Category: General

Reports coming in that Adbrite is sick, that sites serving Adbrite ads are taking for ever to load and even then aren’t showing ads. I’ve just stripped the Adbrite code here from duncanriley.com and the site is now loading nice and quickly, however being the Foundation Day public holiday here (and with the family at home) I’m not totally up to speed on the issue, but Darren does report that it’s affecting everyone using Adbrite, including Gawker Media Blogs. Anyone using Adbrite seeing the same thing??

Tags: Adbrite

Reading this post at Problogger, and click on the link to this blog, and I find Stuart Robinson, from Busselton, WA, about 30 minutes down the road. That makes 3 South West (WA) bloggers I know of! Maybe on day we can get to 10!

For those people who read my earlier post about Blogdesk and love it as much as I do (it’s the first time I’ve ever used a 3rd party blogging tool for longer than a day, and it’s been 6-8 weeks now!) I’ve done up a button you can put up at your site to help Johannes out in promoting the product:

There are some smaller buttons here as well on the BlogDesk site, but I was looking for something bigger, so I made it!

If you are running Windows, blogging, and haven’t given BlogDesk a spin yet, get it here. It’s by far the best blogging tool I’ve ever used, and until now I’ve pretty much disliked 3rd party blogging tools full stop. Image editing, Technorati Tags, spell check and much more. Trust me on this one, even people who don’t like me (Hi Martin!) have agreed with me that this is a bloody great tool! And yes, I’m NOT being paid for this, nor have I been asked to promote it. Honest to god truth, this tool saves me 30 minutes minimum every day by NOT having to use Photoshop to edit photos. Give it a try.

Tags: Blogdesk

One of my favourite games designers, Al Lowe, he of Leisure Suit Larry fame, a game that I spent many, many hours playing on my old XT with its EGA monitor and 10mb HD, is making a comeback, and in true Al Lowe style, its with a comedy offering.

Gamasutra has the interview here.

Tags: Al Lowe

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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