Internet

34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe from RSS feeds:

This is a must read for anyone that keeps a blog.

While it cannot be treated as gospel as the sample isn’t random it does provide some great insight as to why readers cancel their subscriptions to feeds. I suspect a lot of this is also applicable to the blog itself and not just the RSS feed.
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OMG!! WTF A TRANSLATOR LOL

Here is a great potential timewaster , a site that translates anything into a sort of 12 year old kid’s computer lolspeak chat type dialect

An example:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilisations; to boldly go where no man has gone before

morphs into:

SPAEC TEH FINAL FRONTEIR!1!111111 OMG WTF LOL THAS3 R TEH VOYAEGS OF TEH STARSHIP ENTARPRIES!!1!1!! LOL ITS FIEV-YAAR MISION 2 AXPLOR3 STRANGA NU WORLDS 2 SEK OUT NU LIEF AND NU CIVILISATIONS 2 BOLDLEY GO WH3RA NO MAN HAS GONE BFOR3

Checkboxes Not Showing in Google Chrome

Often the checkboxes on web pages are unavailable in the Google Chrome browser. Strange thing is, that everything was fine up until yesterday so I have no idea as to what triggered the issue. There are a some, mostly pretty inconvenient, workarounds here

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FBI Video and Social Web Widget

This FBI video and social networking widget is actually pretty cool. H/T Techcrunch

Wikibumps

This is a fun and potentially useful tool . It allows the user to enter a subject and a month and will return Wikipedia hit numbers. From a blogging perspective it could provide a useful indication of whether something is new or has already been done to death.

This graf from Andrea James at boing boing provides a better and more entertaining account than I ever could:

It turns out that wikibumps usually peak in the first 24 hours, then taper off in about a week, giving further evidence for the hypothesis that the public’s memory generally extends back to the last issue of People magazine. In some cases, the article achieves stasis at a higher level than it had before the wikibump. For instance, Kanye “Imma Let You Finish” West’s bump was 300,000. Taylor Swift’s was 250,000, butTaylor probably came out ahead, as she achieved stasis at more than twice Kanye’s views in December, the last full month of reporting.

boing boing

Now if I could only find a way of embedding the graph that is produced. Anyone?

A quick aside: it is possible to use this without using the interface linked above. Here is a search I did for a post on a different blog:

http://stats.grok.se/en/200901/ed_koch

the 200901 represents January 2009 and ed_koch was the search term. I have bookmarked the first part of the URL, now I can check any topic for any month in about 10 seconds flat.

Disqus Commenting is Crap

I agree with this person

who also sees absolutely no purpose to a centralized comment system for blogs.

It is not hard to put comments on a blog. Really, it is not hard at all.

It is not especially hard to block spam. This blog may not be popular but it’s over 4 years old and gets a LOT of spam; sometimes thousands a day if some bot gets into heat. All is dealt with. It’s not effortless but it’s pretty minimal.

Many blogs that I used to comment on now use Disqus and without exception the process is now much more muddled and way less user friendly than it ever was before. disqus is truly a solution without a problem.

Google Allows Ad Blockers use with Chrome

Interesting New York Times article about Google’s decision to allow Ad blocking technology on it’s own Chrome browser. Google makes it’s money through advertising. As you can see, this site uses Google advertising.

I could nitpick some of the points and I think that certain things will pan out a little differently than suggested but that doesn’t detract in any way from an excellent summary. The market penetration of Chrome though low in numbers is trending up and fast so the impact of this decision may be bigger than Google or the author are stating.

For now, Google is playing only on the fringes by tolerating ad-blocking programs on Chrome, despite the implied threat to its livelihood. Chrome is still a fringe browser — in the vastness of the Internet, 40 million users is still fringe — and ad-blocking browser additions are still a relatively fringe experience.

Beautiful People – Ugly Idea

If ever there was a startup that I would wish nothing but failure and pain on, this is it:

Here is the Beautiful People website

and this is their pitch:

Do looks matter to you, when it comes to selecting a partner?
Do you want to guarantee your dates will always be beautiful?
No more filtering through unattractive people on mainstream sites
Meet beautiful people locally and from around the world – now
Attend exclusive events and private parties

Not sure about the veracity of this quote:

“The sexiest website in the world today” – CNN

I was a bit surprised to find out that they were based in Denmark I must admit.

Social Networking and Small Business Resource

This is the best social networking primer and resource on the web. It is a collection of articles about social networking and small business with loads of links. It is very much targeted at those, especially small businesse owners who are not experts and possibly feel swamped by all the deluge of unsorted information and hype.

From the introduction:

From the fundamentals of Twitterbranding, to the importance of blogging, to getting work done with some great online tools, small businesses face many challenges when trying to understand how to use social media. However, taking the time to learn how to leverage social media and technology to benefit your business will pay big dividends in the long run.

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The Onion Headlines Dictate Stories

I have been a great fan of The Onion since the beginning but I’ve never known a thing about who put’s it together or what is involved. This interview with Joe Randazzo, editor puts that to rights

The process is very much a top down one i.e. the headlines come first, each staffer throws around a dozen into the pot then a sort of voting process takes place and sixteen or so are chosen. Then the stories are written in draft form, reviewed and rewritten.
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