I take the middle road when it comes to advertising in RSS/Atom feeds.

I know the advertisers are wetting themselves at the growing number of eyeballs out there viewing feeds. And I know the potential number of micro-payments from click-throughs are just too tempting for most people. After all, the Intenret is all about money...right? Web 2.0 is not only about the read/write web, or the standards-based web, but about making another impact on the stock market like the Big Bubble in the 90s. Let's all cash in.

That may sound a little harsh, but believe me, I do understand.

The other side I also understand. Feeds [RSS/Atom] are suppose to be small packages of data that gives you a hint of what's to come. You like the snippet of information you see in a feed, you click on the permalink. Really Simple Syndication.

Adding advertising to feeds in the form of images [that are usually made to look like text-ads], while not really impacting the feed hoster, does raise the size of a download for the client [aka you]. Fortunately, if you're on the side of The Force that's winning the current browser war [no...not in terms of total users, but in terms of functionality, security & performance], then you have a option to stop most feed advertising. The Adblock extension.

Of course this only works if you're using a web-based aggregator, but a lot of us are. And my pet beef with feed ads is not so much the content [because they are relevant to me needs and desires as a living product consumer], but that they throw my aggregators design/layout out of wack. That's a good enough reason isn't it =)

In any case, here or some examples of the feeds and their advertisers that you should be able to give the axe to;

/. and freshmeat both get their adverts from feedstermedia. The feedstermedia.com domain is nothing by an adserver, so I thought it prudent to just wildcard the whole name - *feedstermedia*.

engadget, readwriteweb, seroundtable, tuaw & hackaday [shame on you - bad cows, bad cows] all use Googles Ad Services. Adblock *googleadservices*.

boing boing, veen, readwriteweb [hedging their bets by using multiple advertisers] & kottke use FeedBurner, which offers multiple services besides placing adverts in your feeds. For this reason, you might not want to block the whole domain, but rather do it on a site by site basis. eg: *feeds.feedburner.com/~a/boingboing*

Like I said, I understand both sides of the feed-ads argument, but for me personally, I would prefer to keep the feeds I read ad free. I don't mind not having the full content feeds, and have no issue with clicking on a permalink to visit a site to view/read the full post [and thereby allow the sites owners to show me as many images/ads as they want], but my aggregator is my own software with my own design/template and I want the advertisers to stay away from it.

Tomato Torrent — A Macintosh BitTorrent client.

The main goal of this project was to separate the BitTorrent code from the Macintosh code, so that either can be updated without having to modify the other. I got 80% of the download window’s current functionality implemented within 3 days of starting the project. Then I decided to finish “just a bit more,” and the project just kept getting bigger and bigger.

Try it out.

As well as pulling The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen from DC Comics, Moore is also distancing himself from the V for Vendetta film. This is a real bummer because I was hopeing the VfV film would be worth watching. Now I have serious doubts.

Moore's work has often been a source of inspiration for others, including Hollywood, and a number of directors credit him openly. So it was natural that his comic book work might be seized upon as the comic-book-film trend became more popular. But the kindest thing that can be said about the films "From Hell," "Constantine" and "League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is that they're not as good as the comics.

This is true. Even though Sin City was a good film, even a bit of a ground-breaker as far as the whole 'films from comics' thing is concerned, it was still nowhere near the comic. As much as the movie industry tries to reap ideas from the comic format, it's just not working for me [although I'm sure the movie people are making a bunch of money]. I think I'll stay away from the cinema for a while and stick to BitTo...err...DVD.

PHP Trackback is:

A simple, portable PHP class with full TrackBack capabilites. Ping trackback URIs, receive trackbacks from other clients and seed pages for auto-discovery. The class also extract links from a given string and search these links for trackback URIs.

Trackback are something I've yet to implement in my blog software, so I may have to have a looksee at this and intergrate it with MySQL. It should be good as a learning experience in any case. The documentation is well written.

Having a strong interest in Virtual Reality, I'm glad to see a something like The Open Source Metaverse Project start to take shape.

The Metaverse project was created because there is a strong demand, and large developer following, for virtual worlds that allow customization by the player and creation of one's own worlds. ClosedSource virtual worlds exist already - SecondLife, There and ActiveWorlds - but we needed a metaverse engine that is flexible, scalable and that we can customize to an extent not possible within individual proprietary worlds.

Well said and true. The main reason I don't go in for these commercial VR ventures is that it all seems a little too locked in to the companies running the show. For something like a good VR protocol/environment to take shape I think it needs to be open to a little more natural selection.

The Metaverse project is analagous to the web. You can create hyperlinks to any other Metaworld running on any Metaverse server worldwide. Your avatar uses hyperlinks to move to other worlds, submitting to the Game Control Logic in force in the new world.

And this is also a good reason to get behind this project. Having hundreds/thousands of different worlds you to navigate to, hosted on different servers throughout the world is a much better idea that totally centralized systems.

When I get a spare moment I'll download the server and client and see what it's like. From the screenshots it look as if it's still in the early stages, but the promise of an great VR interface is clear in the description of the project.

Koders is a search engine specifically design for searching source code.

Koders.com is the leading search engine for open source code. Our source code optimized search engine provides developers with an easy-to-use interface to search for source code examples and discover new open source projects which can be leveraged in their applications.

Koders Enterprise Edition enables organizations to recognize significant productivity gains by improving code reuse. Developers and managers can search, review and report on the enterprise code base in ways never before possible.

Seems to be built using Microsofts .Net development platform, so I wonder what sort of hardware is required to make this thing run. Seems like a good idea though and I'll give it a shot. I need a PHP class or function to parse OPML files. The one I'm currently using isn't all that crash hot, and, according to other search engines, there doesn't seem to be a lot of OPML parsers for PHP out there.

Searching...

The results for 'OPML', filtered by PHP, only brought back 10 results, and out of those only 3 where actual OPML parsers. Two of the three were the same file, and all three files I've already check out previously. But at least Koders seemed to work, so it might be worth keeping in mind the next time you're looking for a bit of reusable code out there.

I'm heading to Taiwan for a couple of days. I've been working a lot lately and the work doesn't look like it going to let up for while, so I thought I'd take a few days off before getting back into it all.

In 1895, military defeat forced China to cede Taiwan to Japan. Taiwan reverted to Chinese control after World War II. Following the Communist victory on the mainland in 1949, 2 million Nationalists fled to Taiwan and established a government using the 1946 constitution drawn up for all of China. Over the next five decades, the ruling authorities gradually democratized and incorporated the native population within the governing structure. In 2000, Taiwan underwent its first peaceful transfer of power from the Nationalist to the Democratic Progressive Party. Throughout this period, the island prospered and became one of East Asia's economic "Tigers." The dominant political issues continue to be the relationship between Taiwan and China - specifically the question of eventual unification - as well as domestic political and economic reform.

Area: 35,563 sq km
Population: 22.5 million
People: Taiwanese (84%), Aboriginal (2%), Chinese(14%)
Language: Mandarin
Religion: Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism
Government: multiparty democracy

Sounds interesting doesn't it? I don't really know that much about Taiwan [except it produces alot of electronics] and for once I've done a minimal amount of research before departing. I'm kindof looking forward to being surprised as much as possible. Some things I have found out, or that seem rather obvious are that;

• there'll be some great food to be eaten
• apparently the night markets are interesting to a point of brain seizure
• they have onsens.

Not much info, but I know it's going to be an interesting trip. Expect photos upon return.

I've started using Findory, and although I'm only at the early stages, I'm keen to see if it helps. My main reason for starting to use a persoanlization news service is that, well, it makes sense. There's not much point just subscribing to news sites because you're still getting everything push at you [actually pull by you, but you know what I mean]. And a service that supposedly helps with this process of personalization [opps!...no alliteration intended] should save a lot of time wading through irrelevant information.

At the moment I'm sticking to a few key categories in the News section, so hopefully the results should become apparent sooner rather than later.

Another reason is that Findory is a start up that seems to have some nice people behind the controls. Greg Linden kindly commented on my last post about Findory, which shows he cares about the product he's helping produce. And I agree with him 100% - The search war is personal.

I'll let you know how my Findory experiences unfold.

Dan Gillmor has the best tribute I've read so far about Dave Winer, so I'll just link to that. I remember being glued to Scripting News when blogs were in the embryonic stage. I still feed from the site, although [as expected in the ever changing web] a lot of other sites have become more relevant and interesting to me.

Nevertheless, here's a big THANK YOU from me to you Dave Winer. I hope your birthday was a good one.

Apple has release a guide to dashboard development.

Dashboard is a display and management system for Mac OS X desktop utilities, called widgets. Developers can create widgets, such as a clock or a calculator, to provide functionality that doesn't require the complexity of a large application. Widgets can also act as an interface to other applications; for example, a widget can act as a remote control for iTunes.

It's also downloadable as a .pdf if you're that way inclined [Programming Guide/Reference].

While on the dashboard topic, there's a tip on that great site MacOSXHints about how to replace the [dashboard] phone book widget's mapping service.

John Gruber has started a list of "... observations and interesting details..." in relation to OSX Tiger. As someone who well and truly has his fingers on the pulse of the Apple world, it'll well worth keeping an eye on. He's provided a feed to the list as well, so you can let your aggregator check for updates.