A lot of the people I help wonder if hosting their blog on a shared server is okay. Yes it is. But rather than all this “cloud” mentality, I much more prefer the idea of taking as much control as possible.

There’s a latest friend asking if her food blog should come out of a fully-featured box provided by a company I’ve never heard of. The WordPress backend and widgets and boxes are really quite a whiz and someone spent hundreds of man-hours assembling those features – the unadvertised downside is that your blog could get yanked with no notice by the US Government because of someone else’s illegal acts on the same server…

Ever called a bereaving family member to hear the voice of a mourned dead one on the answering machine? It’s creepy and sad and turns up numerous emotions. Now that older users are signing up to join Facebook, they’re often prodded by Facebook algorithms to “get back in touch” with friends who have died.

Following the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, members begged the company to allow them to commemorate the victims. Now member profiles can be “memorialized,” or converted into tribute pages that are stripped of some personal information and no longer appear in search results. Grieving friends can still post messages on those pages. Source

Automation is the key to success with 500 MILLION users worldwide. Getting the death of a friend wrong isn’t an option. One user was locked out of his own profile after dying. Searching the HELP pages offered no, “I’m not dead yet,” advise.

After all the buzz and excitement surrounding what looked like a game changer, one TechCrunch author in particular is daring enough to fly in the face of pride and humiliaty that keeps other fanboys hanging around and says:

…But this fanboy is listing his iPads for sale on Craigslist. Why? Because they’ve become like the paperweights on his desk.

Link: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/17/why-i%E2%80%99m-craigslisting-my-ipads/

Quite a lot of work went into this video. Don’t ignore the effort.

It’s official! 27JAN10 Apple Computers will introduce the iPhone Gen4 and the theorized, much talked about Apple Tablet. While tablets have been around for just short of a decade, so too were cell phones before Apple put out the iPhone. So will tablet makers like HP and Asus finally be given a stylistic blue print for a form factor that the public buys uncontrolably?

Said the detective to the Twitter user who promised to blow up an airport after his flight was delayed for bad weather. “It’s the world we live in,” says Dinarius when reading about Google China’s trouble with a targeted, sophisticated internal cyber attack responsible for thieving intellectual property.

Isaac Asimov’s classic short story about the super computer answering the question, “is there a God,” has lead to fears of technocracies in the Matrix, Doomsday in the Terminator and nihilist jokes among you and your friends no doubt: We’re being replaced by computers. Well, it turns out that computers need our help! Some key advances are introduced…

As if by fate, I was just discussing last night with a fellow blogger about the reality of Internet entertainment reducing Cable TV providers like Comcast to mere Internet Service Providers who pave the wires for their replacements. Sezmi might be able to do it by providing over-the-air broadcasts, cable channels like Animal Planet and Discovery Channel, and providing “thousands” of HD and standard on demand videos.

Why didn’t I ever think of this? While browsing some of the limited and geeky things that Flickr offers users when trying to customize a Flickr badge for a website using the Flickr API, the APP Garden appeared.

Dear, sweet discovery! I just rediscovered the aptly named Wonder Wheel by Google and thought this time to share it. Imagine it like 6-degrees of search terms and you’ll be close. It’s almost like a really drunk conversation where the Wonder Wheel might be heard to say, “I don’t know, connecting ‘glass vases to Admiral Chester Nimitz’ made sense in my head…”