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Buzz Out Loud 1478: Zuck Hunt (Podcast)

Without Molly or Brian, CNET's podcast of indeterminate length is commandeered by indeterminate hosts. CNET's Donald Bell and Eric Franklin steer the Buzz Out Loud ship into the shark-infested waters of poached PayPal employees and Twitter CEOs. Plus, HTC is paying Microsoft for Android phones, the International Space Station reaches completion (sorta), and Mark Zuckerberg hunts for his own lunch.

Flickr adds account-undelete option

Motivated by a very public accidental deletion of a Flickr user's account, and its very protracted restoration, Yahoo's photo-sharing site has added an option to easily reverse an account termination.

"We've now instituted a 90-day delay in deleting the content, including the photos, metadata, comments, and all the bits of an account, after it's deleted," Flickr said in a blog post yesterday.

The new procedure guards against the kind of embarrassment caused by the case of Mirco Wilhelm's Flickr account. Wilhelm had reported another Flickr user for violation of the site's policies, … Read more

CNET lets you jump the line for the Glitch beta

This is your chance to enter the world of the giants.

Last week, Glitch, the new online game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's company Tiny Speck went into beta. A whimsical playground that lets users meander through a complex, stylized virtual world, Glitch might someday be a place populated by millions of people looking for a little more than your standard Facebook game.

But for now, anyone wanting to play the game has to wait in a line of thousands of people queued up for the Glitch beta. Not you, though. At least, not if you're one of … Read more

iPhone 4 nearing most popular camera on Flickr

The camera in Apple's iPhone 4 is a popular option for Flickr users, a graph on the Yahoo-owned company's site shows.

According to the graph, the Nikon D90 continues to be the top choice among Flickr users. However, the iPhone 4 has been gaining ground quite steadily and could overtake the D90 in short order. The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi, Canon EOS 5D Mark II, and the Canon EOS Rebel T1i are the other top cameras on the site.

The popularity of the iPhone 4's 5-megapixel camera on the photo-sharing site doesn't necessarily mean that … Read more

Primadesk offers personal control over your cloud

As more and more applications move to the cloud, our hard drives are falling by the wayside. And that's probably a good thing. But in the process, we're no longer able to easily manage all of our content. And that's a problem.

At least, that's the position of Primadesk, a start-up that is unveiling its new offering at Demo Spring in Palm Desert, Calif., this week. And the company thinks it has a solution: its Primadesk app aims to give us back our control over all our content, even if it's stored in a wide … Read more

Get a 4GB Eye-Fi Explore Video SD card for $29.99

I continue to be fan of Eye-Fi memory cards, which wirelessly beam photos from your digital camera to your PC and/or an online service like Flickr or Facebook.

I'm not, however, a fan of their high prices. Dropping a hundred bucks on a 4GB SD card--even one with built-in Wi-Fi--is not my idea of a good deal.

Here's a better one: Today only, Best Buy outlet store Cowboom has the 4GB Eye-Fi Explore Video SD card for $29.99, plus $5 for shipping. (You may also be on the hook for sales tax.) This same card lists … Read more

Flickr wipes out wrong account--then reconstitutes it

Flickr accidentally deleted a member's account--comments, favorites, and thousands of photos--but now has given the photographer a 25-year Pro-level subscription and all his photos back.

And more importantly for others who fear the same might happen to them, Flickr is working to update its system to prevent such a mistake from happening again and to make such draconian moves easier to reverse.

Mirco Wilhelm described his dismay yesterday to find that 5 years of activity and about 4,000 photos were wiped out when his account vanished. Perplexed, he realized it might be connected to an abuse report he … Read more

The 404 749: Where we trust rodents more than meteorologists (podcast)

Every year the citizens of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania gather around a small hut in Gobbler's Knob (pause) to witness a 100-year old marmot predict the future, and this year it looks like Spring is on its way. Old Phil may be losing his eyesight, because we also happen to be in the middle of the largest storm in the last few decades, according to a less-credible operation called NASA.

Maybe we should shift our focus to a closer weather-predicting rodent at the Staten Island Zoo, Mr. Charles G. Hogg aka Staten Island Chuck, who has accurately predicted winter weather 23 out of the last 30 years.

Still don't trust him? What if we told you that Staten Island Chuck has a Facebook page AND lives in a wireless log cabin adorned with solar-powered weather station panels that allows him to make daily weather predictions using renewable energy from the sun? It's not a joke, this guy is legit.

We can make fun of Groundhog's Day for the next 364 days, but let's move onto our next story about an unfortunate photographer in Zurich who lost over 4,000 puppy photos thanks to a Flickr fumble that accidentally mixed up his account with another scheduled for deletion.

To make up for it, the Yahoo-owned photo uploading service generously offered four years of a Pro account for free, worth about a hundred bucks- sounds fair. Think about this story the next time you can't find the time to back up your data to a physical storage drive.

We also suggest backing up your back ups to a disaster-proof drive, but the truly paranoid should also load their precious data on hidden thumb drives around the office for extra security.

Finally, the big tech story of the day is News Corp. and Apple's latest publication generated specifically for the iPad called The Daily. It's a modern news brand that Apple and News Corp. call the first "all media product" and includes highly interactive and curated text articles, photos, and videos, not to mention text-to-speech audio clips of selected stories.

Unlike most of the news sites on the web , however, The Daily won't be available for free. The publication introduces a new pricing model that costs $0.99 a week or $39.99 for the year. The subscription also includes access to the Web version and users can share articles for free on Facebook and Twitter.

The 404 is truly the Paris Hilton of the Web, so we happen to know the Technology Editor at The Daily. We're hoping Peter Ha can join us on Friday's show to tell us more about the publication, so check our Twitter for the latest updates!

Episode 749 Subscribe in iTunes audio | Suscribe to iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

CES: A slicker Flickr coming to Windows 7

LAS VEGAS--On one charge across the show floor at CES 2011, I dropped by the Yahoo booth and got a tour of Flickr's new app for Windows 7 tablets and smartphones.

Like most media apps I've seen, Flickr lends itself beautifully to Microsoft's mobile OS. The photo service takes full advantage of Windows 7's side-scrolling interface, offering a smooth transition that takes you from recent content to tagged photos to a screen that lets you explore the larger Flickr library.* Clicking on any image takes you to a screen that offers the full array of features: … Read more