A lot of people have been posting referrals to a new site called bux.to on Twitter & elsewhere. It works by having you click ads and stay at the site for 30 seconds. This is click fraud, and it’s against the terms of service for Google AdSense and every other ad service.
Web
Another Google Reader feature: RSS feed
Today I happened to notice the RSS icon in Safari’s address bar while I was using Google Reader. I found that I could subscribe to that feed to get an aggregated feed of all of my subscriptions. Of course reading that feed doesn’t mark the items as read in Google Reader.
my2unz.com is open to the public
Anyone can now register at my2unz.com, although the site is still in beta and not feature complete. I’ve finalized the database structure and cleaned up a lot of stuff. Uploading iTunes playlists & exported libraries should be a lot more reliable now.
Other site features include music discussion forums, buddy lists, and private messages, I plan to add a way to view all tracks owned by a member, and rate tracks & artists by popularity.
What part of 'public' don't they understand?
There has been a lot of kvetching about Google Reader’s shared items feature. People say that it ‘sends their shared items sent to people in their mailbox’, which isn’t true. You need to explicitly add friends to Reader so you can see their shared items.
When you add someone to your friend list, you see their shared items in your feed list – that’s all.
Google Reader has always allowed you to share items. You have full control over which items you share and whether your shared items are public. I don’t know about everyone else but when it says your shared items are publicly accessible it means just that — everyone is able to see it. I always assumed I was sharing those items with the world.
Furthermore, not all of your items are publicly visible. You control the visibility of each tag, and only ‘shared items’ defaults to public.
Articles end up in your shared items only if you explicitly share them by clicking the ‘share’ icon on that item.
This isn’t a privacy violation. It’s a neat way to spread news.
Introducing Techblast.tv podcasting network
If you read Daniel Brusilovsky‘s blog, you may have seen his announcement earlier today of a new podcast, Teens in Tech. This is the first podcast hosted at my new network, Techblast.tv.
Techblast.tv uses WordPress MU with several plugins and themes optimized for podcasting. I hope to add more podcasts and line up sponsors in the next few months.
Search Wijit
I decided to try out Lijit, which Scoble briefly mentioned and I’m impressed. I just had to enter my blog URL and usual nickname and it automatically located my profiles at Flickr, del.icio.us, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Digg and others I had forgotten about completely such as ma.gnolia & StumbleUpon. It also added my entire blogroll as my network, with all of their content.
The result is the search ‘wijit’ you see in the sidebar of this page. It can search all of my content on all sites, as well as content generated by my network.
New Gmail Feature
This morning I discovered a new Gmail feature I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere yet. The More Actions menu has a new item, “Filter messsages like these”. It takes you straight to the Create Filter screen with the search criteria filled in based on the selected messages.
That was one of my favorite features of Eudora, so it was a welcome addition for me.
Student Given Detention For Using Firefox
Slashdot reports that a student has been given detention for using Firefox to do his classwork. The student was in class, working on an assignment that necessitated using a browser. The teacher instructed him to stop using Firefox and to do his classwork, to which the student responded that he was doing his classwork using a ‘better’ browser (it is unclear whether the computer was the student’s own computer or not). The clueless teacher (who called the rogue program ‘Firefox.exe’) ordered him to detention.
Update: It’s a hoax.
Old domains never die
About a year ago, two kids named Brandon and Erik had a podcast called Mr. Mac Geek, which was usually fairly interesting. As often happens, they became involved with other products and stopped updating their podcast.
I never bothered unsubscribing and it recently came back to life. However, it now appears to be owned by someone else and is full of poorly written misinformation and FUD, such as claims that Macs are plagued by spyware.
Podcast Interview
Earlier this afternoon I was a guest on The Teen Web 2.0 Podcast with Taylor McNeil and Daniel Brusilovsky. We talked about PHP & Drupal, among other things. Unfortunately the sound quality from my Plantronics M3000 Bluetooth headset was pretty bad. I’m getting a Jabra headset in a few days, which should be better.