Social networks are successfully adding (active) members from demographics that, until recently, were not even considered a target market. Facebook, of course, is quickly headed towards becoming the 800 pound gorilla in this domain with an estimated 175 million profiles (and growing). That is about 1 in 34 people on the planet, which is pretty impressive for a website that has only been around for around 5 years, even if you discount for the number of inactive and duplicate profiles.

Facebook maintains general statistics on their press page, if you would like some more numbers.

The new version of Wordpress (my blogging platform of choice) has a very cool new social news aspect to it. The dashboard shows popular blog posts from around the world that are related to the content on your own weblog. This is exactly how I found this interesting photoblog post by Matt Mullenweg, who apparently just visited the Taj Mahal in Agra with Om Malik, a well-known web and technology writer (and founder of the GigaOm network of technology blogs).

Heavy Arctic Icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent in Resolute Bay, Nunavut Territory, Canada.

Worker resting on bales of cotton, Thonakaha, Korhogo, Ivory Coast. Cotton crops occupy approximately 335,000 square klilometers worldwide, and use nearly one quarter of all pesticides sold.

Sand dune in the heart of vegetation on Fraser Island, Queensland, Australia. Fraser Island (named after Eliza Fraser, who was shipwrecked on the island in 1836) is the world’s largest sand island. On top of this rather infertile substratum, a humid tropical forest has developed in the midst of which wide dunes intrude, moving with the wind. Fraser Island has important water resources, including nearly 200 freshwater dune lakes, and has varied fauna such as marsupials, birds, and reptiles. Welcoming 200,000 visitors a year without damaging the local fauna and flora is a real challenge to sustainable development on the island, which was declared a World Heritage site by Unesco in 1992.

The Notre Dame de la Paix basilica in Yamoussoukro, Ivory Coast. In 1983, Yamoussoukro replaced Abidjan as the official capital of Ivory Coast. President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who died in 1993, made his native village into a modern city with a grid of wide avenues - which are almost deserted - and every modern facility: international airport, luxury hotels, golf course, prestigious universities, and so forth. Yamoussoukro also boasts the world’s biggest basilica, Notre Dame de la Paix (Our Lady of Peace), consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1990. The former president, who donated this building to the Vatican, insisted that he had financed the basilica’s cost out of his own personal fortune. This building was seen as a colossal waste by many Ivorians. It was highly controversial in a country that lacks schools and hospitals and has only nine doctors for every 100,000 inhabitants (compared to 413 in Norway).

Flock of sheep, Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. After the missionary period, between gold fever and the first drillings for oil, sheep-raising became the chief activity in the north of the main island, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego. The local cabanas (sheep pastures) are huge sheep farms with 3.5 acres of land per head of livestock.

‘Tree of life’, Tsavo National Park, Kenya. This acacia is a symbol of life in the vast expanses of thorny savanna, where wild animals come to take advantage of its leaves or its shade. Tsavo National Park in southeastern Kenya, crossed by the Nairobi-Mombasa road and railway axis, is the country’s largest protected area (8,200 square miles, or 21,000 square kilometers) and was declared a national park in 1948.

Elephants in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. The Okavango Delta is the world’s largest inland delta, flooding seasonally, and is populated by five ethnic groups of people, sharing it with hundreds of species of animals.

In other words, if you didn’t really pay too much attention to taxonomy in college but wished you should have, this video will freaking blow your mind.

Iron Man ::

The Dark Knight ::

I shall assume you have Fink correctly installed and running on your system. If not, there is a tutorial on the Fink website (or refer to my previous post).

Fetch a copy of mediatomb by executing the following operation in Terminal -

$ fink fetch mediatomb

Next, install.

$ fink install mediatomb

You will need to initialize the mediatomb application by running the following command (assuming you chose the default path during the Fink installation) -

$ /sw/bin/mediatomb

This should create a .mediatomb folder in your home directory, with the config.xml file included for mediatomb settings.

This config.xml file has also been updated to include helpful comments on the updates required to run mediatomb with a PS3, as follows -

Make the necessary changes, and you should be along on your path to streaming your media effortlessly to the PS3. As always, you can let me know in the comments if something did not work for you. Good luck!

Picasa Web Albums is the online arm of Google’s Picasa photo organization program, widely recognized as the best photo management application in terms of speed and features. My usage of Picasa has been restricted to the web albums feature (which comes with 1GB of free storage), since I have been using iPhoto on the Macintosh — Google does not currently provide a port of Picasa for OS X (it has been promised for over two years now, but is rumored to be launched ‘later this year‘).

Back on topic, Google recently updated both the web and desktop versions of Picasa and added a new people-tagging feature. The feature is a big step beyond a similar tool offered by Facebook, in that Google automatically attempts to identify faces in your pictures automatically (Facebook requires you to manually click on every face in each picture). Once the person tagging feature has been enabled, Picasa takes a few minutes to recognize faces from all your pictures (depends on the number of pictures available, of course). The face recognition works amazingly well, and the system does a good job of grouping multiple pictures of the same person together. Once done, a user-friendly slider interface allows you to name each person that Picasa found in all of your pictures. This drastically cuts down on the time that would otherwise be required to perform a similar exercise manually.

So, what are the advantages of name tagging your pictures? For one, it makes it easier to search for all pictures that include a particular person, in your collection. This can be a daunting task with even a small collection of photos, and especially so if you have a lot of group snaps.

Another feature of this system, good or bad, is that Picasa links the tagged pictures of a particular person to the profile of that person in your Google contacts list. Therefore, tags are not just a label, but cross-linked with Google profiles. This would translate to photo management benefits across all Google services that are tied in to these profiles, especially social network websites like Orkut. This is not unique to Google’s Picasa, as Facebook handles tagging the same way, creating cross-links to profiles that match tagged pictures.

I’m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight….

If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you’re ‘exotic’ and ‘different.’

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, you’re an American story.

If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

Name your kids Willow, Trig and Track, and you’re a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating, then you’re well- grounded.

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, help register 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, 8 years as a State Senator of a district of 750,000 people, chair the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people, sponsor 131 bills, and serve on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works, and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

If your resume is: local weather girl, 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town of 7,000 people, 2 years as governor of a state of 650,000 people, you’re qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, left your ill wife, and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age-appropriate sex education, including the use of birth control, you erode the fiber of American society.

If you staunchly advocate abstinence-only education, while your teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re responsible.

If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, you don’t represent America’s family values.

If your husband is called ‘First Dude’, has a DWI conviction, didn’t register to vote until 25, and was a member of a group that advocated secession of Alaska from the USA, yours is the quintessential American family.

And, finally, if you’re famous for your quick temper, you’re the one to have your finger on the red nuclear button.

OK, much clearer now.