After my brief post about HappyCampr ripping off Truemors yesterday, the people at HappyCampr replied saying

First and foremost thank u for highlighting that Happycampr is a ripped off from Truemors as mention in ur blog and truemors website.

Second do sharing ur secrets with others is the same as spreading rumors/news/gossips? Happycampr is about sharing of secrets be it ur secret place or hangouts. Does that means rumors=secrets ? What is ur definition?

[...] I did a mock up long before i got to know truemors.

So if what he’s saying is true, maybe Guy ripped off HappyCampr?

I feel like the whole rumor mill mixed with the Digg paradigm is a bit overplayed in general. Digg is clearly the market leader in social news, and, there’s nothing stopping them from adding a rumors section. Even if they don’t, rumors surface all the time in the form of blog posts that are pushed out to the front page of Digg.

I don’t have a TV in my home in San Francisco, so the only time when I get any time with the tube is at my parents’ home in Colorado. Usually, I get all my news from blogs and other independent media sources (I rarely surf CNN.com) Needless to say, it’s always a very surreal experience actually watching CNN on TV.

What I find most amusing is that there are actually Blog Reporters on the CNN team. I saw this for the first time this morning when they did their blog segment, which gives an overview of notable blogs (in this case, ones that are relevant to the London bombings). They surfed to many of the sites I was looking at yesterday when the tragedy occured. I almost felt like the mainstream media were intruding into my space–it’s very weird to see familiar webpages on the TV. Also, they were shooting computer screens directly, and not screen capturing it. This is awkward at best–providing a low quality view of the webpages. They even had to pan around to see the whole webpage! It’s absolutely an awful way to convey the wealth of information in the blogosphere.

This morning, four explosions occurred in London’s mass transit system in what seems to be a concerted attack by terrorists. Bloggers are quick to report from the scene, and Flickr has a photo pool. I still don’t understand how killing innocent people aims to prove anything about someone’s personal beliefs. The only thing it promotes is hatred, confusion, and total disbelief.

Across the pond here in the US, we have yet again raised the terror level in mass transit systems–whatever that means. Haven’t the terror levels already been raised before? How is this going to be different? I find such frivolous threat announcements to be useless for the general public. We all have some sort of common sense–if we see a mysterious package with wires hanging out, we’ll report it.

In NYC, they are doing random police spot checks on buses, which includes a short lecture on what a suicide bomber looks like. I’m no expert on suicide bombers, but couldn’t they easily take on any appearance? There’s nothing wrong with a little briefing on what is suspicious, but there definitely is something wrong with ignoring elements of a suspicious scene just because it wasn’t on the list of suicide bomber attributes handed out by the police. I’m also hoping they’re not making any broad racial suggestions about the bombers.

Bill Clinton was admitted to a hospital for surgery. They say he will undergo emergency triple or quadruple bypass.