads. The ads seem to have most pundits and Twitter reactionaries asking questions rather than wanting to try out the service.

Here are the two most recent ads:

On the other hand, those who live “outside the bubble,” so to speak, all seem to have the uniform reaction that the ads are just downright hilarious.

Are we over-analyzing, or are these ads just duds?

I’m at the WBUR open house “tweetup”, where I just learned about Tweetworks from Mike Langford. Thus the lego-like greater Twitter add-on zone grows.

After Murad Ahmed wrote Citizen journalists told to stop using Twitter to update on Bombay attacks in TimesOnline, and David Stephenson blogged a similar concern, Bruce Schneier responded with Communications During Terrorist Attacks are Not Bad. Specifically,

  This fear is exactly backwards. During a terrorist attack — during any crisis situation, actually — the one thing people can do is exchange information. It helps people, calms people, and actually reduces the thing the terrorists are trying to achieve: terror. Yes, there are specific movie-plot scenarios where certain public pronouncements might help the terrorists, but those are rare. I would much rather err on the side of more information, more openness, and more communication.

I’m sure there was wrong information coming across Twitter during recent California fires as well. But whenever bad things happen — whether caused by bad luck or bad people — good will and good people out-care and out-perform the bad.

The best mainstream media piece I’ve read yet about this topic is Citizen Journalists Provided Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks, by Brian Setzer and Noam Cohen in the New York Times. The first four grafs:

  From his terrace on Colaba Causeway in south Mumbai, Arun Shanbhag saw the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel burn. He saw ambulances leave the Nariman House. And he recorded every move on the Internet.

  Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed — the “thud, thud, thud” of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons — and uploaded photos to his personal blog.

  Mr. Shanbhag, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he had not heard the term citizen journalism until Thursday, but now he knows that is exactly what he was doing. “I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world,” Mr. Shanbhag said in an e-mail message on Saturday morning.

  The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

Actually, a new medium. And a new methodology. And a new way to invest the best, far more than the worst, in human nature.

Germany-based myON-ID Media has raised an undisclosed seven-figure sum in a second round of funding from T-Online Venture Fund to expand its online reputation management platform. MyON-ID is actually more of a combination between a people search engine and an alert service for keywords mentioned across the web.

I quicky tried out searching my own name on the English version of the search application, and the results were a bit messy to say the least. From what I understand, all the engine does is perform a meta search on services like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn etc. along with traditional and blog search engines like Technorati. MyON-ID aims to make money from offering a premium version and advertising on the free service.

I’m not so sure what prompted a reputable investor like T-Online Venture Fund and previous backer Nexum to fund such a simple service, unless I’m missing something here. The Munich-based company claims it’s very strong in Germany, and hopes to repeat this success with other localized versions (in English, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Spanish and Turkish).

There are far better tools out there for online reputation tracking and management, in my opinion. One example is Trackur, which offers advanced tools to monitor social media. Other providers off the top of my head include Brandseye, Radian6, Attentio, Buzzcapture and Chatterguard.

The people search engine market on itself is already a crowded one: alternatives include Wink, Spock, Naymz, PeekYou and Pipl.

I have serious doubts if myON-ID has what it takes to compete on an international level.

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

This post is part of Mashable’s Startup Review series, which highlights great unsung startups. The series is made possible by Sun Startup Essentials.

Send

Send is a free, easy-to-use email encryption service.

It’s not that there aren’t other secure methods to send an email … It’s just that they’re too hard to use. We think everyone should be able to send a secure email … and we all have better things to do than spend an afternoon installing and configuring an encryption solution.

We don’t require you to maintain encryption keys - Though we think the public/private key method works, we also think it was created for geeks and technicians.

Send is compatible with all email solutions including web mail - Anyone with a browser and an internet connection can use Send. and, unlike other available solutions, Send requires no software downloads or additional system configuration.

The service is easy to use - We created Send because the previous process for sending secure messages was too difficult. Our studies suggest that people will not send encrypted messages if the process is even marginally more difficult than normal. Simply put, security is important, but cannot impede productivity.

Personally, I probably take Gmail’s security for granted and have never really thought about sending an encrypted email. But, if I was sending something like, say, the passcode to my house’s security system, I suppose it would be a good idea. Simply called “Send,” the service promises to encrypt your emails “using the same algorithm the NSA has deemed fit for the encryption of TOP SECRET information.” I could tell you how they obtained that algorithm, but then they’d have to kill me.

In any event, using Send for delivering an encrypted message is incredibly easy. Here’s how it works:

1. On Sendinc.com, enter your email address, your recipients, a subject, your message, and any attachments.

2. If you haven’t used the service before, Send will require you to verify the sender address by sending you a confirmation message. You’ll also have to setup a password for using that account in the future.

3. Send your message

4. Recipients will receive the message and be required to open an attachment, which contains the encrypted message.

5. From the attachment, recipients click-thru back to Send, where they’ll also have to create an account.

6. Send decrypts the message and shows the contents to the recipient.

Not having much experience sending encrypted messages, I can’t speak for the alternatives, but as Send explains with the diagram below, they sound cumbersome. Doing it all over the Web, with a solution that will work regardless of what email program the recipients are using, seems like the best way. But then again, if I actually had stuff that was so top secret I needed to use Send, I’d probably take a closer look at all of the options.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

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You've probably already heard of Outside.in, the "hyperlocal" news, information, and conferencing service created to serve cities, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the US. John Geraci, one of the co-founders of Outside.in, has launched a new site called DIYcity. The idea here is to use the crowdsourcing power of the interwebs and open source/Web 2.0 software tools to create applications and services that improve the quality of life in our urban environments. The site is a place where people can come to present and discuss problems and then propose and develop solutions. The site will post these problems as weekly challenges to the DIYcity community. Here's their first challenge:

DIYcity

Depuis mes aventures télévisuelles et radiophoniques, j’ai reçu une tonne (le mot est faible) de courriels, de téléphones et de messages de sympathies, d’admiration, mais aussi de douleurs et de souffrances diverses. J’ai pleuré quelquefois en les lisant et dans twitter, un copain me disais « tu n’as pas peur de devenir la psy de service? ». Il a bien raison, je ne suis pas psy, j’ai beaucoup de difficulté avec l’écoute compatissante et ce n’est pas ma tasse de thé. Moi mon trip c’est le Web. Voilà. Je ne veux pas non plus devenir la trans de service des médias et j’ai refusé maintes demandes d’entrevues, de reportages et de topo sur ma condition. D’être la porte-parole des transsexuelles ça ne paie pas, mais d’être la pro du Web me fait très bien vivre merci. Tout ça pour dire qu’il existe très peu de ressources pour aider les trans, leur parent et les gens qui sont confrontés avec cette condition difficile et encore malheureusement peu connue, mais je le répète, vous pouvez contacter la ligne d’écoute de l’association des transsexuels (elles) du Québec, y faire un don et pousser dans l’cul de votre député pour qu’enfin des ressources psychologiques, psychiatriques, médicales et.al., soient mis à la disposition des gens qui sont aux prises avec ça. Tout ça pour vous dire que je vous partage (avec la permission de l’auteure qui préfère rester anonyme) ce message Facebook qui témoigne tristement de ce que peut engendrer le manque de ressources flagrant pour aider les gens qui n’ont pas la chance de faire du fric comme moi. Quelle tristesse et quel scandale silencieux et souterrains.

Je vous ai vue pour la première fois à Tout le monde en parle et croyez-moi vous mettez un baume sur ma plaie béante de Mai 2008.
Une étape de ma vie s’est terminée le 5 mai dernier par le décès de mon ex-conjoint et père de mes enfants.
Ma fille a trouvé chez lui, dans une grande chambre, je parlerais de grand placard qu’il n’a jamais voulu partager, la deuxième vie de son père et elle me l’a appris en même temps.
Mon ex que j’ai connu, aimé, marié, donné 2 enfants, divorcé etc. pendant les dernière 30 années de ma vie était, comme vous, un trans-sexuel non assumé qui vivait sa double vie en cachette depuis son enfance.
J’ai passé par l’étape de la colère, du déni, du ‘qui suis-je’ pour l’avoir aimé; j’en suis maintenant à l’étape d’essayer de comprendre. Ma vie me lance des ‘flash’ des retours en arrière où je vois ce que je n’ai pas vu