Cancer Patients Bare All in Blogs

Winner will live in California, Tweet about wine

(NEWSER) - Hardy Wallace recently lost his job—but he’ll soon be making $10,000 a month promoting Murphy-Goode winery on the Web, as the winner of the much-touted “Really Goode Job,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The Atlantan, who has a wine blog and has taken sommelier education courses, was first in line at the recruitment drive and says, “I was trying to get this job before there was this job.” More»

(NEWSER) - A California winery has a tempting offer for tech-savvy oenophiles, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The Murphy-Goode Winery will set up the right candidate with a $10,000-a-month job at its Sonoma County HQ blogging and Twittering about, well, wine. The 6-month gig includes room and board; the 2-month hiring process is expected to draw 10,000 applicants and is already yielding good PR. More»

There's been a steep drop among teens

(NEWSER) - Millennials engage in the widest variety of online activities, but older users have some niches of their own, a new Pew Internet study says. Millennials, loosely defined as people aged 18 to 33, are more likely to use social networking, online classifieds, instant messaging, music sites, and "virtual worlds" like Second Life. Their "Gen X" counterparts, aged 34 to 45, use fewer of those functions (though the numbers are rising), but are more likely than Millennials to access government or banking websites, Mashable reports. More»

User reviews site may have been approached by rival

(NEWSER) - Crowd-sourced local business review site Yelp has backed out of a $550 million acquisition by Google that was thought to be almost certain just days ago. Michael Arrington, writing on TechCrunch , is uncertain as to why the deal fell apart, but surmises that “someone” came up with a counteroffer for a "strategic deal" that gave CEO Jeremy Stoppleman “the confidence to say no.” But just who that is—“Apple, Microsoft, etc.”—remains a mystery. More»

Distressing response rate for fake Facebook friend requests

(NEWSER) - If someone you don’t know, represented only by a photo of a rubber duck, tries to friend you on Facebook, you’ll probably...accept. That’s the conclusion of a study by a security firm that created two fake accounts—the fictitious woman behind the duck was named Daisy Feletin—and sent out 100 random friend requests, with about a 50% success rate. And take a look at that name again, gullible ones: Does it not look suspiciously like an anagram of “false identity?” More»