The Blog Day 2005

Today is the first Blog Day, and so far I haven’t made a single step to participate. But now, even if my timezone told me it’s past midnight, I’m publishing some of my favorite reads which aren’t really designed for the mainstream.

  • Dr. Forbush Thinks:
    I like reading these thoughts as they offer me a different opinion on certain matters which are hardly accessible on the front.
  • Middle Manager’s Haven:
    If you’re ever going to become a middle manager, you’ve got to read it. The only problem is that the author suffers from the fear of being identified. He/she choose a nickname… yet very interesting and amusing to read, but unfortunately he/she is not a very regular blog author.
  • Indeskretion Ehrensache:
    The Handelsblatt journalist Thomas Knuewer offers a tight mix of German news and satisfies the popular demand. Quite well known for his writing style in the German blogosphere, yet more or less unknown to the whole world.
  • Fontblog:
    That’s where news and opinions out of the graphics department are being read and made. Its one of the better German corporate blogs I’m aggregating.
  • Agenturblog:
    One of the better semi-corporate blogs of one of Germany’s new media companies. The CEO himself set it up and is giving quite a good push there, and it’s always been in my feed reader software.

The entirety of my daily reads can be seen in the RSS List – download the OPML and enjoy importing them to your favorites. It must be around 180 or 200 different feeds… And if anybody wants to read more, feel free to search for this special even on Technorati with BlogDay2005.

/von

Digg.com Resumee

I’ve been subscribed to the social network Digg.com which is primarily used to add interesting links to blogs, news and just plain websites to an index. But the idea of using the service is ridiculous. Digg is down almost everytime I’m checking it out. Timeouts, errors and overall connection problems become an annoyance. The following message could be displayed at least each hour twice to compete with the digging users:

Digg is adding servers to keep up with demand – digg back in 30 mins. (9:45AM PDT)

At least the owners and programmers behind Digg learned to inform the users instead of giving them a hangtime lag. Nice to know, but the service is far from being usable. The idea is undoubtely beautiful to create a social network, but with people come problems. The users are behaving like net-extremists.

At first, nearly every one who feels uber-cool and geekish is trying to pull the virtual trigger at you – if you dare to make a mistake, especially if you’re new to the service, but not new to social networking. Insults, flaming and pure hatred are coming your way. Anybody can register and simply start to insult another user because they feel like it. A moderation like on many webforums or in blogs of comments does not happen, you can only rate the comments for future reading or ignorance of the flame-users.

At second, the system has a major flaw. Once you publish a supposedly new link, the chance is quite high that the server does not return correct search results to prevent duplicate posts about the same topic. Even if you have used the internal search engine to look for the URL and the title or specific keywords, the result is empty. I found myself adding a link which already existed on the server, yet no search revealed it to me. Being called „noob“ by the self-proclaimed digg.com-elite just made me laugh. Is it my fault that the software is not fully developped yet? Clearly not.

At third, the topics offered are usually not much more than „click me“ posts. If one expects the social networking extension to content-linking, disappointment may be the most simple result. The topics are less special than it looks like. Most of the links are leading to techie-content, but this content lacks of originality.

By now about 20 minutes later, the update message has changed to the worse:

Digg is adding servers to keep up with demand – digg back in 30 mins. (3 PM PDT)

In the end, Digg appears to be one of the most capable social networking systems, yet suffers from its under-developped community. If you’re not with them, if you’re not their mainstream, you’re clearly going to get the red card and a „It’s lame content“ reply. Let’s wait for next week to see if I’m still digging in and out ;)

/von

Blogperience

This is so retro. I created a new blog over at Blogger and don’t know what to do with it yet. It looks funny, and it caused me already a lot of annoyance, but I’ll stick with it. In order to keep track of everything, I’ll co-brand the MikeSchnoor.com with my new Rendili service. I just noticed they don’t offer the option to enter a title. Weird…

Why choosing Blogger or Blogspot now?

I honestly don’t know. As regular user of my own WordPress installation, I’ve become interested in other software tools. For now, I have begun using Blogger on the Blogspot.com domain for myself. Originally I was trying to support Shirazi with the lack of trackback functionality on this service. I can’t tell if this account is worth more than just this test or another one, but I’m going to contribute this article to the original blog at the MikeSchnoor.com to keep track of myself.

What to expect from Rendili?

No clue. Rendili is special for me. It’s been a joyful word of my younger days, and I’m keen on using it more and more.

That’s been the first entry of Rendili. Whew…

/von

Destroy all information Google cannot index

The Googleopus strikes back again! This is too good not to post it, and I’ve had a good laugh at that.

Our users want the world to be as simple, clean, and accessible as the Google home page itself,“ said Google CEO Eric Schmidt at a press conference held in their corporate offices. „Soon, it will be.“

Great! That means a reduction of all blogspot entries, too! Fight the splogs (spam blogs), fight the porn industry, and while we’re on it – become pure again!

As a part of Purge’s first phase, executives will destroy all copyrighted materials that cannot be searched by Google.

Finally I can kill everybody off with one ping one click. Back to book burning, back to the evilness! Is the idea of telling somebody „I will google you!“ already an insult? I give up here, it’s too funny! It’s by the Onion, so read on my dear…

[via O’Reilly Radar]

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9 Days until Firefox 1.5 Beta

The Developer Team of Firefox has re-scheduled their release list for the upcoming browser versions (including betas, RC1 and RC2 candidates).

The lockdown for „Firefox 1.5 Beta 1“ will occur at 11:59pm on Tuesday, Sept 6 in preparation for release on Thursday, Sept 8.

For myself, Firefox has become an essential to web browsing again. This happened basically because of the loss of confidence of Netscape, and I began using MS Internet Explorer again for another two years of time. By now, I’m regularly switching the browsers, and the more news and info I see about Firefox, the less I’m interested in the free-of-update MS IE. On another note, I guess I have my „tech days“ here at the MikeSchnoor.com. First the new Microsoft Keyboard, then Opera as a highlight, and now Firefox. What comes next? ;)

[via Golem | read more | digg story]

/von

High Definition Television in Germany

On October 26th 2005, Germany’s second largest broadcasting network ProSiebenSat.1 plans to officially distribute their two major tv-channels ProSieben and Sat.1 in the High Definition Television (HDTV) format. This includes to receive the channels in a constant 16:9 format on the Astra satellite signal, followed by an expansion to the cable and terrestrial networks until the end of 2006.

In the case for Europe‘ and especially Germany, HDTV is hardly a competitor for the currently used technology. Most broadcasting networks do not rely on HDTV or simply ignore the possible advantages for the consumers‘ experience. The concept of ProSiebenSat.1 includes to combine efforts with both the technology branch and the media producers. CEO Guillaume de Posch explained in their recent press release:

„HDTV ist ein Quantensprung, mit dem das Medium Fernsehen einen Schritt in die Zukunft macht […] Die ProSiebenSat.1-Gruppe war das erste deutsche TV-Unternehmen, das einzelne Sendungen in dem hochauflösenden Format ausgestrahlt hat. Ich freue mich, dass wir nun auch die ersten sind, die mit HDTV in den Regelbetrieb gehen.“

Prior to today’s press release, the company already tested HDTV with special screenings of „Spiderman“, „Men in Black II“ and „Panic Room“ during the past, and received some major positive feedback from their viewers.

[via Golem]

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Opera 10th Birthday – Download Free Ad-Free Version

Download.com informs us about a time-limited special offer: You can receive a valid registration code for Opera’s current version of Opera 8. Simply e-mail registerme@opera.com to obtain a registration code. This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT). I have downloaded the browser and will install immediately upon receiving my own code.

Update:
You may generate your own free codes with this web formular as long as their anniversary party lasts!

[via Golem | read more | digg story]

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Website Owners click on Adsense

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As far as I remember, the majority of professional website users apparently hate to see free content being compared with advertisement banners. But in the end, we all have to pay the bills, and a little income from selling ads even on one’s blog can be worth every buck. Sadly, the MikeSchnoor.com doesn’t produce a profit worth to mention. Hardly noone ever clicks the Google Adsense links which are visible below each entry or on the category and main websites, and on the sidebar. But for testing purposes, I’m on the run with them.

However, Markus Klöschen explained in his recent article why he chooses to click ads. As a website owner, one may not violate against Google’s Policy of Adsense by clicking your own ads, but we can choose to click other people’s ads whenever we like it.

I’m bannerblind. I will in no case click on any colorfull, animated or blinking banner. Since I do visit pages which are using advertisements like that, I pimped my firefox and installed an ad-blocker. This works very good. But I don’t see the ads on my page any more, so I don’t see what some of my visitors see. Therefore I removed the adsense-expression from my adblocker to get the adsense again. From that time on I do see the adsense links and what shall I say, they are relevant.

Relevant… yes, I saw various ads coming from the Google Server and I felt obliged to click and read the advertiser’s website. I found a few things on Business Ethics and some other nice gadgets, added the URLs to the bookmarks and had a good day. One can argument that this does not help the advertiser and is just another cost factor if people click their own Google Ads or are motivated to click ads, but if it’s relevant? I don’t click „Sexy Voice Chat“ ads, but rather those that keep my curiousity engaged, those that keep me interested. If ads are being relevant for me, I will click them on other people’s blogs. That’s what I see as some sort of honorable mission in order to say „Thank you for all your free content.“

Update: Edited due to Markus‘ comment – that’s one for the morning and the lack of caffine. ;)

[via Light Within]

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Blogspot – The Spam Domain

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This morning I read a nice post by Google Blogoscoped: 60% of all Blogspot blogs are spammers. They tested 50 random blogs, of which 30 were spam blogs or had spam related content.

Marty Kay made an interesting comment in regard to Splots (spam blogs) on Google’s Blogspot.com:
„Funniest thing I saw was a bunch of comments on one spam/link site, that was totally irrelevant but pointed to ANOTHER spam site. The spammers are spamming each other.”

This is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever. You are a spammer and try to get money, but you’re being spammed because you’re too dumb to install counter-measures on your own spam blog. But here’s the deadly trigger for Google’s Blogspot domain. With approximately 7,500,000 individual blogs hosted on their domain, approximately 4 million spam blogs exist because of them. However, a second test of another 100 blogs changed the numbers, estimating 42% of the blogs are solely spammers. I wonder how the Blogspot users will react to this…

[via The Blog Herald]

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Microsoft Leaks New Ergonomic 4000 Keyboard

Someone at Microsoft must have had a bad day for publishing content without approval. Fortunately, the web has its own regulations and such news can be digged up quite fast.

Here’s to the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, a new take on their split keyboard of old. A 14° gable separates the two groups of keys, which is complemented by the curved key bed and 7-degree wrist rest for what looks to be a truly comfortable typing experience.

The keyboard is rumored to have the following features:

  • gull wing design
  • optional palm lift to experience the seven-degree reversed slope
  • integrated palm rest
  • a spreadsheet for a zoom slider
  • five programmable keys
  • forward backward keys

The first idea for a price is around $55, since this is no official information and since Microsoft has not yet released the product officially.

[via Everything USB | read more | digg story]

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