April 27th, 2005

Blog will change your business

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businessweek-on-blog.gifOn the latest Businessweek cover:

Blogs will change your business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.

How true how true!

April 21st, 2005

A Better Tomorrow

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two-babes.jpgmrbrown has a great summary of the blogger dinner we have last night (waliao! posted at 2:31am. you win!) so go check it out. The two pretty ladies on the right were the two most famous female bloggers in Singapore xiaxue and adri (actually i was sitting between them but you don’t want to spoilt the picture :-)

Anyway, two reasons we got together last night:

1) Singapore bloggers are working to put together an event to talk about blogging! We should have more details on this shortly once we ironed out a few more details.

tomorrow-banner.png2) finalizing and launching tomorrow.sg, a site by Singapore bloggers for Singapore bloggers. Think of it as Boing Boing for Singapore, linking to the various interesting articles in Singapore blogosphere. To keep it interesting and relevant, we will need you, the bloggers and readers, to recommend articles to us – anything so long it is related to Singapore.

Afterall, Malaysia bloggers have their petalingstreet, Singapore bloggers shall have a better tomorrow (erm…sound a bit corny).

1 more photos available from adri

April 1st, 2005

Journalism is a verb, not a noun

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Via Jeff Jarvis

Many knickers are twisting into knots over the questions ofwho is a journalist and how to save journalism. But those are the wrong questions.

Journalism is not defined by the person who does it or by the medium or the company that delivers it.

Journalism is not a thing. It is an act: The act of informing is journalism. It’s a verb, not a noun.

And no one owns journalism. It is not an official act, a certified act, an expert act, a proprietary act. Anyone can do journalism. Everyone does. Some do it better than others, of course. But everyone does it.

Realizing that — embracing that — will be the key to saving journalism: its quality and its business.

btw, I am preparing for a slew of blogger April Fool’s joke in a few hours (when the people in the west wakes up). And I look forward to the trackbacks, pings, and links to the fav. April Fool entries :P

At least, I am already an April Fool two days earlier.

March 22nd, 2005

VoIP Job Posting

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I been using feedster to montior keyword voip and I notice a there are more and more job postings on voip like this.

I am very happy to see jobs created by voip (hey “voip engineer” could be the new job position in your company) and I am equally impressed that people are using blog to do recuritment ;-)

March 15th, 2005

State of Blogosphere

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David Sifry posted an updated on the state of blogosphere with some interesting information:

blogosphere-mar05-weblog.jpgblogosphere-mar05-newblog.jpg

As of March 2005, technorati is tracking 7.8m weblogs (937 millions links) growing at 30k to 40k per day.

Another interesting part is this paragraph:

There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs – fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.

Of course! Since spammers are finding it harder and harder to spam other people blogs, they setup their own! :-)

March 10th, 2005

VON Blogger Panel

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von-blog-panel.jpgI have a lot of fun at the VoIP Blogger session with Andy Abramson, Dan Brekke, Jeff Pulver, Om Malik, Aswath Rao and Tom Keating. I am also pretty amazed at the numbers of people in the audience who read blogs and also blog themselves. Particularly, it is quite clear that most people read our blogs because they find they get faster news then technology media.

The only regret I have is that we have not enough (voip) bloggers in Asia. While I travel often around Asia for my work and able to give some insight of whats happening over here, things are moving so fast here that I think we need more Asia VoIP bloggers.

Incidently, I started reading some Chinese blogs site regularly. And yes, they support RSS and they have some pretty good RSS reader in China like 摹捚通. Much better then any of the English RSS Reader on Windows so give it a try.

March 5th, 2005

Yahoo! into Social Software

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This would be an exciting news a year ago. But today, it sound just like “me too me too”. Yahoo, where have you been in the last 2 years? You are too late to the party. Why not acquire SixApart who is already doing very cool stuff?

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news) is likely to build and buy tools that help its users create, publish and search blogs, Susquehanna Financial Group Marianne Wolk said in a note on Friday.

Wolk also said she also expects the company to expand into social networking software, which lets users share and organize content.

ps: I am not affiliated with SixApart in anyway – altho I have friends who work there.

February 4th, 2005

Solution to Trackback Spams

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Several MT users has emailed me to write a Captcha solution to the latest trackback spams problem. Unfortunately, Captcha cannot be easily integrated with trackback. In fact, trackback spams are harder to catch because both legit and spams trackback are normally send by machines so any tools that tries to differentiate human from machine will not work.

Nevertheless, I promised to do something about it so here is it: MT-TrackbackAntiSpam.
(To install, unzip, put it in your plugins/ directory and make sure it is executable)

The way it works is fairly simple – if the incoming trackback does not come from the host as stated in the URL, we reject the trackback. For example, if a trackback from url http://online-poker.psxtreme.com/ comes from 194.63.235.156 (an open proxy), then it is likely to be spam. (online-poker.psxtreme.com does not resolved to 194.63.235.156).

This solution has two pitfalls however: (1) it does not stop spammers from sending trackback spams from their own host – a small problem for now because spammers has been hiding behind open proxies (2) it may reject legit trackback if it is not sent by their blog-engine (e.g. blogging client)

Nevertheless, I been using it on my Drupal4Blogger for a while and it has been working well. I hope this works out for MT users too.

February 1st, 2005

Another trackback spam attack

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I got another flood of trackback spams attack this time. Looks like it is getting worst – they perfect the technique and combined it with distributed zombie trackback pings. In just 12hrs, I got over 100+ such trackbacks.

Luckily, all trackbacks need to go thru moderation and I can delete them with a zap. Still, it is not managable. Okay, I really got to find sometime to do the script to deal with it fairly soon.

January 16th, 2005

2005 Top 10 trend according to Fortune

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Top 10 trend in 2005 according to Fortune. No. 1 on the list is blogging :-) Read the excellent article on Fortune which has pretty good summary of what’s happened in the blogosphere last year.

In a related news, Seth discovered the guy behind Think Secret (which is now been sued by Apple) is a 19 years old who started his site when he is 13.