I’d comment on this post, but unfortunately like all Gawker Media blogs you need an invite to comment and so far I’ve only got commenting rights at Valleywag (hint, hint 🙂 ). Congrats though to LifeHacker on picking up the award for best group weblog at The Bloggies. To be honest I probably only subscribed 6 months ago, and some days I wish I hadn’t, it’s far too useful and I probably need less things installed on my computer, not more. It’s also great to see a site that has a positive message going well in an age where snark, gossip and snipping is par for the course. Today I’m hooked, and I hope to be for many years to come. LifeHacker should be the jewel in Nick Denton’s crown because it really is just a completely wonderful site, and if that sounds corny I can only apologise, it’s just that good.
Blog
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Yahoo launches Brick House, but is she that sexy?
TechCrunch reports on Yahoo BrickHouse, “a new semi-autonomous business unit to foster new product development”, but is she good looking, after all, brickhouse is slang for “Full-figured female. Really built.”, or alternatively “very voluptuous woman, NOT like Halley Berry or Jessica alba. Thick and tough like Beyonce or J’lo”. Maybe Yahoo! has a fat arse, or is that going to far? Certainly anyone who has used Yahoo’s publisher network knows that compared to Google she certainly is slow off the couch 🙂
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Hope for the online gambling community
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank is considering a bill to repeal a ban imposed last year on online gambling, said a spokesman for the lawmaker on Wednesday.
“Chairman Frank is considering legislation,” said Steven Adamske, spokesman for the Massachusetts Democrat, who chairs the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.
Now if only we had a politician with the guts to introduce legislation to overturn the ban on online gambling in Australia…ok, I’m dreaming, the chances of that happening are the same as having a true libertarian free market government elected later this year as well, zero and zilch.
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The iRack launched
This is clever:
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Where Land Cruisers go to die: Portland, Oregon
This clever kid is importing old Land Cruisers from Australia to convert to biodiesel for resale in the US, apparently Australian Land Cruisers are the “best cared-for”. I wonder if he needs to convert them to left hand drive? At least now we know where old Land Cruisers go to die: Portland, Oregon.There’s got to be some irony in Australia exporting second hand cars to the United States 🙂
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AuctionAds looking good
I’ve been watching with interest the launch by Jeremy Schoemaker of AuctionAds , a sort of eBay meets Adsense product with ads like this:
I’ve held of signing up until now because I was waiting to be convinced by some hard proof that they convert competitively, and it now looks like EarnersBlog has some proof. I’m flat out with 5 things on the go at the moment but I’ll give it a try myself and report back in a week or two. Certainly it seems like it will become another strong alternative in the online marketers toolbox.
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Organising Information
Just wrote a post at 901am on the latest efforts by the Chinese Government to further censor blogs and remembered that I’d read an article in the last week of so about how the censorship regime works in China. Thanks to the wonders of Web 2.0 I found the article in my BlueDot feed. OK, so I’m late to the social bookmarking movement but the concept of bookmarking has value when you suffer from information overload like I do: I find far, far too many interesting things every day and if I was willing I could probably end up writing 15-20 posts a day, but the 48 hour day is yet to be invented and as is usually the case only a handful end up being posted, and yet adding things to BlueDot is a sinch..but more importantly it’s handy to use as a reference point when I’m looking for something I can remember reading a week before, or even longer. Given that despite 2 hours of trying to prune them my Firefox Bookmarks are still out of control it might be time to add another account somewhere, maybe a private one to bookmark other things as well, business stuff such as software, scripts, how-to guides I want to come back to etc etc… certainly my conversion to all things Web 2.0 is progressing 🙂
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New Wii commercials
Looks like the emphasis is moving onto Mii creation. In a house of 3 people we’ve got at least 10 Mii’s on our Wii now, the golden child loves setting them up, although name choices such as xcgddc are interesting…I’ll have to work on his typing 🙂
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Is Sensis driving traffic to Yellow Pages by stuffing White Pages?
Anyone tried a business search lately on whitepages.com.au? Where as once the site was a great resource for finding contact details, it’s now as useless as tits on a bull, even when using the correct business name. Pop across to yellowpages.com.au and it works straight away. This is a fairly new phenomena, certainly I’ve noticed it only in the last couple of months, question is though: is Telstra/ Sensis purposely destroying business search at Whitepages to drive traffic to YellowPages? It’s certainly working that way in this household, I’ve just about given up using whitepages.com.au now to find phone numbers when I need them.
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Why Australia will never catch up in Web 2.0
SFGate: Where neo-nomads’ ideas percolate
If there’s no WiFi there’s no Web 2.0 office, there’s no Web 2.0 culture, there’s no Web 2.0 development on the scale we see in the US. Whilst the Australian Government (and Opposition) remain obsessed with regulating the internet, nothing is being proposed or done to increase the affordability of broadband, cost being the main factor that limits the offering of free wireless in Australian cafes. When you continue to act like a backwater, it usually means if you aren’t already one, you soon will be.