Parody sites start anti-social networking trend

Tired of phony online friends? Make enemies instead.
Riding on the popularity of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, new Web sites are poking fun at online friendships that connect you to the people you like, by turning attention to the ones you don't.
Over the past 18 months, sites such Snubster, Enemybook and Hatebook are appealing to Internet users who get a kick out of the tongue-in-cheek humour of mocking their friends and others who are just plain cynical.
"I didn't understand these fake-friend war chests that people were so busy building online," said Bryant Choung, a technology consultant who started Snubster last year.
"I would get Facebook requests from people I talked to for three minutes at a bar or party, and now this person wants to go online to peruse all of my photos and contacts. I just didn't get it," the 26-year-old added.
Snubster, a Facebook application and a Web site with 16,000 users worldwide, lets users compile people and things they dislike. No one from Facebook, which boasts 59 million active users worldwide, was available to comment about the sites.
When Facebook opened up its network to outside applications earlier this year, some users decided it was an opportunity to poke fun at the phenomenon.
Kevin Matulef, the creator of Enemybook, said the idea for his Facebook application started as a joke last summer when friends at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were asking if someone was a real friend or a Facebook friend. "It started basically as a satire, sort of a parody of some of the superficial aspects of Facebook and the connections that you have, but now it's kind of evolved and it allows people to express themselves via their dislikes," said Matulef, 28.
Enemybook, which has 9,000 users, is similar to Snubster in that it lets you "enemy" so-called friends, public figures and fictitious characters.
"A lot of people like myself use it just to joke around with our good friends," said Matulef. Choung agrees."I hope that most people take it as a joke, on occasion I do get complaints from people about others who take it too seriously."
But Murray Pomerance, a professor of pop culture sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto, said most people take their online relationships very seriously.
"There are a lot of people who do not believe the friends that they have on these sites are phony," he explained. "I know people who have lots and lots of friends on these sites and who say things about themselves on these sites that they would never say to anyone straight up in public or in private."
Pomerance added that any online social networking, whether it's making friends or enemies, could be dangerous.
"Who you liked and who you hated used to be private," he said. "What they're doing is taking human feeling and emotion and making us actually register them through these online services."

Nature names Pachauri Newsmaker of the Year

International climate change campaigner R K Pachauri of India figures on the cover page of Nature, and the highly regarded science magazine has named him as its 'Newsmaker of the Year'.
The magazine, published from Britain, in its latest issue said: "Nature is pleased to name Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian engineer and economist, and chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as our inaugural Newsmaker of the Year."
In its editorial, the magazine wrote that science, like history, is forged by individuals - even though both are forged on the back of a past whose inhabitants may have faded into anonymity.
"But the contribution of this year's winner to scientific affairs can be celebrated without reservation. Rajendra Pachauri's great strength is in building and organizing institutions in the fields he understands best - engineering and economics as they apply to issues of development.
"In that area, he has enjoyed a success that reflects his calm, yet fiercely driven personality. Over two decades he has built TERI, the Delhi-based energy and resources institute that he runs, into an organization with offices around the world and several hundred staff. And in the past five years, he has chaired the great collaboration that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)," the authoritative science magazine of the world elaborated.

The weekly science magazine underlined the successful stint of Pachauri as IPCC chief and thus giving IPCC a best reward - Nobel Peace Prize of the year.
The magazine said protecting the vulnerable from the threat of climate change is about changing what we all do, and that requires political action as well as changes in personal behaviour.
"But collective action has a positive and uplifting side, too. The IPCC is a case in point. Its members have sacrificed time that they would rather have spent on new research to do something for the world at large. Their endless meetings and discussions, their intellectual clashes and warm mutual understandings, have produced an unparalleled catalogue of reliable knowledge - and authoritative assessments of remaining ignorance - on a scientific matter of utmost public concern.
"To produce something that the hundreds of authors can be proud of, and in which the nations of the world have all, to some extent, invested their trust, is no mean thing. The IPCC's collective efforts span decades. But the person sitting in the chair at its hour of greatest achievement so far is Rajendra Pachauri, and we salute him," it declared.

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London Inn offers free stay for Marys and Josephs

London: Josephs and Marys in search of a room at the inn this Christmas are being made an offer they can't refuse.
A British hotel chain is promising free accommodation to couples who share their first names with the couple from the Christian Nativity story.
Almost 30 Josephs and Marys have already signed up for the free night's stay at the Travelodge, said Shakila Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the hotel chain.
"The 'gift' of free night's stay is to make up for the hotel industry not having any rooms left on Christmas Eve over 2000 years ago when the original 'Mary and Joseph' had to settle for the night in a stable," the company says on its Web site.
The offer is good at any one of the chain's 322 hotels in the United Kingdom, the Web site says. The couples must bring proof of identity and must prove that they are in a long-term relationship.
"If you satisfy the criteria, you get a free night in a family room for two adults and two children," Ahmed said. "There's also parking space for a donkey if needed," she joked.
Ahmed said the offer, which will run from Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night — December 24 to January 5 — had been very well-received.
"We've had a lot of interest. I think people like the fact that it resonates with the Nativity story at a time when the actual meaning of Christmas often becomes forgotten in festive overkill," she said.
Couples can register their names at a special e-mail address set up by Travelodge, which has hotels across the Britain, Ireland and Spain, Ahmed said.

One-film-old Gemma bags next 007 girl role

London: Actress Gemma Arterton of the show St. Trinian will be the next Bond girl. It will be her second film.
Thesun.co.uk reports that the 22-year old beat 1,500 other women to co-star with Daniel Craig in the movie is tentatively titled Bond 22. Filming starts in January.
After getting the confirmation, Arterton sent an SMS to her mom saying, "I got Bond!"
An insider at the Bond studios Eon Productions said, "She has the modern look."

Cyclone Sidr damaged 40% of Sundarbans: UNESCO

Cyclone Sidr that left more than 3,000 people dead as it raged through Bangladesh in November has devastated the Sundarbans World Heritage Site, UNESCO has said.
A report prepared by the UN body found "serious damage" after its experts visited the mangrove forest on the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, spread between Bangladesh and India.
"The experts found that 40 per cent of the site has been seriously damaged by Cyclone Sidr. It struck at the heart of the East Sundarbans, the biologically richest part of the Bangladeshi World Heritage property," UNESCO said.
"Foliage has been stripped from the branches of trees in over 30 per cent of the property. Large trees have been felled by the wind and the crowns of many others have been severely damaged," it added.
A complex network of tidal waterways, mudflats and small islands intersects the 140,000-hectare Sundarbans, one of the largest mangrove ecosystems in the world.
It is home to a wide range of fauna, including 260 species of birds, the Bengal tiger and other threatened species such as the estuarine crocodile and the Indian python.
UNESCO experts who visited the world heritage expressed their concern that this development would help poachers do further damage to the ecosystem.
"Poaching and other intrusions could jeopardise the regeneration of the Sundarbans ecosystem, which should normally take 10 to 15 years," the report stated.
The November 15 cyclone that left Orissa and West Bengal untouched - contrary to meteorological predictions - damaged field stations and many boats in Bangladesh.
Several pieces of equipment of the Bangladeshi forest department in the area have been washed out to sea by the storm, severely compromising the authority's capacity to manage the site, which was inscribed in UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1997.
The Sundarbans are breeding grounds for fish, shrimp and crab, which migrate to areas beyond the site boundary, providing livelihood for 300,000 people in the area, the UN body explained.

Wikipedia faces Google-y, rival Knol launched

Web search leader Google Inc is testing an Internet site for sharing knowledge about any subject under the sun, one that could eventually compete with the popular user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Google's "knol" project started earlier this week and is working with a group of writers by invitation only, Google vice president of engineering Udi Manber wrote in a company blog post.
"There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it," Manber said in the post.
"The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information ... to how-to-fix-it instructions."
The word "knol" is used to refer to the project and to an entry on the shared website.
Google's site will identify the authors posting the information. It will not serve as an editor of the information or endorse what is written on the site.
The site will eventually be opened to the general public and allow users to submit comments, questions or edits, as well as rate posts.
Knol writers will be able to include ads in their posts, sharing the revenue with Google.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is working on a community- developed Web search service that would compete with search engines such as Google and Yahoo Inc.