Colin Charles Agenda

As more and more people get on the Twitter and Facebook bandwagon, advertisers are bound to crop up. I bring you, a rather devious ad company, Twitcash. Everytime you place an ad on your “stream”, you get paid per follower, per post on Twitter, and per friend, per feed item.

Granted, its not easy to get followers (on Twitter) or friends (on Facebook) unless you actually have interesting content or really, real friends.

Will Twitcash take off? Are you willing to risk your friends being annoyed by your adverts? Somehow, I doubt someone “un-friending” you on Facebook for an ad or two (similarly with Twitter). On Twitter, you can just “leave” the person, yet be a friend. On Facebook, there’s a good chance you’ll miss the ad, amongst all the folk adding (or removing) applications :)

I think this is just a start of the market, for advertising firms to look into the next generation of advertising. For instance, no one paid me to get blown away by the Heinz ad on tv last night. But I Twittered it, and blogged it. And therein lies what an advertising company should be looking at if they were to start a marketing campaign.

On another tangent, I for one think Friendster is nearing the end of its life, with Facebook being the clear winner. However, reading today’s newspaper, it seems that it still gets 22.5 million visitors monthly. ” It is also the top site in the Philippines and the No 2 site in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. It has a strong presence in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Macau.”

Technorati Tags: ad, advertising, twitcash, twitter, facebook, social networking, friendster

I don’t normally get excited by seeing an ad on television. In fact, I don’t normally watch “live” television that has ads in it, to begin with. But on this cold day in Melbourne, I was blown away by the Heinz soup ad.

I found that in 2002 Slate had an article about this exact ad. Leo Burnett/London created it, and I’m wondering if they’re reusing it or its just reached Aussie shores. A must read, Ad Report Card: hot soup, cold comfort.

Technorati Tags: heinz, soup, ad, instant gratification, 2 minutes, hot soup, cold comfort

Liferea 1.2.10 actually rocks. It does duplicate detection in posts, and makes my feed reading life, a lot easier.

Liferea Duplicate Feed Detection at work

It also supports bookmarking with del.icio.us, which is nifty. It feels a lot faster than the previous version. It had some internal database change and did the honorable thing and keep a backup of the old one, in case I was planning on rolling back.

All my technical related feeds have been imported into Liferea, and I’m a happy camper. In my idea of making NetNewsWire even more useless to me, I’ve moved all photographic related blog reading to Google Reader.

Now, thats a nice piece of software. With access to the Internet, I can read my feeds and have them always “synced” - i.e. I’m never going to have to read an entry twice, or anything of that sort. The only caveat is that I need to actually be online.

So while it’s handy to read Google Reader feeds while I’m sitting in a shop waiting for my take-out, its also pretty darn expensive. I’m paying something like $4.95 for less than 5MB of traffic per month I think (or maybe its 10MB), with Optus.

Does there exist software to read Google Reader offline (Linux preferred, Mac OS X is OK, Windows tolerated)? Do Series 60 Nokia phones have such ability? I ask because soon I’ll not only have the N73, but an E61i (which has WiFi). If only Liferea read/synced with Google Reader, then I can move all my feeds to a cool backend.

Technorati Tags: liferea, google reader, series 60, rss, feeds

The MySQL community is just great. I’ve been suggesting that we get recordings for the Conference & Expo, alas, its generally not in the roadmap. I mean, look at Apple and their WWDC - all attendees get amazing video recordings that switch between slides and the speaker. Last year, they even delivered it via iTunes! In previous years, they distributed DVDs (valuable, though with WWDC a lot is generally new technology announcements, and I can hardly want to reference what was cool for Panther or Tiger any longer…) Mad props also to the linux.conf.au 2007 team, who also did amazing recordings - sessions were available by the evening they were given!

The MySQL conference is a lot different. There are lots of reusable sessions. Some that you attend, you’ll get knowledge committed for life. The tendency to not see too many roadmap talks makes it very useful for future reference.

Back to why the community rocks. They’ve done exactly what should have been done - record the sessions. Give much applause to:

• Sheeri Kritzer, for a lot of 2007 MySQL User Conference & Expo Presentations & Videos. Sheeri walked around with tripod, and video camera, and did an amazing job. She has MP3 audio and VMV video (it plays on Linux…)
• Baron Schwartz, has a few files, that are available in OGG Vorbis format.
• However, that’s not so good for iPod users, so Kevin Burton decided to make MP3’s of Baron’s recordings!

If that wasn’t enough, let me take a moment to thank all the Planet MySQL bloggers, who pretty much created content so regularly, that you could follow the conference, even while you were not there. Kudos to all!

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqlconf, mysqlconf07, video, audio, recordings, new media, community

The other day, I got interesting Flickr mail. It was from a Wikipedia writer, who wanted to use a Flickr image of mine for an article. Whoote! I was pretty excited. One thing I found odd, was that the licensing should only be Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. You can’t have the No Deriviatives clause, neither can you have the No Commercial Use clause (why? Is Wikipedia becoming commercial?). So I went thru a little “re-licensing” process for that particular image.

Anyways, not one of my proudest shooting moments, here’s Melanie C, from the Spice Girls. You’re very nicely attributed and all, so I’m pretty happy with my image being in Wikipedia. Shot at 200mm, f/5.6, with a really beginner lens, aka the 55-200mm (yes, long before the days I had the 70-200/2.8).

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, photography, melanic c, creative commons

Datuk Shaziman Abu Mansor, is without a doubt, someone who cannot understand the dynamics of the Internet. And he serves as the Deputy Engery, Water and Communications Minister in Malaysia. Why, you ask?

He wants bloggers to register with the authorities, to prevent the spread of “negative or malicious content”. He hasn’t defined the difference of a blog being hosted in Malaysia (I guess this will be a hit for web hosting companies there) or just the ones with the .my suffix, though he seems to be aiming for the latter. Just like in Australia, to get a .com.my you need a company backing that up - why would a company host malicious blogs? A web hosting company, is of course, exempt from whatever it is they host.

Blogs, are the hype du jour. You don’t need one to spread malicious or anti-government propoganda. People were blogging, long before blogging software existed - early Internet adopters, just wrote in regular HTML. If a blog is meant to tell what you’re doing or going to do, does anyone remember finger and the Unix .plan file? Blogs might have just made the barrier to entry for publishing lower (but one can argue that, so has Microsoft FrontPage).

The Johor Baru MP, Datuk Shahrir Abdul Samad thinks, “that the problem was also about inflammatory comments by unidentified visitors to the blogs.” You can’t control what commenters say, and if you don’t exert any editing right over comments (quite unlike Jeff Ooi), you’re protected by the law. If you’re going to run a political forum, exert no editorial content over the comments, and you’re a “saved by the Communications & Multimedia Act 1998” common carrier.

Back in the heyday (’98), the government did say, no-censorship on the Internet. If people are going to move to hosting blogs overseas, this will be a very dark day for Malaysian web hosters (so I suggest, they stand up, together and submit to the government or relevant bodies, how silly this idea is). Marina Mahathir (Dr. Mahathir, ex-Prime Minister’s, daughter) has always mention this would make Malaysia look ridiculous.

It’s also ironic, now that Kathy Sierra has received death threats, people are talking about a bloggers code of conduct, policing the blogs, and so forth. If you listen to Adam Curry’s daily source code, he’s got some interesting recent episodes (DSC576,575, possibly 574) about how wanting to register or police is really silly. We’re all humans, and we’ve all got our ugly sides. The Internet as a whole is just a new medium, that a lot of politicians or people in high ranking places don’t seem to understand.

Why does this matter to me? Its not like I’m running a political website. But I do have interests in the freedom of the Malaysian Internet - those of you that receive email from me, realize it usually comes from a .com.my address, something I’ve not bothered (or wanted to, really) change for years. I also have servers sitting in Malaysian data centers (bandwidth, unlimited, and comparatively cheaper than hosting in Australia).

Join the Blue Ribbon Online Free Speech Campaign!

In conclusion, it should be noted that I refuse to register anything, and if the government chooses to be silly, I will be moving my interests elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, blog, registration, malaysia, silly, free speech, online censorship, stop internet censorship, free speech for all, web hosters, .my

Thats right, web logs are clearly gaining popularity in old media. I was reading the newspaper, and watching some television earlier, and to my shock, have just been bombarded with information about websites and the logs that people keep.

Of interest would be related to the Moorabbin police murders, that happened back in 1998. The news on every channel has brought up the topic of Jason Roberts “web of lies” (tomorrow’s newspaper, today!). He’s got a website, with some journal entries of his prison life up on the Internet. He tends to mention that he’s innocent, has his postal address, and a bunch of poems as well as pictures available for the public to read. Whats really interesting is that his website isn’t searchable via Google (or any other major search engine that I tried), but I found it at a most interesting place - Wikipedia!

An excerpt from the latest Wikipedia history

Clearly the anonymous benefactor of the URL to Wikipedia is a Telstra customer (or on a Telstra owned IP block). If the counter is working, I am visitor number 297. I wonder what these numbers will grow to, with curious onlookers searching for the website later today, and probably tomorrow when it hits mainstream dead tree newspapers.

Then, in today’s Age, The Barbados Butterfly (archived via the Wayback Machine), an anonymous blog, setup by a surgeon, Jillian Tomlinson, has now become invite-only, and she’s been suspended for a week from The Alfred Hospital. The blog contained very little identifying details, and Jillian mentions she wanted to use the blog for teaching medical students to identify ailments from pictures posted. She believes that the blog helped her reflect on her job. From taking a cursory look at the archives, it does seem like it was completely a personal blog, with some meme’s posted as well. There is also a lengthy blogroll of other “doctor weblogs”.

Has any other doctor blogged about possibly confidential information (after all, what you say to a doctor is private and confidential) and been given the sack or a suspension? Does the act of blogging about your work violate medical ethics?

This wouldn’t be the first time someone is being suspended over a blog entry, or a web log in general. Will we be seeing a rise in people getting into trouble over their blog entries, based on violating corporate secrets, ethics, or just plain venting?

Technorati Tags: weblog, blog, jason roberts, web of lies, journal entries, prison life, wikipedia, barbados butterfly, jillian tomlinson, alfred hospital, blog from a doctor, medical ethics, melbourne, australia

Its definitely interesting to see how old media (print - newspapers, magazines, periodicals) are being replaced with new media (blogs, website, RSS feeds), as a trend recently.

Via Zack Urlocker, Infoworld is heading the way of the dodo, in print. They’re moving to a web only publication. So they’re not dying, they’re just reinventing themselves in this connected age - via a web browser or an increasingly popular RSS reader. Steve Fox, Editor in Chief states: “Online bookmarks may be more efficient, site
searches retrieve information faster, but it’s hard to beat a magazine
for its tactility and visceral thrill.” And he’s right - a magazine is something you can pick up at the newsagent, read it on the train, rip articles out, and leave the rest of the magazine for someone else.

Jeff Ooi, mentions PC Magazine Malaysia is going the way of the dodo - completely. They have opted to not even have a website, for their content. That was a magazine that cost less than RM10 per month (two meals at the mamak? Ten teh tariks?), yet they couldn’t provide the value necessary to keep the readers going. It is a safe assumption that most readers prefer to get their IT information fix, via online means (here come the Slashdot, Digg, and various online news sources like News.com, Computerworld, etc.). Besides being free (cost of bandwidth, implied), and ad-supported (most probably blocked via AdBlock Plus or similar), the only real inconvenience is not being able to carry the magazine with you.

However, increased portability of PDAs, the capability of phones to read PDF files, or even subscribe to RSS feeds and get them updated over the wire (via 3G, or WiFi) will make all this paper magazine loss, a thing of the past. What really seems to be lacking, is good syncing software. I like to read my RSS feeds anywhere possible, and more importantly, have them correctly synced - between my Linux Liferea, Mac OS X NetNewsWire, and if possible via a web browser. You’re telling me to go look at Google Reader right now - but it lacks one important feature, that is the ability to work offline.

Another thing is how magazines are read. I like to flip through, rip out important articles, and save them, while not actually keeping the entire magazine. How does that work with the online world? NetNewsWire allows me to flag important articles, I could add them to del.icio.us as I see fit, but only the former will allow true searching (but tie me to my Mac). Duplicate feed entries are also a problem - this might be less of a problem with magazines per se, as their feeds tend not to end up on Planet agregators (though some do), but why hasn’t someone implemented a good feed reader with a sensible database backend that removes duplicate posts?

Ideally, a solution to all this will be a feed reader that was database backed, removed duplicate posts smartly, allowed marking articles for saving and easy exporting, killer search through saved articles, the ability to highlight within saved articles, worked in a web browser but with the abilty to work offline. I wonder if Google will come up with an elegant solution, using some of the offline AJAX features found in Zimbra Desktop.

Technorati Tags: rss, magazines, web publication, rss readers, offline ajax, duplicate removal