Polaroids & Pinholes is an interesting experiment in pinhole photography by illustrator Rowena Dugdale. The above shots were made using a pinhole camera made out of an empty Pringles™ can.
Category: Technology
San Francisco’s Proposed Blog Law
The Personal Democracy Forum is reporting that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will be voting on a local law that requires “local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.”
The author of the piece claims that the city ordinance will require all online pages “that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits.”
However, not everyone agrees that this vote is as anti-blogger as it first sounds. Chris Nolan believes that while the law is poorly written, the core idea is sound that bloggers who receive money from a local candidate to write about them on their site should be compelled to openly disclose those payments to the local election board, and that they should be treated like any other commercial outlet receiving money to promote a candidate, rather than simply free press.
From reading these sites, it certainly appears to be a nasty little mess brought on by recent elections in which blogs and other online forums played a key role in the results. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially since national politics made good use of similar blogs in the last presidential election and how little regulation there is separating the honest protection of freedom of speech from paid-for online political mouthpieces.
Marketing of Your Website Through RSS
BL Ochman has an article up at What’s Next Online entitled “A Totally Non-Techie Explanation of What You Need to Know About RSS“, which is a great introduction to using the growing popularity of RSS and syndication feeds to help market your website, even if it’s merely for a few more readers for a small blog or for more traffic on a large ecommerce website.
Although RSS technology is quickly becoming very mature, the popularity of its use by the mainstream public is still growing, leading to a situation not all that dissimilar to the state of the web in the late 1990s. Now is a great time to get up to speed on how to best use syndication feeds to better serve your website.
Top Spyware Worth $300 Million Annually
Yahoo News has a story about the top ten spyware threats, as compiled by Webroot Software, Inc., a developer of anti-spyware tools.
The stop spot goes to CoolWebSearch, a particularly nasty program dubbed the “Ebola of the Internet” by Webroot vice-president Richard Stiennon. According to the studies done by the company, one out of every two PCs scanned by their software test positive for the presence of CoolWebSearch.
Probably the most sobering aspect of the story is just how much profit there is in spyware. CoolWebSearch reportedly made 300 million dollars last year for it’s developers.