Got $100,000 You Can Have Your Own TLD
So ICANN in another attempt to make more money from nothingness is now going to allow anyone with $100,000 the ability to become it’s own domain registrar.
So that means you can expect to see some crazy top level domains like maybe .xxx, .sex, .pig, etc. This will clearly make it more confusing to the average joe and maybe even make it easier for phishers to catch a few credit card numbers or usernames and passwords.
ICANN must not realize that this isn’t going to help anything, of course this is great for people like Google and Yahoo, search engines are going to be incredibly necissary to navigate the net when you have thousands of top level domains to remember, I have a hard enough time trying to remember whether or not some websites are on a .com or a .net TLD, this will only make it harder.
So thanks ICANN, this is one more step towards making the internet a confusing and ridiculously insecure place. I salute you and your stupidity.
Associated Press Charges Bloggers For Quoting
So apparently this is what the Associated Press considers fair use. Quoting 4 words or less can be done for free (that’s practically not even a quote), quoting 5-25 words will cost you $12.50, quoting 26-50 words will cost $17.50, quoting 51-100 words will cost you $25, quoting 101-250 will cost $50, and 251 words and up is $100.
Do they really expect this to work?
Unfortunately for AP there are too many blogs for them to look through to make sure everyone is following the rules, obviously they could just sue the big guys until the little guys get scared but that is no way to do business (we’re learning that from the music industry right now).
I think every blogger has their own rules for what is and what isn’t acceptable, I for instance believe that I can quote no more than 3 sentences and afterward must give a link to the original story. Some may consider 3 sentences to be too long but I think that any less (in most circumstances) wouldn’t be able to give enough context and someone would be able to twist the quote into meaning something else.
I think the AP is still trying to live in the newspaper world, and now that they can’t control where they’re content is going (like they could by licensing it to newspapers) they are getting scared. Of course they shouldn’t be scared because the only rule they should have is that people link back, meaning that when someone looks for that story because other places are linking to AP, AP will always show up higher in search engines.
Bottom line is that they are going about it all wrong and I wouldn’t be surprised if people completely disregard these rules (as they have been for a long time) and just do whatever they feel is right.
New Google Reader For iPhone Makes Me More Productive
Yesterday Google released a new version of Google Reader for the iPhone with some much needed improvements. Remember this is a beta (hopefully it doesn’t stay this way for months and months like so many other web 2.0 properties do) but it seems to be incredibly stable and I haven’t run into any problems with it myself.
The new version is a lot like the list view in the desktop version, you can scan the titles of items and star them without having to reload the page. If you want to read an item just tap it and it will expand in place so you can read the item and tap the title again to have it collapse back in on itself. You never have to read list view to do all of your feed reading. One last thing that I think is great about it is that when you tap to see the original item it use to take you to Google’s make-pages-look-better-in-cell-phones server which on the iPhone isn’t the optimal way of doing things, now it takes you to the full web page.
Because it is still beta going to google.com/reader isn’t going to automatically take you there, instead you have to go to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to use the new and improved version.
There are a couple of things I don’t like about it though, “mark all items as read” at the top of the page but “mark these items as read” at the bottom of the page seems very odd to me , who ever wants to mark all of your unread items in all of Google reader unread at one time? I also don’t like how the “Refresh” and “Feeds” buttons look, they seem a little too big for me, although it could just be the design of the button that makes it seem so large.
Cutting Down On Your RSS Feeds
I know it has been nearly two months since the last time I posted and I’m not going to apologize for it, mostly because I have good reasons for not post (sick for nearly two weeks, traveling, terribly busy with other projects), but also because I think it is terribly cliche for bloggers to post once every few months and then spend the first few paragraphs talking about why they haven’t been posting… I’m only going to use the first paragraph.
So one of the major problems that I have run into when it comes to keeping up with the news is packing too many RSS feeds into your reader. I don’t have the hundreds of RSS feeds that I know some people do, I can’t, I have some sort of weird impulse forcing me to empty the new items out of my RSS reader everyday, that way I never get behind. That wouldn’t be so bad but for the past year and a half or so I’ve been collecting RSS feeds from all sorts of places, currently I only have 102 feeds but that translates to nearly 1,000 items a day that I have to look through.
What I needed to do was find out two things:
What RSS feeds haven’t been updated in a few months and don’t see any signs of updating in the near future?
and
What RSS feeds do I actually use?
I would like to get rid of all of the feeds that haven’t updated in a while and the ones that I don’t use. Now Google Reader (my RSS feed reader of choice) makes it pretty easy to find out what feeds haven’t been updated in a while.
From the picture above you can see that I only have one RSS feed that I’m willing to get rid of that hasn’t updated in the past few months, Cellularized.com can be removed from my reader.
Done.
The next batch of RSS feeds that I’d like to get rid of are the ones I don’t actually use. Since Google Readers trends doesn’t lend itself very nicely to my workflow (which is I use J and K to go through the feeds, hit S to star them, then when I’m done I go through the starred items, unstar them and bookmark them in my browser), I had to find another way of figuring out what feeds I use. What I decided to do was, every time I went into my starred items I listed all of those feeds in a spreadsheet. After about a week and a half I had 77 feeds listed in the spreadsheet.
I went through all of the feeds that I haven’t starred anything in and decided whether or not I wanted to keep them, I deleted the ones I didn’t want to keep and the rest stayed in.
I ended cutting about 20 or so RSS feeds off of my reading list, this has significantly lowered the amount of items I’ve had to read on a daily basis (many of the feeds I got rid of would post nearly 30 items a day), I’ve got the average items per day down to roughly 800, which doesn’t sound like it is much smaller than 1,000 but trust me, it is.
End.
Here Comes Another Bubble
I haven’t posted any videos here before but I figured that since Blogging is such a large part of Web 2.0 it was relevant.
I’m not sure whether the bubble is close but I do think that a second bubble will come, when? I don’t know. I wish I did, but that is just not how things worked. hopefully it will be quite a while but at the same time, maybe it would be better for it to just get over with.
I’m not going to talk much about this because I don’t know enough about business to understand this stuff, but I do understand that most of the last bubble was fueled by IPOs, this time we don’t have that, but we do have a limited number of advertisers and I think that the money being thrown at online advertising will start to dry up, and that, in my opinion, is going to be what fuels this next bubble.