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Tsunami Warnings for the entirity of the East Coast.

Struth.

Probably will be nothing more than a slight tidal surge (20-30cm), but reports coming in are saying people in Cairns are heading to high ground.

More soon…possibly.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington today announced that April Fools Day was now moving to March 31.

Arrington said in the statement that thousands of years of tradition meant nothing to him, because TechCrunch has a larger combined viewing audience than all the traditionalists in the world combined.

“April 1 has never been a good date in my books to play jokes, and hence I’ve decreed that April Fools Day will now be known as March 31 fools day”.

Read more of the tradition breaking here.

Video over on Chris Pirillo’s blog. Sickening. Totally sickening.

I’m hesitant to start another flame war on guns, but I’ll repeat what I’ve said previously, and note that this is coming from someone who’s politics has always been slightly right of centre, and in a classical sense closest to libertarian: US gun policy is crazy. Guns are horrible things that have no real use other than to shot people, unless of course you live in the country/ bush then you may have a legit purpose to have one. The average Sam Yank in suburban LA or Houston shouldn’t have the right to have a gun in the 21st century, as as Bruce or Shelia Australian in Sydney or Melbourne don’t now. A US with less guns would be a much safer place.

Consumerist does the math on TXT messaging, and finds there is a 7314% markup in the US. Given Telstra/ Optus often charge 25c (AUD), sometimes more depending on the plan, the markup in Australia is even worse again. Of course a lot of it is due to the thieving all three major carriers partake in with network interchange fees. Why the ACCC hasn’t stepped in yet is beyond me, it’s a complete scam, in the same way bank interchange fees are for ATM’s, I pay $2.50 to use a non Police and Nurses ATM, and yet there is only one for the entire South West of Western Australia, and half the time the bloody thing is out of order….but get this, if I was over 55 I wouldn’t pay a cent with a over 55’s account. Lets hope the incoming Labor Government has strengthening the powers of the ACCC high up on their list of priorities.

Posted at 901am today on Bush quoting bloggers. Headline “President quotes bloggers in Iraq defense”, but is it right? In normal (ie not US) English the last word would be defence, and that’s how I originally wrote the post until the “I have to convert this to US English because of the site” part of my brain kicked in. Looking at it, it looks wrong to me, but I think its right in terms of US English, but maybe I’m wrong…anyhow, I’m sure you’ll get my drift on this 🙂

This post at Scripting.com

Notice the link in the 4th paragraph for Russo & Hale.

Not having a go at Dave on this, I’d be doing the same thing in his situation, but it’s interesting to see the godfather of blogging undertaking SEO on posts to hijack Google in terms of his enemies business name. Having said that, is it wise taking on lawyers of all people?

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.