The Flow of Consciousness

Note: Don’t do what I’m describing. It’s probably illegal and it’s certainly unethical and immoral. IANAL, but heed my advice.

I first considered this dastardly scheme when Bloomberg mistakenly picked up a six-year-old story about the bankruptcy filing ofUAL. I can’t find the Google News story, but that’s where I believe it first appeared. Bloomberg picked it up and it was passed around Wall Street like wildfire.

This old news caused a 76 percent drop in the value of UAL’s stock for a few hours, and it took a day or two to fully recover.

More recently, CNN’s iReport picked up a rumor that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had experienced a heart attack. This story, submitted to the social news site, was “not vetted or reported by CNN journalists” according to CNN.

This false news caused a nine percent drop in Apple’s stock, from approximately $105/share to $95/share for a few minutes between 9:40 and 9:52 a.m.

Can you see, observant reader, a pattern here?

1. Introduce believable, yet false news to a social news site, i.e. CNN’s iReport, Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc.
2. Wait for it to get popular and hit the front page and/or wait for a major news outlet to pick it up.
3. Watch company stock the whole time, watching for a major sell-off or drop in price.
4. Buy the stock at the extremely low price.
5. Sell the stock a few hours or days later.
6. Profit!

Someone made a lot of money during those two events.

Someone also made a lot of money last Monday when the house voted down the first version of the Bailout bill and stock plummeted, but recovered the next day. However, that’s very different from this clever, clandestine scheme.

This is nothing new. IANAL, but this wreaks of insider trading and other stock-related crimes. Folks have been attempted, or at least trying to introduce market-shaking news since the inception of the stock market. However, social and automatic news sites make it easier.

Update: The SEC is investigating. Meanwhile, PCworld questions citizen journalism and Slashdot discusses the implications. I for one continue to question the mainstream media and why it doesn’t check the accuracy of reports, not only in the tech sector but in all sectors, especially politics.

The GOP loves less government except, of course, when they need federal billions to bail out their cowboy, unregulated, corrupt economic policies.

read more | digg story

I’ve completed my review of the OLPC XO laptop I received through the Give One Get One program.

It’s live on BIOSLEVEL.com and has been submitted to a number of social bookmarking sites, forums, and affiliate news sites.

Check it out! OLPC XO laptop review at BIOSLEVEL.

For Digg users: One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop from Give one Get One arrives.

For Newsvine users: One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop from Give one Get One arrives.

Here’s a teaser video:

I apologize for the Quicktime; I’m a fan of Flash embeds, but for some reason the Flash version of this video doesn’t function correctly.

The Columbus-based conference recently posted a list of the speakers to present at its conference September 29. Warren Woodford, founder of MEPIS, Dave Grega of UsabilityRubric.com, and Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, executive director of Linux International, are among those presenting at the conference.

read more | digg story

I did a brief survey just now of a few of the more well-known social bookmarking—social news, really— sites. My intent was to find commonalities in features and functions in order to assess what’s been done already.

I inspected Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and Newsvine. I did not consider Bloglines, StumbleUpon, nor Technorati because none of those three show links the same way that the others do—they require account creation or other steps before coming directly to links.

Obviously, the most common feature is voting. A registered user can mark his or her approval (or disapproval!) of a bookmark. If the bookmark is liked by enough people in a certain amount of time, the bookmark gets “promoted” to the front page, where it sits until the amount of users voting for the bookmark slows down to a rate at which it is overtaken by other bookmarks with a higher rate of votes.

Each has user registration as a requirement for voting. Non-registered users are permitted to peruse the bookmarks, but they cannot submit nor vote on bookmarks. Registered users generally have control of a limited profile, which optionally lists at least the user’s nickname and web site URL.

On Digg, reddit, and Newsvine, users can comment on bookmarks. While reddit’s and Newsvine’s respective comment systems are fully threaded (meaning that a user can reply to a comment, and another user can reply to that comment, and so on, and it’s visually separated), Digg’s commenting system is limited to two levels of commenting (New comment or reply to a top-level comment only).

Another product, Pligg—an open source CMS that operates much like Digg and Newsvine combined, has these features, as well.

What unique features does each have? Digg has a lot of tools (DiggSpy, SWARM, STACK, etc.) to visualize incoming bookmarks and stories. Newsvine pays its members for generating content (submitting stories/bookmarks, writing columns), thus creating more page views and more advertising revenue. Both Del.icio.us and Newsvine use tags to help users search for stories/bookmarks based on keywords. Digg and Newsvine both have friend systems, where you can add other users to a list of friends and be able to quickly view your friends’ submissions and links on which your friends have voted positively.

Reddit and Del.icio.us are far more lightweight both visually and page load size than the other two. However, DiggRiver is even more lightweight (and meant for mobile phone browsers, actually).

What other features, both common and unique, am I missing? I care little about the size of each community, nor do I care about its stereotypical users’ behavior. I’m focusing on features.

Paintings by artist Caleb Weintraub. They have names like, “For the fourth time this season, little Jimmy has single-handedly put an end to the prospect of the next great development in Western History,” and “There was no need anymore for camouflage but when battling a plant this large and this pink it seemed a fine tool for motivation.”

read more | digg story

Dumpy Thursday is a weekly set of three single-frame comics drawn in MS Paint. The humor is incredibly outlandish and sometimes abstract or inside-joke-ish. Start at the beginning and check out all ~350 to date, and you will probably almost die in laughter at least 333 times. It’s even got a few flash movies and an periodic full-frame comic.

Some of my friends run it (Peck, Will, Mike), so it’s sure to be hilarious.

read more | digg story

A story I wrote for ThinkComputers.org made the front page of Digg!

File, Print, and Webcam server in 1, the Asus WL-500W N Router