In roughly 24 hours, nearly 6,000 people have registered to participate in an experiment we started called The Influence Project. It's been written about by TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and a score of personal blogs. While it hasn’t taken off the way as quickly as the David After Dentist or Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Rainbow videos, it's off to a good enough start to bust our servers (briefly). But like anything that gains traction on the Web, the reactions have been mixed, ranging from the vitriolic to the pretty damn amusing.

The pitch: An oil company lobbyist (Leonardo DiCaprio) is shaken after his girlfriend, a local meteorologist, breaks up with him over reservations of his contribution to global warming. The split is hastened by a massive hurricane thrashing its way toward the east coast of the U.S., which would likely wreak Katrina-like damage from Maine to Myrtle Beach. DiCaprio's character, feeling guilty, soon discovers that the hurricane's path will also cross a long-dormant volcano, causing it to erupt and spew so much ash that it eventually swirls into a biological weapon that could mark the end of the world.

How can Foursquare get more people to check into places as they go about town? One way is stickers. Next month you will start to see stickers in storefront windows reminding Foursquare users to check in and unlock specials. Foursquare’s director of business development Tristan Walker flashed one of the stickers in front of my camera when I was visiting the New York offices earlier today.

Apple said on Wednesday that it and its partners took more than 600,000 orders on Tuesday for its new iPhone 4, which will be released next week. AT&T, its wireless partner in the United States, said it was suspending preorders for the phone.

Google’s headaches over its collection of private data from Wi-Fi networks are intensifying. Attorneys general from about 30 states are investigating whether Google violated any laws when vehicles used by the company to snap pictures for the Street View service also collected snippets of personal information sent over unsecured wireless networks.

Today, Google Earth released a new edition of its desktop app which hikers, runners and cyclists are going to love. They call it Google Earth 5.2. I call it the Hiker;s Edition. One of the new features allows you to recreate the path of a hike or bike ride by ingesting geo-data from one of your GPS devices. The visualizations show you the speed, elevation, and other stats from your hike, which you can see as an animation inside Google Earth.

With a massive membership of more than 230 million gamers, one of the biggest challenges that social game company Zynga faces is keeping up its growth. One of the secrets to its success is the ability to use its existing hits (Farmville, Texas HoldEm Poker, Mafia Wars, etc.) to cross-promote new games and help launch those games. Its other advantage is that so many people now play its games that new games now get free a ton of press and blog coverage.

On Sunday evening, AT&T sent an e-mail message to owners of the Apple 3G iPad notifying them of a security breach that was publicized early last week. The message, sent by Dorothy Attwood, a senior vice president and chief privacy officer at AT&T, explained that a number of iPad 3G owners’ e-mail addresses, along with a private identification number known as an ICC-ID, were made public through a breach in AT&T’s Web site. The company also apologized for the security error.

Facebook’s nearly half a billion users are now uploading 20 million videos each month, many of which are shared through mobile phones.

Many mainstream news organizations have long viewed Google News as a threat to their interests. But more recently, Google has been portrayed as sensitive to the health of the news media. Eric Schmidt, its chief executive, has worried openly about a world without high-quality journalism.