Everything Else

The Paris-based World Association of Newspapers, whose members include dozens of national newspaper trade bodies, said it is exploring ways to "challenge the exploitation of content by search engines without fair compensation to copyright owners."

Full story at Editor and Publisher.

There have been rumbles and it was just a matter of time.

According to John Battelle they can identify your IP address - at least Google can. It makes you look at that 35 year cookie that Google has in a new light.

I had an email advertisement in my inbox this morning from Rhapsody.com, which is Real.com's subscription music service, saying that they are now available for Apple Mac computer users. If the subscription model (as opposed to the purchase model) for music interests you I suppose it is worth looking at.

Is Google considering acquiring digital music subscription service Napster? That is the rumor reported by the NYPost. I think I heard a few weeks ago that Napster was starting to lay-off people.

Which would make sense for Google to buy a company like Napster, in order to get into the digital music business, rather than try to build it from scratch.

Earlier I talked about Delicious Library which is a software program for indexing your libraries of Books, Movies, Music and Games. I thought I would post an update now that I have indexed everything.

First I bought the Bluetooth barcode reader from Delicious Library. It made indexing over 300 movies on both DVD and VHS very fast. In fact I was done in just a couple of hours! The music went slower - much slower - because most of my CD's have been bought through BMG Classical Music Club and do not have UPC bar codes on them. Compounding this: most of my classical CD's are from the early 1990's and are now out of print. So the bottom line was that I was going to have to do a lot of hand searching. Thank goodness I have broadband! Through trial and error I found the best way was to do a classical music search right on the Amazon.com website. Usually I could find the CD I owned that way. Then I would copy the Amazon ASIN # into Delicious Library and then use that to import the Amazon information for that CD. Once I got the workflow down it didn't take that long, but it was nowhere as fast as scanning barcodes.

The rock and jazz CD's went faster. About 2/3rds of those had barcodes. And those that did not were easy to locate through the title search on Delicious Library.

I also like the ability to download an inventory to my iPod - it is an easy solution to making the Library portable so I can take it with me to the store.

I'm very impressed with the functionality and very visual presentation of Delicious Library. Considering that one program catalogs 4 different collections for a list price of $40 it is a bargain for Apple Mac users. And I finally feel I have a handle knowing what titles I own.

Recently I found a pretty neat website to learn about single serve coffee makers and coffees: Singleservecoffee.com. It looks like a good source for reviews and news of product releases.

There are so many new types of coffee pod makers, coffee pods and even newer systems I though I should re-examine my own modest single serve coffee maker the Melitta OneOne. I bought the Melitta well over a year ago, back before either Folgers or the Senseo machines were available in the USA. You never really hear much about the Melitta and there do not seem to be a lot of third party pods made specifically for it, whereas coffee pods sized to fit both Senseo and Folgers are everywhere.

So how does the Melitta machine stand up?

Quite well actually, depending a bit on your lifestyle. I've been very happy with my Melitta machine. The java pods available from Melitta are limited, or so I thought, until I looked at the Senseo varieties available at the supermarket and found that Melitta has as just as many if not more pods available. I like the Buzzworthy dark roast the best and I also use the Skip the Buzz decaf for after dinner coffee in the evening.

Pods Price and Availability:

Here we have a difference. Most grocery stores in my area do not carry Melitta pods. Which means I have to order them online. For me this is no hardship since I order most things online already. The Melitta pods seem to contain more coffee than the others (they are thicker and heavier although smaller in diameter). Each Melitta pod makes a good 8 oz. cup of coffee, whereas it takes two Senseo pods to make an 8 oz cup. So even with shipping, the Melitta pods are about the same cost as Senseo. If you can find an online retailer selling Melitta pods with free shipping you actually come out ahead on price. An added bonus is Melitta pods are individually sealed for freshness.

Moreover the Melitta has Cooper tea pods available and they make a very good cup of tea, quickly.

Bottom line:

For me, I think I did pretty well in choosing the Melitta. The machine has stood up well to a year and a half of daily use. Is easy to clean. While I can't buy pods in my local supermarket, I can order them online.

(Actually, in a pinch, you can use a Senseo pod in the Melitta machine and use it to make one 4 oz. cup. You have to just mash the Senseo pod down into the holder. I tried making an 8 oz. cup with the Senseo pod but it was too weak.)

I know myself well enough that I'm not going to pay $200+ for a coffee maker. For day to day coffee, I'm not going to pay any more than what I'm paying now for coffee pods, which is at the low end of the scale. I actually like the Melitta coffee pods I have tried, they make a nice big mug of coffee, quickly, with little fuss or mess. So if my machine broke today I think I would still buy another Melitta machine. I was tempted by the Senseo machine because friends of mine love theirs but I don't see it as being any better than the Melitta. Even though you never hear much about it, I still think the Melitta is a great machine to own.

I just polished off my third loaf of bread machine bread. This was the Honey Wheat Berry mix by Krusteaz, which I found at my local supermarket. It produced a nicely shaped and thoroughly competent loaf of bread. The bread reminds me as being like the mid-level premium brands of bread like Sara Lee might produce.

The package did not say anything about whole grains so that is a minus. If I'm going to bake bread at home I really want it to be whole grain bread and better than most of the store bought breads. The Krusteaz matches some of the store bought breads, but I didn't think exceeded them.

MovieLens is a non-profit, ad-free, movie recommendation hickey.  Basically you rate a bunch of movies and it suggests other movies you might like.  Sorta like Amazon but they are not trying to sell you stuff. Run by University of Minn.

Source: Search Engine Watch

I was reading this post by Wil Shipley this morning. And I just made the connection that Wil is involved with both Delicious Library, which I just bought over the weekend, and also with OmniWeb which is a premium browser for Mac OS X. Well I'm impressed enough with Delicious Library to take a new look at OmniWeb as a browser. I tried it once many years ago and I didn't like the rendering engine. But now it is using the same rendering engine as Safari so I think it merits a new test. OmniWeb has a free 30 day trial so I will give it a test for the next month.

Stay tuned.

I'm back to using Safari for awhile. I was using Camino, which I like, but Camino does not tap into the features of OS X the way Safari does.

But there are two things that allow me to use Safari now as my default browser:

1.) I'm no longer using Typepad or Blogger for blogging. Safari just does not do JavaScript the way the rest of the browsers do it so the WYSIWYG posting controls for Typepad and Blogger do not work with Safari.

2.) I have modified Safari with AcidSearch, which allows me to add my own search engines and change the default. Plus I can highlight and right-click and run a search on my new default engine - Clusty. I really hate it when browser makers dictate what search engine I have to use. Without something like AcidSearch I would not bother using Safari.

Who know in a month I might be back to using Camino.

I have been putting this off till after Christmas but I had to break down and buy Delicious Library, a library inventory program which keeps track of books, movies, music and games. I like it that one program tracks all 4 types of items, even though I have very few games. The neat thing is this program will send the inventory to my iPod so I can take my inventory with me (although I would have preferred it sync to my Palm PDA.)

The program is very good about fetching information from Amazon after you type in the book title.

The truth is I can never remember which CD's or movies I happen to have and that is what requires me to break down and buy some software. I often buy them as gifts for others and the titles just blur together.

I am going to treat books a bit differently. Mainly it will be a list of books I have bought from this point onward and it will not totally be accurate because I normally buy the ebook addition of a book whenever possible.

I also ordered the optional, Bluetooth, laser bar code scanner to help me inventory all those CD's and movies faster ... I'm such a lazy slug.

My friend and co-moderator with me at Spider Food Forums has a new search and SEO related weblog. First up is an interview with DaveN.

Congrats to UKGimp.

I deal a lot with books, ebooks, authors and publishing. One thing that has been pointed out about print book publishing is that the editors no longer decide which books get published, the marketing department does and that there is a warning there for ebook publishers to keep the editors in charge.

The way this relates to the Web:

Marketers decide which sites get the highest ratings in the search engines. Search engines are all about marketing. Per Searchengineblog.com:

If you do no SEO whatsoever, but market well, you can get a site ranking in the serps in days, not months. Getting users to bookmark sites, talk about sites, visit sites, engage with sites (marketing, in other words) is the way forward.

The editorial controlled Web was one driven by directories like Dmoz, which has editors deciding which sites are noteworthy based (theoretically) on quality.

It is important to remember that search engines are marketing machines and that the algo and software programs of the search engines are not a judge of true quality, but that they are driven by marketing forces. The second thing to remember, is that marketing devolves to the lowest common denominator and that further undermines quality. It is an essential weakness of search engines.

Related: SEOBook - Marketing Art on the Web.

This is a checklist of things I need to remember to have my friend do in preparation for establishing and doing business on the web. This will be a running list.



General:

1.) Free Web Based Email Address - This is the very first step. Use this for all fan contact on the web. no sense in exposing one's ISP email to spammers by posting it on the web. Encrypting the email address will only slow things down. Recommend Yahoo email or Gmail, because both have excellent spam filters and antivirus built in. Both free. Also use this email for signing up for webmasters services since one tends to get put on mailing lists.



If Using Pro (Paid) Hosting:

1.) Find Easy to use Domain Registrar - At least Easier than Godaddy, which I think is confusing at checkout with all the special offers they make you jump over before purchasing a domain. Also the control panel is so-so for user friendly.

I have this project coming up: I need to advise a writer (novelist type) friend of mine about starting his very first web site, so I figured I would blog about it as I go along. We have not discussed what exactly he wants to do with this first site, but it is good practice for him because he is going to (does) need some sort of web presence from a marketing standpoint even if he gets published by a big publisher.

I want to encourage him to use this first site to learn. So that when he goes on to make his official author site later he will have learned a bit about web design. I think for this first site he wants to serialize a story (which can be a great marketing ploy.)

Now this writer nows zero about HTML, but he can make MSWord word processor do anything he wants it to so a good WYSIWYG web builder for Mac would be handy and he should have no trouble learning to use it. I publish this site with Rapidweaver, a client based CMS, which uses premade templates and is as easy to use as any full featured word processor and has the added advantage of providing consistent navigation. Better, it's only $35 - writers are very poor so that is important.

I wanted to see if Rapidweaver would work with a free web host so I signed up to Tripod which allows direct FTP access. Short answer is No: something stops the FTP upload process when Rapidweaver tried to upload CSS stuff. I'm not sure what all that is about. You can see the results. Rapidweaver has some sort of "smart ftp" setting, I might try to set that differently and see if that works.

A Blogger blog would work fine if this is a serialized story project, but then he would not be learning how to use Rapidweaver. Well I have time to think of something.

Feh! My first couple of loafs didn't rise so good. I am investigating.

Loaf #1: This was a 9 Grain mix. I think it was because the house and also the water was too cool the house was at 68 degrees and the water only slightly above room temp. This mix uses the Whole Wheat setting which lets all the ingredients sit for 1/2 hour so there is plenty of time to cool off. Ended up with a very moist dense loaf.

Loaf #2: This is a Bob's Red Mill 100% Whole Wheat. I cranked the furnace up to 72 and used warmer water. This loaf uses a white bread setting so it just starts mixing right away. It looks like it rose a bit better than the first loaf but it still didn't rise enough to really fill the oblong pan with a nicely shaped loaf. I have not tasted this loaf because I'm still working on eating the other. I let it cool, sliced it and then put it in the freezer for later in the week. I think I have enough bread till next weekend for now so no more experiments till then.

Both of the mixes above make a 1.5 pound loaf. I am not sure what I am doing wrong but I'll keep at it - this is pattern recognition just like optimizing for search engines so it is solvable.

I recently joined Yahoo's 360 on the invite of a good friend. In some ways I really like the concept of Yahoo 360, it allows anyone to blog and interact on the web with no knowledge of HTML. In this respect it is even easier than Google's Blogger. I think a 360 site is perfect for somebody that wants to stay in contact with friends and relatives via journal, email, IM photos and groups. The local reviews feature is also nice and I hope to actually try and write some local reviews.

Two impressions right off the top: 1) I instantly felt constrained by it - where can I put links to other sites?; 2.) I get this feeling of a walled garden.

Still, as an easy site for a personal journal and a place to post pictures of the kids so grandma and grandpa can see them it is pretty cool. And there is demand for this, there are a heck of a lot of people that want to spend no time on design and just want to use their time posting content and not writing HTML code and spaces like 360 is perfect for that. The limitations are also what keep it simple to use.

Yesterday, I decided to buy myself a present, a Breadman Ultimate breadmachine. It's not like there was a lot of choice, the one Breadman model was the only bread machine carried by the store I went to. Its a sign that the big bread machine craze of several years ago is over. The important feature of this machine is the oblong pan which makes a more traditional size and shape of loaf which in turn helps control portion control (the slices on the square pans are just to big for me.) I have a sandwich at lunch everyday so this will add some much needed variety to my otherwise dull diet.

The other manifestation that the breadmachine craze got replaced by the lo-carb craze (pay attention in the back there) - both supermarkets I visited had only a few bread mixes, whereas just a few years ago they had shelves full of competing brands.

I have not made bread with it yet since I'm using up some store bought bread I have first. I tend to prefer whole grain, whole wheat breads so first up will be a couple from Hodgson Mill which I can buy at one of my local stores. I might also send away for some multi-grain mixes from Bob's Red Mill. The machine did come with a nice recipe book and I might try some bread recipes but I'm a lazy bum at heart and I will probably use mixes because they are so easy.

Of course this will give me something to blog about as I conduct mandatory taste testing of the different breads I make.

This post at TW about designing websites for multiple browsers by DianeV, made me check out this news item about Apple's Safari browser making significant market gains.

Apple's Safari browser enjoyed a highly successful 2005 as the only browser to gain market share each and every month of the year. Safari ended 2004 in fourth place with 1.56% market share. Safari gained steadily to end 2005, and leaped past Netscape to grab the third leading browser spot at 3.07% market share.

The browser market is fragmenting fast and it looks like the forthcoming IE7 will render web pages differently from IE6 so that will further fragment the market.

Kim had a great post that took me down SEO memory lane last night. Of course Kim is responding to other posts by: Andy, Danny, stuntduble, Rand and Graywolf.

I think I share a lot of Kim's feelings for SEO in the old days in that there were so many engines and directories that it was endlessly facinating to learn how each one worked and then measure traffic from them. Even small general search engines and directories provided some traffic back in those days because most people still explored the web by surfing instead of searching.

Anyway, in the midst of this conversation something Danny Sullivan said got me thinking:

But it's also important to remember that if we do have A-Lists, B-Lists or whatever, no one's really going to completely agree on them. There are people at WebmasterWorld who simply live in that space look up only to those in the community there. Pick another forum, and you'll find the same.

Now the interesting thing is that there are certain people - voices - that I have found in the SEO community and I have pretty much kept reading their posts even though the communities where they hang their hat have changed over the years. I mean a lot of finding the good advice at SEO forums is about filtering out those that know nothing and finding those that are worth listening to even when all they have is a hunch or a theory. Not all these SEO and designers are famous, many like to fly under the radar, but these are the people whos opinions I have come to respect over the years. SEO forums rise and fall, but I find myself reading more at those communites where these folks congregate even though that has changed over the years. Of course it's all fluid - new people get added to my list and some people drop off, I have never met any of them and I have only had real conversations with a few, but as I look back there is a group of names that when I spot one I still stop and read.

Reminds me of the retirees my Grandfather used to meet for morning coffee most weekdays, over the years the cafes in the little twon would change, new faces would join and others disappear but there was always a group of duffers getting together somewhere for breakfast and coffee and some good gossip. heheh.

Jeremy Zawodny has issued an update on his experiment with selling sponsored links on his blog.

The search engines (one of which I work for) would rather that paid links be tagged with a rel="nofollow" attribute to indicate that any "link juice" or authority shouldn't be passed on to that site.

The problem here is I hate the way the search engines, particularly Google, control the debate on this issue. (Disclaimer: I sell all my advertising on all my sites through Adbrite which gives no link juice.) But webmasters ignore warnings from Google's Matt Cutts at their peril.

Here is my opinion:

Right or wrong has little to do with this issue, this is about Google being threatened by any artificial manipulation of linking. They can and will use their raw power to protect their turf. Webmasters may have the right to sell any kind of link they want but Google will probably do bad things to you if you do.

Google simply has too much market and mind share to be ignored. Ultimately they will fail to hold back the tide on artificial link inflation and their index will degrade (IMO it already has.) I also think that selling ads on a site per-click, like Adsense, does not favor the site owner because the advertisers still get branding value off the ad impressions even if there is no click and the webmaster is not getting paid for that by Google.

This morning Bloglines was down and I was like a junkie needing a fix. It really showed me how much I rely on Bloglines for my news and blog reading. It made me start thinking that I should try one of the other online aggregators and perhaps split my subscriptions between Bloglines and another reader.

First up, I tried Rojo.com. Rojo is pretty with a nice clean bright and shiny look to it. It imported my OPML file from Bloglines in a flash. Everything seems to work okay on it once you get it set up the way you like in Account settings. Rojo was also quite fast and signup was simple. It was all more user friendly that Bloglines.

But there are several things that really bothered me when using Rojo:

1.) No Frames: Bloglines uses a frame to show all your subscriptions on the left and then display the posts on the right. I like that arrangment, it means I don't have to scroll around to click on another blog I have subscribed to. Rojo has these all in one window and I was having to do way to much scrolling. It made me unhappy very rapidly.

2.) Eye Wander.: Bloglines is good about alternating each post in a blog with a dark gray background and a light gray background so each post stands out as distinct and you can tell where one ends and another begins. Rojo does not do this and I found my eye wandering all over the place.

Bottom Line: I might come back to Rojo, but I think I will try another.

I did go through the old blog before cancelling the account and salvaged certain key posts that had some meaning to me. The single most popular post both in terms of comments and visits was the Family Classics Movie List. I have updated it with the titles added by visitors in the comments of the old blog and created a static page for it: Family Classics WGN-TV Movie List.

Thanks to everyone for suggesting movie titles that I had forgotten about!