It’s midterm season and everyone is stressed out about what they got on this midterm and that midterm.  It’s especially important around now because at my school, the withdraw deadline ends up being right near the first midterms, so people can decide if they want to get out of a class without taking a hit on their GPA.  Well in one of my classes, one concerned student emailed their TA and asked how they were doing.  Unfortunately the TA isn’t so great with email.  They ended up sending this response to the entire class by accident:

“On the midterm you recieved a 55. You have 5 missed quizes which will get calculated into your average. You also have a 20 on one quiz. It is very likely you will not pass this class. What ever the reason for the position your in does not matter. If you are worried about your Gpa it would be in your best intrest to withdraw from this class. A withdraw does not look bad with a good reason.
Best of luck
Djk”

Considering no one else in the class got their midterm grades yet, everyone assumed this email was intended for them.  Unfortunately some people suck at reading and just saw “On the midterm you recieved a 55.  A withdraw does not look bad with a good reason.” and decided to withdraw from the class.  If they had read the whole email they would have realized this wasn’t intended for them (unless they really did miss 5 quizes).  The next day the Registrar’s office had quite the fun day un-withdrawing people.  Goes to show why being computer literate is so essential in today’s world.

LA Times published an article about the latest episode of South Park possibly going too far.  They even put a nice little poll at the end to let the reader give their opinion on the matter.  Well the poll says it all.  LA TIMES FAIL.

Read the entire article here.

I guess these big corporations just don’t get it.  Yahoo had something good going back in 2000, but now not so much.  Yahoo Buzz is essentially a Digg clone, but it lacks one essential thing.  Digg’s backbone is the community. They are constantly getting user input, and doing things to make the community aspect of the site better and better.  Yahoo unfortunately failed to realize this, which is why Yahoo Buzz is a huge failure.

This article with both Digg and Buzz buttons embedded shows it best.  The article about Windows XP’s support by Microsoft getting extended by 6 months was posted by tgdaily.com. The article had a total of 2040 diggs on Digg and 8 votes on Yahoo Buzz.  Not to mention if you look at the most dugg articles on Digg, they usually have thousands of diggs.  I’ve seen articles get in the tens of thousands of diggs.  Buzz’s top articles by vote at the time of writing included an article with 750 votes, and the next highest had 180.  It’s like comparing a PeeWee Football team to the Patriots.

Maybe next time Yahoo decides to leverage their large user base and copy another site to try to improve themselves, they should consider why exactly that other site is successful in the first place.