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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

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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