Following the controversial layoffs and addition of thousands of unpaid bloggers that came with the formation of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group, it looks like it’s time for AOL to start rebuilding its content team more traditionally. Former CBSNews.com and Salon.com staffers are being brought into AOL – in paid positions, of course …
miscellany
Follow the Leader: Lady Gaga Breaks 10 Million Twitter Followers
Lady Gaga must be feeling good about her promotional prospects for new album Born This Way. Not only has she taken over social media gaming to break ground for GagaVille, but she’s also just become the first person on Twitter to gain 10,000,000 followers.
Her ten millionth follower arrived around midnight on May 15th, and Gaga …
Watch the Sun Eat a Comet and (Partly) Explode
What happens when a giant frozen ball of ice hurtling at over a million miles per hour suddenly smacks into our sun?
Maybe the sun blinks, or says “thank you, may I have another.” Who really knows, but in this NASA video captured by the SOHO satellite, the collision seems to trigger a massive explosion.
[vodpod …
‘God’ Particle Victim of Identity Theft
It’s not just Sony that’s worried about identity swindlers—it looks like celestial specks of elemental matter have to worry about scammers, too.
Poor Higgs boson, the hypothetical “god particle” we’ve never met, and to make matters worse in our scramble to pin it down, it seems we’re not just waiting for Godot, but having to …
NYT Pageviews Fall in First Month of Paywall, Print Sales Increase
The New York Times’ paywall may have seemed to launch successfully, with early reports of 100,000 paid subscriptions in its first three weeks, but its first full month of operation tells a different story: Page views dropped 24.4% from March to April, with the NYT’s share of all newspaper website traffic dropping from 13% in March to an …
Site Built in a Fort Turns Space Transcripts into Gripping Stories
What could possibly be cooler than reams of original radio transcripts chronicling spaceflight landmarks like the first human in space and the near-fatal Apollo 13 mission, the option to search it all at will, and everything wrapped in a gorgeous, elegant, easy-to-use web package?
I’ll tell you what: all of that, plus knowledge the …
Lord Vader: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Universe’s Number One Terrorist, Is Dead
This just in: a breaking report from The Galactic Empire Times is stating, per a press conference called by Lord Vader himself, that Obi-Wan Kenobi — the universe’s most wanted terrorist — is dead.
Vader’s speech was stern yet brimming with optimism:
“For over two decades, Kenobi has been the Jedi rebellion’s leader and
…
Jetpack Daredevil Soars at Nearly 200 MPH over Grand Canyon
Dressed in snug yellow and black spandex like a human bumblebee, 51-year-old Swiss daredevil Yves “Jetman” Rossy defied death—or at least gravity—to soar over the Grand Canyon last Saturday at speeds approaching 200 m.p.h.
At daybreak, Rossy can be seen (in the video below) wheeling his triangular strap-on carbon-fiber jetpack …
Are You One of 23,000 Defendants in the US’ Biggest Illegal Download Lawsuit?
Did you illegally download a copy of The Expendables, Sylvester Stallone’s old-school macho get-together fight-fest from last year? If so, watch your inbox: You’re likely one of the more than 23,000 file sharers being sued for doing so by the US Copyright Group in what is now the largest BitTorrent downloading case in US legal …
Teen Competes in Ridiculously Short Take-Off and Landing Competition
Valdez, Alaska’s annual Fly In & Air Show gives working Alaskan bush pilots a chance to show off their skills and hardware in the Short Take-Off and Landing (STOL) competition. This year’s event has an interloper – a teenager from Virginia who isn’t even a licensed pilot.
STOL is a necessary skill for Alaskan bush pilots who must …
New Yorker Subscribers Get the iPad App Now, Too
The New Yorker‘s iPad app is one of the nicest tablet versions of any print magazine: published every Monday at the same time as its paper-and-staples equivalent, it features additional pieces of writing, photography and video, poets reading their poems aloud, and bonus cartoons, among its electronic bells and whistles. (It even includes …
Militarization of Space Continues with Launch of Missile-Tracking Satellite
What goes up and doesn’t come down, but has the potential to take all sorts of other stuff down?
If you said a bunch of balloons launched by a misguided games publisher in March, you win a point (two, if you guessed a bit torrent file). But if you said a $1.3 billion U.S. geosynchronous military satellite capable of detecting, …