I wrote a couple of weeks back that I was going to give Jeremy Schoemaker’s AuctionAds a spin, it certainly looked promising. Now admittedly I haven’t rolled it out beyond one small site because of this:

The thing is, because AuctionAds isn’t contextual it’s near on hopeless unless you’ve got a very, very targeted niche site, and the we’re not contextual so you can run it along side of Adsense units is incorrect: Google now allows contextual ads units from other providers as long as those ads don’t look the same as the Google Adsense units on site, which AuctionAds don’t. I tried the ol’ Chitika WordPress hack: inserting the post title php code into the keyword field within the AuctionAd’s script to get contextual ads: unlike Chitika it doesn’t work with AuctionAds. Now if I was running static websites that weren’t template based I could place AuctionAds on a per page basis tuned to the product, but I run WP dynamic sites where I don’t code the ad on a per page basis, but site wide. Hopefully, hopefully some one from AuctionAds reads this post and looks into contextual ad units, this is a company I’d really like to get behind and use, but the product is losing me money at the moment and as such I’m not about to expand my use.

Postscript: check this site out: ps3-blog.info, not my site but up for sale as a “AuctionADs Automated Blog” in this thread at DigitalPoint. Instead of PS3 ads, I’m seeing ads for “Authentic Coach Signature Small Soft Duffle Black”, completely useless. AuctionAds served contextually would be a kickass product.

If you believe the rabid left, David Hicks has been tortured, locked in solitary confinement for years on end….. And yet lets read the SMH coverage of Hick’s court appearance today:

“Rather than being pale from long stints locked inside the maximum security prison, Hicks’s skin looked as tanned as that of his American military lawyer Major Michael Mori, sitting beside him in court….Prison food had added about 10kg to Hicks’s small, 167cm-tall frame,His father described Hicks as looking “puffy”.”

Now that sounds like a man who has been tortured, starved and kept in solitary confinement, NOT. How the f*ck do you put on 10kg if you’re being tortured? how the hell do you get a sun tan if you’re locked in solitary confinement for 23 hours out of 24, or even more as has been alleged by some.

BTW Hicks pleaded guilty after a lot of noise about him pleading innocent. Of course the Hick’s apologists are saying he was forced to admit guilt, without recognizing the fact that he’s proven and admitted to being an Islamic warrior, having fought the Western infidel armies in Kosovo, and being captured in Afghanistan. God help us if the Americans let him come home to Australia, we’re fighting to keep the jihad away from our shores, not within it.

NineMSN: Anthony Callea admits he’s gay

Australia’s Clay Aitken. Will the front page of The West read “Callea Gay Shock” tomorrow? unlikely, more like “Another Eagle caught taking drugs”, but expect a line in the Entertainment Section.

Great to see one back at Gore:

Next to the Reuters story mentioned in my last post about the women turning up to the Madrid Training Bombing trials in a Mohamad cartoon T-Shirt:

Reuters via HotAir covering the Spanish trial of the alleged Madrid Train Bombers:

A woman who lost her husband in the 2004 Madrid train bombings displayed an infamous cartoon mocking the Prophet Mohammad on her T-shirt in front of 29, mostly Muslim, suspects on trial for the attacks on Monday.

The woman?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s white T-shirt showed Mohammad wearing a bomb as a turban ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù one of a series published by Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten which unleashed violent protests by some Muslims last year?¢‚Ǩ¬¶

The woman sat in the front row of the court wearing the T-shirt for around half-an-hour before getting up, walking up to the glass cage containing the defendants and finally walking out of the court, judicial sources said.

Now that’s a hero.

Chris Pirillo puts some perspective on the whole Kathy Sierra death threats meme. I totally avoided the issue in my post on Scoble’s chicken reaction at 901am because it’s difficult to talk about perspective when some one is legitimately upset about what has happened (as I have no doubt that Sierra is) without sounding like you’re either denigrating the victim or siding with the people making the death threats.

I’ve had death threats before, although none I’ve ever taken seriously, but unlike others I’ve actually been attacked with a Kitchen Clever. Luckily my friend and I backed right away on that fateful day about 10 days prior to the 1996 Australian Federal Election and the nutter Labor Party member swung the clever widly at us as he sought to steal the “Mutch for Cook” banner we’d strung on a highway overpass. I didn’t piss my pants, but I’ll admit I was pretty close to it, and it took me at least an hour to stop shaking. I’ll never forget that day till the day I die, and unless you’ve been the victim of any sort of crime like this it’s impossible to relate the feelings something like this brings up. But I digress, because I do sympathise with Kathy’s position, but others need to put it all in perspective, and actually stand up for free speech online, not back away from it. If you’re angry about the death threats, double your blogging efforts.

I’ve held off from commenting this last week on Labor’s announcement that it’s going to dip into the Future Fund to roll out a Nation Wide Next Gen Broadband network (12mps). My first thoughts were that it would nearly be enough to win my vote (that and the fact the Liberals are running an agrarian socialist in Forrest), but like any announcement the devil is always in the detail. The detail, or in this case that f*ckng great big 800 ton Gorilla is Telstra, who were wrongly allowed to keep the last mile to the home network. Rather than let me explain it, let me quote Adam Turner at ITWire.com.au, who must have been reading my thoughts:

“Allowing the country’s largest communications provider to also own the country’s communications infrastructure has been an unmitigated disaster which has seen Australia fall further and further behind the rest of the world. Telstra should have been broken in two before it was privatised, with the nation’s communications infrastructure spun off into a separate company so all communications providers could compete on a level playing field. Instead Telstra uses its ownership of the infrastructure to throw its weight around and hold the country to ransom until it gets its own way”.

Exactly. Labor’s plan, and even the look at me response plan by the Liberal Government has to get past Telstra. Question though, is it to late to force structural separation, or even better, for the Government to retake the last mile copper to home network from Telstra? Think about it, the Government still owns 17% of the company, held by the Future Fund. It also holds the legislative powers to cripple Telstra should it want to. Telstra complains that the copper network is expensive and doesn’t pay for itself, so why couldn’t the Government swap the network for the remaining 17% of it’s shares? If Telstra failed to comply the Government could nationalise the service (ok, admittedly a bad move) or they could cripple Telstra by extending USO (universal service obligations) to 100% of the country with guaranteed service delivery levels that would make keeping the network by Telstra a massive drain on profits, whilst actually delivering a better standard of service to all Australians (a win-win really). If Labor came out and promised this tomorrow (and dropped their ISP level censorship policy) I might even go a spend a couple of hours handing out for them at the polling booth come election day, and that from a 12 year member of the Liberal Party and former Liberal staffer. Here’s hoping, certainly the ALP is making all the right noises for the IT vote.

Michael Gray advisers in his WP advice video: block categories in Robots.txt to help Google SERPs.

Interesting.

We all know duplicate content is bad in Google, but it never dawned on me to consider category pages. I’ve got some work to do in the next couple of days 🙂

news.com enters the who was the first blogger debate.

Justin Hall was the first blogger. Dave Winer wrote the first blogging CMS.

I don’t want to take away from Dave, and indeed he deserves far better treatment in the blogosphere and MSM than he gets, he did many, many great things that were not only vital, but intrinsic in the foundation of the blogosphere and the craft of blogging we know it today, but I can’t rewrite history, and Dave was second. As I wrote 2 years ago at The Blog Herald:

In January 1994, Justin Hall launches Justin?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Home Page which would later become Links from the Underground. The site included links to and reviews of other sites. Notably on 10 January 1996, Hall commences writing an online journal with dated daily entries, although each daily post is linked through an index page. Of the journal he writes
?¢‚Ǩ?ìSome days, before I go to bed, I think about my day, and how it meshed with my life, and I write a little about what learned me.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

OK, so maybe I don’t own the authority site on blog history any more, but even to this day I’ve been an avid follower of statistics, and a compiler of history.

The next part in that post should be noted:

In February 1996, Dave Winer writes a weblog that chronicles the 24 Hours of Democracy Project.

In April, Winer launches a news page for users of Frontier Software, that goes onto became Scripting News in 1997, one of the oldest weblogs remaining on the net today. The company he heads, Userland goes on to release Radio Userland, one of the first blogging software tools.

I’m didn’t make this stuff up, this is verbatim as to how the history of blogging occurred, indeed the post was part of my never completed blogging book project, which still sits on my hard drive somewhere, having gotten to about 40 pages then stopped…I should find the time to start it again…but I digress, because that history was heavily researched at the time, and I have NO reason to believe two years later that it is anything but accurate. I really, really do hope that one day a statue of Dave Winer will grace Berkley, he deserves it, but it won’t be as the first blogger, but the blog father, the founder of the blogging platform, not blogging as such.