bloodykitty.com

Friends4Days is a sweet little site where you get matched with someone and you can converse for four days and then decide whether you want to keep them as a friend (presumably it has to be mutual) and then you get another friend in your inbox. I’m imagining that for the most part if the other party isn’t there for dodgy reasons, you’ll probably hang on to them as friends. Hope the right people and not spammers and network marketers get attracted to it.

SixApart makers of MovableType and LiveJournal have just released Vox, a social media sharing network (yspace/youtube/delicious), their big selling point is that they let everyone plug in to them so no barring of youtube videos a la myspace.

You might like make a video of yourself to send your new friend or stick on Vox, but Premiere is too expensive. Well there’s a whole heap of online video editors popping up that will do simple editing and let you use some cool effects. Most notable has been JumpCut because they recently got bought by Yahoo. But if there was an award for cutest logo, it has to be Eyespot, esp the one for sharing. Love it!

Just installed a new wordpress plugin for my blog, it’s called Now Reading and you can find the results of this if you scroll down the page and look for “Now Reading” in the (right) sidebar. Anyway, it lets you put in books in your collection and allocate them to whether you plan to read it in the future, reading it now or have read it plus it has a space for reviews and ratings and automatically makes a link to Amazon with a pretty little picture. It fit nicely into the sidebar but broke my theme on the actual library/book pages, I’ve tidied up a little, still some more to do but I can’t be bothered. Mind you, that wasn’t the plugin’s fault, it works beautifully, it’s just the wonderful world of wordpress templates and my haphazard CSS skills. Anyway, if you have a blog, check it out: Roblog » Now Reading

Apparently, as of May 2006, there were at least 360,000 Australian blogs. Here is a webcast on how you can set one up yourself. Also so you don’t get into trouble, a legal guide and a guide to blogging anonymously from the EFF (US). As well as some directories listing Australian blogs:
AustralianBlogs.com.au
The Australian Index
Australian Blogwise Listings

Star Wars: Collecting | Lucasfilm Wins Lawsuit Against Stormtrooper Pirate

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California has awarded Lucasfilm Ltd. $20 million in damages in a copyright infringement and unfair competition case against the British firm Shepperton Design Studios and its owner, Andrew Ainsworth. The court found that Shepperton Design Studios had been marketing unlicensed copies of stormtrooper helmets and costumes, and TIE fighter pilot helmets from the Star Wars films, as well as making misleading claims about the authenticity and origins of these items.

It was a relief though to see that Lucasfilms weren’t going to stop fans from making their own replicas.

“Lucasfilm vigorously protects its intellectual property rights in Star Wars,” said Howard Roffman, President of Lucas Licensing. Roffman noted that many Star Wars fans around the world produce replicas of Star Wars costumes for their own personal use and enjoyment, an activity to which Lucasfilm Ltd. has no objection.

There’s one called Sydney Life which is a blog of “student experience” which is predictably irritating (though less so since they’ve gotten on more bloggers), but more interestingly, academics and research groups are being encouraged to start up their own blogs so hopefully some more readable blogs might come out. You can find a list of Sydney Uni blogs here.

I like this one from PostSecret:

What I don’t like so much about them is their awful submission rules. Basically, you send them free content (your clever and charming postcards) and they won’t share it with it anyone. You are allowed to post ONE image as a link only, which is pretty stupid because it means that once you’ve linked to them once, you’re outrightly banned from giving them any further publicity (other than text links which are nowhere near as appealing), however much you might like a future postcard. They have made a book from it and I suppose plan future ones but it’s simple enough to attach a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial license to it and then maybe it would feel a lot less like exploitation.

By submitting information to PostSecret, you grant PostSecret a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including storing it on PostSecret servers and incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books.If you do not wish to grant PostSecret these rights, it is suggested that you do not submit information to this website. PostSecret reserves the right to select, edit and arrange submissions, and to remove information from the PostSecret website at any time at its sole discretion.

No image from this site may be used for any purpose without expressed written authorization, with one exception; you may post one image as a link to this site.

If you’re looking for some good cheap hosting for your website, DreamHost is a definite recommendation. For around $10/month you can host unlimited domains and get 2TB of monthly transfer which is HUGE and it increases at 16GB/week which is much more than many hosts will give for a month. Why am I writing this? Because they also send round the loveliest monthly newsletters, I just got one today and I feel all warm and fuzzy. They’ve also got a birthday special with $99.95 off any 1-2 year prepayment (code 9999) so you can get a year’s worth of hosting for about $20 which is damn good. Only warning is that you might need a little bit of internet nouse to navigate their control panel though, it’s not that good looking and there’s not much in the way of self installers. If you need something prettier/simpler, micfo.com is also really good and is what this website currently resides in.

It really does annoy me when people sue search engines and aggregators for copyright infringement, talk about biting the hand that feeds you. It’s hardly as if they are getting a free ride, I don’t want to even think about the many millions it costs to keep the Google servers going. Fact is, they provide an essential service and make the internet a much easier place to navigate.

Google in Tussle for Digital Rights

In early September, a Belgian court ruled that the search giant could not reproduce certain copyrighted titles and summaries on its Belgian Google News or Google.be Web site, throwing into question the entire concept of online news aggregation, and even search indexing… No question, portals and search engines funnel huge amounts of traffic to editorial Web sites. But there’s growing concern among publishers that they’re getting eyeballs but little or no revenue from news aggregators. At worst, their material is being expropriated and reproduced outright, with no return whatsoever to the copyright owner.

Maybe these publishers are jumping the gun a little soon, products such as Feedvertising (Text Link Ads) are now starting to provide the opportunity to monetise RSS feeds. Though it is depressing to think there are even more places for advertising to creep.

Not that I’m necessarily a huge fan of Google, I think you always have to be wary when a company is that big and powerful, however good its original start up philosophies might have been. There are a couple interesting posts on ZDNet (Google speak on copyright: content owners beware and Google: Web friend or Web foe) following on the above Belgian case and Google’s blogpost “Our Approach To Content”.

This could be really cool: Ning - Create your own Social Websites!
Ning gives you the platform and tools to create your own video, photo or group site which you can make public or private. You also get access to the source code which apparently is 100% customisable. It makes its money through ads and premium services (like $20/month to run your own ads which I think is a LITTLE steep). A pro for some and a con for others is that the web applications are hosted on their servers. I think it would be cooler if they did a Movable Type and sold licences to use it on your own server.

Just as words don’t mean the same thing when they are strung together in web addresses, poorly chosen keywords without any sort of decent linking algorithm in censorship software have bizarre and disturbing results.

The US Government in trying to give citizens of countries like China and Iran access to a politically uncensored web, used screening filters to stop those citizens from viewing pornography (it seems was a bandwidth/cost issue not a moral one, however given that ‘gay’ was one of the keywords used one does wonder…):

an independent report released Monday reveals that the U.S. government also censors what Chinese and Iranian citizens can see online. Technology used by the IBB [U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau], which puts out the Voice of America broadcasts, prevents them from visiting Web addresses that include a peculiar list of verboten keywords. The list includes “ass” (which inadvertently bans usembassy.state.gov), “breast” (breastcancer.com), “hot” (hotmail.com and hotels.com), “pic” (epic.noaa.gov) and “teen” (teens.drugabuse.gov). (U.S. blunders with keyword blacklist | Perspectives | CNET News.com)

That was in 2004, but earlier this year, Google committed a similar blunder, censoring any site that had “Essex” in its domain name and sexual health sites. It also has blackballed entire servers because one user may have a human rights awareness site.