ACMA has released the new tool in the fight against spam: spam matters, but apparently it only matters if you use Microsoft software because it only supports Outlook and Outlook Express. As a Mozilla Thunderbird user, I’m apparently not wanted. Oh well, ACMA is an evil organisation that stifles free speech and helps protect the media barons in this country anyway….so up your ACMA.
Author: admin
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Dogon: Tim O’Reilly responds
Tim O’Reilly responds to the criticism over the C&D to a not for profit organisation daring to use Web 2.0 in their name.
I won’t repeat what he says, but there was one point which I found amazing:
At O’Reilly, we’ve even had to send a cease-and-desist letter once, to a company that was publishing technical books with the picture of an animal on the cover.
That’s right. Apparently now you can’t put an animal on the cover of your tech book! Doesn’t matter if it’s a picture of your pet dog, apparently O’Reilly has a Trade Mark that covers all animals.
Sorry Tim, you wonder why people get upset! This is trade mark law gone mad.
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Australian TV moguls still don’t get the future of TV and computing
I don’t use IceTV myself, because they don’t offer a regional WA guide, but this company is doing a great job in making programs like Windows MCE more usable by providing a EPG, something that you just cant get in Australia, despite the fact you can pretty much get free EPG’s everywhere else in the world.
From the SMH:
JAMES PACKER’S Nine Network has a bone to pick with fledgling electronic program guide IceTV and it is taking its grievances all the way to the Federal Court.
Subscribers to IceTV’s program guide can use it to record shows from their computer or mobile phone. They can also record two shows at once, automatically record their favourites, and pause and replay live television – and fast forward past the ads…Nine’s problem, as laid out in its statement of claim, is that it believes IceTV has breached its copyright by creating a program guide that looks like its own. It is seeking unspecified damages.
But perhaps the bigger gripe that Nine and the other commercial free-to-air networks have is that IceTV’s technology allows users to dodge the ads.
Bring on TiVo to Australia. In the mean time I’ll just have to live with a Windows MCE box without an EPG….grrr.
Tags: Ice TV, James Packer, Channel 9
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Why you can’t trust TV
This is hilarious!
From the SMH:
An Australian military commander has tried to ensure truth does not become a casualty of conflict in East Timor, but embarrassed a TV network in the process.
Australian commander in East Timor Brigadier Michael Slater appeared this morning in a live cross from Dili to the Nine Network’s Today show, with helmeted and heavily armed Australian soldiers standing behind him.
He was pressed by Today host Jessica Rowe about whether Dili really was as safe as the Australian military claimed, given the presence of armed soldiers at his shoulder.
Pausing briefly, Brig Slater replied: “Jessica I feel quite safe, yes, but not because I’ve got these armed soldiers behind me that were put there by your stage manager here to make it look good.
“I don’t need these guys here.
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Tall Poppy Syndrome, Mike Arrington, and how not to handle criticism
A fair bit of controversy about over allegations that Mike Arrington of Tech Chruch fame takes kick backs for favourable reviews.
I don’t know the basis for these rumours, and I’m only an occasional Tech Chrunch reader, mainly because I personally find that Mike Arrington’s reviews tend to (usually) be nothing more than blind cheering for Web 2.0 startups without any objective analysis of whether these startups actually have depth in terms of a business plan and potential, literally the issue of solutions without problems.
Having said all of that though, Mike Arrington has become a poster boy for the Web 2.0 movement with Tech Chrunch, and there is little doubt that the site has been highly successful.
And with success comes the knockers, the tall poppy syndrome. I personally experienced it at times whilst writing at The Blog Herald, and I even occasionally get it now with b5media, although less so now personally as I’ve taken a more behind the scenes role (one could argue that the target has become smaller in terms of public perception).
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9rules no longer involved in Sex Network
Blog Network Watch reports on the setup of the SexNotWork blog network, and that Paul Scrivens, and others from 9rules, are no longer invovled in the network.
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Google Video Ads need some work
Spotted at Hollywood Tuna:
a Google Video Ad. One small problem though, at that’s the buffering rate. If you are going to expect people to click on and view video ads, you are going to want them to pretty much work from the moment the play button is clicked. The buffering time on this ad was roughly 10-15 seconds. For the casual surfer (I was waiting to see what it was like) this time is way, way to long to view an ad. If they are going to work (and I’m not yet convinced they are) they need to be quick, super quick to load and run. -
Michael Jackson loves orphans, particularly the little boy ones….
Somebody at News.com.au has a very wicked sense of humour:
and then there is the photo and captions:
Let’s just hope they didn’t leave him alone with any of the little boy orphans.
Tags: Michael Jackson
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Google Crawling AdWords Landing Pages for Quality
At long last, it looks like Google might be (at least a little bit) cracking down on made for Adsense sites, in this case those who get their traffic using Adwords.
From Threadwatch:
Google is launching a spider named AdsBot to monitor AdWords landing page quality.
Sometime in the coming weeks, a new AdsBot crawler will be grabbing all landing pages independently of AdSense, Googlebot or other Google spiders. Can you still block being spidered? Yes. But if you do so, Google AdWords will consider you a “non-participating advertiser” in the review process. As a result, you’ll take a ding on your overall AdWords quality score
Great stuff from Google. Now if they’d only start cracking down on some of the spam sites using Google we could all sleep that little bit easier as well 🙂
Tags: adsense
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Alien in duck
We kid you not on this on: the picture is an x-ray of a injured mallard duck.
Writes the SF Chronicle:
As if crop circles weren’t proof enough that extraterrestrials are among us, an alien has now been found in the stomach of a duck.
That, at least, is the conclusion reached by workers at the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia (Solano County) when they viewed an X-ray image they took of a sick mallard.