aving gathered statistics, I estimate that my Firefox theme adaptations had over 100 downloads from this domain. The more popular of the two themes is the Mac OS X clone (shown below). It can be downloaded or directly installed. Enjoy!

Note: this theme should be compatible with all platforms

Click image to see it full-sized

Martha Irvine of Associated Press writes about the price of telling too much over the Internet (via Yahoo):

…putting one’s life online can have a price. A few bloggers, for instance, have been fired for writing about work on personal online journals. And Maya Marcel-Keyes, daughter of conservative politician Alan Keyes, discovered the trickiness of providing personal details online when her discussions on her blog about being a lesbian became an issue during her father’s recent run for a U.S. Senate seat in Illinois (he made anti-gay statements during the campaign)…

…Some also speculate that more scandalous blog entries — especially those about partying and dating exploits — will have ramifications down the road…

I have noticed a few bloggers who fear nothing they publish. One has to remember that blogs do not have to lead to personal discussions. This is perhaps one of the advantages of technical blogs where opinions expressed are about products or companies, seldom about individual people. The mentioning of names is still a true danger.
 
 

Top-left: The older days of Apple who have recently sidled next to Intel; Top-right: So-called Microsoft’s Hardware Department; Bottom: Screen-shot of Metisse for FVWM (*NIX)

A very unusual story comes from eWEEK. Microsoft have apparently demonstrated Linux to their audience.

While the answer is unclear, Microsoft Corp. surprised many of the attendees at its annual worldwide partner show here this weekend by allowing a third party to present a “hands-on lab” that allowed attendees to play with a range of Linux desktop software…

…the lab let attendees, many of whom were not familiar with Linux, experiment with KDE (K Desktop Environment) as well as see the Apache Web server in action…

Quite frankly, I consider this to be yet another attempt at being cocky. It was not too long ago that Microsoft paid one of the most popular bloggers in the world to evangelise their company and software products. They also scheme to adopt a large group of bloggers who will preach about Microsoft ‘goodness’. Biassed journalism — now isn’t that something that Microsoft can buy? I also wonder if they demonstrated Linux on some antiquated Debian distribution.

any interesting tools are being pointed out by Jeff Veen and the latest such tool is the personalised tags cloud, which is currently in beta (testing) phase. This Web-based tool, which goes by the name TagCloud, inputs a collection of RSS feeds (as OPML) which reflect on your interests. It then counts the frequency of words within (essentially tags) while excluding stop words like “and” or “since”. Tags reflect on what happens in your own ‘cyber-sphere’ — the means by which you become better orientated. By looking at the cloud, you get a preview of what you’ll see plenty of once entering your browsing cycle.

Owing to his recommendation I built myself a cloud (seen above). The many news feeds make London the primary tag in my case. I later discovered a flaw: if a single feed contains a term which repeats itself over and over again, that term (tag) can dominate.

ahoo officially offer delivery of search results as RSS feeds. They join MSN Search in providing this type of service. Is it possible that Google’s competitors are willing to proliferate as much bandwidth as it takes just to challenge Google and steal some of its avid users? No doubt RSS feeds of this nature consume a lot of traffic and get a very low clickthrough rate from feed subscribers. In fact, people with interest in such a service are often pre-occupied with SEO and keep track of SERPs or news of one particular niche.

The news is rather disappointing for Google enthusiasts. As they offer no analogous service (Google Alerts instead), I set up about 5 feeds from MSN search (no clickthrough though, ever), 2 from Yahoo! Finance (since February 2005) and 5 from Yahoo! News. Google appear reluctant to provide feeds so I ended up using a workaround. There are similar workarounds for eBay or even static HTML pages.

An insightful little article has been released to discuss changes in Google’s advertising strategy, which ‘chokes’ companies relying on Google AdWords.

…A simple description of the way the new algorithm works is that you bid for a position of 5. As it turns out, depending on the region your ad is shown in, you could end up in position number 1 or position number 20…

…The net result of this algorithmic change is that Google is getting richer and advertisers are getting taken to the cleaners with increasingly poor advertising results for their money…

Google’s advertising programme has recently reached the headlines. They are being sued for making no effort to prevent click frauds. Such frauds result in monetary gains for Google and affiliated sites at the expense of advertising businesses. What makes the story more severe is the attempts to turn such lawsuits into class action with potential for many millions in compensation.

n a life that involves subscription to many feeds, it is worth knowing which ones are the most popular. The Radio Community Server collects some statistics and ranks the Top 100 RSS feeds based on the number of subscribers. Below is the top of the list:

All the rest can be found at the aforementioned site.

Feeds slowly become the substitute to the Web browser