A good while ago now Viki Babbles Gonia posted an article outlining the steps to rescue abandoned groups:

Abandoned Groups: Instructions for adoption as owner/admin

I followed the process and mentioned that I would be interested in taking ownership of the Web Development group, since it appeared to have been abandoned. Time has borne this out and ownership has been transferred. Looking at the articles that are being put in the group it is fairly clear that the group has, to some extent, become a dumping ground for political articles.

As of now, this will stop.

I first noticed them this morning - a row of five stars below some articles, just underneath the Facebook stuff.  Scroll your mouse over them and you find that they're ranked from "Bad" through "Boring", "Ok", "Good" and Excellent.  Clicking the "?" link shows that the ratings are run by a company called Outbrain, and it appears that you need an account with them for some reason.

I won't be signing up for anything like that, I'm afraid, but it does intrigue me.  Is this a new dimension to the Vine?  Have you seen it?  So far it hasn't been on all articles or seeds, and I've not seen it often enough to work out if there is a pattern to the ones that do sport it.

UPDATE: See the official explanation in comment #11 below.

I just noticed that the Wetbar is gone (the blue bar at the bottom with links to Facebook and its own tracker etc). I've checked in three different browsers and it is missing in all of them, so it is not related to browser errors or plugins that may inadvertently be blocking it. Now, I have to tell you that I don't miss it, I've never found a real use for it and find that it simply takes up screen real-estate. I wonder if this is a permanent removal? I suspect there is something wrong with it and the powers in the Vine have removed it to maintain stability. Speaking of which - Flash is by far the biggest issue affecting browser stability in my opinion, and the Wetbar definitely incorporates Flash, so I'm happier without it.

Am I the only one seeing this "update"?

Mozilla have released the latest Beta of their Firefox 4 browser for Windows. Beta 7 is being billed as pretty much what will be released as version 4 in the first part of 2011, although it does seem that they are planning a beta 8 and 9 in the next few months. However, word out of Mozilla is that nothing fundamentally new will be added to the release version, and nothing present in this Beta will be removed.

It has been a while, life has been busy and the Vine has taken a back seat. You'd think that being on crutches would mean I had lots of time online, and I do, but somehow the Vineness has left me of late as it sometimes does. Anyway, today I sat in front of the PC and read some of my RSS feeds, some bits on the Vine, and even seeded a few articles. And I thought that I would share a few of the pieces I found that perhaps don't merit a seed of their own each. They're from a technological perspective, and most are a bit funny, so enjoy.

Calling themselves CoAL of Africa, an Australian mining company is opening the huge Vele open cast colliery less than 6km from the Mapungubwe World Heritage site on the banks of the Limpopo River. This has the potential to seriously damage the culturally and biologically important Mapungubwe National Park, the Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area and areas downstream along the Limpopo. Open cast coal mining is a very dirty process, and will result in coal dust blowing from the colliery into sensitive areas, as well as entering the Limpopo river to be transported to areas below the mine.

Mapungubwe is the culturally important area where the famous golden rhino was discovered showing the sophistication of tribes living in the area. The Apartheid government suppressed the find because it clashed with their claim that no black tribes were ever in the area under their rule. Now a World Heritage Site, the park is a wonderful area overlooking the Limpopo River towards the Tuli Block conservation area in Botswana, and over the Shashe River towards Zimbabwe.

The Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA) is an international effort to bring land in South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe into a common conservation area. It straddles the three countries, incorporating land straddling both the Limpopo and Shashe rivers. Despite some problems (particularly with Zimbabwe) there does seem to be genuine political will to get the TFCA off the ground and operating. The mine would seriously jeopardise this area's claim to be a world-class conservancy.

This is a video by a guy walking through a park as the quake hits. It's quite amazing - the cracks in the ground grow and swell, and water pools up on the ground.

There are some amazing, and heart-wrenching, photos here.

If reports this week are to be believed, the entire anatomically modern human population descends from ancestors who lived in southern Africa. This flies in the face of a mass of evidence that the cradle of humanity was east Africa, probably somewhere near the famous Great Rift valley. So where did we really come from?

LESS apparent in SA's Square Kilometre Array (SKA) bid and the MeerKAT project are technological innovations that are likely to change the way people live.

Comprising 3000 antennae, the SKA will be the world's most powerful and sensitive radio telescope, enabling scientists to detect radio signals billions of light years away, when the first stars and galaxies formed. It could answer our questions about the origin, nature and evolution of the universe.

Police from around the world say they have broken up the largest internet paedophile ring yet discovered. Rob Wainwright, head of Europol, the European Police Agency, said the abuse network had 70,000 members and links to 30 countries.

The operation has identified 670 suspects and 230 abused children.

I should copyright the phrase, "Thierry Legault has done it again!" because he does keep seeming to do it again! He is an "amateur" astronomer in Europe, and takes phenomenal pictures of spacecraft from the ground. And this one is pretty incredible: it shows NASA astronaut Steve Bowen doing a spacewalk during Discovery's last flight to the space station!

Anonymous, or Anon, is a movement made up of a number of nameless internet activists from around the world. For many, the 'hacktivist' group has become the face of the new cyber-war against oppressive governments and all-powerful corporates. Others say the group's actions are reckless.

Describing itself as "the freedom of speech, the freedom of information and the freedom of expression taken to a logical extreme," Anon says it breaks laws, but only for the greater good. Al Jazeera's Scott Heidler reports.

An imam has retracted statements about evolution and the right of Muslim women not to cover their hair after death threats were made against him.

Dr Usama Hasan, a science lecturer, has voluntarily suspended his role in taking Friday prayers at Leyton Mosque in east London. He said he went too far in the way he defended the theory of evolution.

The number of people who see Brazil as having a positive influence in the world is rising rapidly, according to a BBC World Service poll of 27 countries.

The country is regarded positively by 49%, compared with 40% last year - the largest jump by any of the 16 nations respondents are asked to comment on.

THE struggle to persuade the inhabitants of industrialised nations to rein in their carbon emissions is well documented, but how is climate change viewed by people in developing countries? My research in Uganda provides some surprising insights. Opposing the scientific consensus on climate change has become something of an article of faith for the socially conservative religious right in the US. But in Uganda - a deeply religious and superstitious nation infamous for its rampant homophobia - climate change scepticism is nowhere to be seen.

Ministers must do more to stop internet service providers (ISPs) snooping on private e-mails without consent, an ex-cyber security minister has said. Some ISPs have trialled software that intercepts and scans e-mails to target ads.

They are meant to ask permission first - but former Labour minister Lord West says it is too easy to flout the rules.

Equipped with nothing more than a mid-range digital camera and a 20-year-old telescope, photographer Rob Bullen captured this view of NASA's Discovery space shuttle closing in on the International Space Station.

Last Saturday was generally cloudy in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, UK. But then the clouds parted, allowing Bullen, an astronomy enthusiast, to snag a shot of the ISS and Discovery as they passed over.

If you bring politics to this thread it had better be directly relevant or I will delete it.

Part of the answer to how and why primates differ from other mammals, and humans differ from other primates, may lie in the repetitive stretches of the genome that were once considered "junk."

A new study by researchers at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine finds that when a particular type of repetitive DNA segment, known as an Alu element, is inserted into existing genes, they can alter the rate at which proteins are produced -- a mechanism that could contribute to the evolution of different biological characteristics in different species. The study was published in the Feb. 15 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

If you bring politics to this thread it had better be directly relevant or I will delete it.

Scientists finally have the answer to this question. A team of researchers at Harvard University say a gene named Agouti is responsible for the color patterns in deer mice and possibly all vertebrates. The research appears this week in the journal Science.

If you bring politics to this thread it had better be directly relevant or I will delete it.

A chemical vital for life on Earth may have arrived ready-made from space. Unexpectedly, a chondritic meteorite has been found to contain large amounts of ammonia, a nitrogen-rich chemical needed to form the basic building blocks of life, including proteins, DNA and RNA.

Explaining how the early Earth gained enough ammonia for life to begin has been a puzzle, because sunlight rapidly destroys ammonia gas in the atmosphere. Furthermore, geological samples suggest that the environment was chemically neutral, rather than the reducing conditions that would have favoured ammonia formation.

If you bring politics to this thread it had better be directly relevant or I will delete it.