Archive for January, 2007
USA Today reports that there seems to be an alcohol jihad occuring amongst the taxi drivers in Minnesota.
To sum up the story, muslim taxi drivers from somolia are refusing to fare airport passengers carrying alcohol due to religious beliefs. Since many of the airports flights are international, a lot of tourists have duty free acohol with them. Some people have reported waiting hours just to get a cab ride.
They can’t call another cab company because of the airport’s strict contract, and the cab company is afraid to fire the cabbies since they’re claiming religious beliefs.
It seems to me like this should be a non issue. It’s perfectly legal to carry unopened alcohol in a cab, and the cabbie’s job is to fare passengers. I think the cab company would be completely justified in firing these employes. After all, I’d surely be fired if I refused to do my job.
If they let this go, where will it stop? What would happen if this worked the other way and some cabbie refused to fare anybody carring the Koran, or refused to fare passengers to or from abortion clinics?
Freedom of religion doesn’t just give you the right to practice what you want, it also means that you can’t impose your religion upon others. If you don’t want to be around alcohol don’t be a cabbie. Nobody forced you to take this job, and if you’re uncomfortable performing ALL of it’s duties then do something else.
January 26th, 2007
There’s a battle going on in the UK trying to extend music copyrights longer than the 50 year term originally imposed. Musicians argue that they need the money that copyrights create for them, and that without longer copyrights they’ll have no incentive to create new music.
It seems to me though, that the opposite is more likely. These musicians created songs knowing that they’d continue to recieve royalties for 50 years - so it was enough incentive for them originally. In addition to that, it seems to me like having your income run out would be a great motivator to create new songs that you could earn money from.
Copyright isn’t intended to be a system of making sure musicians continue to recieve royalties for stuff they did 50 years ago. It was designed to encourage innovation, and discourage copying and ripping off.
January 26th, 2007
LiveScience (via Yahoo.com) has an article stating that children in homes full of books and educational games are less likely to be spanked than their counterparts.
The article goes on to imply that if you give your kids books and games they won’t cause as much trouble as kids that don’t have such luxuries. While their may be some truth to that, it’s more likely that these two are simply correlated to another event: parents who care.
Research will also show that the more active, caring, and envolved parents have more well behaved children. Buying books and games is something a caring parent does.
I guess there’s 2 lessons to learn from this article:
1.) Just because 2 things are related doesn’t mean one causes the other.
2.) Merely buying your kid books and games won’t make him well behaved. You have to spend time with him too!
January 25th, 2007
While flipping through the local cable channels this weekend, Kayla stopped me at a movie called “Cabin Fever” and insisted that I watch it. We’d only missed the first 7 minutes so I said sure, why not?
About 25 minutes later, I actually had to get up and leave the room. There were so many plot holes and stupid scenes in this movie that I couldn’t take it anymore. Heck, the over use of the word “gay” was enough to make me shut it off. Here’s some of my favorite parts:
Worst. Movie. Ever.
January 24th, 2007
Update:Patrick Gavin has contacted me and appologized for the misunderstanding. Apparantley I was correct in pointing out that they don’t mention anything about using rel=nofollow on the website, so currently it is not a violation of their TOS. My account is now in good standing with TLA.com, however I’ve yet to re-instantiate the ads on the webpage in question. This issue has raised a personal debate with myself about the ethics involved in selling text-link-ads. If you have any opinions on this, please leave a comment.
One of the new crazes in advertising is paid content. Patrick Gavin is making a fortune with his text-link-ads.com and reviewme.com websites (not linked to on purpose). They were unique and creative ways to build traffic to your website.
Up until today, I was a text-link-ads.com user, but not in the sense that most users use the site. See, I sold ads that no search engine sees. I used a link condom (the rel=nofollow tag). According to Matt Cutts of Google, this is a reccomended use.
Anyway, these links must have worked. The same people kept paying me $25 every month to continue their links. By my own estimates, 12% of my users who filled out a form on this webpage clicked on an advertisement link afterwards. Their ads ran on every page of my website. They got traffic, and I got enough money to continue hosting the website.
Apparantley though, as Drew from Text-Link-Ads mentioned in his email, using the rel=nofollow tag is a violatin of the text-link-ads TOS. It’s also the reason they’re not paying me this month. (yet as of this writing, they continue to show ads on my site that they don’t pay me for) Does that sound fair to you?
So, I scoured their site for the TOS and guess what? Nowhere on their site is the nofollow tag mentioned. It’s not in their faq, nor has Google ever seen it mentioned there. In fact, according to that link other publishers have been doing it too!
To make matters worse, I actually sent (not 1, but 3) emails asking about the nofollow tag before I signed up. All 3 emails were through their contact us form, but I got no reply. After 2 months of not hearing from them I decided it must be ok, and added in the rel=nofollow tag. After all, if they didn’t want me messing with the code they’d use some sort of JavasScript, not just give me the PHP to copy and paste right?
Now all of a sudden some TOS page that doesn’t exist says I’m not allowed to do what I’ve been doing? And they’re taking my money away because of that? Screw that, I’ve taken the TLA code off of my websites and sent in 2 requests to have my sites de-listed from Text-Link-Ads. (of course, a few hours later I have no reply to these emails either) What’s going on here? Patrick, I thought you were better than that
January 23rd, 2007
Not too long ago I wrote about what it was like to be a blogger in the early days. The main difference? Scarcity, and spam. Spam just didn’t exist then like it does now.
As anybody who runs a blog can tell you, spam is out of control. It wasn’t so bad when I had my own custom code, but that all changed when I installed WordPress. I started getting spam before I even turned the WordPress version live. After that, it increased by about 45 or so messages per day. Something had to be done.
The first step was installing Akismet. That managed to catch those 45 messages / day and mark them as spam, but they still sat there in my database until I could delete them. That’s clearly not optimal.
Thankfully, I remembered what Jeremy does on his blog. You saw this on the old dotCULT too. Up until now though, I’ve had no idea if it worked or not. Guess what, it works great!
So what is it? It’s the “type Ryan here” box on the comments form. Since I installed that, I’ve gotten only 1 spam comment (and it was a trackback from a spam blog) - much better than the 45 I was expecting.
So why does something simple work so well? And what about captchas, mathchas, and kitten auth schemes?
Well, it seems the key to the “type Ryan here” isn’t that it’s easy for a human and hard for a computer. It’s that it’s specific to dotCULT. In other words, it doesn’t make sense for somebody to code their bot to type Ryan into forms if it will only work on one website. The reason these bots work so well in the first place is because thanks to WordPress, all the comment forms are the same.
Try it out on your site. All you have to do is make a change to the standard form (and make it required). Unless a spammer is gung ho on spamming just your site, you should see your spam signficantly drop off.
January 22nd, 2007
By now you’ve probably noticed the links in the side menu, so you probably know that noslang.com is one of my websites. I’ve been dedicating weekends to working on it and my other sites. Well, I’ve been slacking - bigtime!
I usually check the user submitted words every weekend… but I haven’t done so in about 3 weeks. I’ve just been busy. I was in Texas a couple weekends ago, did some FeedButton updates last weekend etc..
So I just logged in, and boom! 900 words waiting to be approved. This is going to take some time.
If you’re not familiar with my approval process it’s like this:
1.) Check word to see if it makes sense
2.) Make sure everything is spelled correctly (I don’t fix improper spellings, no time really)
3.) Google for the word.
If It makes sense, is spelled correctly, and exists on at least 1 other forum or website.. then I add it. If not, I kill it. that’s part of what makes NoSlang the best internet slang dictionary on the internet (and the only internet slang book too!) While other sites are trying to build a large database by paying per word submitted, NoSlang actually takes hours upon hours of human evaluation. It’s starting to get to be too much.
Does anybody else have a few hours they can donate to this for free? I wouldn’t think anybody would - but it can’t hurt to ask. Right?
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January 21st, 2007
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