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Link to a YouTube Comment

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 30, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 89 words

If you happen to find a YouTube comment that’s really interesting and you want to share it with other people, mouse over the comment, click on the “Share” button and copy the link. Each YouTube comment has a permalink, but it’s not easy to notice that the comment is displayed below the video in a special section titled “Linked Comment”. You could also use this feature to annotate a video before sharing it with your friends. Post a comment, copy the link and use it to highlight your comment. ...

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Facebook is fastest social network; Twitter, MySpace slowest

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: November 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 178 words

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...

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First 360° video on Youtube, ever!!!

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: October 19, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 31 words

Today Doritos Late Night presented the first 360 degree musicvideo on youtube. It’s the musicvideo of Professor Green with his latest hit: “Coming to get me”. Go and check it out!!!!

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“This offer is available TODAY only!!!”

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: October 7, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 366 words

Hmmm. That’s not what the source code says We started out the day fat fingering the spelling of “youtube.com” and ended up at the typo squatting site behind the URL “youube.com.” youube.com redirects you to http://youtube.com-prizes.com – obviously a URL intended to make you think it’s really YouTube. Like so many of these “survey” scam web sites, the offer was available “today only: Thursday, October 7, 2010.” Obviously, this is to add a little bit of sales pressure to make a visitor go for the prize ASAP, or at least before midnight. ...

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Toy Story 3: Woody's Roundup of Scams and Fakeouts

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: August 13, 2010
  • Reading Time: 3 min
  • Word Count: 474 words

Toy Story 3 is romping across cinemas Worldwide, and rightly so – it’s the best of the series by far. I thought it might be worth pointing out that being a product aimed at children doesn’t exclude it from internet shenanigans. If you have young children online who are partial to searching for Toy Story material, you might want to warn them about some of the below scams. One of the most popular tactics is advertising the “full movie” on Youtube, but directing the end-user to a bunch of surveys instead: ...

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Pakistan Blocks Facebook Over Caricatures of Prophet Muhammad

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: May 19, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 209 words

A Pakistani court has ordered the authorities to temporarily block Facebook due to a contest that calls for caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The court order follows a petition by a group called the Islamic Lawyers’ Movement, which complained that the contest was “blasphemous.” A search on Facebook reveals two sites featuring such caricatures: one supporting Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who created the caricature of the Prophet, published in Danish newspapers in 2005. ...

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iPad isn't for everyone, so deal with it

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: May 19, 2010
  • Reading Time: 4 min
  • Word Count: 794 words

Thirty-two days ago, I purchased Apple’s iPad, after proclaiming that I wouldn’t. A gadget like this one should be tested if repeatedly blogged about. I would have used a for-reviews loaner, but I’m on the same fraked list as Gizmodo. I bought my own. A month-or-so usage later, I agree with Tumblr and Instapaper developer Marco Arment, who asked about iPad yesterday: “What’s it for, really? Logically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for most computer owners
most people will have trouble justifying the $500 entry price.” ...

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“Today Show” Launches 2-Minute Daily Web Video

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: May 4, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 195 words

Another mainstream media outlet is dipping their toes into online. “TODAY in 2 Minutes” is a new online-only feature of The Today Show. The show will feature host Natalie Morales and will include two minutes of Today content, including weather, news headlines and other stories. Each segment will appear on TODAYshow.com and MSN.com at 6:30 a.m. ET every weekday. The spots will initially be sponsored by Buick. “In 2009, TODAYshow.com had more video streams than the combined total for all of ABC News and CBS News sites,” said Today Executive Producer Jim Bell in a statement released today. “TODAY in 2 Minutes is for people who can’t wait until 7 a.m. to quickly get the news of the day from a place they know and trust.” ...

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Samsung Tries Organizing the World’s Biggest Dodgeball Game

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: May 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 2 min
  • Word Count: 335 words

Ah, cellphones and dodgeball, they go together like
 well
 they don’t really go together at all, but that’s not stopping Samsung Mobile from organizing what will purportedly be the world’s largest dodgeball game on May 12. The practice of launching a stunt to herald the advent of a new product is nothing new — remember when the Droid took over Times Square? And Samsung is no stranger to the record realm; it attempted to make the World Record for collecting the largest donation of mobile phones in one location in April at the Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, TX (the company failed). And managed to set the World Record for the fastest text message sent using Swype technology on the Samsung Omnia II. ...

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YouTube to Let Users Charge Rental Fees for Videos

  • Post author: Omid Farhang
  • Post published: May 3, 2010
  • Reading Time: 1 min
  • Word Count: 187 words

YouTube’s movie rental service is still in its infancy, and it still only offers a small selection of films, but that could change quickly. YouTube exec Hunter Walk told MediaPost that the site will soon offer its users the ability to charge rental fees for their uploaded videos. For the past couple of years YouTube has been focusing on ways for its users to monetize their videos should they become very popular. It launched the YouTube Partnership Program last year, which allows some folks with popular videos (YouTube staff decide which ones are eligible) to share advertising revenue with Google. ...

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