Happy Fourth, everybody - enjoy your fireworks, families, and freedom to do pretty much whatever the heck you want. We’ll catch you next week!

Keep clear of the white whale! Australian booze-cruisers came across one of the country’s most sought-after natural treasures—a white humpback whale commonly referred to as Migaloo—after a long period during which many believed was no longer living. Thanks to its resurgence, booze-cruisers henceforth will be required to maintain a wide berth—500 meters, to be exact—from the fabled creature.

Migaloo’s history is well documented in Australia as well as on the internet; the baleen-eating albino beast, whose name means ‘white fella,’ was first spotted in 1991. It’s discovery has sparked a couple of unofficial fan sites online, and an anti-whale hunting coalition.

In a related story, Captain Ahab is f*cking pissed.

Hollywood moves fast. Real fast. And if you’ve had even a pinch of fame during your lifespan, chances are a motion picture production company will be in the works to produce your biopic before you’ve even been buried. So goes the tale of Billy Mays, the pitchman most recognized for his husky/on the verge of screaming/yet surprisingly controlled voice, his lumberjack resembling looks, and the way he could sell you OxiClean, even if you didn’t have any carpeted floors to be stained.

Now, just days after his heart-disease related death, comes another installment of coverage on Billy’s death. Rumors are currently circulating that comedian and actor Steve Carell will portray Mays in a major motion picture called “Billy Mays Here,” a film about the infomercial king traveling around the country selling odd-ball items. To top it off, Owen Wilson is said to costar as fellow pitchman Anthony Sullivan.

Moral of the story: exploitation sells. The only question left is who will star as Michael Jackson in his feature film? Hollywood better get rolling on it as his funeral is this weekend, and they should be in production stages by then, right? Sheesh.

Much of the driving force behind that consistent scientific shove has been the ever-so efficient nation of Germany. While their BMW’s and autobahn have put their auto industry a step ahead of the rest, they still find the time to pull off the highway of life and churn out even more innovation in other electronic arenas. The latest product of Germany to have the gadget world in a tizzy is that of the printable battery.

The tiny power provider developed by the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems (say that 3 times fast) weighs in at a scant 11.5 grams and carries a charge of up to 1.5 volts. While this lethal does of electricity won’t necessarily power your remote control vehicle to the edge of the kitchen and back, the ultra-thin combination of a zinc anode and a manganese cathode may be used for devices with a limited life expectancy. So for instance, you could say, Lindsay Lohan’s career might be operating on one of these babies, or perhaps one of those annoying birthday cards that blasts “Camptown Races” every time you open it. Either way, you can take comfort in knowing that whatever these things occupy, it would take a lot of printable 1.5 volt batteries to create a giant battery-powered robot to take over the world and rule it forever or to simply change the channel.

Jennifer Hodges

Jenny, OneRiot’s very own ex-ski instructor gone internet junkie, is severely allergic to yellow food coloring. If you read our blog, follow us on Twitter, or have ever had a question about OneRiot that needed answering, there’s a good chance you’ve had first hand experience with this Rockband protege. When Jenny’s not camping, traveling, twittering, reading, photography-ing or laughing at herself, she’s trying to get over her phobia of nail files. See, she’s a busy girl.

Jayson Ayers

Jayson is OneRiot’s go-to guy for business development and partnerships. He’s super fair, creative, and is always out for win / win deals (he told me to write that). Born and raised in Mississippi Jayson enjoys adventure music, beef jerky, and bear hugs. When he’s not pacing the office with his fancy bluetooth headset, Jayson is probably out in the woods providing for the family with is .338 Winchester. Bring home the bacon.

Courtney Walsh

Before Courtney joined OneRiot as PR Director, she helped launch startups and managed media, analyst, and investor relations for a nice set of business and consumer technology companies. Before that, she worked at CNN and NBC as an editor. Before that she went to University of Colorado, where she says she studied Journalism but actually studied The Implementation of Telekinetic Organizational Superpowers. Do you know where your remote is?

Pop musicians got a shock this week when a man who changed the face of their field not only prematurely kicked the bucket, but gave them one final schooling from beyond the grave. Michael Jackson’s music is tearing up the charts and, with much poetic justice, bumping out contemporary pop stars like the Black Eyed Peas (man, they really suck. What ever happened to Joints and Jam?).

The resurgence of MJ’s music was palpable in the days following his death. Every DJ, live and radio, was revisiting his catalog, and the demand from listeners just kept growing. This global and currently ongoing Jackson fest brought music lovers to a world before ‘pop’ meant ‘very very bad’. Modern performers who claimed to emulate Jackson were reminded that he raised the bar to a level that has yet to be met. Think about it; who is the Michael Jackson of today? The closest bet would be Justin Timberlake. Now think further. What is Timberlake compared to Jackson? Absolutely nothing. Pop music sucks right now and the world just got a huge reality check.

MJ’s post-death remember-fest went on past the obligatory two day tribute period because his music is actually a lot better than the trash we’re bombarded with every day. It’s because the era of good song writing and outstanding performance is over. Living in the ‘auto tune and parital nudity sell records’ only just put things into perspective.

Today marks the anniversary of the day when Wayne Gretzky freed the Edmonton Oilers and all surrounding Canadians from Lord Stanley’s iron grip with a few swift dekes and a hat trick.

Nearly every independent country has a special day for celebrating their freedom from the chains of tyranny or a benevolent monarch. In the U.S., that day just so happens to be right around the corner (July 4th - tell us you already knew that). However, before the nation of Lincoln, Washington and well, Rutherford B. Hayes basks in the glow of yet another firework-laden birthday smash, those Nanooks to our North have cause to pop the champagne corks and light off some M-80’s. Why, you ask? Because today is Canada Day!

That’s right, today marks the anniversary of the day in 1867 when Wayne Gretzky freed the Edmonton Oilers and all surrounding Canadians from Lord Stanley’s iron grip with a few swift dekes and a hat trick. Canada would never be the same. Actually, that’s not entirely (or at all) true. Rather, Canada day commemorates the signing of the British North America Act, which united the then four provinces of Canadialand as one nation under a maple leaf, indivisible, with liberty, hockey, and socialized medicine for all.

Canadians all across the Great White North will be whooping it up today with barbecues, picnics, a few poor attempts at water hockey on thawed out ponds, and general good times. Sounds like a good time to us. But really, how is that different from any day in Canada - which begs the question, “Isn’t every day Canada Day?”

“When Tara tweeted offering to send folks an advance copy of her book The Whuffie Factor to review I responded right away, though I didn’t expect to be chosen. Virtually nobody reads this site.”

No one reads this site. Right. As so many of us are exasperatingly aware of, things don’t just hit the front page of a traditional search engine by sheer luck. So how did one “readerless” blog become the go-to place for a review on a popular marketing book? Well, it was Whuffie.

“Whuffie,” a term coined by the author Cory Doctorow, is a friendly word for a powerful concept: social capital. Social capital, also known as the return on investment that comes from gathering trustworthiness and approval online, is one of today’s most compelling reasons to be deeply entrenched in social media. But does the investment pay off? If that self-described small beans blogger turned Whuffie pro-evangelist* is any indicator, yes. However, that post didn’t SEO the heck out of itself just because Tara believed in investing in her community - it got there because her community had money of its own.

For a blog post to reach the top of a traditional search engine’s results, a rather huge, combined community investment must be made– one that is very rare to come across. Not only does a blogger need to write about the search topic, but they also must inspire a ton of other bloggers to write about it, linking their posts back to the original one so that it builds page rank. In terms of social capital, blogs are expensive, taking up tons of the time and effort of very nice, willing people. Thankfully, this mass investment is no longer needed in the area of realtime search, where significantly simpler shares are highly influential in the ranking of search results. Shares are effortless compared to blog posts, taking only seconds of user’s time (yet offering plenty of that same good Whuffie) - and everybody loves to share.

Michael Arrington recently penned something like this: “Re-tweets are the currency of the web.” At OneRiot, where a realtime result’s PulseRank is influenced by those retweets, we agree – but we venture to take it one further. The currency of the web lies not in a simple re-tweet, but in sharing as a whole. Whether it’s via email, thru Twitter, across Facebook, over IM, or hyper-dispersed thru a tool like Yoono, a share indicates a web user’s assignment of value. When a person shares something of yours, they’re assigning that value to you. How awesome is that.

In business speak, shares are to the web what referrals are to the real world – they are the word of mouth marketing of the internet. Online friends listen to online friends because they have already built up the same complex rapport that forms the online backbone of Whuffie. They trust each other and they respect each other – so they click on each others’ links. A lot. And when people click on links, cool things happen. Articles get read. New products and tools are discovered. Links get re-shared. Sometimes, people even buy stuff. Sounds a bit like the kind of stuff you’d want a marketing campaign to achieve, doesn’t it? To us, it sounds like the building blocks for a new kind of SEO.

In business speak, shares are to the web what referrals are to the real world – they are the word of mouth marketing of the internet.

As the readers savvy to our ranking algorithms know, there is a heavy relationship between sharing and the ranking of our search results. You can read up on the details of that here, but the gist of it is that links tend to wind up as search results on OneRiot when someone (and frequently, lots of someones) shares them online. The way we see it, each new share represents a fresh link to realtime information – the stuff people care about, right now. Obviously, this amplifies our general sentiment that sharing is pretty freakin’ important, because it is the most organic way to determine something’s importance that we know of today.

So how do you encourage sharing, embrace your share-ers, and reap the benefits of Whuffie? You enable it. D’oh, right? You’d think so. But as Tobias noticed the other day, only a small number of Internet companies are actually making sharing as easy for their users as they should be. For instance, only a handful of publishers are offering their readers easy, impulse friendly ways to share their content (like sticking a “Tweet This” button on every post). Only a slightly bigger set are putting a fair effort into sharing their own content through social media channels. The smallest set - those that are engage in a healthy mix of both (Mashable is a great example) - are winning, amassing their own social capital and capitalizing on that which already exists in the hands of their users. That said, all the “Tweet this” buttons in the world won’t amount to anything if the content you’re giving your reader isn’t valuable, sharable stuff – but we’ll save that discussion for another post.

The investment seems obvious – the more people share your links, the more valuable those links will become to you. Sharing creates visibility, visibility creates traffic, and traffic creates business. On the flipside, if people aren’t sharing your content, you’re missing out, bigtime, because today’s most effective web marketing is happening via the passing of social capital from computer screen to computer screen.

When Tara shipped her unreleased book off to a nice guy who happened to be very interested, she set off a series of events that led to a big increase in social capital for her – one that’s still paying off. Tara gave her online community the tools they needed to share information, and they essentially took over a chunk of the marketing campaign for her book. The difference between that story and the ones we now get to write is the ease with which we can create ours. Enable people to share your content, and they will. Share your own content, and people will embrace it. Make Whuffie, make it to the top of our search results. Every day.

Now if you don’t mind…Tweet this?

*The author of that great Whuffie Factor review was Chris Patterson, by the way. You can find him here and here. Killer post, Chris

Being the astute followers of pop culture that we are - and being hip to the fact that celebrities die in threes and not 4’s,5’s, 6’s, or 7’s - we quickly saw these stories for what they were. Nonetheless, these pranksters will stop at nothing until they finally persuade us that another one of our beloved elite entertainers is now standing in that spotlight in the sky. Their latest attempt comes at the expense of an obviously immortal singer, one who continuously asserts that he is “NEVER gonna give you up” or “let you down.” We’re talking about 80’s Brit-soul superstar, Rick Astley.

Early this morning the Internets had an outpouring of stories on Mister Astley, who had begun trending oneriot, asserting that the singer had been found dead in his German hotel room at the age of forty-three. Our first reaction was, “Say it ain’t so.”  Our second, however, was to quietly sing the lyrics, “Together forever and never to part.  Together forever with you.”   It was these lyrics that gave us the resolve and strength to realize this story was indeed a crock.  For when Rick Astley croons, “Together FOREVER,” he means it. OneRiot 1, Internet Hoaxsters 0.

Realtime search will allow Yoosers to discover the freshest, most chattered about content on the web, then do what they do best - share it with their buddies!

Yoono 6.1, which just dropped this morning, is a super-fresh version of this five-star recommended add-on. Offering a prettified and simplified user interface, and support for the latest APIs from Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, Yoono 6 will further boost users’ standard ability to easily share pages, images, or videos from their browser across all their networks at once. The addition of realtime search into the mix will allow those same users to discover the freshest, most chattered about content on the web right in the app, then do what they do best - share it with their buddies!

We’re so pumped to have found another great Search Program Partner in Yoono - and we can’t wait to hear what their drooly fans (seriously - people love Yoono like marshmallows love rice krispies) think about us. If you’re not already using it, get on it - you can learn more about it and download for Firefox (IE coming soon!) here. Once you’re booted up, talk to us about it by dropping a comment, or reaching out to us on twitter at @OneRiot or @Yoono – we can’t wait to here what you think!

* Thanks to @rumpl for the inspiration on this post’s title!

If you think your company is a good match for OneRiot’s Search Partner Program, or if you’d like to know more about our API, just ping this guy!

Forget about purebred pups with pedigrees–This weekend’s top dogshow was all about honoring those canines with mugs that only an owner can love. With gnarly coats, stumpy tails, missing eyes, and scraggly teeth, dogs came from all over the globe to win the coveted title of the World’s Ugliest Dog.

While there were some fierce competitors, the ultimate winner was Pabst, a Boxer Mix who won the judge’s votes with his protruding under-bite. This was a total upset, as it was former champion Rascal who was the favorite for the title. Pabst walked away (on leash) with $1,600 in prize money and a sexy modeling contract with “House of Dog.”

While Pabst stole the crown this year, we still are partial to Gus, a Chinese Crested Dog who died of cancer after winning the ugliest award in 2008.

The cause of Mays’ death is still unconfirmed, but speculators are still suggesting that the 50-year-old American icon had suffered from heart disease—not a head injury suffered during a recent airline flight. Whatever the cause, our condolences go out to the family and friends of Mr. Mays. We hope this is the last of the stories we’ll have to report for a while.

11-Year Old Harvey Kindlon was so close! He managed to get within feet of uber-beauty of the moment Megan Fox at the London premiere of Transformers 2, when his well-documented quest to give her a yellow rose was stymied by the flashbulbs of photo hounds from the UK’s trashiest rags. It seemed all was well that ended well though, as the aptly-named Ms. Fox had seen a photo of the boy pathetically longing in the not-so-distance and issued an apology, noting that ignoring such a doting fan was very unlike her.

In an effort to remedy the situation, Kodak put a down payment on Kindlon’s future as a stalker by flying the boy out to New York for a second chance with the ex-fiancee of Brian Austin Green. It seemed that the stars were perfectly aligned for their whirlwind romance to begin as the sexy M.F. was slated to appear on the Today show on Friday in New York, and the boy would finally be able to shower the star with canary-colored petals. Alas, if we’ve learned nothing from Bret Michaels, it’s that every rose, indeed, has it’s thorn. With the sudden death of the King of Pop occurring Thursday, Fox’s appearance was scrapped from the today show and Kindlon’s dreams were subsequently deflated in one fell swoop. The starlet never entered the gravitational pull of the city that never sleeps, as she was whisked back to her home in Hollywood, leaving one sad little boy who will most likely learn that he’ll continually be disappointed in his relationships with women if he doesn’t lower his standards. In a related story, I’ve yet to have that personal political summit with Natalie Portman I’ve been requesting for years.

Zelaya experienced every president’s worst nightmare: the army showing up at your door at night and dragging you to Costa Rica in your pajamas.

Once you look past the civil unrest, bloody public violence, and scathing injustice, a coup is kind of a funny thing. Honduran president Manuel Zelaya fell in line with his socialist homey Hugo Chavez in an impoverished nation with a tiny but wealthy elite and a majority in a festering soup of poverty. Logical assumptions would lead one to believe that the regressive and conservative action of removing such a leader for army rule would be an unpopular action forced by the military. Judging by the condemnation of Latin America and the world at large, it comes as a bit of a surprise that only 30% of Hondurans actually support Zelaya.

The president’s popularity faded as Honduras increasingly suffered economic woes, widespread violence, and corruption at all levels. His emulation of Hugo Chavez led to various spats with other houses of government which culminated last night when Zelaya experienced every president’s worst nightmare: the army showing up at your door at night and dragging you to Costa Rica in your pajamas. Within hours of the ouster, the military had placed their own man at the helm, not that it matters who the new boss is because no country in the world will recognize the military government.

The real victims, as in any such situation, are the people. Progress has now been shelved for the sake of political rivals getting even, and the poverty and corruption that sparked dissent against the formerly established leader will now run wild. When corruption happens at the highest level, it will inevitable grow at all others.

In today’s world of political revolutions, teen sexting, and dying pop icons, one might just be distracted enough to let the real danger seep in. We keep forgetting about natural disasters, and they keep hating us. Mother Nature’s step brother, the sinkhole, is a real bastard, and he’s attacking the innocent. It took geologist Eli Raz 14 hours in the clutches of a sinkhole, followed by five years of procrastination, to come to the conclusion that someone’s got to do something.

By attempting to map the sinkholes around the Dead Sea, Raz hopes to minimize the risk of individuals who flock to the body of water annually for its sandy beaches and pristine blue shallows. While no quick solution exists, he believes that knowing where they are will seriously curb the number of people trapped by sinkholes every year. Since his accident five years ago, Raz remains the only victim.

Another hindrance posed by the sinkholes is that to Israeli development firms, who have been forced to halt the contruction of a hotel and a naval base in the area. Unfortunately for Palestine, development encroaching on the West Bank is looking more and more favorable for an Israel faced with sinkholes.