Neomeme

Several people have asked me about it, so here is a workaround for that nasty bug/feature that may prevent the full text of your posts from showing up in your feeds. Read more »

When you’re trying to build a brand, make sure to grab similar domain names. Otherwise, someone with a similar domain name might tarnish your image. Case in point: Read more »

I’ve noticed that the More tags I have been using to keep my homepage tidy have been cutting off posts in feeds. That has now been fixed for all future posts.

The New York Times has a fawning article today about Pownce, Kevin Rose’s new startup. Pownce is called, among other things, “the hottest startup in Silicon Valley”, with “coveted” invitations- the author has clearly never heard of a private beta-

Digg was disruptive (though perpetually unprofitable). Google was disruptive. MySpace was disruptive. Pownce is a glorified Twitter clone with file sharing. If it did not have Kevin Rose behind it, it would have faded into obscurity, just like a Digg story that is not dugg by top Digg users. Let me restate that. The exact same “disruptive” and “coveted” technology would have certainly gone completely ignored without this: Read more »

Perpetually-in-private-beta online TV startup Joost has announced it has reached 1 million users. That’s a pretty impressive number for a product that still lacks much truly compelling content. But do these numbers matter? And are they even real?

One miiiiilion users!

Read more »

This is too funny- Digg today announced that Microsoft would be serving their ads. I opened Safari (I have AdBlock in Firefox) to see what the ads looked like, and was greeted by this:

(click image for full size)

1. The ads are mixed up- the leaderboard ad is on the right side, and the right side ad is on top. Thus both are cut off. This screenshot is not cropped on the sides- the ad was cut off.
2. That ad is the default Digg ad- meaning there are no advertisers.

I refreshed a couple times, and the ads were back to normal. I opened another story on Digg, and they were messed up again.

Not to reinforce any stereotypes about Microsoft…

This morning, many of the Internet’s most popular sites- Technorati, Archive.org, Netflix, Craiglist, LiveJournal, and others, went down. This was caused by a power outage at a single data center(or, some rumormongers say, a drunk employee accidentally hitting the off switch.) Coupled with the still-popular Onion video about the crash of the Internet, this serves as a stark reminder of just how fragile the Internet really is. Read more »

It’s only been weeks since its release, and a security flaw has already been found in the iPhone. Security researchers from Security Evaluators were able to execute an exploit on the iPhone that gave them complete control of the device. Not only were they able to access the filesystem, including contacts, text messages, and more, but they also had control of the iPhone’s hardware and could make the phone vibrate, for example. The exploit can be delivered through a malicious web page, or a compromised wireless access point, meaning hundreds of thousands of iPhones are at risk.

The security researchers are not releasing any details of the exploit until August 2, to give Apple time to produce a fix. However, it is very unlikely that every iPhone user will apply the patch by then. Read more »

A quick update- I have installed the DoFollow plugin for this blog. Normally, to prevent comment spam, blogging platforms like Wordpress add a “nofollow” tag to links in comments- instructing search engines not follow or give any value to those links. The DoFollow plugin removes these restrictions. What does this mean for you? If you make a comment and enter a website, search engines will follow the link in your comment, and your website will get a free PR5 backlink, as well as a boost to your blog’s Technorati rank.

Lazy Saturday. Usually when bloggers are lazy, they throw together a few links from their feeds and call it a blog post. When I feel lazy, I get nostalgic. So here’s my “links post”- except all the links are from a year ago today, from top blogs:

• Google’s Earnings Results- a Yahoo Engineer’s Perspective
• Microsoft Zune to Battle iTunes/iPod
• Why the Web 2.0 and Media Elite are so upset about paying amateurs
• Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg’s Homepage Content
• Nigerian 419 Scams: Effective as Ever

and from my feeds:

• Craiglist Case Study
• How to make a corporate butt pucker
• Military Management- The New Trend for Small Business
• How to use Google to get a date