Athens 2004 Web site linking policy

The official Web site of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games has a hyperlink policy they would like all Web sites to adhere to.
  1. “Use the term Athens 2004 only, and no other term as the text referent.”
  2. Send a request letter to the Internet Department with a description of your site, reason for linking, the unique URL containing, the link, and your e-mail contact.
How odd. Such policies never work, and might serve as a nice way to aggregate news coverage. I am sure the official site of the Olympics does not need the PageRank help.

Deep Lake Water Cooling System

Enwave’s Deep Lake Water Cooling is now cooling the downtown core of Toronto. Cold water is drawn from the icy waters 83-meters below Lake Ontario. The water pipes cool a closed system of water pipes that cool downtown. Enwave has enough capacity to air condition 32 million square feet of building space capacity: approximately 8000 homes. 40,000 tons of carbon dioxide are removed from the air. Enwave has a video online explaining the system in more detail. (via Metafilter)

MT-Blacklist v2.0e released

Jay Allen released MT-Blacklist 2.0e today. The new version is compatible with Movable Type 3.0x releases but not compatible with 3.1 beta. As the developer of the #1 Movable Type plugin I am curious how the licensing and donation system is working for Jay. Jay asks for $100 per author for commercial use of the plugin and $5 per author for educational and non-profit use. For a 5 author installation with each author using MT Blacklist Six Apart would receive a licensing fee of $200 and Jay would receive a licensing fee of $500.

As the perl hacker/source code reader might be able to surmise, there are a lot of surprises (big, awesome surprises) still asleep under the hood. Some of them will be released with the plugin pack and some later on when I have the time to implement them properly.

Los Angeles Galaxy fires Sigi Schmid

The Los Angeles Galaxy announced the firing of Sigi Schmid in a conference call this afternoon. The Los Angeles Galaxy currently have the best record among the ten teams of Major League Soccer. Sigi was in his sixth season as the Galaxy’s head coach. He coached the Western Conference in the All-Star game on July 31. It is very unusual for a first place team to fire its coach. Over the last five games the Galaxy tied four and lost one. It will be interesting to see how the Galaxy positions itself given the expansion of Chivas USA next season.

Feedster to add RSS advertising

Feedster plans to incorporate contextual advertising from Kanoodle in its RSS search subscriptions. Feedster will also sell its own sponsorships for some of the RSS feeds. There will be one advertisement every sixth headline and users can pay $10 a year for a feed without advertisements. The ad-free feed will be licensed under Creative Commons for non-commercial use. The eWeek article mentions the dispute regarding advertising in RSS feeds. I have no issue with advertising in RSS feeds and realize that it is bound to happen just as e-mail carries advertising messages as a trade-off for the costs of production. Users are used to content appended to the bottom of an e-mail from Yahoo!, Hotmail, or even a corporate disclaimer, and we have learned to mostly ignore those messages. RSS advertising is a bit different because the advertisement is an item and receives the same status as this posting. The best way to get around the problem of advertisements intermixed with other items is to classify the advertising item as a member of the advertising category. <category domain="http://www.kanoodle.com">Advertisement</category> The above code would allow feed aggregators to apply advertisement style markup to differentiate the advertising item from the standard post’s item. Feedster can demonstrate this style modification in their aggregator: MyFeedster. Search engines create a valuable service on top of other people’s content and make money from the writing of others. I am thankful for the traffic driven to my site from Google and other engines and realize these search services exist because of the ability to advertise. My immediate reaction to Feedster’s RSS advertising was “they are mucking up my content!” I then took a deep breath, realized that 250,000 feed subscriptions generating 5 million pings a month is not easy to maintain, and I currently have an observational mentality. I claimed my feed weeks ago but I am still unable to edit my claimed feed. Hopefully the demands of advertisers will help create a more reliable service. I would like to see Feedster provide publishers with the ability to purchase their own ad-free Feedster feeds on behalf of their users. Restricted to a RSS or OPML feed, here are your results. If I am willing to pay for the ability of my users to receive results based on my RSS or OPML feed I will advertise the ability on my site and we both benefit. If you have a Movable Type weblog and would like to provide your users with a RSS feed of your search results, please see my search template information.

RetroPads

RetroPad NES controller RetroZone takes original controllers from NES, Super Nintendo, Genesis, Atari, and Intellivision and converts them into USB game pads. You can now have emulation with the real controllers. I already have one of the top-loading NES systems from 1993 with the “dog bone” controllers. I like to have the full system, but finding and storing the games is difficult. Emulation combined with a nice controller is a good solution.