These photos were taken at a depth of about 20ft along the sloping side of Half Moon reef, just off the coast of Guanaja, in the Bay Islands of Honduras. The fantastic creature is a Spotted Eagle Ray. It's wingspan was about 6ft wide and its tail was easily over 10ft long.   read more »

It's that time of year when CNET polls the citizens of the Intarweb to determine the best applications, services, and platforms. The Webware 100 Awards will be announced April 21st, but voting only goes till Monday March 31st. Categories include Audio, Publishing & Photography, Browsing, Communication, Commerce & Events, Productivity, Search & Reference, Social, Utility & Security, as well as Video. The winners from each category win $5000, so for some of the smaller startups it's a pretty big deal to win in their category. Last year's winners included Drupal (the CMS that powers this site), Last.fm (a great music sharing/exploring site) and Deviantart (a social network for artists). Get out and vote for your favourite online technologies!

There's a new tool out that wants to provide a real-time geolocation services to anyone interested in letting the whole world know where they are at any given moment. It's called Loki, and it's basically a mashup of Google Maps and the cool WiFi location-finding technology from Skyhook Wireless, the company that provides GPS-like functionality to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

By installing the Loki toolbar and clicking on "Locate me", the toolbar uses your WiFi antenna to ping local hotspots and triangulate your location. This information is then fed to Loki, which updates your location status. If there aren't any WiFi hotspots nearby, you can update your location manually through their website. But that's not nearly as cool as the automatic feature. Check it out:   read more »

Back in January during his MacWorld Keynote Address, Steve Jobs hinted that Apple was going to be really busy launching new products and innovations this year. True to his word, there's a lot coming out of Cupertino these days.

Here's a rundown of announcements and rumours for February:

• New iPod Touch and iPhones were released earlier this month with twice as much memory as previous models
• New MacBooks and MacBook Pros just shipped, with another refresh due in June
• O2 annouced the iPhone launch for Ireland, with Austria rumored to be close behind
• A media event scheduled for March 6 will discuss "Enterprise" and launch the official SDK for the iPhone (and iPod touch).
• More rumours are circulating about a 3G iPhone coming sometime mid-year

Since the beginning of the year, Apple's stock has dropped by 40%, from a high of $198 per share at the end of December '07 to a low of $119 earlier this week. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that now would be a good time to order a slice of AAPL pie "a la mode". :)

In other podcast-related news... Those consumer-centric media geniuses at Apple have come up with a new way to make the podcast format even more powerful and consumable. The following patent application surfaced this week at the USPTO:

CREATION, MANAGEMENT AND DELIVERY OF PERSONALIZED MEDIA ITEMS

Abstract

Improved techniques to facilitate generation, management and delivery of
personalized media items for users are disclosed. Users are able to
influence or control content within a media item being personalized. In
one embodiment, personalized media items are podcasts. Users are able to
influence or control the content in or with a podcast. In other words, a
podcast can be created in accordance with a user's needs or
specifications so that the content within a podcast is customized or
personalized for the user.

So what does that mean? In broad-strokes, it's a framework that will allow you to program your own podcast "mixes", by taking segments of your favourite podcast sources, and combining them together in the order you want. Like traditional podcasts, it will allow you to subscribe to your new mix so every day you could get your custom-blended mix of news, commentary, music, etc.. If you currently subscribe to 15 different podcasts, and you only want to hear specific segments from each one, combined in a single show, this will allow you to do just that. Obviously it's going to be designed to work perfectly with Apple's iTunes application and sync to the iPod and AppleTV devices.

The images below, from Apple's patent application, demonstrate how it might work:

Here's another way to look at it: you're hungry for pizza but you don't want to order a "Pepperoni" or "Vegetarian" pizza. You want it customised with your favourite toppings. Just the way YOU like it. In other words, Apple's idea is kinda like ordering a custom podcast pizza.

For anyone in Toronto tomorrow evening (Friday February 22), there is a PodCamp-related meetup in the works for Twitter-folks. Details and late-breaking updates can be found on the PodCamp wiki.

Now, I'm not claiming to be some kind of fortune-teller, but I saw this coming 4 years ago when Sony announced it would integrate the Blu-Ray high definition DVD format into its (then) next-gen gaming platform, the PS3. But obviously these things have to play themselves out and millions of dollars (and consumers) have to be burned before an official winner can be declared. Well, today it's official. HD-DVD, the Toshiba-backed format, is dead.

Is it news if nothing's happened? That's the question I found myself asking this morning as I ran through my RSS feeds.

Yesterday I posted about some tech industry gossip, but was careful to qualify the information as purely unsubstantiated rumor. It's not as if I actually called Bill Gates' publicist to confirm he had cancelled his Facebook account, and I didn't IM Larry and Sergei to confirm whether or not they had bought Bebo. As it turned out, the Bebo acquisition rumor was quashed by the end of the day, and tech columnists went back to speculating about who bought Plaxo.

But the biggest non-story of them all, the one that has generated more speculation than Brangelina's pregnancy, is the ongoing saga of the Yahoo! fire-sale. The only thing that has actually happened so far is Microsoft officially issued an offer, and Yahoo! officially turned it down. Since then there have been rumors that Yahoo! has been talking to Google, and more recently News Corp. about possible alternative deals. Obviously Yahoo!'s shareholders are the ones who are most interested in how this plays out, so Jerry Yang has sent them a letter explaining why they turned down Microsoft's offer. But how much of this news is actually worth paying attention to, since no transaction has actually occurred?

Which brings me back to my original question: is it really news if nothing has actually happened, or is it just gossip? To get to the root of the question, I just had to ask myself who actually benefits from this endless back-and-forth speculation. The answer, is pretty obvious: the publishers who are generating ad revenue from all those page views! Every entertainment publisher knows that nothing generates a good buzz like a little celebrity gossip, and in the tech industry that model seems to apply equally well. So the answer seems to be that it doesn't really matter whether it's truth or rumor, just as long as people are eating it up.

There's just something about gossip that gets people's tongues wagging. So when I ran across two social network-related rumors this morning, I had to do something about it. Obviously, the first thing that came to mind was "spread the news!"

First up, an article in the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Bill Gates has stopped using Facebook. Gasp! Does this mean that Facebook and Bill Gates are... "no longer in a relationship"??? Turns out ol' Bill was spending a half an hour every day on the site, but eventually grew tired of accepting all the friend requests he was getting (up to 8000 a day apparently). Gee, I never knew he was such a popular guy.

The other interesting tidbit of non-authenticated-information floating around the internet today, is that social networking site Bebo definitely may have been acquired by Google for $1 Billion. Of course, there's nothing to substantiate this story besides a "reliable source" who claims it has "definitely happened", but that's what makes it such a great rumor. It's what we don't know that makes us curious after all.

Ok, that's probably enough dirt on the dirt. Everyone get back to work.

Happy New Year! Today marks the first day of the Chinese lunar calendar, and 2008 is officially the year of the Rat (the Brown -or Earth- Rat to be specific). What most western people wouldn't know is that technically the first day of the Rat Year was February 4th, which was the first day of Tiger month, the Tiger month being the first month of the year in the Chinese Fortune-Telling Calendar.

So what does the year ahead look like (if you believe in this kind of stuff)? Well, apparently since Brown is Earth and Rat is Water, people who are either Earth or Water signs will be the luckiest (in the Chinese system everyone has a lucky element). However, Earth and Water are opposite elements, so 2008 won't be one of their best years in their life, unless their animal sign has a special combination with either of those two elements. Ok... so what does that mean for a Water Rat like me?

"Earth and Water have a conflicting and fighting relationship; and
therefore it is hard for them to coexist. In most of cases, if your Lucky Element
is Earth, then the Water is an unlucky element. If the Lucky Element is Water,
then Earth is the unlucky element. If Earth or Water is equivalent to your Money
Star, then your money luck in 2008 should be "money comes, then money goes" or
"money goes, then comes". If Earth or Water is the Career Star, then career
opportunity either come early or come late in 2008. If Earth or Water represent
health, then your heath will be either good or bad, however it will be the
opposite at the end of the year. In short, you will win some but lose some."

- according to ChineseFortuneCalendar.com

So basically this year will have some ups and downs, but it should all balance out in the end. I guess I can live with that. So then, let's get on with it, shall we? Squeak-squeak! ;-)