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i’m happy to announce that i was just inducted into the digg.com 800 club. the group has a total of 4 members (including me). i want to thank all the content producers whose stories i have submitted (for creating the great content) and all the digg users (who have been reading and digging my submissions).

check out my profile, and the complete rankings.

compiler and epicenter, two of the blogs in the wired blog network, accused jason calacanis earlier, of stealing one of their images, erasing their logo from it, and using it without proper attribution.

image: jason calacanis

while they were mocking him by writing that his how-to series (for which the image was used) should be called ‘how to steal’, and were pointing out the alleged hypocrisy in his actions by referring to an earlier calacanis post on scraper sites and plagiarism, what the wired blogs didn’t know was that jason hadn’t stolen the image and erased the logo, rather he just picked it up from a flickr stream where the original has been posted (the original image didn’t have a logo) and the lack of attribution was mere oversight not malicious intent.

what’s worse is that the image they used to accompany their article accusing jason of image theft, was an image taken from a fast company article without permission/attribution. by not doing their research and jumping to their keyboards before contacting jason to hear his side of the story or just asking for a correction, and by showing hypocrisy while blaming someone else for the same, the otherwise-smart blogs have managed to make complete fools of themselves.

both blogs have issued apologies, but the damage has been done.

unfortunately, our attempt to give calacanis a good-natured ribbing came off as more vindictive and mean-spirited than we intended. adding irony to insult, our post on epicenter initially used an image of calacanis that was itself lifted from another magazine, fast company. as a result, no matter how justified our initial complaint, we totally undercut our own case, and in the process made ourselves into an illustration of the very error we were trying to point out.

p.s. i have made the same mistake in the past, and in fact for many bloggers it’s a part of maturing into the field (i.e. we all make this mistake at least once, and therefore it’s good to read/write about it every now and again) but to see such high-profile blogs make this mistake is quite surprising.

Technorati Tags: wired, blogs, compiler, epicenter, calacanis, research, plagiarism, scraping, theft, apology

do you blog in a bad neighborhood? do you think there are people who might have a grudge against your blog? or are simply worried that the competition doesn’t like to play fair? well if you’re concerned about people breaking and entering your blog, you don’t have to be anymore.

i got an email from michael vandemar pointing me to a rather useful wordpress plugin that he has developed, called login lockdown. the plugin records the ip address and timestamp of every failed attempt to log into your wordpress blog. if there are more than a certain number of failed attempts in quick succession from the same ip range, the plugin will automatically disable the login function for that range.

this helps to prevent brute force password discovery. currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. this can be modified via the options panel. admisitrators can release locked out ip ranges manually from the panel.

check out the plugin: login lockdown v1.1 or learn more about the plugin from michael.

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, plugin, security, login lockdown

this morning, tom drapeau, director of netscape, announced the upcoming changes at netscape on the netscape blog.

most importantly, we’ll be providing you the new location for the social news site.

we, as a company, remain committed to delivering a compelling social news experience for our users. this move is an effort to make both the former portal experience and the social news experience accessible so that you can decide which you prefer-or, even better, that you want to participate in both.

we look forward to unveiling a new social news site as soon as possible. the ability to post, comment, rate and share the news that’s most relevant to you is as important to us as it is to you. we will be maintaining an open dialogue with you, our users, so that you’ll be the first to know as soon as we’re ready to pull back the curtains.

[emphasis added]

and this is how the blogosphere reported it:

1. techcrunch - netscape digg clone is kaput
2. webware - netscape pulls plug on digg clone
3. cybernet - netscape’s “digg-clone” calling it quits
4. wikinomics - netscape social experiment (digg clone) is dead
5. epicenter - netscape ends digg-clone social news experiment

it is incredibly shameful to see how these generally credible sources have thrown both the facts and caution to the wind and gone ahead with stories and titles that express nothing more than their hate for the netscape brand. the true story, as you can see from tom’s statement (that sparked the entire conversation) is that netscape is simply moving the social news site to a new home with a new brand name. everything else about the site will either stay the same (or improve).

disclaimer: i am a netscape scout

Technorati Tags: netscape, social news, social media

did you hear that sound a couple days ago? well that was a few hundred thousand iphone early-adopters groaning in frustration and anger in response to steve jobs’ decision to reduce the price of the phone by $200. not only were the customers angry, but so were the investors, sending the stock price down around 10% since the announcement two days ago. while the investors and the analysts will have to wait to see if the move pays off, there are several ways for customers to get their money back.

1. apple’s price guarantee

should apple reduce its price on any shipped product within 10 calendar days of shipment, you may contact apple sales support at 1-800-676-2775 to request a refund or credit of the difference between the price you were charged and the current selling price. to receive the refund or credit you must contact apple within 14 business days of shipment.

2. steve jobs’ apology

after telling usatoday that the price drop was just how technology works and saying tough luck to the early-adopters, jobs’ did an about-face in an open letter to iphone customers.

therefore, we have decided to offer every iphone customer who purchased an iphone from either apple or at&t, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an apple retail store or the apple online store.

3. most credit card companies

The following is quoted from the additional citicard disclosures but most credit cards have a similar offering.

if you buy an item with your mastercard or visa card, and if within 60 days after your purchase you see a printed advertisement for the same item (same model number and same model year) by the same manufacturer for lower price, we will refund you the price difference, up to $250 per item (up to a maximum of $1,000 per cardmember per year) provided the printed advertisement was published on the same day as or within 60 days after your purchase. no registration is necessary.

4. american express

american express also has an offering similar to the one mentioned above, but in spite of the 60-day limit on the offering and regardless of whether you are enrolled in it, american express is offering to adjust the price difference to all members. I called american express return protection at 1 (800) 297-8019 yesterday and was told that even though this was out of my coverage, in this case american express was making exceptions for all members.

after confirming my account and billing address, the lady on the phone simply asked for transaction date, location, price (with sales tax because you also get a refund on that), and the adjustment requested, and told me that the change would be reflected on my account within 24-48 hours.

note: i bought my iphone on launch-day and it was out of the 60-day window but i amex gave me the refund anyway.+

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, american express

peter is 22 years old. he is studying physics and loves mathematics but his real passion is computer science. he has recently become famous for developing reddit media and digpicz.

hi peter. thanks for taking out the time to answer some questions.

let’s start with some background.

Sure. I got into programming around 1996. It was hard to get internet access here in Latvia at that time so I befriended a unix sysadmin who was like my teacher at that time. anyway, from there, i met this friend on irc, who helped me with various computer-related things and introduced me to linux and programming.

my first experience with programming was creating an irc client. it was fun exploring this protocol. since then I have been programming both for fun and work in many various languages. at one point I even wrote an intrusion prevention system when i worked as an white-hat (ethical) hacker.

so how did you end up creating reddit media?

i have been an active reddit user for a while, since the content there is relatively better than other social sites. when they added the programming subreddit, it became my number one source of information. as for why i created reddit media, it was mostly so that people would have an easy way to access all the media (pictures and videos) that is submitted to Reddit.

It was so easy to create it, that i just did it.

and how about diggpicz?

well, as i’m sure you know, digg users have been asking for a pictures section on the site for a long time. i saw that the digg developers kept saying that they would create the section but haven’t done it yet so I decided to do it for digg users. i have had so much programming experiences that this is easy for me and allows me to help such a large community with relatively little effort on my part.

it was just a few hours of work to reuse code that I had written for reddit media to create digg picz.

so where do you go from here? it seems that digg’s official pictures section is coming. is there any chance that they will seek help from you or would you consider working for/with them?

well, even when digg releases their own version, i won’t feel that my efforts are wasted. creating the site was fun and I enjoyed helping thousands of users in the meantime. again, the site took only 7 hours to make. that said, i doubt that they will use my site, because i wrote it entirely in perl and optimized it for a shared hosting server, meaning that all the pages are pre-generated and there is no interaction with database in real time. and digg runs php, so it would be a complete re-write. my intention was never ‘build-to-flip’

working for digg would be cool, but there is a problem with that. I am last year theoretical physics student and i graduate only in June 2008. i am applying for mit this november and if i get accepted then i will put all the effort in studying there and not working. if i don’t get in, then i will definitely consider working for digg.

now that you have created a version of the site for reddit and a version for digg and seen how successful both of them have become, have you thought about releasing a pligg-like cms to let people create their own media sites?

yes i have thought about it, but first i would like to finish picurls.com (same idea as popurls.com but focused on pictures) which will be in perl again. in an upcoming version of picurls.com you will be able to choose from a variety of sources, which ones you want to see pictures from.

hopefully this site will launch by this sunday.

and you are funding all these projects out of your own pocket?

yes, I am funding all of this -literally- out of my own pocket, hence I am looking for someone who would sponsor me a dedicated linux server.

thanks for your time and I hope somebody will generously gift you a linux server.

for more, please check out peter’s website: good coders code, great reuse.

Technorati Tags: digg, reddit, digpicz, reddit media, peteris krumins, social media

i have personally never been fond of online rss readers and prefer the desktop-based netnewswire, but with a slew of updates and the recent addition of search, google reader may finally be mature.

along for the ride in the search release are a few other reader tweaks. you can now hide the side navigation by clicking on the separator to its right. enread counts now go to 1,000, so that you can know just how far behind you are when you come back from vacation. finally, reader now behaves like every other web page and lets you use the forward and back buttons to move between folders and subscriptions that you’ve navigated to.

Technorati Tags: google reader, rss

lulu, an online distributer and publisher of digital content, is suing hulu, the nbc universal/news corp. joint online video venture. lulu is accusing them of copyright infringement, unfair and deceptive trade practices, and federal cyberpiracy.

according to the the press release, lulu believes that the name hulu was intentionally chosen to create confusion in the marketplace.

“We have spent more than five years and tens of millions of dollars in investment successfully building the Lulu brand and website into a place or millions of creators and consumers to publish, buy, sell and manage digital content,” said Lulu CEO Bob Young. “It is clear we are required to move quickly to protect our intellectual property and defend ourselves against this infringement before it significantly damages our business.”

this news comes as kind of a surprise considering that nbc universal/news corp. took five months to come up with the name (and have yet to open the service to the public), but at the same time is somewhat expected given that hulu means ‘cease’ and ‘desist’ in swahili.

the zulu were unavailable for comment.

Technorati Tags: lulu, hulu, nbc universal, news corp.

if you would like an invite to grandcentral and get your very own ‘one number…for life‘, please let me know. i was recently invited to the private beta by a generous friend and in the spirit of generosity i’m sharing all 10 invites i have. all you have to do is drop me a comment or send me an email to receive your ticket into the club.

please also take a look at some other private beta invites that i have.

update: over 50 invites sent out and i’m completely depleted, phew! thanks for stopping by everyone!

Technorati Tags: google, grandcentral, private, beta, invite

we all know that one of the main reasons why facebook became so popular is the great privacy settings the site offers. the ability to show and hide certain aspects of your profile to people or networks in a way that you just cannot on other social networking sites really is where facebook shines. but recent moves by the company are a little more than unsettling.

facebook has decided to launch a ‘public listing search’ that allows anyone to search for a specific person and retrieve their name and profile picture. you can prevent your profile from coming up in the public listing by changing your profile settings to something other than ‘everyone’, but this will not be done by default and you will have one month to make the change before facebook allows search engines to index your information.

if you’re concerned about your privacy at all, this is a change you should make immediately. once your information is indexed by the search engines, this move will essentially make facebook the wikipedia of people search. non-facebook users will be able to go to google, type in your name and retrieve your name and profile picture, courtesy of facebook.

of course this move benefits facebook, by increasing their search traffic, since more people will be directed towards facebook (as they look for information on you), but also because these users will probably feel compelled to sign up to either add you as a friend and find out more about you or even just take the site for a spin. this move is also great for data-miners trying to get as much information on you as possible. but for the unwitting users, this will open up their profiles (even if its just a name and a picture) to a much larger audience than they want or expect.

in addition to changing your search privacy settings on facebook, i encourage you to take a look at marc canter’s proposed bill of rights for users of social networking sites.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, privacy, people search