CogBlogged from ‘January, 2005’

More from the weird web department… can anyone guess who’s remaindered links I am plundering?? Anyhow, as a DOG themed corner of the web and a techie, I gave some serious perusal of Pet’s Mobility: PetsMobility™ Network, Inc. (PetsMobility™) is a wireless communications company that will be providing innovative wireless communication products and services to the rapidly growing multi-billion dollar pet market segment… PetsMobility™ has the first ever Cellular Telephone for pets and will provide a full range of wireless communication hardware and accessories for the pet industry… The patent pending PetsMobility™ PetsCell TM will be compatible with existing cellular and satellite GPS technology. The PetsCell™ will allow pet owners to talk to their pets as well as allowing owners to request assistance should they become incapacitated and require help. In addition, and perhaps more valuable, pet owners will have a piece of mind that if their pet is lost [...]

Okay, so “nofollow” is “nomiracle”… but today I got confirmation from a site in Span that one or molecules of spam were stomped: Hello Mr. Levine Sorry for the long time without news about our “problem” but we’ve been very busy making changes in our network in order to fix it. During this week we’ve changed almost all our network architecture and replaced two machines that should have been the ones that were originating this situation. Now, we’re still making some works but I hope that the problem will be solved at all. Sorry for the inconveniences. Regards from Spain, Julio Xxxxxx This must be a record since it is the first time I have ever gotten a (human) response from a site I sent en email with evidence of a spam coming from their domain. It’s been so long but I recall seeing a whole series of attempted comment spam [...]

From Bore Me, here is a video clip of a bunch of guys who toss a cheerleader through a basketball hoop. There is a lot of surlpus time out there working in strange ways. What else can be said? And can someone help me understand The Two Headed Dog? (from the “I’m feeling old department”).

Oh well, might as cancel the jubilation over Google’s “nofollow” announcement. Ben Hammersley spells out the sobering reality in “Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow”: I’m deeply mystified by the hallelujahs bursting forth about Google’s rel=”nofollow” method of preventing comment spam. The idea being that comment spammers will leave your own site alone, or stop spamming altogether, if they find the rel=”nofollow” tag. I think this is false assumption. It’s based on the idea that producing a link costs something, and therefore the spammer must choose either way. Think of it this way: if I’m a guy trying to pitch a TexasHold’em site, my aim is to get people to go there. Whether this is directly, through a click through, or indirectly via Google, the effect is the same. As a spammer, I don’t care at all *how* they get to my site. I just want the [...]

For the last year or more I have been blabbering about the “small pieces of technology loosely joined”, so it was extremely overdue that I actually read the book I pilfered the phrase from. So thanks to a holiday gift card from Borders (which is really just a portal to Amazon) just fresh off the Amazon.com truck comes my own personal copy of David Weinberger’s

Following a link in an email notification from Jay Allen‘s Comment Spam web site, I came across the best “404 Document Not Found” page I’ve seen in a while: For more fun things like this, or if you have some large amounts of time to idle away, check out the 404 Research Lab, which beyond featuring some of the better 404 Server Messages, has an explanation of 404, tips for web site visitors for getting around 404s, and suggestions for webmasters to do something more elegant than the out of the box server error message.

I’ve been deploying my day time discoveries some web design work I do outside the Maricopa gig… most recently wrapping some of the Small Technologies Loosely Joined for the Eye Dog Foundation. This is a local organization that raises and trains German Shepherds as guide dogs for the blind, providing them at no cost. This has been a donation-ware project, and has gone on and off for more than a year– the Eye Dog folks are not techies, and getting content has been, well tough at times. My plans for the site was to architect it in a modular fashion with an ultimate goal of having a basic admin system for the staff to be able to update the content via web forms. A number of content areas are loaded with randomly chosen “content-lets” such as the background image sin the footer and the “Friends of the Foundation” blurbs in [...]

If you love flickr as much as me, well, you need a groovy, iPod like tune. A band called birdw0rks has done it, check out the flickr song [4.5 Mb mp3], and if your ears are a bit, ahem, well “mature”, here are the lyrics. Oh, there is also cover art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how long till there is a marriage of flickr and an audio equivalent? How about iPodPhotoPodcasting?

After my usual too-much-over-the-top-sarcasm bark at the Professional Bloggers Association, I got a quick professional PBA trackback from their new professional PBA site: Trackback: “Chuckle…” Excerpt: My own personal snarky anti-fan strikes again: http://cogdogblog.com/alan/archives/2005/01/21/amateur.php He does this periodically, so please don’t lash out at him. We all need to be able to laugh at ourselves, and things like       Weblog: Professional Bloggers Association Member site       Tracked: January 21, 2005 10:22 AM How could I not click to see who the target of my snark is? Following the link, though, I get stopped by the body guards: In fact, just about all the links ended up there. So once again, I am a shoeless bum with missing teeth, stuck on the wrong side of the velvet ropes, trying to get a peek at all of the beautiful people. SARCASM ALERT!!!: This is in jest. I know their site is likely new and [...]

Holy Flickr! I just blindly stmbled into yet another wildly frenetic flickr functionality. I think it was Roland’s feed that led me here, but flickr is being used, along with its note features, to create a collaborative map of Vancouver– a series of closer and father up images of the city based on ?? Keyhole. Start by going to the group page for vancouver aerial tagging: Here’s collaborative aerial map of vancouver, which i made so that i could geolocate some images i took when i visited in may. by clicking on the areas under the tacks you can ‘zoom’ in. then you can add notes to those images with the text format [photo]flickrimageID[/photo] and your images will appear whenever someone clicks “expose photography locations” it is a bit awkward interface wise but it is really a lot of fun. because i’ve opened up the images so that anyone can [...]