After years of promises, a major U.S. airline has finally delivered inflight broadband internet service. American Airlines' Gogo on AA service debuts today on its fleet of 15 767-200s. For a fee of $12.95, passengers on those planes will be able to e-mail their bosses, check on their EBay auctions, find dates on Match.com, play poker with their buddies and do everything they normally do with a land-based internet connection. The only thing you won't be able to do is use Skype and other VOIP services, but who wants to hear other passengers chatting on the phone anyways.

American plans to test Gogo on the 767-200s for the next few months. If everything goes well they'll roll the service out to the whole fleet. Typical speeds for Gogo clock in at 500Kbps to 600Kbps -- upload speeds were a more modest 250Kbps to 300Kbps. Wall Street Journal Technology Guru Walter Mossberg recently tried out the service and found that it worked flawlessly on his Dell and Apple laptops, a Blackberry, iPhone, and WinMo-based cell.

Other airlines are following in American's footsteps with Southwest on the verge of testing a new satellite-based system. While the carriers are happy to offer their customers a new amenity, they also see the dollar signs. Inflight broadband is expected to generate $6.6 million in passenger revenue this year, according to a June report by MultiMedia Intelligence. The research firm estimates the industry will skyrocket to $936 million revenue by 2012.

We'd guess by 2013 you'll be able to surf the web on every single flight, but for now the service is only available on American Airlines. Soon enough no one will remember the days of 'net-free air flight.

Labels: internet, Travel

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".

Yesterday YouTube decided to get in on the joke. Several links on the YouTube homepage purposely "Rick Rolled" users. Why? Yesterday 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. 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

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

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. 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

Tired of Facebook? Got some bad blood you need to vent online? Then embrace your hate and say hello to Hatebook.

Hatebook is a Facebook parody site that looks and functions exactly like Facebook... except with an evil twist.

Here's a brief list of the "evil twist" to give you a better idea of how Hatebook compares to Facebook:

• if you want to mail message someone on Hatebook, it's called "junkmail"
• instead of a blue color scheme, Hatebook is an evil red
  
• profiles (called "hate profiles") include a section called “Why I’m Better Than You!”
• "Hate Albums" consist of photos and descriptions of things you hate
• Are you married? Single? Hatebook doesn't care. Your status options consist of Hater, Player, Sucker, Loser, etc.
  

After we created a profile, we were greeted with the following message:

"Hello Sucker methodshop! Welcome to Hatebook! Your registration to the Evil Empire was successful. Feel free to pimp your hate profile."

Also, you are suppose to enter in the wrong mailing address to hide from your enemies. I just used our P.O. Box. I don't really mind if someone hates that. I don't really like it myself.



But why just parody Facebook when you can improve it? The German creators of Hatebook have not only recreated Facebook's functionality, they have also improved it. For example, they've integrated Google Maps into Hatebook (Evil Maps) so you can locate people you hate on a map.

Does everybody love to hate? Even advertisers? Time will tell. In the meantime feel free to hate MethodShop.com here: http://hatebook.org/user/methodshop

BeSocial: methodshop

Labels: internet

What does "POS" mean? How about "SorG"? Don't know? LOL. If you're a parent, you might want to find out what kids are saying to each other online. Here's a sideshow of 20 Internet Acronyms All Parents Should Know.



You also might want to check out this list of common chat room acronyms.

BeSocial: methodshop | wnbc widget | flickr

Labels: internet

MTV's latest reality show - A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila - is built around the dishy, scantily clad singer/model who is reputed to have the most friends in the history of MySpace (2,009,335 at last count).

Tila's career began at the age of 18 when she was discovered at a shopping mall by a Playboy scout and was offered a chance to model nude for the magazine and did a test shoot. Tila was featured as Playboy’s Cyber Girl of the week on April 22, 2002, and a couple weeks later became Playboy’s first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month.

Besides MySpace and Playboy, Tila is also known for her photo spreads in Stuff, Maxim, and her role as host of the popular Fuse TV show Pants-Off Dance-Off.

MTV ordered 10-episodes of Tila's elimination-format dating show. It's slated to premiere on October 9th on MTV (USA).

BeSocial: methodshop

Labels: internet, tech news

When I checked my email this morning, I noticed that Chitika, the blogger-driven merchandising/shopping network, made a Facebook application called iBought. The application allows Facebook users to show off their latest purchases in their profiles.

How useful is iBought? If you checkout my Facebook profile, it says I just bought a goat. No, I didn't really buy a goat. But I wanted to see what ads Chitika would list based on the word goat. Care to guess? I now have 3 bottles of Horny Goat Weed on my Facebook profile. But let's say I bought something good like a giant HD-TV. Why would I list it on my Facebook profile? That's like inviting someone to rob you. Needless to say, I'm pretty sure the iBought application will be deleted by the end of the week.

Besides being useless, Chitika needs to fine tune the application coding. I got this error after trying to interact with the iBought application in my Facebook profile:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /var/www/html/facebook/lib/facebookapi_php5_restlib.php:1) in /var/www/html/facebook/lib/facebook.php on line 197

So why would anyone want to install the useless iBought application on their Facebook profile? Chitika is paying $1 per for every friend you get to install iBought. The offer is only open to the first 10,000 installs.

$1 isn’t a lot, but if you have a ton of Facebook friends it could be a worthwhile. Then again, you'll probably make all your friends hate you. Still interested? You can install the iBought Facebook application here.

BeSocial: methodshop

Labels: internet

Like to see how websites rate against each other while you browse the Internet?

Alexa, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has been providing information on web traffic since 1996. Once you install the Alexa Toolbar, you can then view traffic trends, reach and rank, of any site you visit on the Internet. The toolbar then feeds traffic data of the sites you visit back to Alexa. There are billions of people on the Internet and only a minor portion of them have the Alexa Toolbar. This population provides a "sample" of users that Alexa uses to measure web activity and page popularity.

But their toolbar has only been available for PC users with Internet Explorer. For example, here's the MethodShop.com Alexa Internet Explorer PC only toolbar. Macintosh and PC users with Firefox have been left out of the Alexa sample... until now. An Alexa toolbar called “Sparky” for Firefox was finally released last week.



Why should you care about the Alexa Toolbar? Most people don't. But if you want to support your favorite websites, then you might want Alexa to track what sites you visit. Many webmasters use Alexa ranking to set advertising rates.

If you are interested, you can get the Alexa Sparky Toolbar for Firefox here.

BeSocial: digg story | methodshop

Labels: internet

A lighter and paper shredder helped make Mika Brzezinski the "symbol of television journalism's guilt trip" about Paris Hilton. Brzezinski used both to destroy a script calling for her to read about Hilton's release from jail on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program recently. Part serious, part an act, it has become an Internet sensation. More than 2 million people have watched a clip of the incident on YouTube, around 10 times the number who watched it live on TV. Apparently, she's not the only one sick of the socialite.

"Among journalists it touched a nerve because I think we're tired of pretending this is important," she said. "We also know that, deep down inside, our viewers know that we don't believe this is news. They can't. They can't think we're that dumb."

Brzezinski, who left CBS News last year, has been working as a news- reader and on-air foil for Joe Scarborough on the show MSNBC is trying out to replace Don Imus in the morning.

Hours after Hilton's June 26 catwalk to freedom, Joe Scarborough (widget) and Brzezinski discussed one of the day's other big stories at their show's opening: influential Republican Sen. Richard Lugar's declaration that President Bush's Iraq strategy wasn't working.

It was then Brzezinski's turn to sum up the day's news. She looked down at her script and Hilton was the top story. She froze.

"I could not get through the first three words without crumbling," she said. "My skin was crawling. This was our lead? On a day like this? To me, it was just the ultimate Paris Hilton out-of-control moment. We've gone too far and we've got to stop. That was all real. There was nothing planned about that, and I believe we got a little snappy."

BeSocial: breitbart | digg story | methodshop

Labels: apple tv, internet

According to ABC News.com, the Tennessee Highway Patrol has suspended a state trooper who allegedly received a sexual favor from a porn star and recorded the act with a camera from his cruiser in return for ignoring her possession of illegal painkillers.

The woman, who goes by the stage name Barbie Cummings, said that at a traffic stop on May 7, trooper James Randy Moss found illegal painkillers in her car, but decided not to bust the Knoxville woman in return for a sexual favor.


The incident came to the attention of officials when someone filed an internal complaint against the veteran trooper, according to Tennessee Highway Patrol spokesman Mike Browning.

Browning told ABC News that he could add few details beyond a press release issued Friday that announced Moss' indefinite suspension. But a blog maintained by the woman, which recounts sordid details of the alleged escapade, has drawn additional attention to the case, and the department is investigating whether Moss may have violated the law while on duty.

[Via abcnews.com]

BeSocial: digg it | methodshop

Labels: internet

The Democrats may have wrested back control of power in Congress, but that hasn't quieted the ire of American cable news broadcaster Keith Olbermann. The 47-year-old is known for his Special Commentary segments on MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," where he regularly tears apart US President George W. Bush.

Olbermann's outspoken political views have also made him a hero/villain in the blogosphere. Olbermann's show is a frequent topic of debate on both conservative and liberal political blogs and his "Special Commentary" segments are all over digital video websites like YouTube. It seems like every time Olbermann opens his mouth people sit down at their computers and start typing. Does Olbermann = Internet buzz?

The promotional executives at NBC must think so. They are taking advantage of all the attention Olbermann is getting online. Last week MSNBC ran a very ballsy blogad campaign with this Olbermann quote:

"The President of the United States owes this country an apology."

The blogad campaign also featured an Olbermann desktop widget that pulls headlines from the shows RSS feed every 30 minutes. Even the biggest Olbermann junkie doesn't need more Keith than that, right?

With all this hype on the Internet, you are probably wondering how Olbermann's TV ratings are doing. Olbermann's fast-paced melange of politics and pop culture has made "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" MSNBC's top-rated show. Not bad for a former anchor of ESPN's Sportscenter. Maybe Craig Kilborn should take some notes. His performance in Bench Warmers wasn't exactly Oscar worthy.

digg story | methodshop

Labels: internet