March 31, 2005
It is all over bloggerland today: The wordpress site has been featuring around 168.000 articles, that were linked from the main page with invisible (negative divs) links. The articles were obviously designed to target high paying adsense keywords. Google reacted rather quick after this has been published on Waxy.org: Right now, the articles in question seem to have disappeared from the index, while Yahoo still shows some of them. While there is nothing wrong to cash in on an open source project doing advertising, such practises do decrease the value of Adsense and similar services for the advertisers. In the long run, such behaviour will hurt everyone in the serious web content business.
March 29, 2005
This was quick. Thanks to Azeem Azhar I now have my own Yahoo 360 page. So far I have to share Azeem’s thoughts on the platform, it is still very beta and needs quite some improvements. It might become interesting once there is wide support for outside RSS sources.
According to a post in the Yahoo Search Blog by Randy Farmer, Yahoo has officially started an invite-only beta of their social networking/photo sharing/blogging platform Yahoo! 360. Randy’s 360 page can be found here - I wonder why that URL needs to be that complicated and unreadable. If anybody can send invites allready, I would love to get one: thomas at fruetel dot net.
Wombat Mobile shows how to use the integrated browser in Wipeout Pure to actually surf the web using a PlayStation Portable. The catch: A regular PC is needed as proxy to do this, making it rather useless as a real world application. Still it’s a nice prove of concept.
Update: Somebody had to improve on this. Seni from Wombat Mobile just pointed me to this site, which shows a way to do it by just changing the DNS settings on the PSP to a special public gateway without requiring any extra computers.
March 28, 2005
The Register writes that Sony is trying to take on Apple in the digital music download market by establishing a music download service for the PlayStation Portable. The service is expected to launch in Europe and the US in March. Of course, the multimedia capabilities of the PSP make it well possible that a similar service geared towards video consumers might follow later.
According to Boing Boing the Matrix Online MMORPG has hired 20 actors to play key characters like Morpheus in the game world. They are supposed to be interacting with regular players to push and advance the stories inside the game.
March 25, 2005
Most bloggers are curious what Yahoo’s blog platform will look like, and if and how they are going to integrate Flickr. Charlene Li had the opportunity to have a look at Yahoo! 360 and published an interesting review along with two screenshots on her site. No sign of Flickr yet.
March 23, 2005
Gadget sites traditionally appeal more towards male visitors. Popgadget seems to try and fill that gap: Produce a gadget site tailored for women. Current topics include notebook and cellphone cases, PSP jewelry and maternity t-shirts.
March 22, 2005
Motorola recently introduced their SCREEN3 data service, a kind of RSS like push technology that automatically uploads text and image data to a mobile phone. The data is then to be displayed on the phone’s idle screen. If the user is interested in further details on an item being displayed, he can click a button and get the full story. The content seems to be determined by the service provider.
The first handset to support this interesting technology will be the Motorola V557. The phone also features a VGA quality camera, EDGE,GPRS and Bluetooth support and is expected to be available in Q2 2005.
March 20, 2005
You want to provide a podcast on your website, but are afraid of high bandwidth costs? Blog Torrent might be the solution: It is a script for offering downloads from your website via the bittorrent protocol. It promises easy uploading of large files, and publishes an RSS feed of all published torrents.
