With everyone twitting about the weather conditions in Ireland lately, I created a weather twitter account that will save anything you twit to it with @abouttheweather and will keep them in a Weather category at Idea Forecasting
Internet
New Years Resolutions
I promise to post something every day, ….
….. So far so good!
And would someone try out my twitter clients at @querynet, @iforesee, @fleetthoughts and @ideaforecasting !
Thanks.
Internet Freedom of Speech
I’m always suspicious when a company US games company sues British blogger. What is the point of elevating an obscure blogger to Internet prominence? All this law suit is doing is broadcasting the bloggers opinion further, and if the blogger’s opinions are ‘untrue’ this just makes any damages to the company worse rather than to defend their ‘reputation’.
I think they are operating under the old saw that states ‘there is no such thing as bad PR’ , or they have bribed the courts in Australia, or they are seeking a clever way to declare bankruptcy.
In any case they are seeking to destroy Internet freedom of opinion, by using the more restrictive Libel laws from another country to censor this Blogger. Why not use the Iranian courts, then they could have sought to have the Blogger put to death, or something. I’m sure the Irish Blasphemy Laws could have been used. 🙂
Ireland offline, as in no broadband.
If anyone wants to know the benefits of having an Internet connected population only needs to skim this article Economic Benefit of Getting Everyone Online in the UK
– Digitally excluded households are missing out on average savings of
GBP560 per year from shopping and paying bills online– The most economically disadvantaged families are missing out on savings
of over GBP1billion– 1.6 million children in digitally excluded families could increase
their lifetime earnings by GBP10.8billion– Unemployed people who get online could increase their lifetime earnings
by over GBP12,000– If 5% of digitally excluded unemployed could find work by using job
websites it would deliver an estimated GBP560million to the UK economy– Internet savvy workers can earn an average increase in lifetime
earnings of over GBP8,000– Government could save at least GBP900 million a year in customer
contact costs if all digitally excluded adults got online and made just
one electronic contact per month
and while the amounts will be different in Ireland, the benefits will be similar, maybe even better.
Nokia 900 Meetups
As part of the Nokia Push of the N900 they are having meetup 
where you can meet the Nokia Team in the Nokia flagship stores in Helsinki, Moscow, London, New York, Dubai & Chicago. Too bad it’s not in Dublin, I’d be there, but I guess I’ll have to wait until my Pre-Ordered N900 arrives.
Take that Android Lovers 🙂 the fight for mobile dominance begins.
A Picture of a DYI Server
This is a mythical DYI home server that just might be in my house.
SEO and the Robot Races
If you have been paying attention to this site and my attempts to join the ranks of the super wealthy.
I created a DIY Server which sets under my desk at home, connected to a modest DSL line with crappy uplink speeds. It currently hosts five (5) domains, but is essentially unadvertised on the internet and yet I still get visited by up to 10 Robots repeatedly every day (see below) in the form of GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp, MSN, MSN-Mobile, Baidu and other miscellaneous Curl and Java skimmers.
So what is it that a SEO specialist do, that won’t happen completely natural just by putting any domain up on the internet?
Creating ANY content, or rather interesting content will draw down the bots onto you site, the job of SEO is easy, content creation is the hard part. Let me know what you think.
My Query The Net Project – Part One
My current project, query-the.net now has a prototype, but you don’t have to visit the website, which is more or less a placeholder. Instead, use your favorite Twitter client and direct a question at @querynet {and a question} and wait for a reply. You should (assuming it’s working) get a Twitter response to your query. It’s currently only sending responses every 15 minutes so don’t expect an instant response. Let me know what you think.
I’m at it again.
I must look like I’m out to buy up all the free domains in the internet, now I possess the mighty domain query-the.net! Now what to do with it, not a problem, I just have to make it happen. I hope I’m up to it.
It doesn’t pay to be a cranky old Blogger.
I posted my latest fabulous project Fleeting Thoughts and no one read it. In fact, no one clicked on it, and no one commented either. The only conclusion is that either the project is rubbish, or because I’m a cranky old Blogger, with no friends. Obviously the latter, as the idea is fantastic ( if poorly executed by me), it now comes as no surprise to me, the cranky old Blogger, that social networks don’t support the cranky behavior, of cranky old Bloggers!
You have to be ‘Social’
So, if you are doing social ‘things’ on the internet, like Twitter applications, be sociable, have lots of followers, who also have lots of followers, who like to Re-Twit!
When having a Fleeting Thought, spell check.
I was thinking, or rather having, a Fleeting Thought and decided that I had a great idea, so I sought to buy the domain fleetingthought.com, and didn’t realize I’d mistyped the name, so now I’m the proud owner of fleetingthoght.com, 🙂 you can see now, how Fleeting my thoughts have been lately. It actually might work out anyway as the real domain owner of fleetingthought.com is little more than a squatter.
The substance of the Idea is sound, and I’m building out the Thought now as another project. It’ll be associated with the Twitter Client @fleetthoughts. And when I finally organize my thoughts properly, I’ll write more about it.
Failed WordPress Upgrade to 2.8
I attempted to upgrade WordPress to 2.8 from 2.7.1 and got this message, now I’ve not sure if I should try the automated upgrade again or resort to a manual one.
Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.8.zip
Unpacking the core update
Could not copy file: /public_html/wp-content/upgrade/core/wordpress/wp-comments-post.php
Installation Failed
I suppose I should be grateful that it’s all still working.
That was cute, Keyword SpamBots
I just got Spammed by an obviously semi-intelligent SpamBot, actually three of them, all keyed on the word ‘Business’. They apparently did a small amount of word analysis and corrected the comment spam to appear to be of ‘human’ origin. Akismet only got 2 out of three of the correctly.
Very Cute.
I never thought that SkyNet and AI technology would first be applied to Spamming WordPress Blogs 🙂
Chinese Search Bots
I was thinking that if you wanted to stop Chinese Search Bots and Hackers you could put up a photo of Tiananmen Square and the guy stopping the tanks. But NO, they are still visiting my Idea Forecasting site.
Perhaps maybe if I’d changed the name of the JPG file so that their search engine could identify that photo 🙂
URL shortening Censorship
My new site at http://ideaforecasting.com/ just got censored by the twitter URL shortening service at http://bit.ly/ using SURBL
Warning – this site has been flagged by SURBL and may contain unsolicited content.
The content of this web page appears to contain spam, or links to unsolicited or undesired sites.
http://bit.ly/nbgsV
Source: http://ideaforecasting.office-on-the.net/ideaforecasting/Site/Ideas.phpYou can learn more about harmful content at www.StopBadware.org.
You can find out more about phishing from www.antiphising.org.
There is NO ‘unsolicited content‘ on this site, and if you follow it link you will know. This is the most blatant censorship I’ve seen to date.