Web fosters prolific product reviewers: “I’m rethinking things,” says the prolific 43-year-old Epinions.com free-lance writer. “I’ve written 664 reviews. It’s a book, and I didn’t really get paid for producing it. I should really be getting royalties for all that work.” If product reviewers all had weblogs, and a weblog tool that had forms for posting information specifically for product reviews that syndicated review metadata, then you would have the same functionality as Epinions, in decentralized form. The difference would be that traffic would go back to the reviewers’ site where they could control things like ad revenue. Weblogs allow all the social advantages of a distributed system: control over individual identity, branding and revenue. Pings to central servers and metadata enriched RSS syndication allow for all the technological advantages of a centralized system – real-time updated search and structured querying. Isn’t this decentralizing of publishing and centralizing of aggregation,…

PC Advisor has an interesting use of text ads – certain keywords are green, underlined and show text ad boxes when moused over. Rather like the defunct MS Office contextual links system but for paid for links. This would be very interesting in the blog context as it would allow ads that are correspond to individual posts. On the downside it breaks the church and state separation of ads and content. PC Advisor

PC Advisor: “Apple looks set to introduce its long-awaited iTunes music download service for Windows users on 16 October at a special event in San Francisco”.

Article in the Guardian on the use of RFid in the UK. “in the early summer, at its superstore in Newmarket Road, Cambridge, Tesco began the world’s first trial of a so-called “smart shelf”. Razor blades are one of the most frequently shoplifted items. Small but relatively expensive, they can be slipped into a pocket. The smart shelf was designed to house packets of Gillette Mach 3 razor blades, each augmented with a tiny RFid tag. The shelf contained a reader and – controversially – a small CCTV camera. Each time a pack of razors was removed, the tag triggered the camera and a picture was taken. Tesco began the trial without much fuss but within weeks, a determined knot of protestors appeared outside the store…” Labour Member of Parliament Tom Watson (who has a weblog) “has applied for a parliamentary debate on the use of RFid. What he will…

A few weeks ago I posted a piece on the threats of a software monoculture, a New York Times journalist saw the post and interviewed me: ‘Was I an expert? Er – no, its not a new idea and its kind of obvious if you look at argriculture’. Thankfully the CCIA then published a report which levelled the same argument but from a much more authoritative stance. Michael Gartenberg, a Jupiter analyst, posts that the monoculture threat is groundless. His argument: “The fallacy is that diverse systems will not have security issues or holes”. Nobody has claimed that diverse systems would not have flaws, but diverse environments are not prone to the same catastrophic failures that monocultures are susceptible to. Thankfully Gartenberg is a Jupiter analyst and not a farmer.

A new report by Perseus has some interesting statistics: Weblogs updated less than once every two months: 66% Weblogs updated once a day: 1.2% Active blogs (as defined as those which are updated more than once every two months) are updated on average every 14 days. 26% percent of weblogs created are never used more than once. Weblog freshness, like weblog linkedness, follows a power law, something that is important when designing a weblog aggregator, see: ‘Blog Metrics’.