Provider Paradise

Most of the older participants in online-poker world commenced their vocations at Paradise Poker. During the earlier days of online-poker, only a few poker rooms were available. This company’s software tool was the best and even now it is the best. Unluckily, there are a small number of players who play at Paradise Poker and had been playing for several years. This makes the contest a tad difficult than in any other poker rooms. The rake is as regards average otherwise somewhat more.

WikiCamp : A Photologue

Missed WikiCamp but want to know what took place at the event? Well, you are in good hands. Thanks to copious WiFi, trigger happy bloggers, and professional video bloggers, you catch the action that took place at India's first wiki unconference.

Photos
A fantastic walk-through of the event by Sagaro. Pretty much catches the essence of the event.
If you don't want to miss any photos at all, go to flickr and search for the 'wikicamp'.

Video
The IndiaInteracts.com team has been extremely professional and helpful. They volunteered to help out record the important happenings at the event. Even though its an unconference, I've learnt why its important to have professsionals take care of the video arrangement atleast. Check out some of the videos uploaded so far.

Video 1 : My introductory speech kick starting the event and later handing it over to Jimbo.
Video 2 : Jimbo's keynote talk about Wikipedia, Wikia and the new search engine.
Video 3 : Participants play the role of reporters. Short interviews with Syed and me. Even Jimmy Wales join in and plays the role of a press reporter and interviews the participants. (Earlier in the day, he must have given atleast two dozen interviews)

Digg Should Sue Wired

Wired Magazine seems hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart. I have a problem with that because Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit. And because Wired isn’t just reporting Digg news - they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.

Reddit was acquired in late October. By December, Wired had predicted the fall of Digg, saying “Digg Becomes the New Friendster” without disclosing that they were a sister company to a competitor. I wrote about this on Crunchnotes, saying it was inappropriate because of the (undisclosed) conflict of interest.

Today Wired takes another, more elaborate shot at Digg. In a piece of investigative journalism, Wired reporter Annalee Newitz used a service called User/Submitter that pays people to Digg a story, which resulted in it getting to the home page of Digg. Newitz does mention the conflict of interest, albeit in a parenthetical in the middle of the story (”Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit”).

But my bigger problem is that Wired isn’t simply reporting news about Digg. They’re making the news. And they’re going negative. In the first example, they make a prediction that Digg will fall, comparing it to Friendster. No news was reported - it was just an out of the blue roundhouse punch at Digg. In the second example the reporter actually creates the story she writes about, and willfully violated the Digg terms of use in the process. And this was done for commercial gain - the Wired story describing this has received a ton of traffic (and is actually the number 1 story on Digg right now).

Digg can’t treat Wired like any other user that’s engaged in fraud. Wired is the press, and the press has tremendous power. Wired is putting Digg in an impossible situation, and they should be called on it. Reporting news is one thing (although they should note the conflict of interest there as well), but actively creating negative news about a competitor and then using the massive reach of Wired to promote that “news” is way over the line.