Arthur Firstenberg of Santa Fe, NM says he’s allergic to WiFi. “If I walk into a room of a building that has Wi-Fi, my most immediate sign is that the front of my right thigh goes numb. If I don’t leave, I’ll get short of breath, chest pains and the numbness will spread.” Apparently, he’s not alone in this claim and he and other “wireless sensitives” are banding together to stop Santa Fe from putting WiFi hotspots in public places.
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Currently, significant parts of Twitter are down (in fact, the whole website). However, instead of blaming the problems on scalability issues associated with Ruby on Rails (which is the most popular explanation about the problem), or their own slow reaction time to the problem, Twitter is choosing to blame its most loyal and heavy users, such as tech blogger ubermensch Robert Scoble.

Scoble follows 20,000 people on Twitter and is followed by about the same number. Obviously, he and similar users put a heavy strain on the system. His reply? “Please Twitter: fix your darn problems and stop blaming your users. You now have $15,000,000 in venture. You have no excuses anymore.”
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Of the $3.47 million Barack Obama spent on Internet advertising from January through April, over 80% of it has gone in to the coffers of Google Inc., according to information released by the Federal Election Commission. In contrast, Yahoo received about $352,000 and Microsoft received $73,000.

After spending $640,000 in January, Obama pumped his Internet spending to nearly $2 million in February, likely due to the big Super Tuesday battles waged in that month. He tapered spending off to $888,000 in March and although not all the reporting is in for April, he reduced spending significantly in that month as well.
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Google Earth, previously confined to your PC based client, will now be available on the web and for developers to mash up as they wish. In fact, any of the over 150,000 sites that have already integrated Google Maps into their sites will be able to include Google Earth with just a single line of code. This will put it in direct competition with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, which is already a browser-based application.

Google announced this today at their annual conference for software developers in San Francisco.
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Time for that weekly Facebook update you and three other people have been waiting for. Upon reading through the reaction to today’s rumor that Facebook is about to make their platform open source, a lot of developers that have been working with Opensocial are claiming that it’s good for widgets, but not for apps.

MySpace, Facebook’s top competitor, already is signed up with Google’s Opensocial, along with Yahoo. In fact, as was reported a couple of weeks ago by Vasanth Sridharan, some developers have been gravitating toward Opensocial at the expense of Facebook. Undoubtedly, reports such as these have likely compelled Facebook to open up.
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The New York Times is working on an API that will allow developers to mash up its content. As Times CTO Mark Frons told mediabistro, “The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” Frons said. “How far we don’t know.”

The Times has had some success with its attempts to become more user-friendly for developers and users on the web. Their news quiz Facebook app has 1,500 users (I’m sure they’d like more), and their in-site blog aggregator Blogrunner is a really nice addition to the tech content of their in-house staff and stories through the AP and Reuters. Times ownership has also invested in Wordpress, which powers their blogs.
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The Motion Picture Association of America won another big victory in its battle against film piracy. Two sites, ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, were fined for merely linking to copyrighted movies, not actually hosting them. This comes on the heels of a $110 million judgment against the torrent tracker TorrentSpy, which in turn killed TorrentSpy for good.

Since most of the illegal films out there right now are stationed overseas, the MPAA can’t do a lot to take down guys in Kazakhstan from hosting a pirated version of Indiana Jones. Now, however, they are going after the sites within their purview that are linking to those overseas sites.
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One thing that would really take the Internet to the next level, especially for students, is if millions of books were available to be searched and viewed online. While Google is going ahead with Google Book Search, it was thought that some competition from Microsoft would be good for the race.

However, Microsoft has announced they are shutting down Live Search Books and Live Search Academic because the services aren’t profitable enough. This is the Microsoft now pays you to use their search engine
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As is reported by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, TheRarestWords.com is a new SEO tool developed by an unknown Russian developer. Right now, it’s still pretty rough, but provides some fascinating and helpful information about yours and your competitor’s websites.

If you go to therarestwords.com and put in your site (you may need to ask it to add your site), it will return to you the rarest words on your page, which if entered in a search engine, are most likely to give you traffic. It also shows you the sites with the most similar keywords to yours, a long with a list of rare, common, and overly popular keywords from your site. For equari.com, few of the rarest words on our frontpage are “whopping,” “scrambling,” and “zuckerberg.” And those were all contained in one phrase I wrote (okay, not really).
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There’s a piece by Nick Wingfield of the Wall Street Journal today about what Forrester Research is speculating will be the next steps for Apple. Apparently, they believe that Apple’s future lies in the home, in every room, and with gadgets that aren’t exactly mind-blowing.

This is just Forrester’s forecast of what is coming, and nothing is set in stone. But it makes sense that Apple’s next steps would be about simplifying and modernizing everyday household items.

For example, Forrester sees Apple coming out with touch screen HD picture frames that connect to your computer and put out various media, including videos. Of course, digital picture frames are already out there, but there could be room for Apple to improve. Excited yet?
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