According to a report in the Idaho Statesman, the xxx domain will not come into play for some time, if ever. Again the name was not approved as a top level domain extension today when considered in New York via teleconference. They did however approve .cat for sites using Catalan language.

In a fascinating turn of events, a guy alleges he was getting a ton of SPAM (hardly unusual nowadays). Claiming he’d had enough, he sent an opt out request as is legal in his area. His opt out request was promptly ignored and after detailing the problem on his site, he had a lawsuit filed against him by the spammer, and all the while he says they were sending him yet more SPAM. They sued him for 3.8 million because he called them spammers. You need to read this folks, at the very least you’ll get a laugh at the spammers sheer audacity. www.SpamDVD.org is where you need to go for more information.

[update: We have been contacted by someone claiming to be a lawyer for the other side of this dispute. We invited them to submit their side of the story so we can present their side of things as well.]

Not long ago Google launched a beta service enabling web site owners / developers to create and submit a sitemap. The aim of this is to assist Google / Googlebot with the indexing of every page in your web site, using a standard XML format that lists every URL.

Popular reaction was undoubtedly to embrace this opportunity and start creating sitemaps straight away. Call me simple if you like, but when I started reading Google’s instructions I found it very confusing and very daunting. I consider myself to be highly competent in (x)HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but like many have had no exposure to XML format. The link to the Sitemap Generator looked promising (I was hoping for “Sitemaps for Dummies”) only to find that you need to have / understand Python to use it. It all looked too hard when I first saw it, so I shelved the idea for another day.
(more…)

In response to Microsoft’s questionable paid reports that Windows is cheaper in TCO then Linux comes two new reports from IBM that report the opposite, in fact according to the reports Linux is about 40% cheaper then Windows in the application server stakes.

In other news, the Massachusetts state government has decreed that from 2007 all documents saved by their employees will be saved in open formats. Unless Microsoft adds support for those formats to Office or creates plugins, they are going to lose a good many Office users, possibly to products like OpenOffice.