fans

US Airways pilot big on Facebook

Want some big exposure on Facebook? Just pull off a water landing in a fully loaded passenger jet.

For Chesley B. Sullenberger, who successfully landed US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson river Thursday, that happening appeared to have given him a cult-like following on the popular social network.

So far users have created nearly a dozen fan pages for Sullenberger, the most active of which is pulling in more than 100 new fans a minute and totals more than 51,000 members at the time of this posting. While it's nowhere near the millions attained by some celebrities … Read more

Daily Tidbits: SearchMonkey reads Wikipedia

Yahoo announced on Thursday that it has added Wikipedia deep links and images to its search results. The company, which is using its SearchMonkey platform to add more third-party content to its results, claims that all Wikipedia results in its search will now include links to the first four sections of the article, as well as an image. The feature can be turned off through Yahoo's preferences pane.

MediaGlow, AOL's publishing unit, announced the launch of a new sports site Thursday. Dubbed FanHouse, the site sports a new design and "an expanded lineup" of national sports … Read more

FanSnap scores $5.5 million funding round

FanSnap announced Monday a $5.5 million funding round, which it aims to use on completing the build-out of its search engine.

FanSnap, which launched its ticket search engine beta in September, received funding from existing investor General Catalyst Partners, which led the round.

The FanSnap site is designed to allow users to search for tickets based on a number of criteria, from price range to number of tickets sought, as a well as an at-a-glance ticket price range based on the stadium section using a colored map.

The site gleans its data from 56 ticketing providers including StubHub, Ace … Read more

Cool your laptop with Chinese opera

Back when I was a kid, we had to blow on our laptops (and carry them 10 miles in the snow, by the way) to keep them cool. These days, you young whippersnappers have things a whole lot easier.

Take, for example, the Chinese Beijing Opera USB laptop cooling pad. Just plug it in. It contains three quiet built-in fans to dissipate hot air from underneath your notebook and keep your system cool. But it's also a decorative nod to the high drama of Chinese opera.

The cooling pad is powered via a retractable USB cable, and is light … Read more

Harry Potter ruling points out the limits of fandom

J.K. Rowling recently won the right to be even richer when a US federal judge ruled against a Harry Potter fan's right to publish The Harry Potter Lexicon. In so doing, Ms. Rowling demonstrated two things:

No matter how "right" it may seem to use someone else's copyrighted works, you can't simply assume that right, and Just because you're copying out of love and devotion doesn't make it right.

I'm sure that the defendant in the Harry Potter decision, Steven Vander Ark, must have felt hard done by to see his paean to Rowling's genius stomped on by her. A wide range of Potter fans seem to share this view. As I'll describe below, this isn't wildly different from open-source "fans" who piggyback on the works of others.

But their misplaced feelings and his intentions are somewhat irrelevant here. He copied liberally from Rowling's work to create "his" lexicon, which is the primary problem, as Groklaw points out:… Read more

Top Fantasy Football downloads

With the NFL season under way many football fans are just getting started with another great season of Fantasy Football. If you're a Fantasy sports fan, you've probably already mapped out who your favorites are at each position and right now you're hoping your picks will reap big rewards as the numbers start rolling in. If you're looking to join a late-starting league, you know that every pick counts and any help with organizing your team is what could push you to the top of your league.

Here at CNET Downloads we know that being successful … Read more

Featured Freeware: SpeedFan

SpeedFan isn't overly complicated, but if you don't understand the information it offers, I strongly recommend you research it before proceeding. If you do know the difference between your Vcore and Vsb, it presents some useful system details. SpeedFan's tabbed interface isn't hard to navigate, but let's face it: most users won't be able to make head or tail of the data this utility provides. The program's system-tray icon tells you the temperature of your PC's hard drive, and you can receive information on voltage and fan speeds.

The utility can display … Read more

Stalk your favorite TV characters (legally) with Whrrl

Location-based social network Whrrl has forged a rather odd partnership with content provider HBO to place various fictional characters from the show Entourage as real users on its network.

Events from the television show will end up as annotated items on Whrrl's user-generated map. You can subscribe to whichever of the characters you want, and each of their items go into your central friends feed along with regular users who are providing "real" ratings and locational bookmarks. As the series progresses, locations seen on the show will continue to be placed on the map.

This is a … Read more

Thinking green with the 'Humvee of the air'

Another entrant in the race to produce a ducted-fan-propelled, vertical-take-off-and-landing UAV, the planned "humvee of the air" will morph to different missions and reach targets three times faster than helicopters, according to the manufacturer.

The official name of the vehicle is VTOL-Swift Tactical Aerial Resource, or V-STAR. With a cruising speed of 288 knots, a 650-mile range and a 400-pound payload, the V-STAR promises to be a "breakthrough solution for frontline military logistics," according to Broomfield, Colo.-based Frontline Aerospace. The aircraft would use a Rolls-Royce gas turbine with counter-rotating blades and "diamond-box-wing" design … Read more