31 January 2007 | 0 Comments
[and someone tell me if this has been done already]
I’ve been screwing around with Garageband making my own ringtones, and I gotta believe there’s loads of other folks out there doing the same thing. What I want is a place to share my creations and download tones that other people have made.
I’m imagining a site where I can upload my creations, tag them, and others can demo them (with a nice built in flash player), download them, comment and rate them. The home page will ultimately end up with a list of all the latest tones, organized by tag if you like aswell as providing all the obvious stuff like a list of the most popular (again filterable by tag etc).
Now phonezoo.com is pretty close in concept to this, but from what I can tell phonezoo.com seems to be almost completely populated with tones which have been ripped from copyrighted tracks, which is cool if that’s what you’re after, but I want to create and share original tones…and I have a feeling that there’s loads of other people who’d want to do the same thing. It’s fun to create orginal tones and with the wide spread availability of relatively simple software to create your own music/tones with royalty free loops n’ stuff (like Garageband) I reckon it could work.
Maybe I should build it.
30 January 2007 | 0 Comments
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This is kinda cool
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looks kinda interesting
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review of imagini
30 January 2007 | 1 Comment
TripAdvisor.com does a pretty good job of providing user reviews of hotels and stuff; although recently the flaw in their model has been discussed…namely that they don’t presently connect reviews to actual transactions which opens them up for a certain amount of gaming, ie. I can log in and review a hotel I’ve never stayed at, or that Hotels offer incentives for positive reviews. Of course TA argue that the sheer volume of reviews on the site makes those attempts at gaming pretty much a non issue, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got plans to integrate the booking (they’re owned by Expedia now) and reviewing side of things more which would address this issue to a some extent.
Regardless of all that, what amazes me more is their use of authority in organic search results to rank for pages like this one for New York Hotel Deals (no.1 result for that query in Google at the time of writing, and on the data center serving my results). Have a close look at that page. There is no real content there, the main column is 100% paid links, mostly powered by Adsense, while the left hand column contains links to 100 or more pages just like this one for other cities, and the right hand column seems to be filled mostly with affiliate links (ads masquerading as content).
Now I don’t have a problem with TA presenting advertising on their site, they gotta make money. But wow…the number one result in google (for a very competitive search term) and you’d be pretty hard pressed not to click on an ad here…talk about made for Adsense (MFA). The Adsense CTR on this page must be phenomenal.
The question is should a page which is pretty much designed for the purpose of serving ads be the #1 result for such a competitive search term?
25 January 2007 | 1 Comment
Sometimes I get to work on fun stuff like putmeinparadise.co.nz. With the virtual travel-o-matic postcard imaginatron you can make your own crazy ass postcard, we even give you the code to post it on your blog or Myspace profile. My favorite touch is the retro-analog control panel put together by the guys at Gladeye.
Here’s me and the family soaking up the sunshine on Australia’s Gold Coast…
Don’t you think a more generic version of something like this would go bonkers with the Myspace crowd?
21 January 2007 | 1 Comment
This kind of thing gets under your skin because it demonstrates total ignorance of how the internet works. Can you just imagine the conversations with the legal department which led to a TOS where no one is allowed to link to pages other than the homepage? Particularly in this case why on earth wouldn’t you want people linking directly to particular maps, it is totally free advertising.
Deep link to krak.dk just for kicks. I used to know someone from Odense.
19 January 2007 | 4 Comments
I don’t know what prompted it, but tonight I found myself searching Youtube for clips from one of the orginal Burton snowboard videos, Board With The World. Any other old guys out there will know what I’m talking about :)
Specifically I was looking for that awesome footage of Craig Kelly riding at Powder King way up in northern BC. That footage is pretty much what got me into snowboarding. I couldn’t find any comprehensive clips from those scenes, but I did find this nice Craig Kelly retrospective which includes a few brief shots from those same reels at Powder King. The guy was (is!) a legend, RIP.
How’s the season treating y’all in the northern hemisphere?
18 January 2007 | Comments Off
Just did a long overdue update to the latest version of WordPress, and it was utterly painless…love it. Now I’ve got Akismet installed so hopefully we can avoid the torrent of spam that was beginning to sneak past my old spamkiller plugin.
Probably time to try out a few other plugins too…there’s a bunch I want to try to help with friendly URLs, media, and threaded comments…this weekend maybe.
I ‘ve also taken the oportunity to change out the theme…whaddiya think? Pretty garish I know, but I ‘ve been feeling pretty bored with all the standard templates routinely used. We’ll see how long it lasts.
17 January 2007 | 0 Comments
LOL…I was always fascinated with the proliferation of cashwash/cafe combos in Sydney and Melbourne when we lived there (seems like a good real estate play), and Jennifer and I used to joke about starting one called the Hand Job Car Wash precisely because it would make such a good billboard. Glad to see someone actually do it.
15 January 2007 | 0 Comments
Looks like a hacker called FuckingPirate is out to make a name for himself by hacking well know websites, mostly belonging to personalities in the search and SEO worlds.
This screenshot is what I came across when running through my feeds on Bloglines this afternoon…clicking through to Michael Gray’s blog at wolf-howl.com and it at the time of writing it was redirecting to http://fuckingpirate.wordpress.com/j00z-43-b33-4/.
Check out the list of other sites this guy plans to target…can this be for real? Or is this just Digg linkbait?
UPDATE: Looks like WordPress have taken the hackers blog offline
14 January 2007 | 0 Comments
Well, this sucks. Findory was a cool idea and I thought was implemented in a really seemless way…the casual user wouldn’t have any clue what smartness lay under the hood.
I don’t think this is the last we’ll hear about Findory. Ask.com should buy the technology and add a feature to Bloglines which shows me other headlines I might be interested based on all the items I’ve clicked through on in Bloglines. And no the existing Bloglines recommendation feature is not the same thing, it is very rudimentary compared to the incredible personalization offered by Findory.
10 January 2007 | 0 Comments
Going to see Tenacious D tonight with my sister. They actually got a pretty piss poor review in the Christchurch press after their gig there, but me thinks the reviewer had a small stick up his ass…I’m really looking forward to it.
And while I typically listen to less agressive stuff (anything from Fugazi to Disposable Heroes), I am totally thinking about going to see Slayer who’ve just announced a concert in Auckland. I can’t claim to be a huge Slayer fan, but I don’t mind bringing the noise occaisionally…and I bet if I got a pic of me at the Slayer concert with my Diggnation t-shirt on I’d get on the podcast!
