This is the personal blog of internet web monkey Kevin Muldoon.
It provides a release for his tiny overworked little brain and stops him from getting an aneurysm!
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I had to laugh when I came across this story. It’s one thing to get caught walking in the street in Googles StreetView, it’s another thing to get caught sleeping on the street pissed off your head.
The man, Bill, is not planning to make a complaint.
I’m not too happy about it’ said Bill.
‘I mean, I wouldn’t have been there in the state that I was in, but I wasn’t really thinking there would be someone driving by with a video camera on the roof filming me, either,’ Bill, 36, said from northern Australia, where he is working with a fishing company.
‘What do you do when you lose a mate like that?’ he said of his pal, with whom he had been planning a motorbike holiday around the island of Tasmania.
‘I know what he would have done if I left – he would have partied, too. That’s what I would’ve wanted him to do so that’s what I did with some friends.’
Bill said he accepted he could not expect to have complete privacy in a public street, but he questioned whether his embarrassing moment should be broadcast over the internet.
I come across some great scripts from time to time. I do buy some of them but most of the time I don’t bother because I’m busy with other things or because I don’t think I’d be able to build a successful site with the script. Therefore, from now on I’m going to post some of these scripts and ideas here.
First up is a site called Revou. Revou is a PHP powered Twitter clone. Some features include :
100% source codes
Multi-Language
Template Driven
Free 1 year updates
Built-in API
SMS Integration
Supports SMS/IM/Web
Google Maps Integration
Widgets Plugin
Self-hosted platform
Your first thought might be the same as mine, why would you compete against something as insanely popular as Twitter? Revou answered this themeslves and explained many of the reasons why developing a Twitter type site could be a good idea. The two best points were
Geographical based Twitter clones – Twitter is popular all over the world however it is not as well known in many non-English speaking countries. Therefore, if your native language is not English, it might be worth developing a Twitter type site for your language eg Thai, Malaysian, Portugese or whatever.
Industry-Centric Twitter clone – This has a lot of potential too, perhaps even more than a language specfic focused Twitter Clone.Here’s the example they give for this type :
Peter runs an online affiliate marketing website and he is thinking of new ways to retain more members on his website and also to find a more effective way to promote his products/services to current/new customers. RSS feeds on 1 hand is a one-way communication and forums though with the ability for interaction between users, it only limits to web-based communication. ReVou microblogging software enables Peter to implement micro-blogging capabilities to his website by allowing his “followers” to get updated information about what he is doing (for example his recent campaign on “Making $10,000 in 21 Days with only a domain and $50 startup fees”). By doing so, it will bring greater interest to his members to find out how effective is the campaign via micro-blogging and Peter can also update his profile whenever there are any new affiliate marketing seminars. During seminars, he can also post live news update to his micro-blogging site thanks to ReVou micro-blogging software.
Of course, the above can already be done in Twitter though it could work well if you branded it differently.
Check out the demo to get an idea of how good the script is.
Would I purchase this script? Personally it isn’t for me. At $399 it’s a big investment for something which would need a lot of promotion and I don’t think I would see a return. However, those who already run a large website or company might find some use for this kind of script and I’m sure the price would be negligible, particularly if it was used a lot by employees or management.
Check it out if you have time and let me know what you think.
Well it looks like Google’s Street View is coming to the UK. Expect to see a small bald fat man with a camera the length of his arm at a street near you pretty soon. This will be followed by months of stories of privacy invasions, complaints and more.
Personally, I have no issue with it and I’m sure it will come in handy. Though I can appreciate the situations which have arose which have annoyed some people. A SEO webmaster recently talked about this on his blog (apologies, for the life of me I can’t find the story again so have no link).
The guy lived on a private estate which he explained meant that only residents, guests and the postman could enter. Door to door salesman, religious guys and whatnot are not welcome and it is clearly marked in several areas around the estate that it is private. Well Google didn’t care about this and they were found entering the private estate and taking pictures for street view. Of course, situations like this will arise with a service like this but it does seem that Google does take chances with certain things and will rather take the pic and remove it later than not take the pic.
There have been other situations where google have had to retake pics because of privacy issues. Like when this young lady forgot to wear jeans that fit her!!
Looks like YouTube is going to get taking to the cleaners. I don’t see how they will get out of this one. They have been showing copyrighted clips online with adsense ads at the side. They do remove copyrighted videos but it’s claimed they have been too slow and in the meantime made a lot of money with advertisements next to the videos.
I’ve read a few articles today about the launch of Amazon’s new payment system. Their payment system allows developers to use Amazons back end. I for one welcome. According to the New York Times there are 81 million customers in the USA with their credit card details in the amazon system so it would be beneficial for some websites to add this feature in that respect.
Many are not so keen on using this system though.
One advantage PayPal has over Amazon is that many large retailers see Amazon as a competitor. Companies like Toys “R” Us and Borders, the book chain, have retreated from selling products on Amazon.com, complaining that the company was undermining their sales on the site and using their sales data to compete more effectively with them.
“Many larger retailers express concern about partnering with Amazon because Amazon is one of their largest competitors and they don’t want Amazon to know their information,” said Scot Wingo, the chief executive of ChannelAdvisor, a company that helps retailers sell online. “On the other hand, eBay and PayPal aren’t going to use sales data to go source product themselves because they are not a retailer.”
When you think about it, this is a very smart move by Amazon. With over 80 million people with their details online with them in the USA alone, they are in a great position to get a head start into the payments industry. I can see why some retailers are a little reluctant though.
Google reported the other day that their servers have now indexed over 1,000,000,000,000 URL’s. Compare this with 26 million pages when they launched in 1998 and one billion in 2000. It’s a pretty good estimate on how much the web has grown in the last 10 years.
I see no reason why this growth will slow down. Internet usage is still increasing in developing countries and every day millions of more pages are generated. It’s amazing when you think the internet was originally used by academics to communicate with each other.
I switched on my pc this morning to see that I had a message from Sun to update my Java. They update quite frequently so I didn’t think anything of it. When I was skipping through the steps of the installation I noticed that they had an option to install Yahoo’s toolbar on my pc and it was already clicked. I tried to unclick it but I had stupidly already clicked the next button and the hourglass was there telling me I was too late.
This is a technique which software companies have used for years however I have noticed recently that many huge mainstream multinational companies are trying to get an extra buck by bundling crap with their scripts. I admit that in this instance I should have went through the installation procedure more carefully however it doesn’t change the fact that they are bundling it with Java in the first place and it doesn’t excuse them checking the box by default.
Of course, this is a very common method on the internet. Shopping sites nearly always sign you up to newsletters unless you specify otherwise and scripts from smaller companies sometimes don’t even tell you the crap they are installing on your computer.
The modern internet has been around for about 15 years however it remains a place which is rarely regulated and questionable methods of making money are still being used by billion dollar companies.
I finally got off my ass and did some work today. I arrived back from my 2 weeks holiday in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, on Sunday night. Yesterday was pretty much a write off with regards to work as I hadn’t slept much Friday and Saturday night so my body was playing catch up yesterday.
Anyways, I thought I would post about a funny story I read today on BBC. Today, people from the Greek island of Lesbos lost an appeal to stop gay women around the world calling themselves Lesbians. The guy who started the case, Dimitris Lambrou, said that islanders refer to themselves as Lesbians and the term has disgraced them for years.
I can appreciate that islanders may now be embarrassed and frustrated by what Lesbian means in todays world but I think it will be impossible to change the meaning of the word, particularly since Gay Women have been calling themselves Lesbians for years. I’d say they have as much chance as making the term ‘Gay’ mean fun and happy again.
This is the personal blog of internet web monkey Kevin Muldoon.
It provides a release for his tiny overworked little brain and stops him from getting an aneurysm!
