"When the Sun Falls, Darkness Rises" by Stephen Chinnadorai on Flickr

Most of us will set our cameras to Auto, simply because it’s easier to let the camera adjust all the settings for you — but a lot of the time, your camera is wrong. There are some situations where it’s just necessary to use Auto mode: When you have to capture the moment quickly, when you simply don’t have time to fiddle around with Apertures, ISO sensitivity and other settings.

But, when you do have time, you should explore your camera’s settings — especially if you use a Digital SLR camera. I personally have my camera set to “P” for most of the time, which means all I have to do is set the ISO, and then everything else is done automatically. I don’t use Auto for two reasons: It pops up the flash at times where it’s not necessary, and Auto does not support the RAW file format (which is vital for post-processing).

Changing the aperture can dramatically change the way your photo will look. A wider aperture (lower f-value) will give you a very narrow depth of field, which is great for macro shots or portraits. Wide apertures are also necessary in low light where you don’t have a flash. Narrow apertures (higher f-value) are great for landscape shots, where you want everything to be in focus.

There are no rules of photography. Play around with all the settings, over or underexpose photos, make everytthing out of focus — it’s up to you.

If Digg is about the users controlling the content, then shouldn’t Diggnation be the same? Why should Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht (or David Prager) choose the stories, when we could?

Sure, Alex and Kevin only pick stories that are highly popular on the site - which means we do have some say in what’s on the show - but thousands of stories hit the front page of Digg every week.

What I’m proposing is an extra button in Digg a Firefox add-on that, once a user has Dugg a story,  will give the option to suggest it for Diggnation. A limit of five or so suggestions per week would be more than enough per user.

The result of this should be a list of what Digg users want covered on this week’s edition of Diggnation. The stories covered in the show would be entirely controlled by the users who have opted-in for this add-on.

On the other hand, it’s Kevin and Alex that make Diggnation what it is, so they would know which stories they can entertain us best with. Diggnation viewers may also not be Digg users at all - their reason for watching Diggnation could be because they don’t want to look through Digg.

What do you think?
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Sure, Facebook could easily be the most active social network right now — but will it keep its position in the years to come? What initially started as an internal site for students in Mark Zuckerberg’s college has expanded into a global phenomenon. Facebook has seen massive growth in the last year. But, like MySpace is slowly becoming — it could become history soon.

I personally prefer Facebook to the other “major” social networks like MySpace and Bebo, because of its simplicity and ease of use. Although, with the launch of Facebook third-party applications, the site has become a lot more cluttered and MySpace-esque. Facebook have managed to keep rolling out new features to keep the users happy so far, including their minimal advertising system. Compared to regular banner advertisements, Facebook have more targeted ads — sometimes including mention of a user’s friend (with their permission).

It’s not all good at Facebook: They have alreaedy been alleged of stealing the idea from ConnectU. Facebook may also not be making as much money as you think; in fact they could be losing it, according to this TechCrunch article.

There are plenty of up-and-coming social networks being created all the time: Some good, some bad. Facebook’s end could be nearer than you think. Or, Facebook could surpass Google and become the biggest website on the Internet, holding all information in one place. The future will be interesting…

First off, I’d like to apologise for the two-week hiatus of no posts on my blog — I’ve got some fresh content coming that I hope you will enjoy in the coming weeks. 

I know this is now considered “old news”, but I’d like to talk about Cuil (pronounced “Cool”) because of their claims of being “better than Google”. So I tried entering the ultimate query into Cuil: My name. The result? My LinkedIn profile came first, followed by some other social networks with my name — but there was no link to my own website. Google, on the other hand, lists my website first; then my articles on Appletell, and the social networks follow.

The second test was an easy one for Cuil, I typed the word “London” and the results looked much more promising. I was given an Ajaxy drop-down menu on the right, which gave me more information about the city. But, I was still happier with Google’s results. I got a map, and all the relevant results I wanted — such as the government site and Wikipedia.

To be fair, Cuil is new and probably hasn’t had anywhere near as much time as Google has to index all of the Internet’s pages. Many publishers will optimise their sites for Google, which again might help Google receive better results. I’m happy to see some competition coming in for Google — because, one day, something will be better than Google.