justflogme

Most folks don't want to admit it, so I'll lead the charge: I can't get enough of celebrity gossip sites.

Each day, I'll surf to my favorites and find out everything I wanted to know about Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and other celebs. It's my guilty pleasure. And by the looks of things, especially if we are to believe a post written by Perez Hilton's founder, which claims his site had 13.9 million page views Monday, I'm not alone.

So let's take a look at some of the prominent celebrity gossip sites across the Web and find out why they're so intriguing.

Defamer
Although Defamer was originally a separate entity under the Gawker Media umbrella, the company's founder and CEO, Nick Denton, announced recently that the site would become a section on Gawker.com to streamline business operations. And although it's not the most popular of the celebrity gossip sites, it's still worth visiting.

The content on Defamer is interesting, but I've found that it tends to be a little late in its reporting, and it's not nearly as compelling as sites like TMZ or Perez Hilton. In fact, despite its name, Defamer is decidedly "nicer" than the competition, and its tries to be more news-oriented than some sites that simply post pictures and comment on the way a particular celebrity looks.

I don't mind that Defamer has chosen to go that way, but as a major Perez Hilton fan, I enjoy the occasional snark.

Perez Hilton
If you haven't been to Perez Hilton to find out all the juicy details on A-list celebs like Angelina Jolie or D-list celebs like LC (Lauren Conrad) from "The Hills," you probably haven't spent enough time on the Web. Believe it or not, this site is, in its own strange way, a Web institution.

Rather than posting videos, a la TMZ, Perez Hilton boasts some of the funniest and most eye-popping stories on celebrities anywhere on the Web. The site is filled with pictures Perez finds of celebrities living their daily lives, which are then edited to include mean-spirited or (at times) nice comments. That said, many of the edits made to the pictures by Perez are adult in nature, so it's best if you read this blog when the kids are asleep.

Perez Hilton has been around for years, and the site's founder, Mario Lavandeira Jr., is one of the most hated people in Hollywood. He doesn't mince any words, and his blog posts, while short, are biting and shoot straight from the hip.

Unlike sites like Defamer, Perez often breaks big stories and has shots of celebrities hours before other gossip sites. Because Perez Hilton is the biggest site in the space, Lavandeira has been cited in a slew of lawsuits, and some celebrities criticize him, saying he goes easy on some and unnecessarily hard on others. He claims that he's tough on everyone.

Regardless, Perez Hilton is a must-see for celebrity watchers. The blog posts are sometimes serious, often funny, and always entertaining.

Posh24
Posh24 may not be one of the biggest celebrity gossip sites on the Web, and it's easily eclipsed by popular destinations like TMZ and Perez Hilton, but I still enjoy the different perspective it offers.

If you haven't been to Posh24, the site tries to offer the same experience as Perez Hilton: it shows a slew of pictures and brief posts below them. That said, it doesn't feature the same biting commentary you might expect from Perez Hilton. Like Defamer, the site is nicer in its postings.

Believe it or not, even though I love Perez Hilton, I like Posh24 because it is the nicer alternative. After a period of reading brutal Hilton posts, seeing the same stories (or pictures) offered in a nicer tone is a welcome change. That said, Posh24 doesn't have the same amount of coverage as Perez Hilton, which means that you may see the same faces more often than you might like.

The Superficial
The Superficial is all about pictures. And although it's not as popular as sites like Perez Hilton, it's the best place to find images of your favorite celebrities.

As soon as you get to the Superficial home page, you'll be shocked by the number and quality of pictures on the site. Believe it or not, it has more pictures displayed on its front page than Perez Hilton, and to the right of the posts, there are galleries ranging from "Gisele in a Bikini" to "Madonna's Chin Hair." Suffice it to say, the site has anything you're looking for when you want to look at your favorite (or least favorite) celebrities.

The Superficial takes an unapologetic look at celebrities. The site doesn't mince words, and it will capitalize on supposed celebrity weight gains or errors in judgment. It's not nice often, but it certainly is entertaining.

TMZ
TMZ, the AOL-owned celebrity gossip site, not only is one of my favorite destinations on the Web, but I also love to watch its television show, which features many of the same videos you'll find on its Web site.

It's TMZ's dedication to video that makes it an ideal destination for celebrity gossip seekers. Unlike Perez Hilton and the other sites in this roundup, TMZ relies heavily on video. Each day, there's a host of clips showing celebrities walking into restaurants in Hollywood or shopping in New York City. And each time, the TMZ camerapeople ask those celebrities baiting questions, trying to get something (anything) out of them.

It doesn't often work well. But there are times when you won't believe what some of these celebrities will do or say. On an almost daily basis, there's at least one celebrity who says something cringe-worthy, and every time, I'm left wondering why they would say such a thing on camera.

Regardless, I find value in TMZ because of those videos. Instead of pictures or stories that don't really tell you about celebrities, TMZ's videos give you an opportunity to see what they're like. You get a feel for whether they're nice people. More often than not, you'll find that they just don't want to be bothered, and they say nothing. Who can blame them?

web

Bespin is a Mozilla Labs experiment that "proposes an open, extensible Web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards."

What does that mean? Well, the short answer is that Bespin gives developers the ability to edit local or remote code via a Web browser. The current release is written in JavaScript, and it supports editing of HTML and JavaScript files, but no compiled languages such as Java yet.

While still a Mozilla Labs project, Bespin looks like an excellent representation of what I've called a "cloud editor," wherein developers can manipulate code directly, and the platform is aware of what to do, once the code is changed.

There are a number of browser-based editors already, but check out the video, and you'll see why Bespin is interesting.

Via Cote

You can follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

web

Just in time for the weekend, social networks Facebook and MySpace were dealing with several new security issues on Friday that could expose personal information and communications from friends.

Facebook said it had removed a new rogue application that was spamming users and exposing their information. Before it was halted, the application sent messages claiming that a friend had reported the recipient for violating Facebook's terms of service and offered a link to click to find out more information.

Users who clicked on the link were providing the app access to their profile and personal information as well as unknowingly forwarding the message on to everyone in their Facebook contact list, according to Graham Cluley's blog for Sophos.

"Our team disabled this application for violating the Facebook Developer Terms of Service," Facebook spokesman Simon Axten said in an e-mail. "Some additional versions of it have sprung up, and we've disabled these as well. We're actively monitoring the site for others and are working to block the application completely."

Cluley said Facebook should do more to prevent such rogue applications from spreading in the first place than just shutting them down on an isolated basis.

"One of the problems is that Facebook allows anybody to write an application, and third-party applications are not vetted before they are made available to the public. So, even as Facebook stamps out one malignant application, it can pop up in another place like a poisoned mushroom with a different name," Cluley wrote.

"It sounds like this could be a new favoured trick being used by spammers and identity thieves to build up their databases of intended targets," he wrote. "My advice to Facebook users is to think very carefully before adding any new applications."

The problem prompted a Facebook user to create a Facebook group for victims of the scam, noted Trend Micro in its anti-malware blog.

The rogue app surfaced less than a week after the spread of a similar app dubbed "Error Check System" that falsely warned users that their friends were having problems viewing their profiles.

"Surely these two events in just a single week mean that it's about time that Facebook reviews its application hosting policy," the Trend Micro blog said.

What that quote suggests is akin to saying, 'there have been two robberies, we need to implement martial law in the city,'" said Facebook spokesman Axten. He noted that there are more than 660,000 developers and the "vast majority" of Facebook applications are not "nefarious."

The company makes it easy to be a Facebook developer--asking only for a valid e-mail address to get an application key--to foster innovation, and has a dedicated Developer Operations team that investigates applications that show "anomalous activity," Axten said.

"In this case, we responded quickly to user reports and disabled the application before too many people were affected," he said.

Meanwhile, over at MySpace, a spokeswoman said the company fixed a vulnerability on Friday that enabled strangers to view MySpace users' private comments. As with the other privacy holes that have been reported on, someone would have to know the exact URL and insert the correct user ID to exploit the weakness.

web

As a service to those of you who found your T&E budget cut to the bone and thus unable to support the flight to Palm Desert and the steep admission fee to the Demo 09 conference being held there next week, we present several ways to track the buzz at the show without being at the show itself.

I've put up a lot of ways to keep track of what CNET writers are seeing at the show. This is a bit of an experiment on my part. If you're inclined, let me know (in comments) which works for you, or doesn't.

Demo live video
Go to www.demo.com/live to watch the demos in real-time (or close to it). This page also has a Facebook widget. But the Demo tech audience will be filled with Twitter junkies, so...

Twitter
Follow CNET and CBS writers me (@Rafe), Daniel Terdiman (@GreeterDan) and Larry Magid (@LarryMagid). We'll be twittering everything that happens at Demo. We'll also be blogging the demos and trends that merit deeper discussions, on our Demo 09 roundup page. That page will have our Twitter feed embedded as well.

This RSS feed will aggregate the Demo 09 twitters from us. You can also open up this CoverItLive window, which will have the same content. There's also the @Demo09 Twitter ID, which is an automated account fed by, again, the Demo twitters from me, Larry, and Daniel. However, it's slow to update.

To follow the twittering of everybody at Demo 09 (or at least everybody who provided the Demo team with their Twitter IDs), follow @DemoChatter. Better yet, to follow everything that people (including us) are saying about Demo 09 everywhere, use Twitter Search or a search-enabled Twitter client like TweetDeck to track the hashtag #Demo09.

The official Demo 09 Twitter feed (yawn) is @DemoTweets.

The leak
The full Demo 09 program guide was also leaked yesterday (it's not supposed to be made public until Monday morning, when the conference opens). You can see it at the Silicon Angle blog. It will tell you who's at the show and what they are showing. I have always found, though, that what's written in the guide is rarely a useful indication of what's going to look good or bad on stage. Be sure to follow the live updates if you want the skinny.

web

As an iPhone user, one of the things I've found to be increasingly irksome is the customer review system built into Apple's App Store for the iPhones and iPod Touch.

It's as basic as you get, which follows the design ethos found in the many of Apple's hardware products, such as the no-button Mighty Mouse, disappearing MacBook buttons, and I/O ports on its notebook computers and LCD displays.

While simplicity is one of the qualities that makes Apple's products more approachable for the basic user, it's something that doesn't translate well to a crowd-powered review system.

In its current state, the review system lets you very easily rate a software application from one to five stars, along with the option to write in any thoughts or feelings you have about it. This sounds great, in theory, but a good majority of the reviews found on App Store applications seem to prove otherwise.

More often than not, you'll see one-star reviews in which people are raving about the quality of an application. There are also people who give an application five stars, then go on to spend two paragraphs discussing how often it crashes and larger off-topic issues like international pricing and the handset's lack of a copy-and-paste feature. You also get a lot of comments written in ALL CAPS, with lines of Emoji icons, colored stars, and superfluous exclamation marks.

In every sense, it's like the Wild West: untamed and full of interesting characters.

To Apple's credit, on Friday, the company (as promised) removed reviews from customers who had not purchased the application they were reviewing. This may cut down on spam and ill-conceived or written reviews, but it's not a big step in improving how the review system works.

Problematic by design
The problem stems from the fact that Apple has treated software reviews with the same level of simplicity it's approached movie and music reviews. These two mediums are not interactive, nor do they have hangups like development schedules and performance issues.

While you can rate an album or music track based on your enjoyment of it, it's not speaking to a truth about frame rate jitters, buggy code, or a developer who has not put out a necessary update in six months--all things you may find in iPhone applications and that can be good to know before plunking down money on a purchase.

One reason there's a lack of these types of clarifications in user reviews is that Apple has fragmented its reviews system based on platform. Mobile users don't get the same quality of review browsing as those using iTunes do. For instance, when viewing user reviews in iTunes, you get the option to flag a bad review and say whether it was helpful. You can also sort by best and worst reviews, along with the most helpful and recent.

On the iPhone, users have none of these options. In fact, there's currently only one way to view reviews--in chronological order. For a device that's slowly gaining independence from having to sync up with a computer (as seen in recent improvements to podcast downloading on the device), this is troubling.

A better system
There are a three things Apple could do, explicitly to software application reviews, that would beef up the system and make reviews really matter to the potential customers who read them. All three can be found on Amazon.com, which has done a really fantastic job of creating a single ratings system that works on multiple genres of products:

1. App Store-iTunes parity
A step in the right direction would be to bring both review systems up to speed with one another. Offer the capability to sort and flag straight from the device. This could be done with sorting buttons at the top of the review section, just like what was done to sort application categories by date and popularity in the latest App Store update.

Also, let me see a better breakdown of the ratings, like Amazon, Newegg, and others do by showing you how many types of user votes each combined rating is comprised of. Seeing the average rating, which comes out of all the user reviews combined, is helpful. But if I could see that the app has a few hundred four- and five-star ratings, more than the lower numbers, that really says something--especially if I can drill down and read only the reviews with a specific star rating.

2. Developer response
I'd love to see something similar to what Amazon.com allows, in which you can respond to certain reviews with an agreement or rebuttal, something that would let both users and developers approach a concern or praise with feedback of their own.

Using this system, a developer could post direct responses to criticisms instead of the one-star review sitting there, tarnishing an application's score, long after the user had left his or her review. More importantly, the developer would not have to wait on Apple to deal with a review, presuming that it had been flagged by users (who were using iTunes to flag it) before taking action.

3. User credibility
Amazon has something called Real Name. It's a system that lets users back up their reviews by putting their legal name on it. While Apple might frown on the security risks of such a system, it's done great things for Amazon, and has given people who leave detailed and thoughtful reviews a way for others to follow what they're reviewing.

Apply the same thing to the App Store, and you could end up selling more applications from people who are buying things based not on media coverage, or popularity, but purely on the opinions of users whose opinions they respect.

So which one of these things is Apple most likely to add? My guess is the first; a slow trickle-down from iTunes, allowing users to flag bad reviews from the App Store.

Other features from iTunes have slowly crept into the App Store, and in the latest update, Apple seems to have realized that people want more ways to dig through the ever-growing list of applications. I'm just hoping the company will put that same effort into helping us wade through user reviews.

web

As those of you with older PCs may have noticed the hard way, some of the new features in Apple's Safari 4 beta for Windows require a graphics card with at least 64MB of on-board RAM that supports at least DirectX 9. This makes it the first browser I've heard of with an explicit graphics card requirement, but is this really a big deal?

DirectX 9 has been around since 2004, and you can pick up a card for your desktop that supports it for around 20 bucks. This isn't quite analogous to Windows requiring a massive hardware upgrade for Vista, although it is definitely annoying.

What is strange is that Cover Flow on iTunes will work on these older machines, including the main Windows XP computer I use at work. The graphics card is older, yet, as you can see in the screenshots, Cover Flow works in iTunes and doesn't in Safari 4. This leads to my other complaint about the beta: Safari offers no notification when your graphics card is not compliant. Top Sites and Cover Flow merely don't appear. So if the browser must require an upgrade, when iTunes doesn't, the least Apple could do is include some kind of warning.

This isn't the biggest deal in the world, and Safari 4 is still in beta so there's plenty of time to work out the kinks. But this strikes me as a seriously annoying problem, if nothing else, when you consider that the graphics and design elements of Apple software are one of their big attractions.

Apple suggests that one solution could be to upgrade your graphics card drivers, which didn't work for me. Apple had not returned my call requesting comment at the time of publication.

If you have other problems or solutions to problems in Safari 4 beta, tell me about them in the comments.

web

Today the Rocky Mountain News publishes its final edition after nearly 150 years. Elsewhere, newspaper publishers everywhere from San Francisco to Philadelphia face equally grim prospects.

The reasons have been well chronicled by others like Poynter Online and I won't waste time rehashing familiar arguments and analyses. But one complaint about newspapers is that they increasingly are out of step with their readers, who for too long were ignored at the bottom rung of a one-way hierarchy which defined their relationship.

It was only a coincidence, but the Rocky Mountain News announcement came on the same day that Facebook declared that it would embrace a community-driven process for governing. Responding to a controversy earlier this month over changes to its terms of service, Facebook said it will henceforth put any proposed modifications to its membership up for public debate in a "notice and comment" forum.

Not everyone was impressed by the announcement. Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a scorcher over at ReadWriteWeb, dunning Facebook's management for losing its grip. But if I read Marshall correctly, he's not slamming the company for its bid to be more transparent. Rather, he's arguing that Facebook still hasn't fully absorbed the real reason behind the flap.

What's delusional about the company's position? Multiple company officials on the call today said that the controversy showed how much of a sense of ownership users have over Facebook and that they wanted a sense of participation in its governing. (You complain about us because you love us!) We'd argue that it is pretty clear people have a sense of ownership instead over their content and want Facebook to keep its hands off. Ownership of content, not the lack of input on policy, was what people were upset about.

Fair enough. And voting may not be the best idea out there. Still, I think Facebook deserves credit for at least trying. Listening to the conference call on Thursday, I found myself wondering whether some of the very decades-old newspapers now going through a horrid time might have fared had they found a way to similarly engage their readers once the Internet went commercial. How long, for instance, has it taken for newspapers to let its reporters begin blogging? How about the inclusion of reader comments--let alone taking feedback on how to make coverage more relevant to the community's needs? Or reader blogs, for that matter? (There still aren't many of the latter.)

There are obvious differences between Facebook and a big city newspaper and I'm not suggesting that the cure here is simply to sprinkle some Web 2.0 fairy dust and everything will be as it was 25 years ago. But Facebook is also a media company and as Larry Magid smartly writes, its 175 million users are the ones who supply the content. Giving them a voice in policy making, whether to quell a brewing storm or to get out ahead of the next one--that's less interesting to me than Facebook's willingness to experiment.

It's not a perfect system and there doubtless are going to be rough spots ahead. Still, I'm going to cut them a break. It's easy to be cynical about the motivations but if Facebook has found a way to offer up more transparency and yes, even as Marshall suggests, participation over governing, then the company has hit upon a formula that will keep it relevant. Wish The Rocky Mountain News and its industry cohorts would be able to say the same. Sigh.

Update, 12:33 p.m. PST: A Brooklyn blog reports that The New York Times next week will begin neighborhood blogs. Thanks to a pointer from TechCrunch, where Jim Schachter, the editor for digital initiatives at the Times, confirms the pilot program. Schachter also asks the following:

Can we create a combination of journalism, technology and advertising that people who don't work for us can adopt? How much or how little oversight by us would be needed to keep the quality high? Would people pay to be associated with us? Would there be enough revenue that some split between us and a non-NYT blogger would work? I'd love to know what readers here think.

web

The biannual start-up fest Demo kicks off Sunday in Palm Desert, Calif. There will be somewhat fewer launches--only 40 -- at this show than at most previous Demos, but the lineup is interesting. Here are the companies whose pitches I am most looking forward to, based on public information about them. What actually happens at the show may make this list irrelevant, but this is the early take. The full rundown of presenters is after the jump.

Rafe's five preview picks for Demo 09

Avaak has DARPA mesh radio technology and has applied it to video for its military contracts. Its entry into the consumer market will be a personal video system. Interesting.

Ensembli will be trying--as so many have before--to apply some AI to finding content on the Web and in RSS feeds for individuals.

Desknet, it appears, is trying to build a desktop client that aggregates all your social network activities.

Qualcomm MEMS Technology may be talking about some cool new display technology.

Transformyx makes software for corporate crisis management. There will be a lot of corporate crises this year. Looking forward to seeing what it's introducing.

Demo 09 presenting companies

Consumer Devices
Always Innovating, Inc.
Avaak, Inc.
Coveroo, Inc.

Consumer Software and Services
Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc.
Cc:Betty, Inc.
deskNET SA
Ensembli, Ltd.
Evri, Inc.
Gazaro, Inc.
HAM-IT, Inc.
Home-Account, Inc.
Jadoos, Inc.
Kutano Corp.
Primal Fusion, Inc.
Promptu Systems Corp.
Qubes, Inc.
Skout, Inc.
SmartyCard
Symantec Corp.
Vokle, Inc.
Xandros, Inc.
XMARKS

Enabling Technology
bluBuzz, LLC
eFormic, Ltd.
HowSimple, LLC
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc.

Enterprise Software and Services
7 Billion People, Inc.
BitGravity, Inc.
Document Depository Corp., LLC
Ontier, Inc.
Purewire, Inc.
Silverstone Solutions, Inc.
Transformyx, Inc.
Zuora, Inc.

IT Management and Infrastructure
AppZero Corp.

Small Business Software and Services
Citrix Online
Liquid Media, LLC
Technicopia, LLC
Zipadi Technologies, LLC

web

REDMOND, Wash.--At Microsoft's TechFest, it takes a little imagination to see how the research technologies might eventually come to market.

A new video from Microsoft shows in an elegant, if utopian way, what it might look like if all of those gadgets came together several years hence. Earlier ...

web

Google Maps' Street View feature uses imagery collected by cameras mounted to Google cars, but now the company is blending in photos taken by the public as well.

Panoramio, which Google acquired in 2007, lets people share photos that have been geotagged with location data so they can be shown on a map. Those Panoramio photos already were available in Google Earth and Google Maps, but now they can show on the more personal Street View as well, Google programmer Frederik Schaffalitzky said in a blog post Wednesday.

Potential advantages of checking the photos on Street View include views at a higher resolution view or during a different time of day, which could be handy for the occasions when Google's Street View camera was shooting into the sun and didn't produce much of an image.

And of course a disadvantage is that the Street View intrusiveness to which some people object is amplified.

When a view can be shown with Panoramio images, a "user photos" icon shows in the upper-right corner of Street View. Clicking it shows an array of local photo thumbnails, and clicking one of those thumbnails loads that image. Above it is a link to the Panoramio page of the person who added the photo.

Not every Panoramio image is included. Once you've contributed geotagged photos to Panoramio, "Google's image-matching algorithms will analyze them at some point to see if they are also a good match for a Street View location," Schaffalitzky said.

web