Yesterday the Washington Post published a great article about young teachers and their wild Facebook profiles. What did The Washington Post find? Sexual innuendos, a talking sperm cartoon, helpful tips like 'Don't smoke crack while pregnant' and a lot of sexual objectification and drunk party photos.

How do you find these "wild teacher" profiles on Facebook? It's easy.

1. Log on to Facebook. You need an account.
2. Join your local neighborhood/city network.
3. Search Facebook for the name of your local school system.
4. Then sit back and "watch the public profiles of 20-something teachers unfurl like gift wrap on the screen, revealing a sense of humor that can be overtly sarcastic or unintentionally unprofessional -- or both."

So who is in the wrong here? Are the young teachers naive to the fact that their students, parents and school administrators can see their Facebook profiles? Or are we wrong for holding teachers to a higher standard than the average Facebook user?

Some American states including Florida, Colorado, Tennessee and Massachusetts have banned teachers from having public profiles on MySpace and Facebook. And teachers unions have started warning their members of the dangers of having a racy social network presence. The teacher's unions might want to add Flickr to that caution list. A quick Flickr search for "sexy teacher" introduced us to Jennifer. She's a teacher in Taipei who wants to be a model.

Here's an easy solution for everyone. If you are a teacher, then edit your privacy prefs. Don't allow everyone in a Facebook network to see your full profile. Anyone can join your local city/town network and see your profile. Or take advantage of Facebook's "Limited Profile" feature. It only takes a few seconds to edit your privacy preferences and it could save your job.




methodshop

Labels: internet, social networking

Google has officially launched Website Optimizer, a tool that Webmasters can use to test variations of a site's content and design to increase conversions. The free tool is available at google.com/websiteoptimizer, and the search giant has also launched an accompanying blog, tutorial and discussion board.

Website Optimizer was first rolled out as a beta in late 2006 for users of Google's AdWords platform, but the expansion means that any site owner can access the tool (provided they have a Google account, like Gmail) and start running multivariate tests.




methodshop

Labels: internet

According to the Facebook blog, the social network is launching a live chat feature this week allowing users to communicate in real time from their Facebook profile pages. It's still in beta I think. Not everyone has been able to install the new chat application yet. I've gotten a few install errors so far and I don't see the chat app in my profile yet.

A chat application is great news for Facebook users. The "Wall" application was great for some things. But sometimes you just want to have a conversation with someone that isn't publicly posted in their profile or doesn't have the delay of going to their "Inbox" first. In case you were wondering, all Facebook Chat conversations are one-to-one, completely private, and only between Facebook friends.



Bonus: You don't have to get IM account info from all your Facebook friends. Just install the app and your Facebook friends will automatically get added to your chat list.

To add the Facebook Chat application to your profile, just click here. But remember it's a little buggy still. Don't flip out if you get an error. Hopefully they will get things all straightened out by the end of the week.

I hope they add a "Pages" option to the chat app next. It would be nice to be able to chat with fans on the MethodShop.com Facebook Fan Page.


methodshop

Labels: internet, social networking

Have you been "Rickrolled" yet?

1980s pop star Rick Astley is now making headlines again after years in obscurity thanks to millions of Web surfers being Rickrolled by pranksters. Webmasters and bloggers are purposely redirecting unsuspecting Internet users to a video of Astley performing his hit “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

How does a Rickroll work? It's basically a bait and switch. Let's say I make a link that says Sexy Paris Hilton Video and you click on it. Instead of actually seeing Paris Hilton, you'd be directed to a Rick Astley music video. That's a "Rick Roll".

Tuesday YouTube decided to get in on the joke. Several links on the YouTube homepage purposely "Rick Rolled" users. Why? Tuesday just happened to be April Fools’ Day.

The act of Rickrolling has even evolved beyond cyberspace. Pawl Fisher, a student at Eastern Washington University (EWU), recently "Rick Rolled" a March basketball game at his school. Pawl actually taped parts of the video before the game and edited in some game footage. So he didn't actually stop a game in progress. But it's still really funny. Here's the clip:





So what has this done to Astley’s record sales? They are way up. Even his iTunes sales are up. His record label is trying to get a re-release of Astley greatest hits album out not only to keep up with demand but to obviously cash in on the Rickrolling craze. Astley recently spoke to the LA Times and called the phenomena "bizarre" and only hopes that his daughter receives no embarrassment over it.

Personally I think it's one of greatest phenomena ever to sweep the Internet. By the way, the error page for MethodShop is a "Rickroll".

So the next time you randomly click on a link and see a short guy with red hair wearing a black shirt and a tan trench-coat singing... congratulations, you've been Rickrolled.


methodshop | youtube

Labels: internet, video

For April Fools Day 2008, Google's Gmail rolled out a fake "custom time" feature, which purports to let users send e-mails into the past and consequently never miss important deadlines again.



You can read more about this fake Gmail feature here.

methodshop

Labels: holiday, internet

Have you ever wondered... "How Many Cannibals Could My Body Feed?" If so, then go buy a lottery ticket because today is your lucky day!

OnePlusYou.com made an Adobe Flash application that analyzes your body type and calculates the number of cannibals that your body can feed. The site also claims that asking yourself "How Many Cannibals Could My Body Feed?" may be the "most important question you'll ever ask yourself." I'm such an idiot. I thought it was "What's the meaning of life?"



Kind of random but check it out: How Many Cannibals Could My Body Feed?

If you're about to eat lunch right now, I apologize.


methodshop

Labels: internet

Every year on March 17, we honor Saint Patrick (circa 385–461), one of the patron saints of Ireland. Whether or not you choose to celebrate the holiday by wearing green, eating Irish foods, imbibing Irish drink (usually Guinness), or attending parades, we wish you a safe a happy holiday.

Everyone wants to be Irish on St. Patrick's Day... even computer operating systems (WARNING: Serious nerd humor below). So as you raise your glass to St. Patrick this year, try to pretend your beer was a computer operating system. It might go a little like this...



Macintosh Beer
Considered by many to be a "light" beer. All the cans look identical. When you take one from the fridge, it opens itself. The ingredients list is not on the can. If you call to ask about the ingredients, you are told that "you don't need to know." A notice on the side reminds you to drag your empties to the trashcan.

DOS Beer
Requires you to use your own can opener, and that you read the directions carefully before opening the can. The can is divided into eight compartments of 2oz each, which have to be accessed separately. A lot of people keep drinking it after it was discontinued.

Windows 3.1 Beer
Was the world's most popular beer in the mid-1990s. Looked a lot like Mac Beer's. Requires that you already own a DOS Beer. Claims that it allows you to drink several DOS Beers simultaneously, but in reality you can only drink a few of them, very slowly, especially slowly if you are drinking the Windows Beer at the same time. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, a can of Windows Beer will explode when you open it.

Windows NT Beer
Windows NT beer could only be purchased by the truckload. This caused most people to have to go out and buy bigger refrigerators. The can looked just like Windows 3.1 Beer. Touted as an "industrial strength" beer, and suggested only for use in bars.

Windows XP Beer
Tastes like Windows 2000 beer but comes with a pretty dress. It opens sometimes without asking and if you leave a case of it open for awhile, it might explode all over your basement. Oh best of all, sometimes Windows XP Beer likes to open your front door and let people in to hang advertisements all over your house and steal your credit card number.

Windows Vista Beer
Windows Vista Beer looks a lot like the newest Mac Beer but tastes more like Windows XP Beer. Most people will probably keep drinking Windows XP Beer until their friends try Windows Vista Beer and say they like it. Many people try Windows Vista Beer, then spit it out and spend hours trying to put Windows XP Beer back into the same can.

UNIX Beer
This very heavy beer comes in 32oz cans, and has been around for years, rumor has it that it was originally brewed as a hoax by a couple of bored workers, only for them to find that some people actually liked the stuff. It tends to be drunk only by freaks or eccentric academics, often with beards; and drinkers of it do not like drinkers of any other beer. In its basic form it doesn't look particularly impressive, but with the addition of a magic ingredient named "X", it can be converted into an all-singing all-dancing beer on a par with the others. Many other varieties exist, with a huge range of flavors and (often unpronounceable) ingredients. Mac Beer has many of the same ingredients as Unix Beer.

OS/2 Beer
Tasted like a mix between Unix and DOS Beer. Allowed you to drink several DOS Beers and a Windows 3.1 Beer simultaneously, but slowly. You never saw anyone drinking OS/2 Beer, but the manufacturer (International Beer Manufacturing) claimed that 9 million OS/2 Beer six-packs were sold. The best place these days to find a an OS/2 Beer is inside an old ATM machine.

Amiga Beer
The company went out of business, but their recipe was picked up by some weird German company, so now this beer is an import. This beer never really sold very well because the original manufacturer didn't understand marketing. Like Unix Beer, Amiga Beer fans are an extremely loyal and loud group. When this can was originally introduced, it appeared flashy and colorful, but the design never changed much over the years, so it looked dated in its later years.

VMS Beer
Requires minimal user interaction, except for popping the top and sipping. However cans have been known on occasion to explode, or contain extremely un-beer-like contents. Best drunk in high pressure development environments. When you call the manufacturer for the list of ingredients, you're told that is proprietary and referred to an unknown listing in the manuals published by the FDA. Rumors are that this was once listed in the Physicians' Desk Reference as a tranquilizer, but no one can claim to have actually seen it.


methodshop

Labels: holiday, internet

The United States is no longer the nation with the largest number of internet users. China overtook the US last month in users for the first time, according to the state-run China Internet Network Information Center.



Researcher BDA China Ltd. estimates there are now over 220 million internet users in China, compared with 217.1 million in the U.S. Online ad revenue continues to lag in China, however, totaling $1.3 billion in 2007 compared to e-Marketer estimates of $21.4 billion in America.

Maybe it's time for me to start promoting the Chinesse translation of my blog.

methodshop

Labels: internet

Hulu.com, the long-gestating Internet joint venture between NBC Universal and Fox, emerges from limited testing on Wednesday to make its catalog of TV shows and video clips available to anyone on the Web.

The streaming-video site displays free, ad-supported shows and feature films from NBC, Fox and more than 50 media companies, including Sony Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

On Wednesday, Hulu is also planning to announce that the Warner Brothers Television Group and Lionsgate will add content from their libraries. Hulu will also give sports fans highlights from N.B.A. and N.H.L. games, and full-length N.C.A.A. men’s basketball games from the last 25 years, the company said.

Hulu’s videos also appear on AOL, MSN, Comcast, MySpace and Yahoo. Over 5,000 Web sites have embedded clips from Hulu, the company said.

Hulu has so far failed to recruit two major television networks, ABC, a division of Walt Disney, and CBS. Jason Kilar, Hulu’s chief executive, said that he was still having regular conversations with executives at the two networks. But even without them, he said, the company has quadrupled the number of show titles in its library since testing began.

“We won’t stop until we have everything in terms of premium content. That is our mission,” he said. “I just think back to the fact that 24 months ago, there wasn’t anything online legally in terms of full TV episodes or films. In just 17 weeks, we have gone from nothing to over 200 premium titles.”

NBC Universal, a division of General Electric, and Fox, a division of the News Corporation, announced their joint venture to much fanfare nearly a year ago. The then-unnamed company was at first viewed skeptically by many in the industry as a desperate attempt to keep up with the Google’s YouTube, the dominant player in online video.

Recently, Hulu has received high marks from media and Web executives for creating an easy to use site with high-quality video and professional content attractive to advertisers.

Hulu has been in a password-protected testing period since October, but has slowly been inviting users to enter the site. Mr. Kilar said that more than five million viewers have watched Hulu videos in the last 30 days, and that 80 percent of the shows on the site are viewed at least once a week.

Hulu is experimenting with giving viewers a choice in advertising. During certain shows, viewers will be able to choose which commercial they want to watch — for example, whether they want to see an ad for Nissan’s Rogue S.U.V., Maxima sedan or Z sports car.

Some viewers will also be given the opportunity to watch a two-minute film preview before a TV show, and then skip all the other advertising breaks.

One challenge Hulu faces is building a predictable and stable library of content. To protect DVD and Web download sales, media companies often make TV shows and films available free on the Web for certain periods of time and then remove them. For example, there are 11 episodes of the TV show “24” on Hulu — beginning with episode 18 of the first season.

“If those episodes keep disappearing, they are going to have trouble getting people to go back and recommend TV shows on Hulu to their friends,” said Bobby Tulsiani, an analyst at JupiterResearch.
[Learn: NYTimes]

methodshop

Labels: internet, video

anagram (an-uh-gram)
noun

A word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of another word or phrase.
For example, Elvis to Lives.

To rearrange letters in such a way. To anagrammatize.
[From New Latin anagramma, from Greek anagrammatismos, ana- (up, again, back, new) + -gram (letter).]


Did you know that parliament is an anagram of partial men? Or, Clint Eastwood an anagram of Old West Action? Someone once said, "All the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie." Here is your chance to discover the wisdom of anagrams.

[Play: Wordsmith]


methodshop

Labels: games, internet

I found a very interesting video on bpmonaco.com today that shows how people in different regions of the world count money.

I never even thought that people counted money differently depending on where they are from. I guess we grow up watching other people counting money a certain way and then we get programmed to emulate what we see.





methodshop

Labels: internet, video

Olivia Munn, the foxy geek hostess from Attack of the Show (G4 TV) and Playboy Magazine (Feb 2007), is in a new viral YouTube video for Dell Computer called "IT Through The Decades."

The clip helps promote Dell's servers by poking fun at all the poor IT related decisions companies have made the past few decades (1978-2008). In the clip, Mike the IT guy suggests "new" technologies like databases and bar codes and gets made fun of by his colleagues.

Olivia doesn't have a ton of lines but she definitely adds some sex appeal to the YouTube clip. Warning: It's a little long (especially for a "viral" clip). Olivia fans will also probably get a kick out of seeing her dressed up in retro 70's and 80's outfits. You can save this clip off YouTube by following these instructions.





If you're looking for more Olivia Munn, just Google search her name. YouTube is full of clips of her doing things like riding a Hawaii Chair, seductively eating hotdogs and recovering from a baby oil slip. Too bad she's dating that turd biscuit Bryan Greenberg from One Tree Hill.

Video: IT Through The Decades - Olivia Munn



methodshop

Labels: internet, tech, video

The Pirate Bay (TPB) is an Internet site that bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" and also serves as a search index for torrent files. People can just search for any movie, application or song torrent and use a BitTorrent client to quickly download the file for free to their computer.

The man behind the project, Gottfrid Svartholm ("anakata"), is now facing copyright charges. Gottfrid is rather shy and tends to stay out of the spotlight. However his fight with the Swedish authorities has given him no choice.

Here's a rare TV interview with Gottfrid I found on YouTube.





methodshop

Labels: internet, tech news, tutorial

The U.S. podcasting audience reached 18.5 million in 2007, according to eMarketer and was projected to top 65 million by 2012 with 25 million listeners downloading one or more podcasts a week.

Ad spending on podcasts in the U.S. is also expected to creep up, from $165 million in 2007 to $435 million in 2012.

Major podcasting networks like Revision3 are growing with the medium's success by revamping their websites and adding new programming.

If you're not already a podcast consumer, then check out the podcast section in iTunes. There's a lot of great stuff from tech shows to yoga workouts. And they are all free. I usually watch 5-10 podcasts a day on either my iPod Touch or Apple TV. Makes the bus ride to work much more enjoyable.



Here are a few favorites:

• Diggnation - weekly rundown of the front page stories on Digg.com
• Tiki Bar TV - drinking games
• Unboxing Live - take a new gadget, and open it up while the camera is rolling
• Midwest Teen Sex Show - explores topics concerning teen sexuality from gym class to syphilis
  
• The Totally Rad Show - movie, comic books and game reviews
• Make Podcast - how to tweak, hack, and bend technology any way you want
• Play Value - the history of video games.
• NBC Nightly News - the full TV broadcast sans commercials
  

methodshop

Labels: internet, podcasting, video

Last month, 395 Croatian men, women and children covered themselves in blue paint, dressed up as Smurfs and got ready to go down in history... as failures.

The "Croatian Smurfs" had gathered in an attempt to smash the previous world record for "most Smurfs gathered together at one time."

Unfortunately due to a research error (possibly caused by Gargamel), their attempt was all in vain.

According to the latest, but out of date, Croatian printing of the Guiness World Records book, the record for most Smurfs gathered in one place was 291. With 395 Smurfs, the Croations thought they were sure to earn a new world record.

However in 2007, a group of students at Warwick University beat them too it. The Warwick students had managed to round up a grand total of 451 Smurfs and according to Guiness, currently hold the world record.



They were close, but Croatians needed a little over 50 more Smurfs to beat the Warwick University record. Perhaps they should have contacted Guiness World Records before the attempt. I want to feel bad for them, but just seeing the the 2 words "Croatians" and "Smurfs" in the same sentence kind of freaks me out.

A somber spokesman for the Croatians had this to say: "We could easily have got more Smurfs, but we thought that over a hundred more than the American record... would be enough."

In case you've never heard of The Smurfs before, they are are a fictional group of small blue creatures who live somewhere in the woods. The Belgian cartoonist Peyo introduced Smurfs to the world in a 1958 Belgian magazine called Le Journal de Spirou. However, Smurfs are probably best known from the 1980s animated Hanna-Barbera Productions television series, The Smurfs (DVD).


methodshop

Labels: internet, offbeat

Wil Wheaton, former child star (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stand By Me) and blogging pioneer, has officially come out in favor of US Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

In a post from his temporary "In Exile" blog (it's a long story. Wikipeida it if you really want to know), Wheaton begins his endorsement blog post by saying "not that my endorsement means much of anything."

He couldn't be more wrong. Wheaton may not think that many people find his opinion "influential" but his Presidential endorsement made the front page if Digg.com tonight. Most of us bloggers know how valuable making the front make of Digg.com is. The front page of Digg is a web traffic gold mine.

In Wheaton's endorsement post, he goes on to say "I believe that Barack Obama is the best candidate running for president who can begin to repair the damage inflicted on my country by George W. Bush. I miss my country, and Barack Obama gives me hope that I can get it back."



So in the grand scheme of things, what does Wheaton's endorsement really mean for the American Presidential race? I think Digg.com user ShemDaimwood put it best with this comment "To the online community, Wil's endorsement probably means more than Ted Kennedy's."

There's still now word on who Picard has decided to endorse. But to quote another Digg user, kete00, "...with Will Wheaton's endorsement, Obama can set his phasers to victory!"

We will see what happens in November. In the meantime, apparently Ron Paul firmly reins over the Digg community.

methodshop

Labels: internet

Mozilla is working on a mobile version of Firefox. Unfortunately, it probably won't see the light of day until end of this year. Well it's about time. I was wondering why this was taking so long.

In case you don't already run Firefox on your computer, get with it already,