Slashdot Mirror

There may be valid concerns, of course: people should know who has access to the information, whether real names are being used with those gmail accounts, what, if, any filtering is being done, etc. But you haven't been forthcoming with who you actually are in relationship to these multiple organizations: are you a school board member, a concerned community leader, or...?

Speaking of paranoia, this sounds just a little like astroturfing by someone else, to get people to brainstorm negative things. Are you a person who's trying to sell competing services, like discrete servers and software?

I do see someone using that same "hyperorbiter" username in New Zealand, a Stu McGregor, associated with http://www.definitive.co.nz/, which is "is a support company for Mac/Linux oriented schools and businesses. We offer comprehensive support at competitive rates and we are committed to your interests being met."

Coincidence, or?

History proofs you wrong. this article too. http://technorati.com/technology/it/article/hackers-use-google-published-exploit-to/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/28/facebook-loses-users-biggest-markets
http://www.geek.com/news/millions-are-leaving-facebook-every-month-due-to-boredom-1553510/
http://technorati.com/social-media/article/facebook-deserted-by-millions-of-users/

Summary, their oldest markets, i.e. US/Canada/Europe have reached "peak Facebook", and numbers are going down in those older markets. E.g. in the Technorati article...

> Data released by analytics firm SocialBakers suggests that people are
> leaving Facebook in their millions.
>
> It reveals that the social network has shed 6 million US visitors in the
> last month, which represents a 4% fall. The UK fares no better having
> lost 1.4 million users last month, a drop of 4.5%.

> Worryingly for Facebook this is far from a blip. In the last six months the site
> has lost 9 million users in America and 2 million in the UK. There's a similar
> picture across the developed world, with usage falling in Canada, Spain,
> France, Germany and Japan.

Yes, the numbers of well-off North Americans and Europeans leaving will be more than offset by the influx of third-worlders. But that guy or gal in the call centre in Mumbai, or the peasant in Asia, is not worth as much to advertisers as the westerners that they replace.

He's short, bald, really kind of a douche, and is determined to run Microsoft into oblivion.

http://scm-l3.technorati.com/11/01/31/25951/steve-ballmer.jpg

Many of the researchers making such claims have been funded by BP. There is evidence that the well has still not stopped leaking completely. The fishing and seafood business in the Gulf is devastated and may never recover. http://technorati.com/entertainment/film/article/the-big-fix-film-gulf-oil/

.
No wonder Microsoft is on a downward spiral....

That would only result in Apple going elsewhere

They already tried. It didn't go well.

It also seems like Apple relies on Samsung for the iPhone 5 processor, too. Maybe Samsung is the only manufacturer with the right set of tools for building them?

1,000 seems very low.

I bet I could compile 1000 swear words. After all the Pakis managed it, though they did resort to including every word that is sacred in non-Muslim religions.

If you live in America, you don't need GM foods for that...although you may have to mix it yourself.

How about realizing that it's a money grab.

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210649/Kinect-s-BOM-roughly--56--teardown-finds-

Are you serious? You really think the entire cost of a device comes down to the sum of its parts? No costs involved in packaging, manufacturing, shipping, marketing, R&D, software development, profit, etc...? The iphone 4S is estimated at having a BOM totaling $188, but anyone with a shred of intelligence knows that there's much more to developing such a thing than simply buying those parts.

http://technorati.com/sports/article/fifa-to-censor-match-action-shown/

I think he may have been referring to the ridiculously frequency that campaigning politicians use songs by Bruce Springsteen, John Mellancamp, etc, without getting the permission of the artist to use it.

The most recent case I can think of off the top of my head was back in June, Michele Bachmann was using Tom's Petty's "American Girl" without Tom's permission (Link.)

PS how many people watch netflix? It's not even available in the EU

First: The United States is relevant because the Linux Foundation, mentioned in the article, is headquartered in the United States. Second: Yet. Third: By "Netflix" I meant "Netflix and foreign counterparts", and LoveFilm operates in several countries where Netflix does not.

How many users need 16 bit CMYK press print in their camera snaps (especially since most camera users will use the 8bit RGB Jpeg format)? None.

Professionals do.

Who HAS to create flash apps? Nobody.

What's the alternative to Flash for creating a vector animation?

TurboTax doesn't do the tax returns for 99% of the world's taxpayers.

First: The United States is relevant because the Linux Foundation, mentioned in the article, is headquartered in the United States. Second: By "TurboTax" I meant "software like TurboTax, such as its closest competitor H&R Block At Home, or foreign counterparts".

I've NEVER heard of Stone Edge.

Neither did I until I ended up at my last job. Just because you don't know anybody who runs a particular package doesn't mean nobody runs it.

Sonic 3 is run by, oh, nobody.

Then what well-known platform game is played by a lot of people? I bet a lot more people play Sonic 3 than SuperTux.

Diablo II is niche.

All individual video games are niche, just as all individual books are niche. But again, this is a sample, not an exhaustive list. The odds are greater that you'll find a game you like if you start with Windows than if you start with desktop Linux, especially when online multiplayer requires all players to have the same title.

Netflix: DVD

DVD watching software does not come with Linux because of U.S. patents and U.S. anticircumvention restrictions. VLC is technically illegal in the United States. The United States is relevant because the Linux Foundation, mentioned in the article, is headquartered in the United States.

Photoshop: GIMP

GIMP does not have 100 percent of the features of Photoshop. Professionals who rely on those features cannot rely on GIMP.

TurboTax: Online banking , GNUCash, etc

Those are counterparts to Quicken, not TurboTax. TurboTax has specific programming for a country's most recent income tax laws and for those of its political subdivisions.

StoneEdge: SCO's POS suite

Don't you remember the SCO $699 scam? That was a P.O.S.

All your Games: Games on Linux

Which popular video games, other than first-person shooters rated M for Mature (or foreign counterparts), are ported to Linux?

In fact budget cuts are a very potent motivator for public sector bodies to get more productivity out of the same resources, and that shows.

You didn't look up baseline spending. The DMV doesn't get budget cuts. During this economic downturn everyone is tighting their belts, except the government which has spent 33% more than it did just a decade ago.

I'll figure out the lose vs. loose and you figure out economics 101. If you can't figure out why the public sector bodies improve I think you have a little more analysis to do. I'll help you out here: the only reason the DMV improved is because of legislative action, not a sudden interest in customer service. There were angry voters at the gates with torches and legislators put their nose to the grindstone. Not the DMV. And so what if DMV has improved their service - it still sucks when compared to a private company. The whole "service" the DMV provides is nothing but a cash cow for state government, a non-service, so their goal is to take your money and give you a card, pretty simple, and for this it takes 20 minutes of waiting in line because they didn't have enough wits to open more windows. Or maybe the problem is that they can't afford to hire anymore civil servants because they get paid at a base rate almost 2x what their private sector counterparts get paid, once again proving that the government is inefficient and couldn't care less where your money goes.

The more you analyze this the more obvious it will become to you that the government can't be as efficient as a private company because they are the government. Do you think a private company needs permission from the shareholders to fire a worthless employee? (no) Have you ever heard of how difficult it is to fire a tenured teacher at a public school? School systems usually just put bad teachers on permanent paid leave of absence rather than try to fire them - some even just let them continue to teach. Does that sound like good customer service? I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

It does not matter if you can show that nothing short of an EMP will interfere with or disable one model of plane, or even a dozen models. The simple and quite honestly undeniable fact that some common electronic devices might interfere with the navigational systems of some planes means that not only are the airlines completely justified in restricting passenger use of said devices (it's their private aircraft, they can restrict you whichever way they want - you really don't have any say other than refusing to fly by that airline) but people who think they are justified in protesting those restrictions on the plane are putting all the other passengers in danger. All you need is one corner-case of random phone and random plane and a couple hundred people die in a plane crash. Until a full and complete list of safe use cases can be established by testing and possibly retrofitting, the risk inherent in using any wireless device on any is unacceptable.

For what it's worth, I've been on several flights that support in-flight wifi access (paid of course). This would suggest that there has been some (hopefully) rigorous testing with certain types of signals and planes. Unfortunately, the task of testing *every* device with *every* plane (you can't necessarily even just rely on testing a certain model - faulty or damaged interference shielding in older planes could present a danger that varies between individual planes of the same model) is virtually impossible. Passengers really need to just accept that there will be a somewhat limited list of acceptable devices on a somewhat limited number of planes. Violating those rules is reckless and frankly quite self-important. As much as you think the airline employee telling you to shut off your phone is an idiot, they are being told to say that by people that are very likely much smarter and have much more information than you.

The problem with you arguing that it is a tax, and is thus allowed under the Constitution, is that the president insisted at first that it was not a tax (See http://technorati.com/politics/article/health-care-mandate-thats-not-a/ [Unfortunately, it's a two-pager article].):

Let's go back to last September [2009], shall we? In an ABC News interview, George Stephanopoulos very pointedly asked the president how forcing Americans to purchase a particular service and imposing penalties if they don't is not a tax. To Obama's credit, he did a bang up job trying to get around the question, even going as far as accusing Stephanopoulos of "making up" language that brands the health care mandate as a tax, even after the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of "tax" was provided to him. The president fired back by stating, "My critics say everything is a tax increase," and when once again asked if he rejected the notion that the mandate was a tax increase, he said, "I absolutely reject that notion."

On the next page, the article notes that it wasn't until legal challenges were filed against the bill, stating the mandate was unconstitutional, that the administration said it was a tax:

Robert Pear, in a July 16 New York Times article, reported that the DOJ "says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is 'a valid exercise' of Congress’s power to impose taxes." Essentially, this whole fiasco, that wasn't tax, is now a tax because the Commerce Clause in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, says it is...even though it wasn't a tax...but it is...until it isn't again. The DOJ also contends that because the IRS will be collecting any penalties and that they will be required to be reported "as an addition to income tax liability," this also makes it a tax, and therefore "no one can challenge it in court before paying it and seeking a refund." This is where it almost seems like the administration is simply trying to play a game of "Gotcha" when it comes to the debate of "tax or not a tax."

Danger, Will Robinson! The president's either lied to the public or clueless when it comes to the English language. I could assume incompetence over malice, but since everyone says he's a great public speaker, I'm inclined to go with the malice explanation.

In case you missed it, a press conference was held on Sept 27 to focus media attention on decades of UFO interference with U.S. military nuclear weapons installations. UFO researcher Robert Hastings and former U.S. Air Force Captain Robert Salas organized the conference, which included presentations made by seven former USAF personnel. Roughly two dozen media representatives attended the press conference, which CNN streamed live. Read more: http://technorati.com/technology/article/redefining-consensus-reality-american-medias-coverage/#ixzz13hP4lX00

and paid microsoft a royalty.

http://technorati.com/technology/android/article/htc-to-pay-microsoft-royalties-on/

i have a htc hero. nice phone. but i'm not going to buy a htc if they are paying ms. just rubs me up the wrong way. not buying a motorola because of the efuse nonsense. google aren't staying in the market selling nexus either. so that leaves much smaller selection.

The car in front is still a Toyota

I hope the car behind isn't.

Here you go. Only $95!!! http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-Toshiba-Laptop-T4800CT-500-plus-Windows-3-1_W0QQitemZ190310608796QQ

And here's a lovely 266 megahertz netbook from China. Wow. Even my ancient Win95 laptop has more power - http://technorati.com/posts/xzY7CIHTC7dj1WdoEZan8RTDqpS1hKUfgiQOE8zmLOA=

Google can't solve this problem because their business model requires web spam.

Google is in the advertising business, not the search business. Search is a traffic builder for the ads. Google's customers are their advertisers, not their search users. They have to maximize ad revenue. The problem is that more than a third of Google's advertisers are web spammers, broadly defined. All those "landing pages", typosquatters, spam blogs, and similar junk full of Google ads are revenue generators for Google. Every time someone clicks on an AdWords ad, Google makes money, no matter what slimeball is running the ad. Google can't crack down too hard, or their revenue will drop substantially. Google does have some standards, but they're low.

Google went over to the dark side around 2006. In 2004 and 2005, Google sponsored the Web Spam Summit, devoted to killing off web spammers. From 2006, Google sponsored the Search Engine Strategies conference, where the "search engine optimization" people meet. That was a big switch in direction, and a sad one.

As we demonstrate with SiteTruth, it's not that hard to get rid of most web spam if you're willing to be a hardass about requiring a legit business behind each commercial web site. Google can't afford to do that. It would hurt their bottom line.

However, cleaning up web search results with browser plug-ins is a viable option. Stay tuned.

No, that was Sony.

Now, are their conservative blow hards on Fox? YES! But, their are also Liberal blow hards on all the major news chanels including Fox.

Which one of the other major news channels coordinates their daily talking points from the party and campaign leadership? Fox does that. Here, here, and the documentary OutFoxed goes into the relationship in a lot more detail. Scott McClellan confirmed the White House coordinated their talking points with Fox. OutFoxed has a lot more detail that substantiates the relationship was much deeper.

That's not a news media, that's a political tool. Everyone manipulates the media...or tries to...but which media outlets are coordinating talking point memos from campaign sources? Name one and be sure and provide the links that back it up (even if they're partisan). Not just the usual emesis about mainstream media.

You may have done PLENTY of studying of Islam, but you know nothing of it except what you want to see, a religion which dictates war and hate. See, you have a serious problem, you're reading the Koran, and you're taking it literally, unlike the majority of Muslims, who just want to live a simple life of peace. This still makes you an uneducated moron. Go LIVE in a Muslim country, then come back to us and let us know what you experience. And when I say go live in a Muslim country, I mean really live there. Not visit some tourist town.

I wish it weren't so. I wish your relatives the best, I really do. But there's a long road ahead and they are, sadly, VERY much in the minority concerning their interpretation of the Muslim faith.

And who the FUCK do you think you are telling people that they are a minority in their views? Excuse me, but the majority of Muslims are moderate and don't actually follow the book word for word. They are in the majority. They've gotten over the fundamentalist bullshit. You haven't. You really need to get a life. Yes, there are suicide bombings. Those are from minority fundamentalist factions. Guess what Einstein, if you play the news of a minority faction over and over again, people will believe that they are part of the majority.

In all seriousness, though... "worrying" that your religion is "hijacked", and actually standing up en masse and saying so, are two different things. And by and large, Muslims seem just fine letting people "hijack" their religion all day long.

So if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to listen, does it make a sound? Just because you're ONLY hearing about the bad, doesn't mean that nobody is actually speaking up. Take 9/11 for example. While asshats like yourself were busy whining about there not being a response, there actually was.

So why don't we ever hear about these things? Because sex, violence, and hate sells. Why should they focus their reports on people who preach peace when they can focus on those that preach violence? Get this in your fucking skull. If you were to read slashdot, and NOTHING but slashdot, you would believe that all computer users were smart and only used Linux, hated the RIAA, and knew everything there was to know about technology.

If you ONLY hear about suicide bombers, you'll believe that they are the only ones that exist.

I've visited Muslim countries on three different occasions, living with the locals, and I've felt nothing but warmth and kindness. There were no death threats, no "death to america" chants, and certainly no mistreatment of women in everyday life. It existed, and I talked to the locals about the problems and they all agreed that things are slowly changing for the better.

Islamic countries have a long way to go, and rather than focusing on specific verses that preached violence, why don't you focus on the big picture? Why don't you put as much time and energy looking for some signs of progress?

No, that's not enough, but over time things will change for the better, and blithering idiots like yourself will still be around spewing out propaganda bullshit that would make Karl Rove blush.

http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DXIenDGSAdPA?reactions

Needless to say obama finds himself the sole arbiter of truth, and clearly states that doubting the truth of his (absurd) campaign promises will result in civil AND criminal penalties. Obama, NOT anyone else, created "Obama truth squads" and threatened "legal" violence.

Stalin couldn't do it any better.

So please don't continue "raining on my parade", without having actually checked what the events are.

That had this: Veteran of the Psychic Wars - Blue Oyster Cult http://technorati.com/videos/youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dnrd2xf5DIlU run through their head when they read the headline?

Really? Personally, I find that kinda hard to believe, ya know?

What's next, using MySpace and LinkedIn to promote political campaigns?

> but to think that many ordinary Americans are writing their own blogs... nope. I don't buy it

It is true, many many ordinary people around the world have a personal blog. This was an online survey, so the article is a little misleading: it is actually the 80% of internet users that "know what a blog is".

  The numbers of bloggers are definetely high though: According to www.technorati.com there are more than 100 million blogs around the world. Even if many of them are dead, we are talking tens of millions active blogs -there is no question about it- and a large percentage of them has to be from US.

The future of social networking isn't about telling everyone what you had for dinner, well, not in the Twitter way anyway, it's about deriving content from the experience, in other words, writing a review of the restaurant you visited and making it available for syndication, more like Technorati but with attribution and maybe even reward, or indeed what the original idea of the world wide web was, at a deeper level - where the link was the basic principle of Sir Tim's version of the Web, it becomes the article, or indeed the video, the song or the slideshow. Hmm, I sense another website coming on...

Having read the briefs available at
  http://uncrooked.pbwiki.com/
here's a non-lawyer's opinion.

First, many of the demands are ridiculous, such as lengthy apologies for changing small bits of articles almost no one seems to have read (until Mr. Crookes himself drew attention to them), and demanding that google return nothing when "gang of Crookes" is entered in a search engine. This despite the fact that major newspapers carried the story and used that phrase. So evidently THEY do not believe that using it to refer to Mr. Crookes' political allies is defamatory.

Second, this is certainly SLAPP as understood in the US, so the first thing google and yahoo should do is apply for a change of venue and countersue (for triple damages). It's not the defendant's ability to pay lawyers that defines a SLAPP so much as the suit being "against public participation", that is, political statements, by the individuals. Every statement listed in the suits regards Crookes' behaviour in the party not in his business.

Another factor that makes a SLAPP "strategic" is usually the timing. Elizabeth May, whose faction in the Green Party opposed the David Chernushenko faction Crookes supported strongly, had just announced a major deal with the Liberal Party of Canada. The suits were filed interestingly just after, distracting attention and reducing ability of May allies to support her in that controversial move. You can read more about this in blog posts:
    http://technorati.com/tag/Wayne+Crookes

Third, the defendants are in fact mostly individuals. Have a look at this, which lists all the defendants (in an awesome logo!):
  http://p2pnet.net/story/12037

They're mostly individuals. The companies seem to have been targetted to gain more information and incriminating information against the individuals.

Fourth, the goal here seems not to get money so much as information useful to suppress dissent. This seems to be a classic attempt to leverage political information out of a corporation, the way Yahoo was coerced into providing data on dissidents in China. Canada is no better than China in this regard since it allows people to be sued for "libel" despite the statements being both political and true.

What's more, the individuals all have a track record of being involved in actual political debates, many as candidates for the Green Party of Canada itself. This is clearly a politically-motivated suit by Mr. Crookes and his "gang". The Green Party of Canada under his mentorship or influence (while Dermod Travis was there) filed two similar politically-motivated suits against Gretchen Schwarz and Matthew Pollesel, which were dropped as soon as the 2006 election was over.

This certainly would be considered a SLAPP suit in the US. In California, it would expose Mr. Crookes and his "gang of Crookes" to triple damages in a countersuit. After all, he's called very large publicly traded companies "reckless" and unconcerned about enabling harassment (i.e. spreading truth).

Given that people use search engines precisely to get true information, and given that yahoo for instance would be placed in an impossible position if it had to obey demands from foreign courts for information that exposes it to lawsuits under the US Alien Tort Claims Act, yahoo probably has no choice but to respond strongly to discourage this kind of nuisance lawsuit.

It's still relatively easy to find lots of links relevant to Wayne Crookes and the "gang of Crookes" controversy. Here's one account by Chris Tindal:
http://www.christindal.ca/2006/08/07/the-silliness -of-suing-a-wiki/

And here's the original account of the party internal events which may disappear anytime. Crookes is only directly mentioned in a small part of it but possibly because of his central financial role is implicitly understood by many people to be implicated in all of it:
http://openpolitics.ca/GPC+Council+Crisis

A lawyer named Rob Hyndman admits being chilled and deleting a comment he calls "very well argued, and passionately made, and in a world that made sense would in unedited form clearly be legitimate and necessary political commentary":
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/04/21/comment-edite d-because-of-libel-chill/

(if anyone can dig the original out of a cache and post it here outside of Canada that might be useful)

For those of you who still don't understand why BC libel is not US libel, here's what Dan Burnett, a lawyer now involved in the cases, says about it:
http://www.lawyersweekly.ca/index.php?section=arti cle&articleid=371&rssid=4

And here are a pile more links from blog aggregators. Find more using
http://technorati.com/search/Wayne+Crookes
http://technorati.com/search/gang+of+Crookes
and similar searches on digg, deli.cio.us and so on. Plus the WTF entries.

This seems to be a complete version of the original Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=99714811

Here's a copy of an Ottawa Citizen article proving that major party figures said Crookes "bought" the party and that it had "sold out" to him. Amusing:
http://www.egyptiangreens.com/docs/general/index.p hp?eh=newhit&subjectid=5135&subcategoryid=270&cate goryid=37

Other links on the relevant matters from the blogs include

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_politics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/online_journalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/radical_transparency

articles
http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Talk:Wayne_Crookes (really interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=85159885
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=99714811
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:BShgcqxTpzsJ: openpolitics.ca/Gang%2Bof%2BCrookes%3FPHPSESSID%3D b13d6821b09286ced373730fb33468a6+openpolitics.ca+g

It's still relatively easy to find lots of links relevant to Wayne Crookes and the "gang of Crookes" controversy. Here's one account by Chris Tindal:
http://www.christindal.ca/2006/08/07/the-silliness -of-suing-a-wiki/

And here's the original account of the party internal events which may disappear anytime. Crookes is only directly mentioned in a small part of it but possibly because of his central financial role is implicitly understood by many people to be implicated in all of it:
http://openpolitics.ca/GPC+Council+Crisis

A lawyer named Rob Hyndman admits being chilled and deleting a comment he calls "very well argued, and passionately made, and in a world that made sense would in unedited form clearly be legitimate and necessary political commentary":
http://www.robhyndman.com/2007/04/21/comment-edite d-because-of-libel-chill/

(if anyone can dig the original out of a cache and post it here outside of Canada that might be useful)

For those of you who still don't understand why BC libel is not US libel, here's what Dan Burnett, a lawyer now involved in the cases, says about it:
http://www.lawyersweekly.ca/index.php?section=arti cle&articleid=371&rssid=4

And here are a pile more links from blog aggregators. Find more using
http://technorati.com/search/Wayne+Crookes
http://technorati.com/search/gang+of+Crookes
and similar searches on digg, deli.cio.us and so on. Plus the WTF entries.

This seems to be a complete version of the original Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=99714811

Here's a copy of an Ottawa Citizen article proving that major party figures said Crookes "bought" the party and that it had "sold out" to him. Amusing:
http://www.egyptiangreens.com/docs/general/index.p hp?eh=newhit&subjectid=5135&subcategoryid=270&cate goryid=37

Other links on the relevant matters from the blogs include

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_politics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/online_journalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/radical_transparency

articles
http://medlibrary.org/medwiki/Talk:Wayne_Crookes (really interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=85159885
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wayne_Cr ookes&oldid=99714811
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:BShgcqxTpzsJ: openpolitics.ca/Gang%2Bof%2BCrookes%3FPHPSESSID%3D b13d6821b09286ced373730fb33468a6+openpolitics.ca+g

"...all I do in a day is go to work then come home, smoke up, and read shit on the internet so I don't think many people would want to read about that..."

You, Sir, have missed the point. Blogs aren't about writing new and interesting ideas, they're about linking to and excerpting from other blogs, thereby getting a higher ranking at Technorati.

That, or posting pictures of your cat.

Actually these ads are illegal in the city of Boston. A company can't just put up bills on public buildings or structures with no permit.

You might think its no big deal, but to many Bostonians it is a very big deal and something we're mad as hell about.

Many of those are NOT search engines at all (at most sites with a search feature) and many fairly well known, useful and actual search engines are ignored - where is technorati? where is boardtracker? blogpulse? sphere?

At least the 'author' could have done 5 mins research to find something actually relating to the title..

We are slowly working towards that, but we are not at the point where this can be done both fast and well. Unless you have FBI/NSA/CIA/government resources, of course.

"Perhaps it's time to move past the blog hype and to consider some method for differentiating personal diaries"

This is one of the primary reasons we made MinistryHome.org. In a nutshell, it's like mySpace for anti-narcissists. The point of joining the social network is to promote your ministry to other people and to explore what other people are doing to make the world a better place.

We specifically split profiles into personal vs. ministry so as to allow people to filter which content they want.

I'm not sure if niche sites like this will do enough to relieve your angst, though... perhaps something can be done through the likes of peopleaggregator or technorati. Maybe RSS/Atom could include a uniform "content topic" attribute.

In IBM's defense, it's not a format they've made up. hCalendar's primary author is from Technorati.

The VERY relevant site that Jack Herrington forgot to mention there is Pingerati. That is THE site through which all these Microformats are shared. The system is based on pings, much like the rest of the blogosphere. Both Pingerati and Microformats have a major force behind it - Technorati.

Look at technorati for example and look at the effect (or lack of) on technorati traffic when google launched their own blogsearch.. nothing at all.. it failed to make an impression despite technorati having growing pains of its own that probably annoy many users and send them elsewhere. Google tries to apply the same methods used on their main search system to the blog search and its not really working partly because its more about people than data.

Blog search is fairly saturated already and most of the big search players have a blog search of some kind and 'independants' are still popping up daily but what about board/forum search? None of the majors do it at all!

Boards are not seen as quite so trendy as blogs and so have been mostly overlooked despite them being hugely popular and showing no signs of stagnating.. the board world is still growing fast and the only real board search engine to date is boardtracker which has many of the features that google and the rest of GYMA lack including..

Persistant search.. they all offer alerts but what use are these when they are alerting on content they just found which was created years ago? Only the specialist search engines like boardtracker offer real persistant search at the moment.

Categorized searching (helps with the problem someone mentioned above when searching for 'horn' since you can restrict search to the 'music' category or whatever you want) - again boardtracker has an effective implementation of this and a few others may also but where is Google?

Searchable rss feeds.. rss is good and google does have it on their blogsearch but what about the main search? Its very widely used these days and not having it is like having a three wheeled car.. it will still go, but corners are tricky and you'll feel a prat driving around in one. ;)

Tagging systems with tag clouds etc and other 'social search' features. Yahoo leads the way with these through various aquisitions.. boardtracker offers tagging for boards, technorati for blogs.. but where is Google? They seem to prefer complex automated systems rather than letting the wisdom and power of the masses help out with organizing the worlds data.. its their loss.. yahoo knows it, the verticals know it. You can't really replace one with the other but they work well together, its smart to integrate both, its smart to enhance one with the other.

Google is certainly still the best and fastest general search engine around but they still have some learning to do and either they should get out there and do some smart aquisitions to fill the chinks in their armour or they should start building what the people want because the times they are a changing.

I don't think you can Slashdoteffect Crooks and Liars. It hosts video all day every day. It is one of the top 20 blogs on Technorati (as of now, #17).

I'm a little skeptical about blogging myself, and like you say, much/most of it isn't terribly original. However, I think that if there is some value to blogging, it probably comes from the selection and arrangement of the texts that bloggers choose.

I don't know what blogs you've been reading, but there are hundreds of original content blogs out there. I publish a weekly column at my blog about ADHD, Depression, etc. and how to deal with it - all original content. I scan dozens of original content blogs via RSS daily and I find more every week. None of them paste copy from elsewhere.

That's not to say that the regurgitators aren't out there. I just ignore them. Perhaps you've been following only tech blogs? They're notorious for being nothing more than PR, product announcement, and link hounds. Gets very boring after a while. When you venture out into niche topics you begin to encounter more original content, and I don't mean personal blogs where people contemplate their navel and discuss the fluff they pulled out of it this morning.

The trick is to find a blog with original content and then see who they link to. To streamline that use a site like http://technorati.com/ to search for specific topics. I just discovered artblogs this week. Some are better than others, but the ones that stand out are rewarding for me to read. Who knows what niche I'll discover next month. Blogging is exploding out away from the typical political and tech topics. It's rather exciting, IMO.

I agree that a lot of blogs aren't terribly original, but the one's that have value to me don't collage other people's content. I'd recommend digging deeper into blogs before dismissing them, and start by stepping away from the A-listers.

You're right : there is confusion and translation errors here.

China is not setting up a new TLD. They are just adding domains under the well known .cn domain, like .mil.cn for their military stuff. They also added domains like ".com.cn", but with chineese characters for the ".com" part. And they continue using the currend TLD servers, controlled by ICANN.

Thanks Technorati for helping me find more informed bloggers. Read it yourself:

• China's alt. root? Panic over confusion
• China's New Domain Names: Lost in Translation
• China's New Domain Names: Lost in Translation / comment

... it's the network of interlinking blogs (via trackback/pingback) that carry on an ongoing conversation that is the real power of the blogs. Along with RSS and Atom, which aside from just letting you read a bunch of blogs through a single interface also let sites like Technorati provide a nearly real-time search of the "live" internet, blogs and the related technologies that have sprung up around them are really creating a new paradigm of information sharing. Google lets you search the static web, but Technorati (and PubSub, and Google Blogsearch, and other RSS/Atom indexing/search engines) let you search through information as it happens, and follow the interlinking cross-blog conversations. That's incredibly powerful.

I actually just wrote a post on this subject on my blog a few hours ago... *cough*...

THE SINGULARITY

Throughout history, we championed the content creator. Only a tiny fraction of the population could write or understood math or science. Only a tiny fraction could dedicate themselves to the arts.

Most individuals' time was consumed by being agrarian generalists: they owned a farm, and they were constantly occupied by all the repairs and maintenance of their property. It wasn't a job, it was a way of life. But now, more and more, our economy makes us all incredible specialists. We're confined not only to a literal cubicle, but to a cubicle of tasks, often only seeing one tiny part of our contribution to social welfare. But as a result, we end up with leisure time. (Cf. Judge Skelly Wright's opinion in Javins v. First National Realty Corporation). While those reading /. while at work might quibble, the fact is that we all now have meaningful leisure time in some sense, we're not dedicated 100% to our livelihood.

In addition, current technology is allowing us to collaborate and share information as a global community like it never has before.

What does all this mean? For one, it means that techies can have bands, and even get national coverage, without giving up their day jobs. In fact, if MySpace is any evidence, anyone can have a band... and a lot of us already do. Also, given that 80,000 blogs are created each day (though 40,000 are probably also abandoned each day), huge throngs of people have something to say and are able to say it to huge, unrelated throngs of people.

The singularity is similar to the way other areas of economics have evolved. It used to be that 90% of the population made 100% of the food, and now only 10% of the population provides 100% of the food. It's the opposite for art and science (naturally, as we're freed from producing necessities, we can devote more time to producing luxuries, improving general quality of life, and solving more complex problems). Traditionally, 1% of the population made all the cultural content. The singularity? Soon, 99% of the population will be making 100% of the content.

For the first time in history, we are the captains not only of our personal destiny, but of our cultural destiny. However, as cultural creativity becomes so democratized, our contribution will become less and less controlling. Like Warhol said, it's not that we're all going to be famous, it's that we each only get 15 minutes.

THE DOWNSIDE OF A CULTURE OF CREATIVES, AND A SILVER LINING FOR SEARCH

A professor once said to me, "No one cares how much you know anymore, that's why we have the Internet. The important thing is creating new ideas." The formidible aspect of the new society of cultural creatives is that soon, no one will really need you to create ideas anymore either. Your drop in the cultural bucket is less and less meaningful every day. Content is easier and easier to make and share, and everyone wants to play, so as a corrolary, it will become harder and harder to find compensation as a cultural creative.

So what's the new valuable thing, in this storm of data/content? Maybe not making worthwhile contributions to the arts, science, knowledge, (which is important, but self sustaining). However, finding the worthwhile signal amidst all cultural noise is becoming more and more valuable. Someone needs to be a sieve for all the content being thrown around right now. Technologies of search and sort are the ways to do it. Google is not prospering because it learned something about advertising. Google is prospering because it precociously encapsulates the spirit of the dawning age, while most of us are still trying to figure out just what the hell I'm talking about.

Be careful with this UI concept: email demands immediate attention. More discussion, via technorati: http://technorati.com/search/%22river+of+news%22+e mail

Hotmail will be an AJAX based app when Microsoft releases Kahuna

Perhaps the worst violater of sending unsolicited SMS messages is the company SMS.ac out of San Diego, California.

They've got a track record of trcking users into giving up their passwords to AOL and Hotmail accounts and then using the addresses those accounts contain to send messages to your friends and family that appear to have been sent by the unsuspecting victim. In one case Joi Ito was compromised and when he pubilshed his troubles on his blog they threatened him with legal action!

A search on Technorati http://technorati.com/search/sms.ac%20complaints will reveal an astonishing number of people that have been victimized by this company.

If you haven't heard about this, you really should take a few minutes to check out the scam. The lure is free sms messages...they claim 5 per day, but what happens is shortly after you sign up you begin receiving "friend requests" not dozens, but four or five a day. This doesn't seem like much but if your premium sms charge is 0.50 and you get 5 per day times 30 days per month well...most people on /. can handle that math.

I signed up to do an investigation for my blog and discovered some support for the complaint that these "friend requests" are company originated. Over the course of 3 months I had probably at least half a dozen requests by different screen names with the same photos as well as multiple requests by the same screen name.

Now if there are the millions of members they claim, what are the odds of two people scraping the same images? And of course two different people with the same screen name is an impossibility.

Adding insult to injury (I mean besides the couple hundred bucks I shelled out to verify this) the company actually had the audacity to post a "Cellular Bill of Rights" in my opinion, this is like the fox being left to guard the chickens.

Of course unlike Voice Spammers that are paying to place and terminate their calls, the folks at SMS.ac obviously aren't paying much if anything. Complicit in this, though to what degree they're aware of the issue is Qpass http://qpass.com/ and their m-Qube system for non-operator originated mobile wallet billing.

Personally, I believe enough complaints to Qpass would put a dent in SMS.ac's evil ways. Believe me, they are evil. People lose their phones over this, and it's the one's that can't afford it...kids that didn't know any better who get hurt. Read the complaints for a while and you'll be as indignant as I was when I wrote about their Cellular Bill of Rights http://technorati.com/search/sms.ac%20complaints

Perhaps the worst violater of sending unsolicited SMS messages is the company SMS.ac out of San Diego, California.

They've got a track record of trcking users into giving up their passwords to AOL and Hotmail accounts and then using the addresses those accounts contain to send messages to your friends and family that appear to have been sent by the unsuspecting victim. In one case Joi Ito was compromised and when he pubilshed his troubles on his blog they threatened him with legal action!

A search on Technorati http://technorati.com/search/sms.ac%20complaints will reveal an astonishing number of people that have been victimized by this company.

If you haven't heard about this, you really should take a few minutes to check out the scam. The lure is free sms messages...they claim 5 per day, but what happens is shortly after you sign up you begin receiving "friend requests" not dozens, but four or five a day. This doesn't seem like much but if your premium sms charge is 0.50 and you get 5 per day times 30 days per month well...most people on /. can handle that math.

I signed up to do an investigation for my blog and discovered some support for the complaint that these "friend requests" are company originated. Over the course of 3 months I had probably at least half a dozen requests by different screen names with the same photos as well as multiple requests by the same screen name.

Now if there are the millions of members they claim, what are the odds of two people scraping the same images? And of course two different people with the same screen name is an impossibility.

Adding insult to injury (I mean besides the couple hundred bucks I shelled out to verify this) the company actually had the audacity to post a "Cellular Bill of Rights" in my opinion, this is like the fox being left to guard the chickens.

Of course unlike Voice Spammers that are paying to place and terminate their calls, the folks at SMS.ac obviously aren't paying much if anything. Complicit in this, though to what degree they're aware of the issue is Qpass http://qpass.com/ and their m-Qube system for non-operator originated mobile wallet billing.

Personally, I believe enough complaints to Qpass would put a dent in SMS.ac's evil ways. Believe me, they are evil. People lose their phones over this, and it's the one's that can't afford it...kids that didn't know any better who get hurt. Read the complaints for a while and you'll be as indignant as I was when I wrote about their Cellular Bill of Rights http://technorati.com/search/sms.ac%20complaints

(typetypetype) [Ctrl+L] http://www.technorati.com/ [Enter]
(typetypetype) "luxuriousity"
(clickety) "Hypnosis Smoking Stop"
(clickety) "Flag!"

In case you weren't aware, there's this Really Ethical (NOT) open source CD distributor out there called Luxuriousity. I'm not linking to them here. Google for them. See their web page then, their atrocious use of business clip art, and their love of rebranding open source programs and trying to make some easy pennies while trying to hide the fact that they're, in fact, selling CDs of stuff that can be downloaded for free from the net. (and if you're wondering what that has to do with hypnosis, well, they're also selling hypnosis MP3s.)

I also noted that lately that they're actually engaging in Blogger spamming. Really nice folks we're dealing with here. There were tons and tons of these Luxuriousity spamblogs last I checked, now all of them had disappeared (one still appears in Technorati but is 404'd).

I definitely welcome the flagging thing; there's tons and tons of spam blogs in blogger. Spam blogs *suck*.