Standing in the way of control!

Tomorrow is the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, where the world’s greatest athletes will gather to compete in contests of legendary skill and strength and compare the definition of their ab muscles. For sports fans—and fans of tight and toned bodies—it’s also a great opportunity for sight seeing. We recommend the swimming or beach volleyball venues, since they tend to have the fittest girls and the skimpiest outfits. However, there are beautiful babes in every sport and discipline so to celebrate the lighting of the torch we offer this gallery of smoking hot Summer Olympic athletes past and present. Let the Games begin!

Via Fleshbot

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“Cosmetics giant L’Oréal painted Beyonce a lighter shade of brown for a new Elle magazine ad…”

[CF via SH]

UPDATE: FROM The Huffington Post

NEW YORK — Cosmetics giant L’Oreal is denying it lightened Beyonce’s skin tone in an ad.

“We highly value our relationship with Ms. Knowles. It is categorically untrue that L’Or�al Paris altered Ms. Knowles’ features or skin tone in the campaign for Feria hair color,” the Paris-based company said in a statement sent to the Associated Press through the singer’s representative.

The ad is in the current edition of Elle magazine.

L’Oreal, the maker of Garnier hair care and Lancome cosmetics, is the world’s largest cosmetics maker.

A representative for Beyonce said the singer would have no comment beyond L’Oreal’s statement.

Beyonce has been a spokeswoman for L’Or�al since 2001.

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Koobface is not the latest thingamajig in the arsenal of objects you
can throw at other Facebook users. Instead, Koobface is a set of two
new computer worms (like viruses, but more interested in spawning than
infecting) that are spreading themselves all around Facebook and its
lesser predecessor MySpace through the sites’ comments sections. Users
are tricked into involuntary computer infections when they click on
links titled “Paris Hilton Tosses Dwarf On The Street,” which might’ve
been a headline on TMZ but is actually a nefarious attempt to get
people to download a video player “patch.” And if you upgraded to the
“new” Facebook, you probably deserve it. [D'Technology]

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Another Y Combinator startup, ididwork, announced its launch yesterday. In short, the web-based service lets employees keep record of work they have completed. Employees can then submit a weekly or monthly report to their manager in the form of a chart, graph, or simple summary, and receive feedback through the system. The service is designed to drive performance reviews, eliminating the need for status meetings, and allowing employees to be evaluated based on concrete information rather than a manager’s impressions.

What differentiates the service from the many performance monitoring platforms out there is that the managers don’t have to participate. It is designed to be useful solely from the employee’s perspective, letting them track their own progress and analyze trends over time. The service does not have to serve the enterprise, but rather can spread amongst individual users. Employees can decide to forward performance breakdowns to managers, who then have the option of joining the network. There is clearly a viral aspect to the service that could make it work, but it is dependent on how necessary employees find it to record their own progress, and how informative it can really be.

The idea seems simple but it tackles a big problem: it is difficult to judge productivity in big companies. In employee reviews managers often have very little idea of what an employee has done, which leads them to make judgments based on behavior that seems productive; like staying late everyday, or sending out company wide emails at three in morning. It also gives employees an idea of what their associates are working on with a news feed, eliminating the need for status meetings.

As far as competition goes, there are many similar services but not many that follow the same model. There are work logging services, but they focus on billable hours, and there are many performance review platforms, but these target HR departments rather than individual employees. 37 Signals‘ BackPack has some similarities, but it is more suited for coordinating operations within a group rather than tracking individual performance.

The founders plan on eventually charging employers after the service takes off, allowing early adopters to continue using it free of charge. To expand, the service plans on integrating desktop widgets and customizing performance breakdown charts in the distant future.

The founders of ididwork previously started Expensr, which was bought by MyStrands. Prior to that, they worked in large consulting companies where they derived the idea for their newest project.

Techcrunch

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In a post to the official Digg blog, Kevin Rose has announced a new Digg extension for Firefox 3 that incorporates a toolbar and notification system into the popular browser that should appeal to heavy and casual Digg users alike.

In a video introducing the extension, Kevin Rose says that its main purpose is to get a feel for what features users would like to see incorporated into future releases. The extension was developed for Firefox 3, but users can download a Firefox 2 compatible extension here.

Small notification messages now appear in the bottom right of the browser window, displaying updates on topics you’re covering along with your friends’ recent activity (you can specify what events you’d like to receive notifications for). The collapsible toolbar includes a counter that indicates how many Diggs and comment the current page you’re browsing has received, and includes a “Digg It” button that allows you to submit and Digg stories without having to visit the site.

Techcrunch

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The small Dutch town of Hengelo is about to test out a new kind of concrete paving slab that actually grabs onto the car-exhaust pollutant nitrogen oxide (a key smog and acid rain ingredient) sucking it out of the air and rendering it harmless. The special bricks contain a component based on titanium dioxide that acts to “fix” the pollutant with the aid of sunlight. The best bit is that the resulting nitrates just wash away with the next rain. Clever stuff: and if the trial results next summer show improved air quality, I’m sure we’ll see environmentalists dancing along singing “Follow the green concrete road!” Or something. [Physorg]

Via Gizmodo

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There’s a social network for just about anything you can imagine these days, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are services centered around quotations and famous words. Increasingly, these sites are offering more ways to collect and share your favorite quotes with widgets and plugins. Some are even making connections with other services such as pageflakes, igoogle, netvibes and many others. Here’s a rundown of the best sites for word lovers, some old and some new.

QuotationsBook

QuotationsBook aims to become the Facebook of quotes by incorporating some of the cool features that we’ve come to expect from our online services such as our own RSS feed of our favorite quotes which we can share with others. For example, you can add your quote feed to your FriendFeed account and your friends can then see any new quotes that you’ve added to your collection. Here’s Paisano’s quote feed. Another feature that’ll be appreciated is a customizable badge widget which lets you embed your collection on your own site. There’s also a firefox extension that lets you search for quotes from its search box, a gadget for Vista, and a widget for the Mac dashboard.

QuotationsBook has made some impressive connections with Web 3.0/Semantic services like Freebase, which has begun to include quotes from quotationsbook in its articles. Here’s an example from an entry about Mark Twain (look at the bottom for the attribution for quotes used).

One of the things missing from QuotationsBook is the option to contribute and save your very own quotations and sayings. However, Amit Kothari, the founder of QuotationsBook, has stated that they are planning to add that much requested feature in the future. Amit has also launched a service called Moonrise, which is referred to as “Twitter for emotions” (long before anyone had the urge to Plurk). While you cannot share your own original quotes there either, you can express your feelings or mood along with a photo, video and yes, you guessed it, a quote from its sister-site QuotationsBook.

QuotesDaddy

QuoteDaddy is another quote service with some cool social media features like QuotationsBook. They also have a customizable widget and provide an RSS feed of your favorite quotes but there are some differences worth mentioning. QuotesDaddy has a slicker interface and allows you to enter your own original quotes, not just from famous folk. I think this is a critical feature for any quotation service, especially in the looming semantic Web 3.0 era.

You can setup Gmail to automatically insert your favorite quotes randomly by following these quick steps. (The same process will work with your Quote RSS feed from QuotationsBook).

The Best of the Rest

The following quotation sites don’t have all of the Web 2.0 bells and whistles but they can provide that special quote that you’ve been searching for thanks to massive collections accumulated over time. Many sites provide specialized categories for every imaginable type of quote you could ever want or need.

- WikiQuote is a growing wiki (duh) with approximately 16,000 quotes at this time. Much like Wikipedia, anyone can contribute to the open library of quotes.

- QuotationsPage doesn’t have much pizzazz but it’s been around the longest. Launched in 1994, it has over 26,000 quotations online from over 3,100 authors.

- Bartleby includes over 87,000 quotes featuring impressive collections such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, The Columbia World of Quotations,Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, and Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations.

- QuoteDB is a popular site because of its simplicity, but it doesn’t have a large collection of quotes at this time. It does have a nice random quote generator widget though for your blog.

- About.com has a quotations section with a vast collection of different types of quotes.

Just for grins and giggles

- The Best Stuff from the mouth of Steve Jobs Steve Jobs (Wired Magazine)
- The most visionary (and Funniest) things that Bill Gates has ever said!
- Famous last words
- Play the MovieQuotes Game

Conclusion
No matter what kind of quotes you’re looking for, they’re out there on the Web. Whether from a movie, TV show, athlete or even the bible, you can find them online in no time at all. Thanks to social media and social networking, it will continue to become increasingly easier to collect and share your favorite quotes, including your own original sayings. It will be interesting to see how far all this goes. Will we be able to pull any quote from our collection online and insert it in any email, blog post or comment or even a tweet on twitter? I have no doubt that we will and you can quote me on that

[MASHABLE!]

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Once a solely private activity, what makes men weep in public?

1. Making parents proud. “I know how proud my mum and dad have been,” a visibly overcome Vaughan told the assembled journalists at his resignation press conference. “I spoke to my dad this morning and he said ‘you know can walk away a proud lad because you’ve given it everything’ and that’s all he ever asked me to do.” Anyone else need to dry their own eyes after that?

2. Birth of first child - or grandchild. Now that men are routinely present for this everyday yet momentous event, tears in the birthing room are not uncommon. Not only is this the fruit of a man’s loins, the progeny that will carry his name (perhaps), but he has just witnessed his beloved partner undergoing the agonies of childbirth while he stands by, unable to contribute much beyond encouraging words and a toot on the gas and air. The consultant obstetrician who delivered Gordon Brown’s son, John, said both the PM and wife Sarah “wept tears of joy” at his birth.

His great grandmother lost poor relief after having an illegitimate daughter

3. Tribulations of loved one. Newsnight’s Jeremy Paxman doesn’t do emotion, beyond irritation. But while filming genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are, he welled up on discovering the hardships suffered by his poverty-striken forebears. And blokes don’t come much blokier than former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, who liked to characterise himself as “Australia’s mate”. But this carapace cracked during a 1985 television interview in which he spoke tearfully about his daughter’s drug addiction.

4. Letting a loved one down. Rough, tough Mr Hawke again shed tears on TV in 1989 as he admitted cheating on his wife of 33 years. Playing the “I’m only human” card, he wept as he vowed constancy. He later divorced his wife and married his long-term lover Blanche d’Alpuget. And cried at how beautiful she looked.

5. Saying sorry. It’s a hard word to get out. In his resignation speech last May, there was a watery shine in Tony Blair’s eyes as he thanked the British people and said “my apologies to you for the times I have fallen short”. Bill Clinton, a habitual crier, wept at the White House’s annual prayer breakfast in 1998. Held the day the Starr report was released, the then President of the United States told the assembled clerics that he had sinned: “It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine.”

6. Letting yourself down. Footballer Paul Gascoigne famously welled up after he was booked in the 1990 World Cup. Not only did that yellow card mean he would not be playing in the final, none of his teammates would either, as England was beaten 4-3 by West Germany on penalties.

Mike Skinner’s ballad of lost love caught the mood in summer 2004

7. Being dumped. In his hit single Dry Your Eyes, Mike Skinner - aka The Streets - sings of a young man’s pain as he tries to persuade his girlfriend not to dump him (”We can even have an open relationship, if you must”) and his mate’s efforts to bolster a beaten man (”Dry your eyes mate/I know it’s hard to take but her mind has been made up”). Released as Portugal sent England crashing out of Euro 2004, it soundtracked thousands of shattered sporting hopes. Which leads us to…

8. Beaten in a hard-fought game. Footballers habitually cry after missing a crucial penalty. Tennis genius Roger Federer, more used to smiling through his tears as he hoists yet another winner’s trophy aloft, welled up as he clutched the loser’s plate in Wimbledon 2008.

Dry your eyes, mate

9. Winning a hard-fought game. After gruelling close encounters with Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell, Shayne Ward shed tears as he was named the winner of X Factor 2005. Making a virtue of this, his subsequent hits included I Cry and Some Tears Never Dry. Another to cry a river upon winning was flamboyant snooker player Alex Higgins, who battled his way to win the 1982 World Championship. He wept as he beckoned for his wife and daughter to share in his triumph.

10. These aren’t tears. It’s just bits of dust.

[BBC]

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Okay, the S60 actually has two buttons: power and the shutter. Everything else is done on the massive 3.5-inch touchscreen, but a lot of the functions are actually automagical—auto-scene selection, one-touch portrait zooming, which automatically zooms in and frames a portrait, and an autofocus and exposure lock. The camera also comes with a stylus for doodling dirty words on photos in a super-basic editor. Oh yeah, it’s actually a camera too: 10 megapixels, 5x optical zoom, up to ISO 3200 and image stabilization. In lots of colors! It’ll be $350 next month. Check out its totally smooth, knob- and button-free back.

NIKON INTRODUCES THE ULTRA-STYLISH COOLPIX S60 WITH A 3.5-INCH TOUCH-SCREEN LCDNew Compact Digital Camera Offers a Sophisticated Design, Fun Features and an Intuitive Touch-Screen Control

MELVILLE, NY (Aug. 7, 2008) – Nikon Inc. is pleased to announce the COOLPIX S60. Representing the cutting edge of elegant design and intuitive operation, this stylish compact camera introduces an entirely new, amazingly innovative, 3.5-inch TOUCH-SCREEN LCD and a new graphic user interface that places shooting and playback controls at the user’s fingertips.

“We are very excited to introduce the COOLPIX S60,” said Bill Giordano, general manager marketing, COOLPIX for Nikon Inc. “When consumers asked for a bigger LCD screen, we listened and created a camera that not only takes great pictures, but is extremely fun to use as well.”

To accompany its new TOUCH-SCREEN LCD, the COOLPIX S60 features several innovative shooting modes that are seamlessly integrated into the camera’s interface. The camera’s only “physical” buttons include the power and shutter release, leaving all the camera functions to the TOUCH-SCREEN display.

For crisp, in-focus pictures, the COOLPIX S60 offers consumers the ability to lock the autofocus and exposure on a subject by simply touching the corresponding location on the LCD screen. For great portraits, the S60 features a new Portrait One-Touch Zoom function, which commands the camera to automatically zoom in and capture a subject with the right amount of framing and focus. Adding to the camera’s ease of use, the COOLPIX S60’s TOUCH-SCREEN is customizable with a choice of three different “HOME” screens with large icons that make fingertip selecting of camera modes simple and accurate.

Touch controls also bring a new dimension of fun to viewing images. In playback mode, S60 users have the ability to use their fingertips to scroll through images and zoom in on their pictures by simply touching the screen. The camera also features Auto Image Rotation, which automatically rotates the images for optimal viewing depending on the horizontal or vertical position of the camera. The camera comes equipped with a stylus for a variety of tasks including: the Draw Function, which allows users to write memos or add drawings on their images, and the Paint Function, which allows fun frames and stamps to be added to images. Images will be saved as copies, allowing access to the original image. The new HD Pictmotion function, combined with HDMI connectivity, allows high-quality playback of images and slide shows on an HDTV for the ultimate photo sharing experience.

In addition to the aforementioned features and the new TOUCH-SCREEN interface, the COOLPIX S60 features 10 megapixels, a 5x Zoom-NIKKOR lens, Nikon’s hallmark imaging processing concept, EXPEED™ and Optical VR Image Stabilization technology for steady shots. For capturing sharp images in low-light situations, the S60 features ISO capabilities up to 3200 and an auto ISO selector mode which allows the camera to select the optimal ISO settings for different shooting situations.

New to this line of COOLPIX cameras is the Scene Auto Selector mode, which creates a carefree shooting experience by automatically selecting the scene mode appropriate to certain shooting situations such as Portraits, Landscapes and Macro photography. For great portraits, the S60 also features the Smile mode, which automatically releases the shutter when the camera detects a smile on the face of the subject, and Blink Warning, which displays a message when it detects that a subject has blinked, allowing the shot to be retaken or saved according to the user’s preference.
All of the features listed above are elegantly packaged into Nikon’s compact wave-surface design and are available in a choice of Crimson Red, Espresso Black, Arctic White, Burgundy, Champagne Pink, and Platinum Bronze. The COOLPIX S60 utilizes a rechargeable EN-EL10 battery and SD/SDHC memory cards. The camera will come packaged with the COOLPIX Software Suite for editing, sorting and sharing images.

The COOLPIX S60 will be available nationwide in September 2008 at an MSRP of $349.95*. For more information about the S60 and other COOLPIX cameras, please visit www.nikonusa.com.

[Nikon]

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