Tagvertising on new levels

So we got another form of advertising, along the lines of 1000tags. I took a look at ZoomTags in the office this morning, bit of a shaky start as I couldn’t get registered for the program to start out with due to an error on the registration form (a matter which was later fixed in the day), alas now that code won’t start displaying on my blog until February 6th… but its a start.

The gist of it being that you set up a tag cloud, with predetermined keywords if you prefer on your website, not at all unlike del.icio.us, and thats about it for your part. Advertisers in turn bid on the keywords and it works off a pay-per-click system.

If you blog, and you like your tags, then this might be just for you….

For You AdSense Heads

For those of you about to rock…. we salute you.

For those of you using AdSense, you might want to check this article out. Seems to be the same stuff cropping up the more I research it, but this one, just fresh from Google, is relevant all the same.

Bloggers Be Banned!

The Japanese team taking part in the Winter Olympics in Italy have been pretty much warned ‘blog – and you’re on the next plane home‘. Bad news for the Japanese, but good news for bloggers in a sense. The JOC are instructed their teams not to start blogging the Winter Games as the Olympic Charter bans athletes’ journalist activities when the games are on, and violators will be disqualified. Of course, this would suggest that bloggers are now journalists?

If thats the case then I’d like my free press pass to a few certain places this year, thank you very much…

Seriously though, it is a little outlandish. Some of the sporting committee’s are even going as far as telling their members, who have personal homepages, to stay away from the internet and not update their sites while they participate in the games.

Anyone ever heard of the freedom of speech and all that?

Take 2 in hot… coffee…

I’d safely say that almost anyone who has owned a Playstation 2 or used one, has at some stage, tried their hand at the Grand Theft Auto series. I’ve been a fan ever since the top-down first version, and even that one was given a 15/18 cert when it was released in certain areas. Having grown up with the series on the PC and then trying my hand at the console when Vice City and San Andreas were released, I was astounded to hear today that Take Two Interactive are being sued, for a nice sum for hiding a mini-game within the PC version of GTA : San Andreas which depicts the main character in sexually explicit scenes, which can be controlled by the user. The minigame itself has been dubbed ‘Hot Coffee’.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has taken Take-Two to court for deceptive business practices and making false statements in marketing the game, for its failure to reveal the extent of its sexual content.

The smart thing is, Take-Two originally claimed that the scenes were added by hackers in the form of a mod for the game, until later admitting that the scenes and minigame were actually embedded within the original code. Big mistake there lads!

Check this article covering the original story (pre-court case), mid last year. Did anyone else NOT know about this?

Hacker Tricked Into Jail

If you’re going to steal software, or download software – for the love of God don’t start selling the stuff as well! Microsoft just sent the US hacker behind IllMob.org to jail for a two year period, followed by a three-year supervised release which will be monitored by special software set up on his own computer.

What did he do? He advertised, and twice sold, incomplete portions of source code for Windows 2000/NT, first selling to a private investigator before selling to an FBI agent which got him indicted under selling a company’s stolen trade secrets. The fact of course that he has a previous criminal record for trespassing, repeated theft and assault didn’t really help his case.

“Basically, everything I do, I do ass-backwards,” Genovese said in an instant-messaging interview ahead of Friday’s sentencing. “I like drawing, so I spray paint. I like music, so I took some radios of kids I hated in high school. I like computers, so I hack.”

You can read the full story here

Google Has A New Rival – Kosmix

$7.4 million in venture capital funding and a bet that they can finally crack the “meaning” of a webpage based on its content sees two Stanford graduates (same college as the Google boys) launching Kosmix, currently alpha, as a new search engine with a different approach to results. Kosmix, like Google and Yahoo, is crawling and indexing the entire Web. It has come up with its own technology to rank pages by category, instead of by keyword. It’s two founders, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan are both ex-Amazon (Director of Technology and General Manager respectively)

nstead, Kosmix looks at what pages that link to other pages are saying — to take a bigger stab at judging the meaning or subject of the page. If the linking page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can begin getting at its meaning, or at least muster up enough information to categorize it by topic. Harinarayan calls it “category rank.” Kosmix is essentially tagging pages with categories. “Auto-tagging the Web,” as Harinarayan puts it.

Certainly an interesting read of an article for your Friday evening browse of the web!

Landmark Ruling for UK Filesharing

Via BBC… High Court judges ordered two men to pay the British Phonographic Industry between £1,500 and £5,000 for making thousands of songs available online. One of the men said he did not know he was acting illegally, the other said there was no evidence against him. The BPI has launched 139 similar cases since October 2004, most being settled out of court for up to £6,500.

“Your honour… I didn’t know that it was illegal and I should have been paying for the stuff”… I can see it now. Sets a good example though with IRMA currently in Phase II of its fight against the same. Also nice to hear that last years legal music sales finally outweighed the illegal!

BlogBeat Followup

I have to commend Jeff at BlogBeat for his quick turnaround in answering my few questions on the service, namely about installing blocking cookies on your machine in order to prevent tracking your own visits from your own computer. He has thankfully allowed me to make the trick public as well, with announcement to follow at BlogBeat early next week.

“From the browser you’d like to block, browse to your blog’s URL with this querystring “?bbnyah”… So for you, it would be “http://www.kenmc.com/?bbnyah” (w/o the quotes).”

If you want to count your visits again, look through your cookies for the one labelled ‘bbnyah’ and remove it. This should be itegrated to BlogBeat screens on Monday but its another cute trick that I’m fond of, and thanks again to Jeff for the quick turnaround.

The Power Of Blogs

Forbes.com have an interesting article on the power of blogs and bloggers in helping a company drive a product to the masses.

One interesting point that was raised…

To get noticed by bloggers, companies should appoint internal bloggers and start them blogging,” said Wyman. “Of course, the blogs must be authentic. Also, companies can sponsor blogging events and meet the bloggers themselves to see what makes them tick.“

Take a read of Tapping Into The Blogosphere, pretty good stuff.

Blogbeat Your Blog

BlogBeat has launched recently enough and is offering 30 day trials to users to help you track statistics across both your blog and RSS feed. I’m already tracking with StatCounter which is throwing up some useful statistics, Google Analytics is in there too in the background so whats the harm in trying a third one?

“Bogbeat provides all of the basic statistics including visitors, referrers, search engines, browsers, etc.., but also has great post detail stats, RSS statistics (for Feedburner), comment tracking, outgoing links, and more…”

It’s going to cost $6 a month for blogs that are under a half million page views monthly, which I sit into just about right so what harm… The trial is up on February 27th so I’ll report back before then with the findings! In the meantime, SolutionWatch have a great review of the service, or you can try it for yourself at BlogBeat.

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Update: Emailed a friendly guy at BlogBeat who also informed me that the tracking has the same blocking cookie function as StatCounter, just not seen yet when you login, but kindly sent me the link – and it works. Snappy response, I like it!

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