Author: Scarlett Madison

We have the technology. The hanging-chad debacle of the 2000 presidential election proved that we had the need. Now, as more states adopt electronic voting machines to register the “voice of the people” during election times, stunning allegations are being leveled on Diebold voting machines and the ease in which they can be hacked. According to the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory, these machines can be hacked for $10.50 and an 8th-grade science education, casting doubt over the validity of the votes that will be going on across the country during the Republican…

Let’s look at the lighter side of social media. With so many privacy concerns rolling around, turmoil around the world fueled in many ways by social media, and general shenanigans dominating status updates, we want to lighten things up a bit and have a chuckle or two. What would happen if social media sites were actually your neighbors? That’s the questions that our infographic designers at Column Five Media tacked in their latest take on offbeat visual news. Click to enlarge. …

If there’s only one certainty in life, it’s change. If there’s only one certainty in social media, it’s that people will hate Facebook changes for a little while, but will get used to them and adapt. It happens every time. This will be no different. There has been outrage over the recent changes and more keep rolling in from f8. We will moan. We will gripe. We will swear off the site, but that won’t last. Eventually (within days, even hours) we’ll be back on Facebook figuring out where they moved everything and realizing that, once again, the change wasn’t as bad as we thought. Here’s Timeline. It’s a…

When they launched Digg Newsrooms Beta yesterday, much of the buzz within the community was both positive and hopeful. There was skepticism to be sure as Digg made disastrous moves on their last major launch last year with v4, but the overall sentiment was strong. Shortly after the launch, Digg CEO Matt Williams appeared on Bloomberg with Emily Chang on Bloomberg West.  The piece, called “Digg-Ing Out of a Hole,” met Williams with tough questions and an honest “no holds barred” batch of questions from Chang. Williams answered the questions with a mixture of passion and factual statements. “Who…

There is a lot of passion surrounding social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. People either love them or hate them. There is no gray area. Zynga is banking on as many people as possible loving it as they prepare to release Mafia Wars 2. According to Zynga, it’s the “most bad-ass game to date.” Here’s the trailer: According to Zynga, “Mafia Wars 2 takes one of our longest running and most successful franchises to a whole new universe, introducing a vast 3D world where being bad never felt so good.” There are currently 25k fans of the new Facebook page for the game, a far cry from the 17 million likes and…

In case you ever wanted to be a hero or a villain in the comic book world but didn’t want to pay for it, the massively multi-player online game DC Universe Online by Sony Online Entertainment is going to be free to play starting in October. The increase in social games mixes with the impending release of Star Wars: The Old Republic are likely the causes for the shift after less than a year of charging players $15 a month. DCUO, which cost Sony $50 million and took 5 years to develop, was released in January. To continue to recoup their money, they are not making it entirely free; players will have three tiers…

People who are not part of the Reddit community are likely unaware that it is the launching point for a good portion of the content that eventually makes its rounds to everyone. Blogs and users of other social media sites like Digg, Tumblr, and Buzzfeed grab content that goes viral on Reddit and re-purpose it in their communities. There are many who create content to post on Reddit, but the real power is in exposure of others’ content. Members on communities like 4chan create content and get a decent amount of exposure, but Reddit is where much of it gets “launched” to the rest of the world. Users comb…

With about a million iPad apps and a billion iPhone apps available, finding good ones isn’t hard. Finding ones that stand out from the crowd often is. If you like making music but don’t necessarily have “skills” with instruments, MadPad is an iPhone or iPad app that can help. No skill required – just bring your imagination and creativity. “Remix your life” is their way of putting it. By sampling everyday sounds and using a slick interface to put them together into music, even the most mundane places like hardware stores can be used to create music. Check it out: …

Google’s first entry into social gaming wasn’t spectacular. By allowing a handful of partners to develop, they were only able to yield 16 games total for their social network, Google+. Compare that to bigger sites like Facebook with thousands of games and even smaller sites like Tagged.com who have hundreds of games, Google+ has been a minor blip in the growing social gaming industry. All of that should be changing soon as Google+ announced that they were launching their initial API release. It is much more limited than other platforms, allowing only public data to be used, but it’s a start. They…

Every now and then you come across something that’s, well, different. It’s hard in today’s world where so many products are simply variations of others. Creativity seems to be dying with the compact disc. The “different” that popped up was these geekaliciously epic 3D Steampunk Robot Magnets. Steampunk is getting old and robots are so yesterday, but there’s something about these little contraptions that screamed at me. I haven’t bought any yet – hard to swallow at $15 a pop – but by golly there’s a yearning that will need to be quenched. Someday. …