Ever wondered if running a recreational Web site can become a full-time occupation? Ever wondered if bloggers can be paid a wage to blog in favour of a particular company? That it, using the audience as a tool for income? It is a rarity, yet a reality, which more and more people strive to attain.

I pretty much know what ambitious Webmaster are trying to accomplish with advertisements, but if it is income for life, I would warn them in advance. There are very few Webmasters who, at the moment, can actually boast getting a wage out of advertisements (WebMasterWorld is just one example). However, there is a difference between making ends meet and sustaining an income for life. As with all businesses, the terrain changes and one must change and adopt to to this perpetual change. This change is not intervention(time)-free.

The Web, for instance, is changing all the time and all sites need to evolve. Advertising channels and income sources are running dry even for journalists, in part due to online content, bloggers, and Web 2.0 sites, which are far more fascinating (interactive) than ‘old school’ news sites. And by the way, all my sites combined do not generate more than $30 dollars a month. This is not even enough to cover the hosting bills.

To elaborate on the issue of evolving to facilitate trends, 6 years ago I was using nothing but Windows. I thought my skills were well-invested and bound to endure. Nowadays, I never even lay my hands on Windows and, while I consider this change a tremendous improvement, I just know I would never have managed to do the same things as effectively had I stuck with where I was (a monoculture).

HEN Webmasters discover that someone stole their content, they often report this to Google. Blog plagiarism has truly become a plague, but stolen content, spam, site scraping, and copyrights infringements ought to be reported to all search engines, which is why I set up this one particular Web page. It enables any Webmaster or user to report content misuse to three search engines at once (or in parallel at the least).

What was the motivator for this little handy frameset? I noticed that many people report undesirable content to just a single copany called Google. But what about the others? Shouldn’t all be infomed at once? I believe there should be an impartial, not-for-profit body that watches over content theft. somehat like the DMCA, I suppose. Such a body (or site-accessible service with interfaces) could centralise knowledge regarding Web offenders and prevent various companies from doing this independently, merely reinventing the wheel to achieve the same (search) results.

Think big(ger). Let’s get the Web more organised, better structure, and immune to fraud. Never delegate this responsibility to companies, which are slowly making our Web more commercialised and semi-privately owned.

Can you make sense of the numbers? They spell out “blog”.

Y blogging patterns have been rather patchy recently. When I first began blogging, back in 2004, a few short items per week seemed beyond sufficient. I even argued strongly in favour of short posts, which better suit the low attention span of people in the age of information overload.

In due time, I began sticking to a daily post. This was less sporadic then before. I perceived it as a rather steady and predictable pace that accommodated my readers. At some later stage last year, the figures began to climb up. I opted for 2 posts a day; then 3-a-day became a new ‘standard’. I kept this pace going for a long time, but at the back of my mind I kept saying to myself: “blogging is dying. Just enjoy it while it lasts”.

Much has been changing in recent weeks. At the moment I have several hundreds of readers, yet I seem to encourage little feedback in the form of comments. That is perfectly acceptable to some, although it is also nice to receive feedback from the readers. Comments are a very pleasant bonus, not a hindrance. Currently, with nearly 100 posts that I send to mailing lists and UseNet on a daily basis, I get more than enough interaction with people. I consider some level of interaction to be a basic necessity. Who is to oppose this aspect of human nature?

So, what does it all boil down to? I cannot deny the fact that the terrain of the Internet is changing and this includes the existence of over 100 million blogs, just a year or so down the line. I wish to cite less articles and submit more unique contributions to the Web, whenever I have something to offer or say. For the time being, I may as well stick to just a daily blog post. I will remain quiet when nothing noteworthy crawls among my synapses.

What is net neutrality? As one site puts it, it is:

“…the idea that every packet of information — a piece of an email, a piece of an mp3 of a radio broadcast — carries equal importance. That is, a message from me moves no faster or slower over the Internet than a message from the Queen. Or from CNN…”

It is no secret that the Internet is vast and it’s growing at a tremendous pace. With increase in size, unless capacity catches up, there will have to be compromises, in terms of resources. We are yet to discover how the entry of developing countries will change the terrain of the Web.

In other news, expect China to have 60 million bloggers by end of 2006.

Links can lose their value and
get rusty, even with Google

was innocently browsing the Internet this morning. By serendipity, I then arrived at a page where Google boast their contributions to Open Source software through funding (Summer of Code). It is only one example among others. But then, upon immediate inspection, merely all links turned out to be rel="nofollow"ed. SearchStatus made it evident by highlighting those links with red shades.

I have always adamantly believed that the purpose of this new class for links was different. I thought it was introduced in order to prevent and deter spam, among other things such as accommodation for microsformats (e.g. XFN). Here is the snag: If Google themselves are using rel="nofollow" to obstruct dynamicity into relevant, on-topic links, why should anyone else be hesitant to do so? rel="nofollow", a concept that was put in place by Google, is confirmed to have become something that can be misused. Its use has gone beyond the so-called ‘link condom’ (for spam) utility. Otherwise, Google demonstrate hypocrisy herein.

SING virtualisation software, someone from Hungary illustrates how Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows can be worked on simultaneously (view screenshot and further details), without the need to boot into a different, independent partition.

This comes only a week or so after Boot Camp from Apple began supporing Linux. It now caters for Linux boots, as well as Windows boots. It relies on the availability of Intel chips, which replaced Power PC in an important strategic move. This makes the prediction and vision of triple-boot machines a reality, but moreover, it does so without the obvious perils. It obviates the need to reboot Mac OS X. This equips Apple with a huge selling point.

have this sick habit, which is my tendency to keep track of bug reports I have submitted to projects. As uninteresting as it may be, here is my latest report to WordPress:

Leak’ Outside Bounding Border

[Latest nightly in use]

The appearance of the dashboard is inarguably impressive, so call it a pet peeve perhaps: I find the following box spillover somewhat of an eye sore, which should be trivial to fix. The “Write post” box is extended when the items on the left are expanded, but what about those the reside on the right-hand-side?

Local Screenshots

I sometimes feel like a bug report which is not recognised or awarded for (if not financially, then at least on a personal level), there is little or no incentive to intervene and assist further.

I must admit that I lost a fair bit of passion for WordPress development. I have been less willing to help once it began to drift onto a commercial agenda (Automattic). But as I digress, I may continue to contribute to a project whose code is GPL‘d; a project that has impact on many sites and enriches people’s on-line experience. I still feel discouraged to do more debugging when somebody else out there gets paid for it. The forum mavens have expressed similar sentiments before.