Somebody just asked me how to search Ecademy with Google.
Just add site:ecademy to the search terms. eg Tools Importer site:ecademy.com

I'll add this to the site somewhere. [from: JB Ecademy]

Cooler than a very cool thing. mapping Flickr tags to locations. Then mapping the photos onto maps. It's shortcut to proper GPS embedded in EXIF, just tag your photos with the Zip/Postcode where they were taken. [from: del.icio.us]

Comment Spamalot from Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent talks about the issues of MT comment spam on MT owners and hosting companies.

I'm curious about Typekey. I'd like to think but I'm really not convinced that a centralised identity system will help stop spam in the long term. And as I like the idea of decentralised identity systems, I'm even less sure about that. My experience with yahoogroups is that people will sign up to Yahoo with a temporary account, join a group that requires moderated entry, wait for approval and then spam the group. This does not bode well for any system, no matter how many layers of indirection there are, where the entry requirements can potentially be automated. And we haven't yet found a good way of enforcing manual involvement from real people.

As for Typepad, I'd encourage SixApart to work with SXIP as an alternate as soon as possible. As we have more and more identity verification systems, the pain of signing up repeatedly to each one is becoming too much. In this case, I'm not a user of SixApart products so why should I have to sign up to their identity system just so I can comment? I've already got a passport, yahoo account, blogger account, numerous Drupal system accounts, Slashdot, kuro5hin and on and on. Surely one of those would do?

DECAFBAD has got some very interesting thoughts about exploding a PC's functions into myriad computers scattered round the house and wider internet. Two bits really caught my eye.

Miscellaneous Thoughts about Exploded PCs - Archives - Blog - 0xDECAFBAD Blog : Furthermore, I have concerns that ditching the open, general-purpose PC could kill a lot of freedom. This is especially worrisome if appliance vendors lock into proprietary networking and communication standards, or require nasty licenses like for the CSS algorithm used with DVDs. I'd really want to see the fabric between appliances, the circulatory system between my PC's exploded organs, based on open standards and protocols. Right now, the general-purpose PC is virtual and fluid enough to dodge efforts to hold it in place, but firmware and hardware are practically forever.

This is I think critical. Every special purpose machine we're being sold now has some form of lock in. Even the humble iPod (and it's not so humble apologists) has siginifcant lock in to iTunes and Apple.

I’ve already ditched a central desktop computer, and sometimes this makes me feel like I’m living in the future. I used to have a machine that I used for everything— network services, web browsing, email, IM, file storage, movies, games, et al. However, slowly but surely, all the things this one machine used to do for me are being split off into simpler, dedicated devices. It’s like all the internal organs of my old PC are being splattered throughout our apartment.

The Network is the Computer...

I'm seriously considering upgrading my Win XP laptop with a larger hard disk. But I'm seriously worried about the process. Can anyone recommend software and instructions to do this? Preferably cheap or free.

This raises another question. When you've spent several months or even years configuring an XP desktop and you finally decide to upgrade to a new machine, what are you supposed to do to copy all your data, applications and setup across to the new machine?

Hard disks are cheap these days. An 80Gb laptop drive is under £80. Desktop drives can be had for 2-300 Gb for similar money. So it's crazy to be struggling with a laptop that only has 20Gb or a Desktop that has 40Gb which is what was shipping a year ago. But it's not exactly easy to swap drives and there doesn't seem to be much help from the operating system to do it.

So let's hear from the MS experts how you would do it. [from: JB Ecademy]

I'd like to see the new MSN Deskbar search integrated into Firefox as a search plugin. Lazyweb should be redundant here as I'm sure somebody is already working on this. The same goes for the Google Desktop search and the forthcoming Yahoo/X1 desktop search tool.

Linux based bootable CD image [from: del.icio.us]

What is revolutionary here is that Prodigem completely automates the entire process of setting up bit torrent sessions for the distribution of your content. You simply upload your content via the web and with the click of a few buttons, the Prodigem serve [from: del.icio.us]

I'm proud to finally unveil swarmstreaming our third generation of swarming algorithms that are designed for the fastest downloads of web content and multimedia without any special server software or silly .swarm files. [from: del.icio.us]

At this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on
your site. Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When the AdSense ad code is
first run on a page not previously indexed by our crawlers, our crawlers will
usually get to it within 30 minutes. At times it may take 48 hours or longer. If
you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 1 week before the changes
are reflected in our index. Until we are able to index your web pages, you may
notice ads that may not be as relevant as that could be. We appreciate your
patience and understanding.

Interesting. I wondered if they indexed pages in response to displays of their AdSense code. So that tends to suggest that I can get Google to index my new blog entry by making sure that the next page I see after posting a new entry is the new blog on it's permalink page.

However, my actual question was this.
Why do I get so many Ads for Blogging systems on my blog? Just because it's a blog
doesn't mean the readers want to set up their own.

It seems I am not alone in this. It's as though AdSense has said "Ah, it's a
blog, if I haven't indexed the page yet show blog ads"
And I don't feel they've really answered that.

At the moment, I think the problem is that despite Google's success with AdSense they still don't have enough Ads with enough granularity to be able to put something contextually close on every blog entry.

Damn, damn, damn, I hate IE6...

I finally found a way of doing the classic Slashdot style header, 3 columns, footer without tables and just with CSS. The gist is a sequence of header, left sidebar, right sidebar, content, footer. Each element has an ID. The sidebars use Float left and right, and the footer uses clear:both.

So it all works nicely in Firefox and appears to work in IE. Until there's substantial content and then IE starts rendering the content half way down the page. It turns out that the nasty kludge is to wrap the content in a dummy table. It seems that IE can work out that you can't fully render a table until the final table close, but it can't work out the same thing for a div.

Anyway, another hint that might help someone. If you define a column in IE and then embed a table with width 100%, it uses 100% of available space, not 100% of the column. The kludge here is to wrap the table in a div with width 100%. And the style info has to be in the html not in the CSS stylesheet eg <div style="width:100%">

Then there's remote Javascript content like the thumbnails of My Ecademy network on the right. IE only renders this about 1 time in 3. Firefox renders it every time.

Damn I'm sick of IE's CSS bugs. As one person recently said, 5 days to do the UI in Firefox. 5 weeks to make the UI work in IE as well.

Regular Sucking Schedule is a blog from Glenn Fleishman about the problems of RSS sucking up bandwidth.

Two data points that reflect the stupidity of users.

1) A couple of years ago I did a PHP version of Aaron Swartz' tool for generating RSS from BlogSpot and Blogger when those services didn't do RSS. http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php
I turned this off more than a year go, but I still get hits from people trying to collect it. And there are still people with Rssify in their blog templates. eg. http://snunes.blogspot.com/

2) I also wrote some PHP code to scrape Google News searches and turn it into RSS.
http://www.voidstar.com/gnews2rss.php
I had to close this down as well due to bandwidth problems. Now it
generates nothing but a new item each day saying "It's closed down, stop
asking for it". Some people either don't read or can't read. eg http://www.mortgage-blog.com/

There's some lessons here.
- Aggregators that don't do something about dead feeds are mean and nasty.
- Writing code to use a free service elsewhere on the web and then walking away is mean and nasty.
- Blogs and websites with no contact information at all are mean and nasty.

The London Meetup.com group for WiFi needs an Organizer. Could it be you? [from: JB Ecademy]

Miranda IM is a multi protocol instant messenger client. [from: del.icio.us]

I'm starting an experiment to see if I can strip out the Blog tools from the AdSense Ads on this site. We'll see. At the moment, AdSense seems pretty slow about actually using the "URL FIlter"

[from: del.icio.us]

The NPD Group: Digital Music a Prime Opportunity for Music Industry, But Challenges Remain : By comparison to CD sales, in which sales of new releases are the most crucial marketing component, catalog titles that were released more than 18 months prior are a key point of focus for consumers looking to purchase digital music. Sixty-seven percent of the content acquired from P2P is catalog, versus 33 percent for new releases. Similarly 63 percent of the content acquired via paid music services were catalog titles, versus 37 percent for new releases. "Catalog sales are a much larger part of digital music than they are in the physical-music realm," Josephson said, "For some consumers the numbers suggest that digital music is filling a content void created by the limited shelf space available to brick-and-mortar CD retailers.

More proof (if it was needed) of Long Tail effects in digital music distribution. As I've said before the music industry should be digitising and offering online their entire catalogue including deleted items as fast as possible. Since the capital costs were long since paid, there should be no problem with selling it at an extreme cut price. This is inventory that simply isn't available elsewhere (although it may be at Amazon) so isn't earning any money right now.

From a post on Ecademy.

I was wondering if anybody had advice on the best ways of tailoring the adverts being displayed via Adsense. I am running a test on my blog site at the moment where I have added in the Adsense code to display adverts on my site. However, to date, the adverts only seem to display links to other blogging software products - I would prefer them to show adverts for the things I tend to blog about, e.g. gadgets / software development / comedy etc.

You've just hit the problem with Google AdSense. It seems that either Google doesn't have enough Ads, or they are not good enough about finding context, or the blog companies are spending huge amounts of money on AdSense and so swamping the real Ads. I also have a suspicion that Google forms a view of a particular site and uses that as the context until it has indexed the specific page. Which means that the problem is that Google isn't indexing blogs fast enough. (which they don't).

Whatever, the net result is the same, AdSense doesn't seem to work very well on blogs. I have exactly the same problem. I write about all sorts of things, but all I ever seem to get is Ads for Blogging Systems. And just because it's a blog doesn't mean that every person viewing it is looking for a way of building their own blog. Quite the reverse in fact.

Here's an example. I wrote about Win XP being 0wn3d in 200secs a week ago. If I use the Google preview adsense tool (IE6 only, yuck!) on that page, Google is suggesting 12 Ads of which 11 are for blogging systems. Bizarrely, I go back to the same page, 5 minutes later and the ads have changed and now 7 out of 12 are for blogging systems. WTF?

Secrets of Firefox 1.0 is a good starting point if you want to try hacking Firefox defaults and making subtle changes to the way it behaves.

Haven't tried Firefox yet? Download it now. [from: JB Ecademy]

Essential [from: del.icio.us]