Web::Edgio Test

This is a test for edgeio…

I’m sure many people will be doing the same thing. It will be interesting to see how edgeio manages these junk postings…

Web::Craigslist is being sued!

This is not necessarily new news, but I had a heated discussion with my good friend Bill about this issue today. A federal lawsuit accuses Craigslist of violating fair housing laws by publishing discriminatory classified ads, and this really pisses me off.

I don’t understand and thus cannot agree with the logic that a website is responsible for its user’s misbehaviour. I understand that’s how it worked in the off-line media such as the newspapers, but Craigslist is a totally different environment that does not produce any content itself, it is just a tool. I think this is like punishing an organization for the fault of its members.

Several Internet law experts said the suit seems likely to fail, citing a 1996 federal law that says an online service provider isn’t considered a publisher or a speaker when it merely passes along information provided by someone else.

I believe, as long as the web site does not make any editorial contributions to the content, it should be the person who published the content that should be responsible. I think the legislators are suggesting that web sites should start policing their own community, and therefore asking them to moderate the content.

I think this has huge implications to this new way of living that we are getting used to. This law suit will not only affect the big players like Yahoo! and eBay, but pretty much any web sites that supports user generated contents – can you spell ‘web 2.0′?

I don’t think Craigslist will lose this battle, but I guess I am just frustrated. Am I totally missing something?

Random::Blog Traffic

Now that I am blogging almost daily, I started thinking about ways how I can increase traffic to my blog. Robin Good wrote this great article titled, "RSSTop55 Best Blog Directory and RSS Submission Sites".

This was probably the most informative article on this subject. But now what? Do I have to submit my blog information to all these sites? Somebody’s gotta come up with a submission service for all the 163 sites listed in the article. I know I will pay for that. — Now that sounds like a good business to me!

Photo::Sensor Dust

Digital SLR is great. Only if you can manage to avoid dust on your sensor. I took my relatively new Canon EOS 5D to my recent trip to Squaw Valley. When I looked at the files after I got back home, I found that all of my landscape pictures had serious sensor dust effect in the sky.

Sensor dust is a serious problem because it affects all the images taken with the camera body. You will have the problem until you clean the sensor. The enlarged (actually 50% reduced) black box portion of the left image is shown below. How ugly is that!!!

I’ve had this problem with my old D60 and 10D as well, but it was only after I used it on several field trips that I noticed the dust. I’m not sure if 5D is more prone to dust (because of its larger sensor?), but having serious dust problems for a relatively new camera is truly disappointing.

 I bought a sensor cleaning kit about a month ago, and I guess I finally found a true reason to use it:(

For those who are looking for information on how to clean you sensor, here is a very useful article.

Web::AltaVista?

I just started reading a book called, “The Search” by John Battelle. In one of the early chapter titled, “Search before Google”, John spent half of the chapter talking about the rise and fall of the once popular search site – AltaVista.

It is a truly amazing story – started as a research project to demonstrate the processing power of DEC’s Alpha processor, becoming the most popular search site and then slowly having faded away from our memories. This is one company that had a chance to become what google is today.

I always thought that I kept good track of what happened to web companies, but I didn’t know that AltaVista was sold twice after Compaq taking control of the website. I actually would bet that there are not many people that know who owns AltaVista today — it is owned by Yahoo!

At the peak of it’s sucess, it was first sold to Compaq as part of DEC ($9.6B total value). Unfortunately, once again, AltaVista was run by a hardware company and they had no clue. In 1999, after the founder Louis Monier finally left the company, AltaVista was again sold to CMGI for $2.3B. Although CMGI invested a lot of money for a massive PR campaign and even filed for IPO, the ill-fated AltaVista now had to face a bigger downfall – the Internet bubble had burst just before their planned IPO. It was then sold to Overture in 2003 at $140M, which was, as we all know, eventually sold to Yahoo!

I thought it would be fun to take a look at the Internet Archive’s “WayBack Machine” to see how AltaVista has changed over the years:

 

Photo::Digital Negatives

If you know me, you know I am a black & white photographer. I started with digital 4 years ago, but soon switched to film. Over the years, I’ve tried basically every type of camera – 35mm SLR/rangefinder, medium format SLR/rangefinder and large format. I also tried all the different types of medium – b&w negatives, color negatives and positives. Of course I tried all kinds of printing – b&w printing, ilfochrome, ra-4, digital scanning and printing.

Now, my favorite combination is medium format SLR/Large format View Camera + B&W film + Darkroom printing. However, last year, I sold some of my unused gears and bought a Canon EOS 5D, which is a 12.8 megapixel full-frame digital camera. I love the wide angle, high resolution images that it produces. I’ve been thinking how I can use this digital camera while printing with the analog method – the darkroom.

Gadget::Smartphones

I’ve been looking for a smartphone for a while. My main use of it will be schedule management and email, maybe a little bit of web browsing. So, about a year ago, I looked around and tried Treo 650 and Samsung i730. I heard that a new version of Treo was due and I decided to get an i730.

i730 was great – windows mobile is great, bluetooth/wi-fi support is great, email support works perfectly – but I returned it after a week of use mainly because of the size. I ended up getting a RAZR. I am very happy with my RAZR. It’s a great phone that’s small. But I still miss the scheduling/communication features of a smartphone.

Ever since, I’ve been waiting for the Motorola Q, which was supposed to be released last year. I saw it at the CES earlier this year, and I really liked it for its functionality and form factor. I only wish that it had bigger screen. But it seems like that one is going to take at least 6 more months for me to use it with Cingular here in the US. (They are releasing the CDMA version for Verizon first)

Now I am looking forward to the new Samsung SGH-i320. This one looks really  promising, and if I get this, I’ll be able to contribute to my mother country’s economy:) The problem with these cellphones are that they make the announcements too early. It usually takes 6months to sometimes more than a year to actually start selling them at storefronts. They should all learn from Apple’s announce-today-sell-tomorrow practice, if you ask me.

 

Web::Ning

Ning is a new venture from Marc Andressen which provides a web service that lets you easily create a simple, social application through cloning existing applications created by other members. This is very interesting because there are hundreds of thousands of potential simple social applications – such as ‘best of xxx’, ‘worst of xxx’, ‘xxx sharing’, etc.

Mike Arrington has written about ning several times (here, here and here). He was especially harsh on them on the second one and I agreed to most of his issues. The recent announcement of launching new features took my attention and I decided to try it out myself.

 

Web::Browster

Browster is my latest discovery, which is also one of my all-time favorites. Basically, it is a plug-in for a web browser (IE or Firefox) that lets you navigate through websites much more efficiently. It is especially useful when you are browsing through a list of links (e.g. search results, news articles, forum postings, etc.) or when you’d like to peek at a page without having to open a new browser window.

Web::Social Bookmarking

Here is a list of websites that has something to do with ’social bookmarking’ or ’search based on human indexing’.

• del.icio.us
• digg
• wink
• furl
• spurl
• blinklist
• del.irio.us
• feedme links
• linkroll
• netvouz
• scuttle
• snap
• clusty
• blingo
• rojo
• simpy

… and here is a great resource for understanding the players.