Tech and Computers
Digg’s latest fail leads to mini start ups
Aug 31st
As you may or may not of known. Digg the popular social news site has sold out to corporations. And now have little influence of what’s on the site. Since the change about one week ago, I have checked the front page everyday and sure enough all the submissions are by corporate sponsors. As the only popular alternative to Digg called Reddit, which has it’s own problems like being known as one of the ugliest sites on the web (which is ironic for a website that you have to read closely) and that it is designed for children and in many ways ran like children.
So does this mean social news is now dead with no alternative? Of course not.
Since the decline of Digg there has been several little wannabees popping up. None have really taken off, but with the fast downward spiral Digg has sent itself into and the dislikes of Reddit from day one. I think it’s only a matter of time before one of these lucky spawns take off.
We have joined them with our social news site PageRanked.com unfortunately have no time to market right now and timing is crucial for the next social news service to come up. If you have time and a desire to compete, we have some tips below of how to start for free.
How to make a social news site for free.
If you want to jump on the bandwagon then best way is with pligg.com , it’s free and works great. Granted the support is terrible and they really don’t care as a company. but free is free, and you can always get your own tech guy to help out when needed.
Once you set up pligg on your new site, you can simple start adding content and start marketing.
It’s toss up who will win, but i can safely say the lost members of Digg are more then enough to keep any site going strong. Just check there website and you will see account closed over and over.
Can nano-technology mean a new energy source?
Mar 19th
It’s so tiny, you can’t see it with the naked eye.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered an energy source that you can see only through a microscope.
The researchers devised a process for generating electricity using nanotechnology. They plan to refine the process in hopes of creating a new environmentally friendly battery, among other products.
It works like this: Researchers used tiny wires, known as carbon nanotubes, to create a powerful wave of energy, according to Michael Strano, and MIT associate professor of chemical engineering. He is also the senior author of a paper on this new phenomenon, published in this week’s Nature Materials journal.
After coating these tiny wires with a layer of fuel, Strano said his team generated a so-called thermopower wave and stumbled across a reaction that may eventually be used to power electronics, computers and cell phones.
“This could lead to batteries that are up to 10 times smaller and still have the same power output. In the portable energy and energy conservation arena, we’re trying to find power sources that have a smaller profile but hold more energy,” Strano told CNN Radio.
To build a power source, such as a battery, it’s necessary to move electrons in a material from one end of the battery to the other, creating an electrical current. This thermopower wave MIT researchers discovered, using the class of molecules know as carbon nanotubes, does just that.
Strano said “some of the advantages of this technology [are] you can generate a lot of power from a very, very small device.”
And that’s not all. Most batteries on the market now are made from highly toxic heavy metals, which are very bad for the environment — metals like lead, nickel and cadmium.
Batteries made from this new thermopower technology would be completely nontoxic, Strano said.
“The materials we use to make these thermopower waves are organic. They’re not grown naturally, but they’re made of carbon. In other words, you could essentially incinerate them, or they would degrade over time, there’s no heavy metal residue,” Strano said.
There’s another potential benefit in using a so-called thermopower battery: energy savings.
“Most people don’t realize a battery sitting unused in your laptop is leaking its power away,” Strano said. “If you take all the laptop batteries that are produced in one year, in the off state, they’re leaking an amount of power during that year that we could store in a small nuclear reactor … and that’s power that’s essentially lost and dissipated just from laptop batteries.”
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