It's okay. I'm not sure how it's pronounced either.

President Obama is perhaps the most famous executive addicted to his Blackberry, but there’s someone who has stumped RIM’s creators or the Blackberry.  After 25 years catering to high demand industries and 3 years going after the general public, RIM seems to have missed a major demographic.

“Are you going to make a phone more for kids so that my Mom will let me get one?”

At Tuesday’s shareholders’ meeting in Toronto, a child in the audience left RIM’s Co-Chiefs stumbling for a proper response to the simple question.

Mike Lazaridis, after pausing uncomfortably to find the right response, said, “There’s lots of opportunity and, you know, if the current BlackBerries aren’t acceptable to your mother, hopefully the next ones will.” [click to continue...]

In 1985, John Hughes wrote and directed The Breakfast Club. It helped push the careers of five rising stars to achieve relative success. These members of The Brat Pack were quoted, emulated, and launched into the yearly playing schedule on TBS 24 years after the film was made.

In this era of unoriginality in Hollywood, they really should considered making a new version that takes everything about the movie a little closer to the edge. Why?

Why not? [click to continue...]

Greenpeace.org has uncovered disturbing information about Nintentdo, Xbox, and Sony Playstation. Their consoles and accessories contain materials that can be hazardous to people and to the environment. According to Greenpeace, there are greener alternatives available to make truly eco-friendly consoles, but they are currently not using these.

The dangers do not stop when the consoles are no longer used. E-Waste, or Electronic Waste, is potentially a greater problem as it is more likely to become an issue during the manufacturing or disposal process.

ArsTechnica took a look at the findings and had mixed feelings. While there is definitely evidence that the manufacturers should get together and share techniques to produce greener consoles, the popular blog still showed less urgency in the matter than does Greenpeace. [click to continue...]

Entertainment Weekly put out a surprisingly nice list of the 20 Scariest Movies of All Time. What they didn’t do is rank them. So, for our readers’ enjoyment and for the convenience of not having to click through 20 pages just to see the whole list, here they are, ranked by scary movie experts from across the globe (or at least by me).

The reason that magazines prefer lists over rankings nowadays is because these are opinions and everyone has a different one. They fear people reading the list and say “this is all wrong.” I have no fear of this, as I know that the list is wrong for most people. It’s just the way I see it using their list of movies ranked the way I would have ranked them. [click to continue...]

Local search has become a hot niche within the overall search landscape. Web searchers want to easily access data about what’s around them as efficiently as possible. As a result, more local search tools are popping up.

Whatsopen.com is one of these new local search destinations. Originally released at the beginning of the year in “Beta,” WhatsOpen’s only unique feature was its claim to provide hours of operation data for businesses that appeared for a user’s search query. Unfortunately, upon using the site for only a few seconds it became clear that the initial version of Whats Open had completely inaccurate and useless data, and had little more to offer than a cute frog logo and some fluffy language hyping their supposed testing in China and a pending mobile application just around the corner. [click to continue...]

Advertising sometimes goes too far. They just don’t always understand exactly what they are implying. I’m sure they didn’t mean to command people like dogs (or worse?) but that’s exactly what they did on this ad that is currently appearing on Digg.

Here is a portion of the original page where it was found:

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Find more odd news here.

Advertising on the Internet isn’t what it used to be. People aren’t falling for the “9,999th Visitor” iPod winner ploy. They are catching on to Google Adsense, and pop-up blockers have destroyed that avenue.

The problem is, they also don’t want to pay to visit websites. “Don’t make money off of us, AND make it all free.” That’s the message, and a recent study described in Arstechnica about Web surfers and Behavioral Targeting touches on this fact. Check out that article (later) but first, let’s take a look at a solution. [click to continue...]

In the short life of this blog, it has received quite a bit of attention both negative and positive. One of the stories in particular about McCain Fanning the Obama-Clinton Flames has received comments on it as well on Digg and Propeller that are not complimentary.  It has been called names, bashed, yadayadayada.  It’s awesome!

Bloggers are in many ways amateur journalists.  I have written columns for print publications in the past and I prefer the editorial license allowed in blogs.  Why?  Because you can be more bold on the Internet than you can in a newspaper or a magazine. [click to continue...]

Over the past several weeks, I have been privy to many projects in different stages of development. One thing that seems to hold true for many of them is that the developers’ idea of “the next big thing” is a hybrid of sorts.

Some are leaning towards social media mixed with social networking. Most of the social media sites have tried to head in this direction to some extent. All have fallen short. Most notably, the Digg changes a few months ago have turned from an attempt to socialize social media (with shouts and other features) into an unfair way to game the system. The results have been disastrous. [click to continue...]