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Great gifts for geeks, hand-picked by Download Squad
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Posts with tag UserGenerated

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

Slashdot lets users vote on stories with Firehose

Slashdot Firehose
Once upon a time, before Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and the relaunched Netscape, there was Slashdot. The original social news site for geeks allowed users to submit and share interesting articles with their peers back when Web 2.0 wasn't even a twinkle in anyone's eye.

While there's still an active community of Slashdot readers/commentors/submittors, the site's not resting on its laurels. This week, the site pushed its Firehose service into wider release.

What's Firehose? It's Slashdot's answer to the new crop of user generated news sites. It's basically Slashdot classic, but with voting. Each story has a + or - next to its headline. You can use the icons to vote a story up or down.

The stories are assigned a color based on their popularity. The top stories are red, and the least popular are black. You can use a color slider at the top of the page to filter the stories you see. And a Slashdot editor picks some of the hottest stories of the day to put on the front page. If you're a purist, you can skip the Firehose experience and continue visiting Slashdot's main page for your news unsorted by the wisdom of the masses.

[via Mashable]

Filed under: Internet, Video, Web services

Vidmeter: tracking popular (but not always good) online videos

Vidmeter
You check YouTube's featured and most viewed videos daily, but you've got this sinking suspicion that there must be something more out there than fake porn and promotional material for TV shows and movies.

Well, if you want to get your finger on the pulse of what kind of user-generated content the kids are watching these days, you might want to check out Vidmeter. The site tracks the most popular videos (based on views and comments) at Atom Films, Break.com, Daily Motion, Google, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, vSocial, Yahoo, and Youtube.

The pages are ranked every hour, and you can easily track which videos are moving up and down in the rankings, although I'm not sure why you'd really want to know. And what does all this research show? That fake porn still tops the list. By a long shot. The most popular video today is "Chicks Gone Wild!" The still shot at the start of the video is of a scantily-clad woman, but the video itself shows a number of baby chickens, some disturbing computer generated imagery, and a tender moment between two dogs.

[Via Techscape]

Filed under: Internet, Video, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Web services

Movidity: like YouTube for your phone, but newer and untested


MovidityThere's plenty of ways to transfer YouTube or Google videos to a mobile device. But what if you don't feel like downloading and transcoding videos to save on your phone? Movidity hopes you'll just say YouWho? and use their site instead.

Movidity plans to launch movy.tv in January. The site will let users upload audio or video content which will automatically be converted into a format that is viewable on most smartphones and PCs. You'll be able to browse videos from any phone with a web browser and JAVA/MIDP2 support. If you visit the site on a PCE, you'll be able to watch videos in Shockwave format.

Of course, just because you can doesn't mean you will. And while user-generated video sharing sites are becoming a dime a dozen these days, I'm guessing most folks are just going to wait for industry-leader YouTube to roll out its own mobile service.

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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