Ken McGuire

Author: Ken McGuire

  • Feedburner resorting to SPAM?

    Feedburner. They’re great. Can’t say that I have a single complaint about them todate. I can geo-tag my feed, I’ve subscriptions coming through FeedBlitz, I can organise my RSS feeds into one standard type – and so the list goes on. But with all of this, emails are starting to appear around the web looking suspiciously like spam mail, simply telling you to go out and sign up for Feedburner.

    In addition to feed management services, we also offer feed monetization – which gives publishers the ability to advertise in their feeds. With our growing list of publishers across a broad range of advertising channels, we have a number of very interesting ad campaigns running that might be appropriate for your feeds.

    If you need any help setting up your feeds at feedburner.com or if you have any questions please feel free to ping me. Take care and I look forward to working with you in the future

    Ok – its not asking you to buy anything, and if you want to make the use of Feedburner’s core functions you don’t have to go forking out the cash. All the same, where do you draw the line? Would you consider it spam mail? You didn’t ask for it, didn’t sign up for it, you don’t know who the guy is and now he’s telling you to visit his website. Or do you consider it direct marketing? Or is there any difference any more in this day and age?

  • Blog Awards Nomination

    So my own blog is listed in the Technology sector of the Irish Blog Awards as one of the initial nominations. Following a public vote, each of the categories for the Blog Awards will be whittled down to five entrants in each one. Thanks for continuing to take the time on reading Creative Imagination and, hopefully, the blog will be there again next year.

    There’s some fantastic reads in the technology category including Dave’s Rants, Michele Neylon’s blog, Eirepreneur and Tom Raftery’s IT Views. Overall I think this is a fantastic move for the Irish blogging community on a whole and whatever about the awards themselves, it is certain to create a wealth of attention for everyone involved in blogging in Ireland.

  • Daft.ie worth €15 million?

    If you happened to read the Irish Independant on Saturday (don’t ask me how I was reading the Irish Independant on Saturday, but I was!) and turned to page 3, there was a very nice writeup on Daft.ie.

    Set up by Brian and Eamonn Fallon as a spin of a project of Brian’s going through the education system as we all do, Daft has become massive over the past few years and advertises around 140k properties a year for rent with a further 20k for sale over 45 countries.

    I remember using it myself when heading off to college first and was impressed by its relative ease of use. What I was amazed to read is that given the work on the site, its traffic and potential revenue that there was a price tag put on the site, estimated at between 10 and 15 million Euro.

    Thats a whole lotta euro!

    Of course, the brothers say that its not for sale, but nice to see an independant Irish website doing so well!

  • Bad Internet Habits

    At the end of what has been a very busy week I’ve got to ask a question…

    My family have got bad internet habits. Well, I view them as bad. Immediate family, distant family, friends – the whole nine yards. If you know the URL of a website, why do you insist on going to Google or Yahoo and typing the full URL, that you know too well, into the search box on either site and then wait for the results to appear before hitting the website?

    Isn’t that why they put address bars in IE or FF, or why we have a command prompt in DOS? Anyone else notice or get annoyed by that habit? I can’t crack them out of it!

  • Lock Up Your Documents…

    …and hope you’ve not caught the Nyxem virus which is supposed to hit today, February 3rd. Via BBC… Computer security firms are bracing themselves as the moment approaches when the Nyxem virus will strike. On 3 February the bug will start erasing Word documents, spreadsheets and other common files on infected PCs. Compromised machines will also be used as launch platforms to help the virus seek out fresh victims. Because the virus is known to be lurking on more than 300,000 PCs, this scanning could generate large amounts of net traffic as it activates.

    Good thing I wasn’t working three big spreadsheets yesterday which wouldn’t be served well if they were lost to a virus. Actually, been years since I lost anything to a virus, can only remember one occasion – losing Aces Of The Pacific and X-Wing on the PC to some virus I picked up off a PC magazine cover disk…. they laughed it off, damn them! Been a while too since I reported on a virus threat, used to do it on a weekly basis during my final year in college (we had to maintain a security site, so of course I ran a blog 😉 )

    Anyway, the infected machine count stands at around 300K and they reckon its more likely to affect home users (since security tends to be a little better in the office). And how do you get duped into it? By opening attachments that claim to have pornographic pictures or videos included. So are we guessing that most computers will belong to males? (Don’t take offence to that, or to generalisation 😉 ).

    Dor those of you concerned…. DMP – Oracle files, DOC – Word document, MDB – Microsoft Access, MDE – Microsoft Access/Office, PDF – Adobe Acrobat, PPS – PowerPoint slideshow, PPT – PowerPoint, PSD – Photoshop,RAR – Compressed archive, XLS – Excel spreadsheet, ZIP – Compressed file are the filetypes that are affected. I’m done for if I get it! As would the whole of Waterford IT’s multimedia students…. hope you’re paying attention.

  • Pixellance – a Scam?

    Following up on yesterday’s post it seems Mel Rogers isn’t the only one that’s been had… Mel’s also just set up a Pixellance blog over at blogspot covering and commenting on the whole issue, stop by and take a read.

  • Pixel Robbery

    A couple of weeks ago I was reading a post on David O’Neill’s blog concerning ‘missing the boat’ on the pixelad business. Still subscribed to the comments, I was amazed to read the case of one reply this morning.

    “I purchased a “large ad” at an agreed rental of $5 per month. It was stated that the site, and ad’, would be maintained for at least 2 years.

    My ad was recently removed and when I asked why I was informed I would have to pay $47 a month to have it put pack due to the fact that the owners had spend so much money marketing the sites.”

    The site in question is Pixellance, which recently joined forces with RentPixelAds.com… Looks like a con job (no offence intended to the owner of the site – just my opinion). Take a read of the comment for yourself but its highly disappointing to see something like that in any service. As soon as the site gets any attention at all they jack up the prices? Supply and demand at work or just a ripoff?

    Note : made a little edit to the original post, didn’t want to be offending anyone in general terms 🙂

  • Tagvertising on new levels

    So we got another form of advertising, along the lines of 1000tags. I took a look at ZoomTags in the office this morning, bit of a shaky start as I couldn’t get registered for the program to start out with due to an error on the registration form (a matter which was later fixed in the day), alas now that code won’t start displaying on my blog until February 6th… but its a start.

    The gist of it being that you set up a tag cloud, with predetermined keywords if you prefer on your website, not at all unlike del.icio.us, and thats about it for your part. Advertisers in turn bid on the keywords and it works off a pay-per-click system.

    If you blog, and you like your tags, then this might be just for you….

  • For You AdSense Heads

    For those of you about to rock…. we salute you.

    For those of you using AdSense, you might want to check this article out. Seems to be the same stuff cropping up the more I research it, but this one, just fresh from Google, is relevant all the same.

  • Bloggers Be Banned!

    The Japanese team taking part in the Winter Olympics in Italy have been pretty much warned ‘blog – and you’re on the next plane home‘. Bad news for the Japanese, but good news for bloggers in a sense. The JOC are instructed their teams not to start blogging the Winter Games as the Olympic Charter bans athletes’ journalist activities when the games are on, and violators will be disqualified. Of course, this would suggest that bloggers are now journalists?

    If thats the case then I’d like my free press pass to a few certain places this year, thank you very much… 😉

    Seriously though, it is a little outlandish. Some of the sporting committee’s are even going as far as telling their members, who have personal homepages, to stay away from the internet and not update their sites while they participate in the games.

    Anyone ever heard of the freedom of speech and all that?

  • Take 2 in hot… coffee…

    I’d safely say that almost anyone who has owned a Playstation 2 or used one, has at some stage, tried their hand at the Grand Theft Auto series. I’ve been a fan ever since the top-down first version, and even that one was given a 15/18 cert when it was released in certain areas. Having grown up with the series on the PC and then trying my hand at the console when Vice City and San Andreas were released, I was astounded to hear today that Take Two Interactive are being sued, for a nice sum for hiding a mini-game within the PC version of GTA : San Andreas which depicts the main character in sexually explicit scenes, which can be controlled by the user. The minigame itself has been dubbed ‘Hot Coffee’.

    The Los Angeles city attorney’s office has taken Take-Two to court for deceptive business practices and making false statements in marketing the game, for its failure to reveal the extent of its sexual content.

    The smart thing is, Take-Two originally claimed that the scenes were added by hackers in the form of a mod for the game, until later admitting that the scenes and minigame were actually embedded within the original code. Big mistake there lads!

    Check this article covering the original story (pre-court case), mid last year. Did anyone else NOT know about this?

  • Hacker Tricked Into Jail

    If you’re going to steal software, or download software – for the love of God don’t start selling the stuff as well! Microsoft just sent the US hacker behind IllMob.org to jail for a two year period, followed by a three-year supervised release which will be monitored by special software set up on his own computer.

    What did he do? He advertised, and twice sold, incomplete portions of source code for Windows 2000/NT, first selling to a private investigator before selling to an FBI agent which got him indicted under selling a company’s stolen trade secrets. The fact of course that he has a previous criminal record for trespassing, repeated theft and assault didn’t really help his case.

    “Basically, everything I do, I do ass-backwards,” Genovese said in an instant-messaging interview ahead of Friday’s sentencing. “I like drawing, so I spray paint. I like music, so I took some radios of kids I hated in high school. I like computers, so I hack.”

    You can read the full story here

  • Google Has A New Rival – Kosmix

    $7.4 million in venture capital funding and a bet that they can finally crack the “meaning” of a webpage based on its content sees two Stanford graduates (same college as the Google boys) launching Kosmix, currently alpha, as a new search engine with a different approach to results. Kosmix, like Google and Yahoo, is crawling and indexing the entire Web. It has come up with its own technology to rank pages by category, instead of by keyword. It’s two founders, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan are both ex-Amazon (Director of Technology and General Manager respectively)

    nstead, Kosmix looks at what pages that link to other pages are saying — to take a bigger stab at judging the meaning or subject of the page. If the linking page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can begin getting at its meaning, or at least muster up enough information to categorize it by topic. Harinarayan calls it “category rank.” Kosmix is essentially tagging pages with categories. “Auto-tagging the Web,” as Harinarayan puts it.

    Certainly an interesting read of an article for your Friday evening browse of the web!

  • Landmark Ruling for UK Filesharing

    Via BBC… High Court judges ordered two men to pay the British Phonographic Industry between £1,500 and £5,000 for making thousands of songs available online. One of the men said he did not know he was acting illegally, the other said there was no evidence against him. The BPI has launched 139 similar cases since October 2004, most being settled out of court for up to £6,500.

    “Your honour… I didn’t know that it was illegal and I should have been paying for the stuff”… I can see it now. Sets a good example though with IRMA currently in Phase II of its fight against the same. Also nice to hear that last years legal music sales finally outweighed the illegal!

  • BlogBeat Followup

    I have to commend Jeff at BlogBeat for his quick turnaround in answering my few questions on the service, namely about installing blocking cookies on your machine in order to prevent tracking your own visits from your own computer. He has thankfully allowed me to make the trick public as well, with announcement to follow at BlogBeat early next week.

    “From the browser you’d like to block, browse to your blog’s URL with this querystring “?bbnyah”… So for you, it would be “http://www.kenmc.com/?bbnyah” (w/o the quotes).”

    If you want to count your visits again, look through your cookies for the one labelled ‘bbnyah’ and remove it. This should be itegrated to BlogBeat screens on Monday but its another cute trick that I’m fond of, and thanks again to Jeff for the quick turnaround.

  • The Power Of Blogs

    Forbes.com have an interesting article on the power of blogs and bloggers in helping a company drive a product to the masses.

    One interesting point that was raised…

    To get noticed by bloggers, companies should appoint internal bloggers and start them blogging,” said Wyman. “Of course, the blogs must be authentic. Also, companies can sponsor blogging events and meet the bloggers themselves to see what makes them tick.“

    Take a read of Tapping Into The Blogosphere, pretty good stuff.

  • Blogbeat Your Blog

    BlogBeat has launched recently enough and is offering 30 day trials to users to help you track statistics across both your blog and RSS feed. I’m already tracking with StatCounter which is throwing up some useful statistics, Google Analytics is in there too in the background so whats the harm in trying a third one?

    “Bogbeat provides all of the basic statistics including visitors, referrers, search engines, browsers, etc.., but also has great post detail stats, RSS statistics (for Feedburner), comment tracking, outgoing links, and more…”

    It’s going to cost $6 a month for blogs that are under a half million page views monthly, which I sit into just about right 😉 so what harm… The trial is up on February 27th so I’ll report back before then with the findings! In the meantime, SolutionWatch have a great review of the service, or you can try it for yourself at BlogBeat.

    —
    Update: Emailed a friendly guy at BlogBeat who also informed me that the tracking has the same blocking cookie function as StatCounter, just not seen yet when you login, but kindly sent me the link – and it works. Snappy response, I like it!

  • IIA Blogging Seminar

    March 8th (2-5pm):One of Ireland’s most respected and active bloggers, Michele Neylon will present a ½ day seminar, at the Hilton Hotel Charlemont Place, on everything you need to know about blogging. If you are a novice, a regular blogger wanting to improve what you do or interested in adding blogs to your company’s marketing mix then this is for you. Places are strictly limited to the first 30 people who book. The cost is €95 for non members and only €55 for IIA members. This event is expected to book our fast.

    This seminar will cover the following areas:

    · Wonderful World of Blogs (some introductory examples)

    · What is a Blog?

    · What are its uses?

    · Technical Overview of what makes blogs work RSS feeds and all that stuff

    · How to set up your own blog

    · Blogging Pitfalls

    · Commercial applications of blogging

    · Can blogging win you business

    · Search engines and blogs – will your content be found

    · Monetizing your blog

    · How to promote your blog

    · Examples of how blogs can be done badly

    · Excellent examples of blogs – globally and in Ireland

    · Can blogging win you business

    · Question and Answer session

    Pity its limited to 30 seats… could be an extremely interesting day!

  • DeviantART Kicking Out U18s

    Interesting points are being raised in relation to DeviantART’s recently published “Terms of Service”. I know that myself, John, Rob, and other ‘Deviants’ will recall the uproar over their last range of legal documents published. But now, they’re kicking out the under 18’s which I think makes up the mainstay of DA’s userbase….

    “To register as a member of the Service or purchase products, you must be 18 years or lawfully permitted to enter into and form contracts under applicable law. In no event may minors submit Content to the Service. You agree that the information that you provide to us upon registration, at the time of purchase, and at all other times will be true, accurate, current and complete. You also agree that you will ensure that this information is kept accurate and up to date at all times. This is especially important with respect to your email address, since that is the primary way in which we will communicate with you about your account and your orders.”

    From Jark’s blog…

    Minors, which make up the vast majority of the userbase of deviantART, are now no longer allowed to submit content to deviantART. Not only are those under 18 not allowed to register for an account but they can no longer submit their art to the site or interact in areas where they will ultimately be submitting information to deviantART for all to view.

    My thoughts…. ridiculous. I really, honestly don’t know what they’re trying to achieve with this. Don’t they know that kids are the future of today, tomorrow…. No bloody wonder everyone is flocking to MySpace!

    Bring back Jark! 🙂

  • MySpace, MySpace, My Space!

    MySpace! Its the word on everyone’s lips at the moment. What’s so bloody great about MySpace? I’ve taken a gander at it a few times and most recently last week found more of my friends on it than I cared to find. Is there some secret about MySpace that has everyone crawling there or is it just “the” place to be at the moment?

    Running a gig (I run gigs under another one of my ventures… KilkennyMusic.com) recently I was speaking with a member of one of the bands who was constantly taking the piss out of one of his own band members for all the profiles he has on MySpace. Another one was greeted by “Jesus…. you’re not another bloody MySpace band are ya?” (in reference to a band that wasn’t appearing on the night).

    Sure enough, the more bands I get through Kilkenny Music, the more they’re sending me to their ‘MySpace’ page. Seems to be nothing more than a glorified blog of sorts except you get ‘friends’, similar to the way you get ‘watchers’ on DeviantART. Now it seems that if the US wasn’t enough, they’re going to hammer the UK market as well.

    They’ve got over 50 million users, 32 million of which are reportedly active and driving the site. I wasn’t exactly blown away by it myself but I’m guessing that the advertisers are well impressed!