Wag The Dog is a brilliant 1997 satire, starring some big names (de niro, Hoffman), about a U.S. president inventing a war to increase his chances to win the upcoming elections. The president’s staff calls in a famous Hollywood producer to create a non-existing war (see trailer below, it’s a great, smart, funny movie).

When I discovered the news about the Jakarta bombing earlier today using tFeeder, I thought about Wag The Dog and Twitter. Think about the Iranian elections - how many of us actually been in Iran? How much do we know about what REALLY happened there? Many pictures were tweeted, sure, but do we really know when they were taken? Could some of them been taken in other parts of the world? Maybe, Maybe not.

What I’m trying to say here is that Twitter can easily become a tool to create an alternate version of reality. Since we learned to trust twitter so much, it shouldn’t be too hard for a small team to create a large event on a global scale that never really happened. It could be a simple mashup of pictures, videos and a large group of twitterers, all tweeting at the same time (preferably in an exotic time like late night or early morning). If I had to pull one of this acts, I’d produce an alien invasion.
But a strong organization (governments? secret agencies?) might use Twitter to generate a view of reality that will serve their own interests.

Will President Barack Obama (a social media star) ever ‘Wag The Bird‘?

Wag The Dog Trailer

• More server power = more technology stories, from more sources, more frequently : we added several new servers to be able to get faster updates from more blogs and technology websites. We currently read stories from more than 25 blogs and websites, all dedicated to technology (the complete, up-to-date- list is available in our F.A.Q. page). Just to name some of the blogs and websites we cover: Techrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm and Ars Technica technology blogs, PC World, Cnet news.com and Information week websites and Google, Twitter and Apple official blogs.
• tFeeder for mobile: technology news are updated every few minutes. For those of you who can’t afford to miss a hot technology story we created the mobile version of tFeeder. It runs on all mobile phones (including the iPhone and Android phones). You no longer have any excuses not to stay up to date on the hottest technology news: tFeed away in the train, during a boring class, while you have Friday night dinner with her (or his..) parents.
• Google Friend Connect - tFeeder is an extremely useful tool and a huge timesaver. But the real fun begins when you can tFeed with others. We added the Google Friend Connect bar at the bottom of our homepage. Using the bar, you can get the latest updates from us and from other community members. You can also take part in the live discussions on hot, trending tFeeder stories.

We have made many other improvements (such a video tutorial, an F.A.Q. and a technology blogger program), but on all that on our next post.

• Twitter has become tech bloggers favorite punchbag. Everyone’s badmouthing them, for good reasons. Techcrunch were first to break the story, having received stolen Twitter documents from the alleged hacker. They are now in negotiation with Twitter lawyers about materials they are publishing. Other blogs and media outlets also received the docs, but TC promised they’ll publish some of those soon. Several docs are already published here and some financial forecast here.
• Mahsable also got their hands on the Twitter documents, but chose not to publish any of them.  They published two stories on the Twitter documents, taking it straight at Twitter.
• Security was the main topic of the day, as Firefox 3.5 (the browser I’m using) has a huge security hole in it. Mashable offers a workaround, and FF should release a patch soon. A great day for security companies.
• Facebook is also having a great day - not only a competitor (Twitter) seems unreliable and vulnerable, FB added 50 million new users in the past 3 months. Impressive.

• Techrunch Robin Wauters (the leading Techrunch blogger in terms of tweets-per-post), reports that Youtube no longer supports Internet explorer 6. IE6 is a terrible product, but where does it stop? Could Google one day say ‘we do not support IE6,and IE7, and IE8′ ? The post is Boiling, with over 1,000 retweets in the past couple of hours.
• Techrunch also reports that sales of the Palm Pre are flat. Techrunch has a long history with the Plam Pre, as they criticized the product early on and caused quite a stir when a fellow tech blogger reviewed a giveaway Palm Pre, hinting foul play
• Cnet news has an interesting story about the growing importance of Chip makers (e.g. Intel) as the Google-Microsoft war expands. It used to be a software war, between search engines, office suites and online services, but since Google’s announcement of the Chrome OS, it’s becoming a hardware war as well.
• Engadget, the gadgets blog, reports that Apple crossed the 1.5 Billion downloaded apps mark. That’s truly amazing. Apple invented the market for application downloads and no one to date was able to imitate its success.

• It’s interesting to see that 2 of the top 5 top technology stories on tFeeder are Techcrunch stories,and one story is a Wired story - usually the top 5 are owned by Mashable (see screenshot below).
• Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that a company called DST is buying stocks from Facebook employees. That means a lot of happy faces on the Facebook campus, congratulations! Mashable also covers this story and it’s a BOILING story on tFeeder.
• Techcrunch also has a story written by an anonymous person, an executive from one of the largest Internet companies (at least this is what they say, who knows, a PR stunt??), suggesting the whole Google ranking and SEO industry should be regulated. That would mean many SEO companies will die, I don’t see it happening.
• A big story is coming from Mashable’s Adam Ostrow - apparently Microsoft will offer its office 2010 suite (Word,Excel etc.) as a hosted service, similar to Google Apps. Is this Microsoft’s counterpunch to Google’s Chrome OS announcement?
• ReadWriteWeb suggests that comments are dead and tweets are their replacement. These days, everyone thinks that Twitter will kill everything - it will kill Google search, it will kill RSS, now it will kill comments. Whatever..

To get more of the hottest technology news on the web, register to our RSS Feed.

But as time went by, I realized that RSS was not enough. Although it offers a simple way of accessing a large amount of content, it lacks one major feature - ranking. The RSS protocol was never meant to include any information in regards to the quality of each story. There were many other options to find hot stories (such as Digg), but in the past few months, there’s a new kid on the block - Twitter. And as most technology bloggers would agree - Twitter is becoming a powerful a recommendation engine, particularly useful for promoting interesting technology stories.

So we took the best of both worlds and created tFeeder - a realtime leaderboard of the hottest technology news from the top technology blogs, mashing up RSS and Twitter. Tfeeder reads the different blogs’ RSS feeds to learn of newly published posts, and gets the number of times a post was tweeted (by calling the TweetMeMe API), dug, or commented. That way, you get realtime list of the most interesting technology stories on the web at any given moment (we update tFeeder every few minutes).

Tfeeder also makes it very simple to focus on what interests you the most - you can filter the stories list by blog, by keywords (Google, Twitter, iPhone etc.) or by a keyword search, all using a single mouse click.

Tfeeder also provides aggregate data about the top technology blogs and writers. We will occasionally publish interesting figures about the different blogs, writers and popular technology topics as they are reflected in the realtime statistics we gather.

We recommend you to register to our RSS feed, it’s free,fun and useful!

Mashabale gets all excited about…nothing

Mashable is one of the leading web 2.0 blogs, probably no. 2 after Techcrunch. Although these blogs title themselves as social media blogs, they post mostly about Twitter,Google,Microsoft,the iphone and sometimes the kindle - not all pure social media players.

Today Mashable writer Stan Schroeder does a very poor job being a tech blogger and writes about something that didn’t happen - his original post states that Amazon is releasing the Kindle’s source code. That is just not true, as he explains later in an update to the post.

That post is what I call a Null Post - you’re looking for something to write about, it’s early morning and you need to get those visitors coming, so you write about something without checking the facts.It can become embarrassing.

The funny thing is that I did the exact same mistake on my open source ERP blog - I reported that a certain software vendor released its product as open source, but it turned out that he didn’t - he just provided an easier access to the source - the source was available for free for a long time already. This type of mistakes tend to surface faster than you think! 

Techcrunch Vs. Wired

This have been going on for some time now - Techcrunch Michael Arrington taking it at Wired magazine. Techcrunch is my favorite technology blog, and about a month ago I got my hands (for the first time) on a printed Wired magazine, and I loved it (October 2008 issue).

The TC-Wired war started a couple of years ago, with Michael, in his own unique way, took a couple of low blows at Wired. You could tell there will be blood. Indeed, bloddy it became when Wired criticized the Washington Post for publishing technology news syndicated by Techcrunch.It became really dirty, and then it went into a coma, at least for  a while.

A couple of days ago Techrunch (Gears, which covers gadgets), posted this : Wired looks at junk that doesn’t work. Is Techcrunch wiping the dust off that old war? I sure hope so! I’ll keep you update, register to our RSS feed.

Here’s the screenshot of the two visits, who’s source are the keywords : ‘Twitter’ and ‘Technology’, from Bing search engine:

I tried to find out who are the visitors who were referred to my blog from Bing. I was surprised to find that they came from within Microsoft Corp network!! ( I used MaxMind IP geocoding services to find details of IP address 65.55.165.102, which is one of the visitors’ IP).

See screenshot below:

As far as I’m concerned, there are two possibilities here:

1.A real person working for Microsoft searched Bing for ‘Twitter’ and ‘Technology’, and my blog appeared high enough in the search results, and that visitor click on my link from Bing.

2. A robot identified my site as a blog (perhaps as a technology blog), and generated a spoof visit, knowing I will look through my stats (what bloggers do several times a day), and then follow the link that apparently brought a visitor, thus generating a Bing hit. Spoofing this kind of visit is pretty simple (you can pragmatically generate an HTTP request and set HTTP_Referrer to whatever you want).  As a matter of fact, I get several such spoofed visit to all of my blogs, but I never got one from a major website.

Keep in mind that there are millions of bloggers out there checking their stats to see who visited their website and where did they come from. If you can get only half of them to click on a spoof visit to check the visits’ referrer, you can generate a considerable amount of traffic.

So which is it, a real visit or a spoof? You decide for yourselves, but just try to search on Bing for Twitter or technology and see if you get a result from this blog (Solar OverPower). It might be that Microsoft is loosing it.

Google defines wave as :

.. a tool for communication and collaboration on the web

but that sounds so late 90’s - communication? collaboration?? that’s web1.0 stuff.
Google sure got a lot of hype around Wave, some calling it an MS office killer, some Twitter buster, and some claiming it will become the ultimate project management tool. I’m not sure yet if I see the added value in using Wave. As a stand-alone product, which adds real-time features to email and lets you easily share pictures using drag-and-drop, it seems to me as a natural evolution of Gmail, no more.

I believe what can make Wave a true game-changer will come from a 3rd party developer, someone who will leverage Google Wave’s API to create a new type of web service, possibly mashing Wave up with other web services.

And the truth is, I think I might have a killer idea, the next Twitter. And that’s why I need your help - I requested a user for the development sandbox and still waiting for confirmation. If you happen to have a sandbox user, I’d love to get an invite!

To understand Google Wave with minimal effrot, read this great Google Wave F.A.Q.
If you have more time to spear, here’s the Google Wave live demo.

Look for furture post on the Wave app I plan on building, register to t our RSS feed.