Zensify announced its latest app, ZenNews [iTunes link], this morning. It's basically an intelligent news aggregator, using algorithms to find "what's hot" from a variety of sources including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Al Jazeera, the Guardian and more. It parses Twitter and other social mediums to figure out who's talking about what, and then creates a tag cloud of hot topics. There's an aggregated view combining all sources, or you can view a tag cloud for each source. You can toggle sources and/or categories on and off in the preferences.

If a keyword in the tag cloud reveals more than 5 articles, tapping it will drill down into another tag cloud, repeated until the keyword returns a list of 5 or fewer articles. View articles within ZenNews using the built-in webkit browser, or open them in Safari. You can always switch from the tag cloud to a list view for any page, and there's a default view titled "All News" which lists all the aggregated news (in list format) at once. You can drill down to specific topics in the Categories view, and see what's new/hot from all enabled sources for a single category. As you read, you can mark any article as a favorite, and view a list of your marked articles in the Favorites view. You can quickly share articles via Twitter or email, as well.

It's all quite slick, and pretty solid for a first release. I did run into a bug which would bring up blank tag cloud pages if a specific combination of being on a certain view and losing a network connection at the right time occurred. I spoke with the developers yesterday, and I'm confident they'll smooth out any wrinkles quickly.

Zensify is offering ZenNews for free. Their plan is to demonstrate the buzz-detecting algorithms, and then offer white-label versions -- using a subscription model -- to companies with a need for up-to-the-minute buzz tracking. For the rest of us, this is a good-looking and, as far as I've been able to tell, accurate way to see what's happening in the world at any given moment. Check out the gallery below for a preview, and grab a copy on the App Store.

I love the iPhone, save for one thing. It sits on my desk every night, right near my computer, and the speakers I've got hooked up to it. And every 15 minutes, when the iPhone checks email for me, I get that buzzing -- the sound of radio interference flying across my speaker wires. And almost every night, I have to jump out of bed angrily just to shut off the speakers and stop the buzzing. Little did I know, all I've ever needed was an empty can of Red Bull.

Yes, someone has fashioned a "shield" out of an emptied and carved up Red Bull can, and supposedly it works like a charm -- just fashion it around the dock that came with the iPhone, use a little doublestick tape to make sure it stays on there (and I would maybe put some around the edges, too, so you don't slice your fingers open every time you pull the iPhone off the dock), and no more buzzing sound.

The maker does wonder if it would affect the actual signal of the iPhone at all, but it hasn't so far. If you've got a Red Bull can around to cut up and are driven as nuts as I am by that buzzing noise, here's your makeshift solution. The other option is to buy speakers that don't buzz, of course, but this seems a lot cheaper.

MSN Money has a fascinating report on the reaction to Apple's unveiling of the iPhone at January's Macworld. If any event could be said to trigger a groundswell of grassroots reporting, it was the iPhone. In fact, the iPhone certainly set new records in that regard with a huge response of rich media--podcasts, photos, videos, hands-on reports and more.

According to the MSN article, the iPhone was mentioned by more blogs for the next 10 days than either McDonald's or George W. Bush. Wikipedia had an iPhone entry within minutes of Jobs' keynote speech. Nifty article, well worth a read.

Before we dive into the actual story, lets just take a minute to sit back and appreciate just how fantastically bizarre that title is.
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Ok then! Mac daddy Steve Wozniak has announced that in December 2007, he and Moon man Buzz Aldrin (second person ever to set foot on the Moon) will participate in an expedition to the South Pole in which the intrepid explorers will be conveyed by Hydrogen fuel cell powered H1 Hummers.

The Apple co-founder revealed his plans at Stanford University's AlwaysOn conference. The modern day eco-friendly adventure will be filmed using 3D cameras for use in an upcoming James Cameron film. According to Woz, the team has received significant input from the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, which runs three of its buses on fuel cells.

[via Cult of Mac]