If you use AOL Instant Messenger, stop now. Uninstall it, and never use that crap again. AOL recently made changes to the Terms of Service for AIM, including this quote among others:
You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.
Read: Steve Rubel
Off and on for a while now, there have been rumblings that there are not enough women bloggers out there. For the most part, I think that the “problem” of not enough women blogging is just a figment of the imagination of women’s activists. If we really want equality, we need to stop singling out the women in every situation, and blogging is no different.
So basically, I have become tired of the argument, and have generally ignored posts about the topic lately. But this post from Rory Blyth is one I just couldn’t ignore:
It isn’t so much that there aren’t a lot of women blogging (there are), but that there aren’t many female tech bloggers…Before anybody goes and tries to come up with a solution to the “problem” of too few female tech bloggers, determine first if it is a problem. I’m not saying that it isn’t, but it’s foolish to assume without weighing differences between the sexes that it is.
Well said.
The weather here in Edmonton has been quite nice lately, except for the wind. In some places though, there is still lots of snow! Such as Inuvik, where I used to live. If you haven’t already, check out Martin’s new post on Inuvik in March, and be sure to look at the gallery. Some really neat pictures!
On Wednesday, I posted about the new Google News customization capabilities. I was obviously very excited in my post, and I didn’t really take the time to think about the new features. Perhaps it was because the product-that-will-always-be-beta finally changed in some way. In any case, I have been doing some reading (as I often do) about it, and came across two really great posts that sum up the drawbacks and/or flaws of the service.
The first is from Jeremy Zawodny at Yahoo:
But I use a few browsers and several computers. Without any sort of login or registration system, though, I have to make the same customizations on each of those machines and on each browser. What the heck? Isn’t that like having a version of My Yahoo! that just forgets your settings every time you use a new computer? That would really suck.
Very good point, I didn’t even realize this at first! Thinking about it though, Jeremy is right. I would love to be able to have the same Google News page on my desktop and on my tablet. The second post is from Steve Rubel:
Google News introduced a new feature today that enables the user to put customized searches right on the home page. That’s all well and good, but where are the RSS or Atom news search feeds?
Also good point. This is, in my opinion, the biggest area Google is behind. MSN Search, IceRocket, and many others all offer RSS feeds of their searches, so why not Google?!
I was lucky enough to attend this morning’s draw (number 15 for those of you keeping count) at the Tim Hortons Brier. My grandpa had another ticket, so he invited me to go, and of course I said sure!
It was pretty cool actually, and I was surprised at how busy the place was. The news stories about record setting attendance all come clear when you’re sitting inside Rexall Place. We saw the BC vs Quebec game that Quebec won, essentially giving three other teams another chance. Good games too, lots of amazing shots.
Alberta’s Randy Ferbey has now locked up first place, you can read all about it. The finals go down this weekend on CBC!
Looks like I forgot to get the license for the treeview control we use for Episode Notes at BlogosphereRadio.com. As a result, it now displays a friendly expiration notice. I had installed the evaluation version, and I must say, I absolutely love the control! I will definitely pick up a license, and if you’re looking for such a control, I highly recommend ASP TreeView (works with both ASP and .NET)!
Quick – what’s the best way to bridge the digital divide between rich nations and poor nations? Nope, not computers. Nope, not Internet either. The answer, is mobile phones, according to The Economist:
A new paper finds that mobile phones raise long-term growth rates, that their impact is twice as big in developing nations as in developed ones, and that an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country increases GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points (see article).
The digital divide that really matters, then, is between those with access to a mobile network and those without. The good news is that the gap is closing fast. The UN has set a goal of 50% access by 2015, but a new report from the World Bank notes that 77% of the world’s population already lives within range of a mobile network.
I think its really quite scary how widespread mobile phones have become. I can’t think of any other technology that is so available in areas of very low income. On the other hand, if mobile phone networks are making a difference, having an impact, then I guess that’s nothing but good news!
Read: Economist.com
Just finished reading “Click Fraud: Problem and Paranoia” on Wired, about a panel on click fraud, and I was disturbed enough by the article’s conclusion to write about it. First of all, what is click fraud?
Click fraud — the skewing of pay-per-click advertising data with illegitimate hits — can be accomplished in a number of ways, ranging from manually clicking on the same ad link repeatedly to deploying automated bots. Whatever the method, the results are the same: Merchants pay for traffic from someone who has no intention of purchasing anything. Return on investment: bupkis.
In the last few years, pay-per-click advertising has become big business thanks to Google and Yahoo. As a result, there are a lot of people up in arms about the problem, enough to hold this panel. If you read the article, you’ll find that many merchants are afraid to confront Google and Yahoo and others about the problem, because they do not want to risk having their website blacklisted in the engines and thus, rendered basically non-existent.
So if merchants aren’t going to confront the network operators about it, what can be done? Well, you could get even. However, I wouldn’t call that a solution. Nor is the idea “bandied about at the conference” a solution either:
Contest the charges on your credit card as fraudulent. If enough merchants did it, they could enlist powerful allies: American Express, Visa and MasterCard, who would likely pressure the other search engines to do something about it.
Really? Do you really think that’s a great idea? Somehow the idea of solving your problem by creating a problem for someone else doesn’t seem like a wise solution. And who’s to say that the credit card companies would refund the charges? They aren’t stupid, they’d catch on.
Seems to me the panel was largely a waste of time. Everyone got together to discuss their sob stories, but no real solutions were discussed. Maybe the first question that needs to be asked is, “can we solve this at all?”
I look at Longhorn, and I just get excited. I think wow, I cannot wait to have this stuff working in my hands. I took Alex’s advice, and watched J Allard’s keynote from GDC and I now have the same feeling about Xenon, or the next Xbox. Check out the video, and also check out this list of specs from Mr. Awesome.
I have always said that Xbox Live is a much smarter approach than Sony’s with the PlayStation. I now feel that more strongly than ever. Unless PS3 has something equally amazing, its over for Sony. Goodbye, thanks for coming out. Microsoft will rule the console just as they rule the desktop.
Ah this is just wicked! They still haven’t figured out a way to make money, and so the page is still in beta, but Google has added the ability to customize their news page. You can re-order the sections on the page, set the number of headlines for each, add and remove sections, and – best of all – you can create your own customized sections!
MasterMaq's Blog 