This article from InternetNews.com points out an attempt by an advertiser to get regular references to their product/site from regular high traffic bloggers. Unless it is a clearly disclosed situation, I would be offended to find a post I am reading turns out to be a paid ad. The company says that the blogger can post a disclaimer if they like. Absent that, it has the elements of whoring your site. If you want sex for money at least yo u can say so! I hope the recipients do. They claim they will disclose who they are paying to post on the site FAQ.

The other interesting thing is that the advertiser says you don’t even have to say (more…)

For just $30 a year for a consumer, or $600 a year for commercial users, you can use Keyhole, an interactive mapping solution that gives you zoomable high definition images of the earth. I can see where a realtor for example, may benefit from being able to show a site to a prospective buyer. I can see an attorney using it to research the scene of an incident, etc. I think it may be a bit pricey for most, but it does have a free seven day trial. Many cities are in very high resolution, such as Boston in this example.

The recording industry, encouraged by favorable treatment from the most liberal federal bench in the US Appeals system, has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court, seeking to hold file sharing software companies responsible for the sharing done by clients of the company.

Among Monday’s petitioners siding with the entertainment companies were the Association of American Publishers, Screen Actors Guild, Recording Artists Coalition, National Basketball Association and the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Marks said. Now those are some strange bedfellows. One wonders how else they may be entertwined.

A fascinating article on the use of WiFi networks to relay messages via remote control cameras in high crime neighborhoods. New Orleans reports significant drops in crime. Of course then the question is how much standard monitoring do we as a free society tolerate? Do we have an expectation of privacy when we look around and don’t see anyone near us? Does crime prevention override issues of freedom from scrutiny? It might be one thing to kick on the cameras when they get a call, but to keep them running continuously … it has some downsides it might seem.

This article is a must read! This guy Mike Davidson just participated in a major redesign of the ABC News Site. The breadth and wisdom is so significant that I have included this post in six of my blog categories (general, web design, css, html, news, rss).

(more…)

Corel Software today (October 14th, 2004) announced the purchase of Jasc, the company that produces the popular Paint Shop Pro program. Hopefully it will lead to more widespread use of the program and will not lead to increased costs for this fine program.

According to a HollandSentinel.com article, a new bill would crack down on voyerism. I suspect it would also make a lot of my home movies illegal. There must be a better way?