Archive for the ‘IT & Tech’ Category
As you may know from reading some of my other postings, I’m always a huge fan of people who use the internet to stand up for their beliefs. In an interesting article posted on CNN, reports show a large scale Iranian resistance to the latest political “election” over the internet.
I think its fantastic to hear people standing up against this crazy theocracy they call a government, and moreso great to hear of more middle-eastern countries using the internet as a protest tool.
While the government is doing a good job of cracking down on political discourse, online Iranians are holding to their convictions strongly. I support them – Iran could really show its colors in the middle-east right now!
Microsoft released their new search engine, Bing, earlier this month and has seen some small improvements as a result. Built off their existing LiveSearch functionality, Bing is essentially a face-lift to their previous search technology (a component of MSN). This article on Yahoo! Tech gives some statistical breakdowns of the search engine shares. En-brief: Google 60%, Yahoo! 20%, Microsoft 10%.
At this point, I’m not sure how anyone could compete with Google on a reasonable level. Setting a company upon the task of essentially reading and ranking every single piece of written literature on the internet is an amazing task, not to mention the efforts of attacking the extremely solid Google brand. I feel like Google is to the point where its like Coke is to soda- its synonymous with search.
Good luck with that Microsoft, I’m stickin’ with Google.
Today I wanted to make sure to officially announce that I offer quality affordable web hosting as a reseller to 15+ year veteran host ICDSoft. I have offered ICDSoft accounts for a number of years, but have recently decided to draw more attention to it as it really is a great service at a great price. Each package comes with top-notch customer support and a customized control panel that is yours to command. I’ve posted details on pricing and features on this blog.
To check out the details regarding my available hosting packages, and why you’d want to purchase one through me, please review my web hosting page.
Being a big proponent of OpenSource software, I’ve been using the OpenX ad server platform for many years now. Needless-to-say I was very happy to have recently downloaded and installed their latest release which features some huge improvements to their only shortcoming- the user interface.
OpenX is a free PHP/mySQL software thats fantastic for delivering advertisements for web for pretty much any kind of delivery from small ad tiles on your website or full server functionality (like for media players). Recently implemented on a Flash radio player developed for my buddies at CustomChannels, I’ve found it to be an easily customized and implemented solution for keeping tracking of ads and getting professional level statistics.
If you’re looking for a way to increase revenue to your website or implement a full-scale ad campaign for media delivery, ask me more about OpenX!
I read an interesting article on Yahoo! Tech news today following a case of a mayor in a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina who has decided to begin posting public notices online rather than using local newspapers. The mayor claims to have saved the city budget a surplus of $13,000 by utilizing online advertising rather than papers and it has caused quite a stir in the local media since state law previously required all public notices to be in newspaper form.
I think this poses and interesting conundrum: posting public notices (such as re-zoning and land developments in this case) online obviously shows a clear-cut pricing difference than newspapers which arguable saves everyone money, but at the same time folks who don’t have internet access (do they even exist anymore?) could miss out on important public messages.
I’m all for the death of newspapers and not just because I’m an online aficionado- I happen to think the newspaper had plenty of opportunities to change its pricing model, but like many dying media industries, refused to do so while it was still profitable. Evolve or die, no?
In an interesting article on Yahoo! Tech this afternoon, web founder (who helped develop the HTTP technology that runs the web) Tim Berners-Lee, spoke to a consortium in Madrid about online privacy. The discussion in question was a new piece of software that will allow ISPs to track demographics and deliver advertising to customers. Quoting Berners-Lee: “The postman does not open my mail, the telephone company does not listen to my telephone conversations. Internet use is often more intimate than those things.”. Word.
It seems like a lot of broad-band technologies seem to be taking a more pro-active approach to their advertising. I mentioned earlier cable television networks plan to do the same thing- gather localized demographics about what you watch and use it to target advertising.
Y’know, so many services gather incomprehensible amounts of data about us wherever we go, the pessimist in me thinks this argument is just a drop in the bucket even from the Founder.
I read an article at Yahoo! Tech today that peaked my interest just a bit regarding Cable TV attempting to try “targeted advertising”. Targeted advertising is when advertisements are custom delivered to you based on a trend (like how Amazon knows what to suggest for you).
I’m not surprised to see TV taking on some of the ad facets that have shown success online. With the advent of TiVO / DVRs, there are a lot more ways to skip ads. Television advertising has been seeing a drop every since the popularity of mass distributed internet video and I’ve heard stats that some MTV microsites score more ad revenue than their spin-off channels.
It’ll be interesting to see how this works out. Looks like we’ll need to find another way to circumvent TV ads yet again.
I read an interesting article today over at Yahoo! tech. Apparently the company Psystar is marketing a Mac OSX compatible desktop that is essentially a Mac clone for far cheaper.
I found this article fascinating as I had never heard of an official company making and distributing “Mac clones”. My question is- what took so long? The term IBM-PC clone has been around for almost 20 years now. Rumor has it Mac is suing Psystar too. I suppose if I had a distribution monopoly on something as large as the Mac brand, I’d want to sue the cloners too.
Given you could always build your own machine and put whatever operating system you wanted on it (like my Frankenstein machine), but this is one of the first I’ve heard of in mass production. Head over to Psystar’s website if you want to read more.