Aehso’s Output

While moving this site to a new hosting provider this evening I added the reCAPTCHA Wordpress plugin to help control comment spam. reCAPTCHA’s tagline “Digitizing Books One Word at a Time” sums it up nicely.

The word images contain two words - one from a scan of old text that couldn’t be identified via OCR, the other is a verification word. If you match the verification word then we both know you are human and

1. they use your other word to translate the word that couldn’t be OCR’ed.
2. your comment gets added to my post

Nice!

I completely agree with Brad and Fred - Alex Iskold’s The Structured Web and Facebook: What If More Is Less? contain some great concise analysis of the how the web and the networks within it are evolving.

Well worth a read if you’re looking for some food for thought and can spare 10 minutes….

First the Eircom router wifi security fiasco and now a Monster fiasco is brewing. Wonderful stuff, watching the Irish blogosphere (or rather James, Tom, Michele and Damien) in action.

I wonder what the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s view on this one is - do they ever make public statements on cases like this?  Matt Cooper had some gob from Eircom on The Last Word this evening, trying to explain away their mess, it’d be great if someone from Monster.ie (the culprit himself perhaps?) would go on air tomorrow evening…

ValleyWag kick up a storm, Om is sorry, Mike Arrington is unapologetic. With so much spin in play it’s hard to figure out what even happened.

Jeff Jarvis has a very insightful write up. It also outlines how Federated Media previously approached him to help get Cisco’s name onto a Wikipedia article on their ‘human network‘ slogan. Interesting tactics. (Update: it gets worse for FM and they respond)

Jeff has always had a pretty open and comprehensive about page (for as long as I’ve been reading) but in the blogosphere nobody can hear you cheat until you are caught. A look at Federated Media’s author list is also worth a quick scan. Damn, I read a lot of feeds from that gang!

It all smells, doesn’t it? I’m expecting a mega-iPhoneGate in 3-6 months time (I was hoping not to mention that thing before next week but alas). I mean, c’mon, all that hype, for free? Hilarious!

Update 2: Mark Pilgrim has a fantastic translation of a rather ill-advised comment by a FM VP on the original Valleywag piece.

It is odd isn’t it. Google have one of the best online feed readers on the market but it has absolutely no search capability. Zero, nada, no way to keyword search through the entire history of the feeds that I subscribe to. That is just plain wrong for a Google product. Every time I try find an old post I end up switching to the Google Blog Search but that does not restrict result to feeds I have subscribed to with Google Reader.

What a mess. But apparently Google realise that it is a mess. Poor Microsoft, trying to bully their way into search, are making a bigger and far more extensive mess.

Google have just lost a landmark trademark case in the appeals court in France - LVMH (Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) claimed Google were unfairly selling their trademarks to 3rd parties (including counterfieters) via AdWords:

Vuitton’s efforts are aimed at making the search engine more of an advertising/marketing service for the merchant than a research service for the customer. The Web’s roots suggest it’s intended to be more of a populist tool.

This is a pretty far reaching verdict, even if it was in a French court. What happens to search result quality if Google cannot sell trademarked keywords to third parties? And how many words does that leave? Given AdWords contributes most to Google’s overall revenue I’d be nervous if I held Google stock now.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one pans out. Can/will the big brand owners follow suit in the US courts? How can Google accomodate this ruling given the vast sets of trademarked words in different jurisdictions?

My blog seems to have made it onto a spambot list so it’s time to install a captcha on the comments page I think.

Anyone out there with quick recommendations for any of the various Wordpress captcha/spam tool plugins?

Yet another cool Firefox extension, Performancing for Firefox adds a split-screen HTML editor that can be configured to post to your blog(s) via XMLRPC. Just like I’m doing now. Sweet.

I’m going to have to come up with a decent Firefox extension, all the cool kids are writing them these days…

Via Dave Winer, a sensible commentary on podcasting by the people by Greg Linsay.

Winer obviously disagrees though - the “Columnist Greg Lindsay trashes podcasting by the people” headline kinda gives that away! The article doesn’t ‘trash’ podcasting by the people - it just states that there won’t be much money to be made out of the practice. I didn’t notice any comment by Linsay on the quality of these podcasts. He is just highlighting that the corporate world is awake to blogging and podcasting and are already adapting to the new channels faster than with any previous channel, and they are already grabbing eyeballs.

In fact, the ‘rebuttal’ article subsequently referenced by Winer only re-enforces this assertion! I’m not sure what point Winer wanted it to make, but the assertion that corporate blogging will be the death of traditional journalism is nonsense. If Winer’s main beef is with advertising then he has got his blinkers on. Many ‘independent’ blogs and podcasts advertise products either directly or indirectly and lets not forget the recent ‘expirements’ with advertisments in RSS feeds.

For those of you considering quitting the day job to earn your crust blogging-non-stop Jason Calacanis, founder of WebLog’s Inc (a commercial venture that publishes many trade/vertical blogs) are projecting that they may collect collect over $1 million in revenue from Google AdSense click-thru’s this year.

That sounds like an interesting achievement until you consider they have “103 bloggers on the [sic]payrole and nine staffers here at WebLogs Inc”. To be fair, it’s not their only source of income, but still, $1m for a whole year for producing and publishing all that content? And they are one of the best known “blogging companies” in the world?

I like some parts of their philosophy but a statement like “traditional journalism is imploding” can only coming from someone who believe their own poo smells of roses. (Hey if you’re trying to sell yourself to one of the big media networks, you’ve got to hype the product up right?)

Traditional journalism will not implode - there is no substitute for a professional journalists analytical, filtering and writing skills to distil multiple sources of information into a concise and accurate story. (Most blogs I regularly read are written by folks who are good writers - unlike me

Traditional media channels on the other hand are a different story. Media companies will evolve to use new channels to get their content (and advertiser’s messages) to their customers - a retrospective comparison of the WWW of 1993 with the WWW today shows just how good big business is at catching up.

I think I’ll stick with my real job for the moment, and just do this for the fun of it…

(Oh, by ‘flogging’ I mean “to publicize aggressively” not “to beat severely with a whip or rod.”)