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Dave Winer on ads in RSS “The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate.” here here. There are only three possibilities for ads in RSS: 1. where the feed is an aggregated feed or search result from many sources, then the ad is similar to what the search engines do (but this is a volume game – the individual ad revenue is less than at the destination site). 2. where MOST of the RSS ad revenue is given back to the publisher – so that the publisher can decide whether the ad revenue outweights the potential revenue from the added traffic. 3. Where the RSS feed is full content – although to be honest most people can make more revenue off fancy advertising at…
I disabled comments a while back because of the spam issues from gambling and porn sites, but noticed that 10% of my traffic was to inbound links to some poker site comments that I hadn’t deleted. The inbound linking is to game Google into indirectly boosting pagerank for the eventual destination using clustered keyword terms, a more sophisticated variant of placing outbound links in comments. The traffic came from what appear to be affiliates of a CPA affiliate program site, 888.com, which in turn linked to poker sites that were owned by the same company as 888.com, operating out of the UK’s Gibraltar. These companies are owned by Cassava Enterprises, who, one might imagine, are a small, shady company, operating offshore. However, it turns out that Cassava Enterprises are in the process of going public in the UK for an estimated $1.5 billion, underwritten by Credit Suisse First Boston. See…
What is acceptable on TV: a.) A nipple – not actually visible, but it’s shape visible through clothing. b.) Two people re-enacting creating life in a loving manner – fictionally. c.) Minor swearwords. d.) Encouraging violence and hatred. Racism, homophobia, misrepresentation and extortion. Answer d.) And for this madness, Max Blumenthal encourages people to complain to the FCC about a specifically odious example. At the moment 90% of FCC complaints come from one organization on the lunatic fringe. If Max can encourage enough bloggers to write to the FCC, at the very least it will help redress the balance. It may even help the FCC re-address how they deal with the fact that their complaints currently come from a minority group and therefore their guidelines do not reflect the ‘true moral majority’, the mainstream of America which is largely benign and moderate. Here is where you file complaints. Complaints can…
I haven’t seen details of Google’s ‘newsrank’ patents, but am pretty sure that Moreover’s ‘source rank’ which does pretty much the same thing, by the sound of it, and which has been made public to clients since 2001, would constitute prior art. BetaNews | Google Plans to Rank News By Quality: “Patents recently filed by search giant Google reveal that it plans to soon rank news stories by the quality and credibility of the source, rather than just by date or relevance as it currently does in its searches.”
We’ve added a Wists javacript wizard which allows you to publish and of your Wists linkrolls on your site, matching the look and feel, rather like Flickr’s badges or the headline feeds we used to syndicate at Moreover. You can choose to show Thumbnails and text links, just thumbnails or just text. To fore up the wizard within Wists, click on ‘publish on your site’, next to the XML icon.
Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan’s highline, which were unveiled at Monday’s opening at MOMA. Manhattan’s highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park. It’s a terrible idea. Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern. The problem is that linear parks don
Marc Canter had it absolutely right when he cautioned about the fuss over Ajax. Perhaps Ajax is a meme more than a ‘thing’, and like all good meme’s something that is spreading because the environment is ready for it. When I first used Gopher or WAIS and then downloaded Mosaic I was impressed by the architectural simplicity of Internet applications, so much so that I stopped being an architect and started working on web stuff. Here was something in computing that was seemingly a retrograde step – one window instead of many. I spent most of my day at the time in front of a twin screen CAD application that had several hundred palettes. But because that one window opened onto a world of other computers, like a unix terminal, it was so much more elegant. (My favorite new experience with UI has been finally using VI, a text editor…
Ancient rivers and sedimentary rocks on Mars. A gravity warmed sea beneath Europa’s crust. Microbe like structures in a Martian meteorite. Planets around distant stars. And now: Cassini Finds Hydrocarbons on Titan The last few years have dramatically changed the notion that life on Earth is unique. With a sample of one, there is way way to be sure, but each new discovery points in the same direction. I would hazard a guess that the universe is indeed teeming with life, as a natural, emergent phenomenon. That seems like a wonderful, awe inspiring thought, and yet we are still arguing as to how life evolved on our own planet. Arguing about evolution itself. There are those who would have the universe be billions of times smaller, thousands of times younger, and with no diversity. Is that more wonderful, more spiritual?
Dana Blankenhorn graciously apologizes for his piece saying that Evan should resign from blogger. Well done Dana.
Tabloids are big in the UK, and its always been a mystery to me why in a country like the US, which is the king of popular culture, there is no real-news tabloid. I like tabloids cos they are funny and I like Sploid even more because it is like Slashdot meets the Onion, edited by Richard Dawkins.
You often hear the term ‘moral relativism’ used pejoratively compared to the continued use of the morality of 2000 years ago. What this needs is a new term – much like the use of the positive word gay instead of homosexual or pro-life instead of anti-abortion. Moral relativism means is that your notion of morality changes over time – but like the arrow of time itself it always moves forward – moral relativism means moral progress, as compared with the static and eventually obsolete morality endorsed by all religions. Quotes by Pope Ratzi: “Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. … Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching,’ looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards.” Indeed it is, and moral progress is better by definition.