Delirium Propaganda

I don’t know if you can remember the day you started blogging? I can, and boy did I have the wrong impression of what blogging was. That day was quite strange and exiting at the same time. I can recall perfectly well what I is was doing at the time and how I got drawn by the “make money blogging” hype that was sweeping the internet. Back then I didn’t even know what a blog was and although blogger.com was already a wide used service it was news to me. After reading a few short articles, to short in fact, I started creating my first blog. At the time I had returned to my home country and was unemployed so any slight opportunity of making money was good news for me, in fact just too good to be neglected.

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It seems that the tables have turned and this time it’s the Pirate’s Bay turn to start dishing out Legal threats. Apparently the MediaDefender email leek is going to do more than embarrass the company, it could mean legal trouble. The Pirate Bay, after analysing the leek emails, have posted on their blog that they have gathered solid proof of Hacker activities promoted by MediaDefender. According to the article the Pirate Bay long has suspected that fowl play was being used but never managed to get proof until the emails were leek last week. This important evidence was delivered to the Swedish Police and the the Pirate Bay has already informed that they will be pursuing legal action against the following companies.

• Twentieth Century Fox, Sweden AB
• Emi Music Sweden AB
• Universal Music Group Sweden AB
• Universal Pictures Nordic AB
• Paramount Home Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Atari Nordic AB
• Activision Nordic Filial Till Activision (Uk) Ltd
• Ubisoft Sweden AB
• Sony Bmg Music Entertainment (Sweden) AB
• Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Nordic AB

Let’s see who is going to have the last laugh now.

A few weeks ago Opera rolled out its latest browser, 9.5 Krestel Alpha, for Beta Testing. I downloaded the browser on the first day it was released and have been using it, testing it, ever since. After a few days of testing one aspect really impressed me, Krestel did not crashed even once since I’ve been using it. If you take into consideration that even FireFox tends to crash now and then on Vista, so far so good. Unfortunately there is still once feature lacking in Opera and from the looks of things it won’t be added in Krestel. A decent spell checker. In order to get it working in Opera you have to download an Aspell library, jump a few more hopes and if you’re lucky it will work. Once installed the feature is so archaic that I’m sure many of us will just use Firefox when spell checking is needed. Either than that things are working well and I hope all of you will try it out.

[tags] Opera, Browser, Krestel, Firefox [/tags]

Social Networking Sites (SNS) are here to stay and from the looks of things, the number of visitors are growing by the day. I’ve never been much of a Social networking fan preferring the old fashion forums over the more modern SNS filled with pretty pictures and cheesy pick-up lines. According to statistics, in 2006 the top 10 SNS sites grew an amazing 47% in terms of visitors and new members.

Market share (2007):

1. MySpace.com - 79.70% market share

2. Facebook.com - 11.47% market share

3. Bebo.com - 1.28% market share

4. Imeem.com - 1.03% market share

5. BlavkPlanet.com - 0.87% market share.

Myspace still leads the Social Networking scheme with an increased of 70% from April 2006 to April 2007, while visits to Facebook were up 126% and visits to Bebo were up 184%. (source)

[tags]Myspace, April, Social Networking Sites, Social Networking, Bebo, Facebook. [/tags]

Google is great for searching the web, we all know that right? But did you know that by using a specific query you could get so much more. In fact you can search the entire web for specific files like, mp3, xls, wma and many more. If you get creative you will learn that you can also search for databases “sql”, not bad.

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” “Last modified” mp3

Simple query string do find mp3 files on directories. Obviously the mp3 tag at the end is for google to search only for mp3 files.

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” mp3 “pavarotti”

Basically the same function as above, the only thing that changes is the “pavarotti” which specefies what mp3 files you’re looking for.

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” +(”/ebooks”|”/book”) +(chm|pdf|zip)

This one is a little more complex. With this string you will search for “ebooks” or “|” “book” with the following formats “chm, pdf, zip”.

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:”index of” +(”/ebooks”|”/book”) +(chm|pdf|zip) +”terry”

Once again if you would like to search for a particular author add the name like in the example above.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”

Another cool search string that you might want to try.

If you’re a cleaver chap, like I know you are, you’ll undoubtedly understand that the options are endless and searching Google using this method can bare many fruit. I for one use it frequently when trying to search for specific documents that are hard or nearly impossible to find using the normal search function.

[tags] Google, Search, Mp3, [/tags]

Pligg is a CMS script that mimics the functions of sites like Digg or Reddit. The project has been active since 2005 and as really come a long way since those days. From a webmasters perspective I only ever saw one tiny flaw with Pligg, it was very slow to load, which in my opinion was a significant draw back in today’s web2.0 internet. A problem that has been addresses with the realease of Pligg 9.8 Beta. Other than that it is a great script with a bright future no doubt.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any true examples of sites running the pligg script which was a pity. I know that on the official site they have a few showcases but I wanted something more mature and tested. So here is what I’m going to do. If you have a site using the pligg script please leave a comment, if I like it I’ll post it here for everyone to see.

[tags]Pligg, CMS, WEB2.0, Beta, Sites [/tags]

Amazon is offering everyone the opportunity to download, for free, four pilot shows that are going to premier this fall. The shows include Bionic Woman, Chuck, Journeyman and Life. Apparently NBC and Amazon have finally struck a deal which will authorise various popular TV shows to be rented or downloaded using the Amazon Unbox service.To watch the videos you’ll need to install the Amazon Unbox player. The files are in Windows Media Video format but who cares since they’re 100% free? Can’t get better than that.

[tags] Amazon, NBC, Shows, TV, Free, [/tags]

Good news for all Opera lovers, it looks like the latest release of this super cool browser is on its way. Opera 9.5 code named Kestrel was first announced around two months ago with little being said after that date. Luckily for us that is about to change. Opera Software has finally announced that the much anticipated public alpha release will roll out on September 4, in other words tomorrow.

The developers also revealed some information regarding what to expect in the upcoming releases. Bellow is a list of the key areas they have focused on:

• Improved performance
• Site Compatibility
• Accessibility
• OS integration
• Opera Mail

All we have to do now is wait and see what other surprises the developer team has in store for us.

Update: You can get more information and download kestrel here.

[tags] Opera, krestel, Browser [/tags]