The Fat of the Land
As if Americans didn’t have enough on their plates with foreclosures and rising unemployment, the obesity epidemic continues to weigh down the Land of the Free.
As if Americans didn’t have enough on their plates with foreclosures and rising unemployment, the obesity epidemic continues to weigh down the Land of the Free.
Today, Princeton Professor and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman held a lecture at the FU Berlin. You know what follows now: Liveblog ist back! Again, only in German, since I can type faster this way.
Two and a half months into the writer’s strike and the first late night shows are back on the screen. In the first week of January, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien all returned to restore nightly TV routine. A week later, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show followed suit. How did Jon Stewart do? Did he survive out there without the scripted gags of his humoristic elves and their mighty pens?
To find out, we tried to get into the studio and watch the taping of his first show back on air. Unfortunately, about 500 other people had the same idea. Instead of lining up at the end of the queue around the block, we talked to one of the protesting writers in front of the studio. [Read more]
Yesterday, the much anticipated search engine of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been released into the online world. The idea behind Wikia Search is to create a search engine that ranks the results according to user ratings.
But surprisingly, this core function hasn’t been enabled yet. All users can do so far is write so called “mini articles” that give a brief definition of a search term. This leads to rather limited search results, since the basic principle of this “social” search isn’t implemented yet. At least the founders know that, too.
It will be interesting to see whether Wikia Search really has the potential to turn around the way we search the internet- which by now is dominated so much by Google’s search engine that the term “to google” has come to mean any kind of internet searching. With this unseen- before power Google has come to dominate our perception of the outside world- what you can’t google isn’t really there, is it?
So far, Wikia Search has the inherent problem of any community- based project. As long as only few people use it, it doesn’t have much to offer to other potential users. But only if many people start using it, it will become better, so for right now, it’s a toss-up.
Stay tuned.
By Jessica Binsch
FOX Business News launched yesterday; the channel has been on air since 5am EDT, same for the website. Here is how they kicked it off:
A Business News Station had been in Rupert Murdoch’s sketch book for quite a while, although FOX Business Networks (FBN) has to share the market with CNBC – reaching almost 90 million households alone – and Bloomberg. FBN will only be broadcasted to 30 million homes in the beginning. So what’s it going to be? A conservative, big-business friendly PR-machine? [Read more]
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