Entries from May 2007 ↓

If you are, it’s time to begin following StormTrack and hurricanes.

Technorati tags:
disaster preparedness
hurricane
social media
Twitter
weather

If you have a blog on Blogger.com, you may find that Blogger has begun requiring you enter an odd-looking string of characters each time you publish a post. This extra step is called “word verification” or “Captcha.” You must enter a string of characters to identify yourself as a human being, as opposed to an automated procedure.

Blogger Help gives two reasons for this requirement in Why do I have word verification on my posting form?

1. Blogger suspects that your blog is spam. An automated process within Blogger applies certain filters to identify potential spam blogs or “splogs” - bogus blogs full of gibberish, designed to fool search engines. The endless proliferation of “splogs” causes problems for the Web as a whole, not just for the owners of legitimate blogs, as Wired.com explains in Spam + Blogs = Trouble.If your blog is flagged as potential spam, then Blogger will require word verification every time you publish a post.

   Not only is this a nuisance for you, but it also hurts your efforts to gain readership for your blog. Your blog will be penalized in Google’s search algorithms. Moreover, your blog will be excluded from the “Next Blog” taskbar button and the blurbs on Blogger Dashboard.

   So what do you do if you know your blog is legitimate? The next time you post to your blog, click on the encircled question mark next to the Word Verification caption. A form will pop up that lets you submit a request for a human review of your blog. Enter your e-mail address, and in a few days, you should get an answer from Blogger Support about clearing your blog for regular use.

2. You, or your blog team members, have been posting too rapidly. Blogger will require word verification for the next 24 hours to control the load on its servers, as well as to discourage spam. During that period of time, if you post to your blog by e-mail, the blog posts will be held as drafts.Blogger makes no exceptions for specific blogs, so it’s no use contacting them to complain. So if your blog must support an unusually high posting rate, you’ll have to host it elsewhere and support it with more specialized software.

Update: Google mistakes one of its own blogs for spam!

Technorati : Blogger.com, blogging, spam, tech tips
Del.icio.us : Blogger.com, blogging, spam, tech tips
Ice Rocket : Blogger.com, blogging, spam, tech tips

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The folks at twitterfeed.com are providing an automated service that captures your blog’s Atom or RSS output at regular intervals and posts up to 140 characters of each blog post to Twitter. You can post under your existing Twitter ID, or set up a new one for the blog. It’s free and in beta test status at this time.

For a ridiculous example of how this can work, see I Can Has Cheezburger, which is the twitterfeed-powered version of the infamous “LOL” bad-grammar cats macro-meme explosion that has been amusing (or irritating) everyone all over the “intertubes.”

Technorati tags:
animals
blogging
design
feeds
humor
meme
photos
social media
tech tips
Twitter
Web 2.0

See Introducing Twapper 2.0b: Mashing 30boxes and Twitter on the 30boxes blog. 30boxes is an “identity aggregation” service for Web 2.0.

They’re offering another way to access Twitter from the mobile web that has some advantages over Twitter’s own m.twitter.com interface. In a nutshell, Twapper lets you view expanded URLs, more photos, and other things that you can’t view directly through Twitter Mobile. If you already are a 30boxes user, you can mesh Twapper in with the other features of 30boxes. It works on a PDA or on a conventional cell phone, subject to memory and other limitations of the device.

Click here to access Twapper. Access to the basic display features is free and no registration is required.

Technorati tags:
cellular
mobile web
social media
tech tips
Twitter
Web 2.0

Here is the story of the heroic service of Capt. Lance Peter Sijan, as recounted by the United States Air Force.

He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously for his heroism during the Vietnam War, where he died as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. He displayed this strength of character not just at one particular time of great danger, but consistently throughout a long ordeal.

The USAF website noted the Irish heritage of Capt. Sijan’s mother, but not the Serbian heritage of his father. Capt. Sijan’s Wikipedia biography does mention this.

Capt. Sijan was not the only Serbian-American awarded the Medal of Honor. Reportedly, a greater proportion of Serbian-Americans per capita have been awarded the Medal of Honor than any other ethnic group serving in the U.S. military.

Sadly, credit is not being given where credit is due. Not long ago, the U.S. was at war with Serbia, for reasons that did not prove justifiable in retrospect - which is why the mainstream media has so little to say about the Balkans at present. Even now, the U.S. State Department is still trying to detach Kosovo from Serbia to turn it over to jihadist rule, and to sell out the Bosnian Serbs as well, in defiance of all common sense. Encouraging the public to admire a Serbian-American hero would no doubt raise too many embarrassing questions about past and present foreign policy mistakes, and about those bureaucrats, journalists, and elected officials who are clearly to blame.

Beware of John McCain!

Kosovo: Foreign Policy Litmus Test for US Presidential Candidates

(R) Senator John McCain who made his name nationally known by advocating the 1999 NATO Bombing, and the empowerment of radical Islamofascists in the Balkans. Back in 1999, McCain even advocated the we send American troops into Kosovo on behalf of the secessionist drug-running KLA. McCain has consistently been on the Albanian American Civic League’s payroll and even marched with them a year after the NATO intervention. McCain doesn’t mention that while he was a POW he shared a cell with US Captain, Congressional Medal of Honor winner & proud Serb-American Lance Sijan for whom the Air Force created the Lance P. Sijan Award. If Sijan were alive today, he wouldn’t spit on the better part of John McCain. McCain receives 47% of his campaign donations from $2,300 or more contributors. McCain is a conservative Republican and aggressive interventionist.

Dump McCain Now!

Fellow blogger Ron Goodwyne introduces this new blog:

The project is called Ft. Hard Knox and you can find it at www.FortHardKnox.com. Of course you’ll find excellent conservative commentary and opinion there but that is not its primary purpose. It is designed to combine blogging, wikkis and message boards in one platform to involve people who are not necessarily web savvy.

Some of the authors on 1389 Mobile Blog will be helping out at Ft. Hard Knox as well.

Technorati tags:
blogging
conservative
forum
politics
Web 2.0
wikis
writing

According to this Breitbart article from AFP, more and more physically normal women are demanding plastic surgery to “improve” the appearance of their vulvas. This “designer vagina” surgery (or, rather, butchery) involves cutting away healthy sensitive tissue, with the end result being a vulva resembling that of a prepubescent girl.

1389 declines to speculate on the depth of the mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness that could motivate supposedly modern, civilized people to begin toying with the savage custom of female genital mutilation.

Off-topic tech note for fellow mobile web enthusiasts: 1389’s laptop was down, so this entire blog post was entered via a bare-bones Sanyo SCP-7000 cell phone. This is not the easiest way to go, but it will work. However, the memory limitations of the cellphone itself are a problem, in that this limits the size of the file that can be loaded back into the cellphone for editing with the Blogger editor.

Technorati : atavism, culture wars, moblog
Del.icio.us : atavism, culture wars, moblog
Ice Rocket : atavism, culture wars, moblog

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DigiDave discusses the changes in Technorati’s user interface in Technorati’s New Design. Also, please read the comments posted there.

Seems as though Technorati is de-emphasizing the blog search and blog networking features that made it so worthwhile, and instead trying to be a news aggregator for the general public. It’s possible that they are afraid of competition from Google’s blog search, which is much less powerful and does not have the infrastructure to promote blogger networking. 1389 thinks that they’re making a mistake in trying to reach the mass market by downplaying their strong suit and becoming a me-too player in the already crowded news aggregator arena.

Technorati tags:
1389
blogging
Google
Technorati
social news
tech industry
Web 2.0