If you’re looking for maps of your favourite video games, check out the Online Video Game Atlas. There are some very large and detailed maps for download.
Be careful, though. This quote may act as a warning:
Weellll… I just learned how big a PNG has to be before Opera rolls over and plays dead.
At last a performer who understands the new way of the music world.
Billy Bragg has released his latest live recording exclusively as an MP3 download. For AUD$17 you purchase the 150MB zip file direct from the artist. It’s 33 MP3 files, encoded at 190kbs. The killer is that there is no DRM on the files – you can do with them what you want for as long as you want as many times as you want. I’ve got them on my PC, put them on my iPod and burnt a CD for Rae to listen to in her car. I didn’t have to go to the shops nor did I have to wait for a sliver of plastic in the mail.
When is everyone else going to understand this?
I am gradually building up the number of RSS feeds I keep track of, currently using Bloglines because it’s an online aggregator, so I can access the same content from both work and home and keep track of it in one place. It also allows for decent categorisation of feeds.
One of the FAQs on the Bloglines site is How Many News Feeds Do Most People Track?, which is answered:
The average Bloglines user tracks more than 20 news feeds. The most we’ve ever heard of is 1,400 news feeds. Not everybody has the stamina for that amount of information…
How many feeds are you actively tracking, and on what kinds of subjects? How often do you check for updated posts, or do you have new items ‘pinging’ on your desktop?
I am currently tracking 122 feeds, with categories including Animation, Business, Charities, Education, Environment, Ethics, Faith, Human Rights, IT, Media, Personal blogs, Science, Technology, Weird, and Writing. I also take advantage of Bloglines search feeds which match specific words and phrases to blogs ‘on the fly’. I tend to scan headlines every 1-2 hours during the day.
Why are webloggers googlebombing online poker?
I assume it’s to reduce the attractiveness of spaming the blogs with the term. Wouldn’t you want positions 1-10, rather than just #1, and really shut the action down? I don’t see that it will. But wikipedia will be regarded as a more relevant site, and that’s gotta be good, right? Speaking of which, I must go check for vandalisim on my pages…
You’ve got your fast net connection, you’ve got your torrent client, you’ve got you iPod with over 20G still free and you’re thinking it would be really cool to get 750 free MP3s to help fill it up a little.
Well, I can help you.
The South by South West festival have put together a 2.6G bittorrent of 750 artists associated with the festival and it’s free to all comers.
Check : http://2005.sxsw.com/geekout/fest4pod/ and don’t miss the 20 additional songs beneath the main link to take your swag to 770.
An article from The Economist on Robert Scoble, and the whole corporate blogging thing, and also revealing why Microsoft’s developer TV “channel” is called Channel 9. (And here’s Scoble on the tree in the picture in the Economist article.)
Corporate blogging has certainly taken off in the States. But will it be worldwide like personal blogging? Will it move out of the IT industry into other sectors? Does the rest of the world enjoy evangelising for their companies like the Americans do? Do companies in the rest of the world have that kind of online community that American IT companies do?
Indeed, since the IT industry is largely driven by American innovation, are there companies elsewhere that have the kind of geek following needed to bring corporate blogs up to the kind of readership where senior management consider them worthwhile?
Scoble is unrepentant, considering it inexusable for a corporate web site not to be doing this and making it clear it’s not technology for technology’s sake: it’s marketing, and feeding your web site with visitors.
Despite the global village, in some respects those of us in AU remain a little way behind the pack. Mick at G’day World talked on one of their recent podcasts about trying to set up a corporate blogging conference, and it seems to have died for now for lack of sponsors.
I recall that I saw URLs on US TV ads in early 1996. It must have been another year before they popped up in Australian TV ads. Maybe there’ll be a similar delay until corporate blogging takes a foothold here and worldwide.
M1cro50f+’s guide to 733t-speak. Hmm, it doesn’t seem to mention pr0n.
(via Sc0ttie)
The Register’s Interview with a link spammer.
When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he’ll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site’s phrase. “But you’ll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don’t know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page.” And the cost of doing it? Once the code is written, pretty much zero. “Bandwidth is cheap,” he says. “You set it going in the evening and come back in the morning to see how it’s gone.”
So what beats them? Sounds like captchas (those distorted images requiring a human to type a letter)
So what does put a link spammer off? It’s those trusty friends, captchas – test humans are meant to be able to do but computers can’t, like reading distorted images of letters.
There’s several WP plug-ins that will do them; I haven’t tried it yet. But I will soon.
There’s something of a backlash against the NoFollow initiative setup by Google.
Mark Pilgrim paints a sobering picture of the power and tenacity of spammers.
Which sounds better, or more like something you’d say? “I googled it” or “I A9 dot commed it” ? Have you actually used A9.com, anyway? (I have. Once. Yesterday. After I read that story.)
ABC Radio blog feature (Real or Windows media).
Pregnant women probably shouldn’t listen to part two.
As everyone knows, the web is the best place for finding and viewing high quality pornography in the comfort of your own home. Or internet cafe.
Pornzilla is a collection of tools for surfing porn with Firefox. These bookmarklets and extensions make it easier to find and view porn, letting you spend more time looking at smut you like.
I love the tools including the one that allows you to “… find galleries similar to one you have open without using the keyboard”
They need funding:
“Since nobody has contributed to our testing budget, these tools have only been tested with free porn sites.”
Is it good that they’re being kept off the streets? Perhaps you’d like to give the authors jobs?
I love what CSS can do, the power it gives you to make a pretty page and the power to change that without changing the underlying page. Zen Garden changed my understanding of what could be done.
Then, I saw this CSS horror, and I truly understood the power.