john keegan dot org

APIs and Developer Platforms: A Discussion on the Pros and Cons - ReadWriteWeb: The API is the frictionless means for any two web-based services to interact and share data and capabilities.

From SEOmoz | Know Your Playing Field: The Real Top 100 Domains:

• 60% of the top 25 domains are controlled by an elite six.
• 43% of the top 100 domains are controlled by an elite dozen.
• Together this elite dozen drives more than 1.3 billion monthly unique visits.

A must read… FYI, the list of top 100 domains is available here:

• CSV
• EXCEL
• PDF
• NUMBERS

Got an email from Google today about how you can avoid phishing, which is defined by Wikipedia as “an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.”

Here are the tips offered in the Google email:

• Don’t reply to or click on links in emails that ask for personal, financial, or account information.
• Check the message headers. The From: address and the Return-path should reference the same source.
• Instead of clicking the links in emails, go to the websites directly by typing the web address into your browser, cut and paste or use bookmarks.
• If on a secure page, look for “https” at the begging of the URL and the padlock icon in the browser.
• Keep your computer’s antivirus, spyware, browser, and security patches up to date and regularly run system scans.
• Review your accounts regularly and check for unauthorized activity.
• Use a browser that has a phishing filter (Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera).

A related article by Walter Mossberg was also published at WSJ today, How to Avoid Cons That Can Lead To Identity Theft.

Charlene Li on social networks’ value in a recession: …it means all those me-too, social-network with a twist startups who don’t have a monetization plan, or whose plan is dependent on traffic=advertising, are in trouble. This is social media — media being defined as ways to turn traffic into advertising. Not a good place to be sitting in a recession, when marketers are looking for scale and interaction and persuasion, not just impressions.

thisblogismyblog: Obi-Wan’s appearance at the Pinewood Derby occurs between the events of Episode III and Episode IV.

I found this new blogging client for Blackberry and it seems to work fine with my bb 8830 and my WordPress 2.3.2 blog.

The name of the client is BB Meta Blog Blackberry Client and I am posting this with it.

Does anyone know of any other Blackberry blog clients?

Inside Cable News today is reporting on the sale of the domain names ireport.com and i-report.com to CNN. Domainer Rick Schwartz sold the names to CNN for $750,000.
Note that Rick bought the domains in 1997, long before CNN had ever thought of creating its ireport service (I wrote about its launch here).

So why does Inside Cable News title their story Cyber-squatting pays off? WIkipedia defines cybersquatting as follows:

Cybersquatting, according to the United States federal law known as the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.

Was registering the domain ireport.com almost 11 years ago something done in bad faith? Surely not. I would bet Rick’s wife thought he was crazy 11 years ago; buying domain names that had no present value. It’s called speculation, and there’s nothing illegal, immoral, or unethical about it. No one had any claim to the term “ireport” at the time.

Now his speculating has paid off, but please don’t paint it with the “cybersquatting” brush, ICN. That’s just incorrect. Registering “BruceSpringsteen.com” and hoping to sell it to the Bruce for a big payday is indeed cybersquatting, but registering generic terms and made up words is not. It’s just capitalism.

Update: ICN has changed the title of their article to Domain name speculation pays off, noting that the term ‘Cybersquatting’ doesn’t apply in this case. All media outlets should learn how to issue a correction like this one, with humility.

Even if you are not a programmer, Rails Is a Ghetto is a must read.

Amazon S3 Plugin for WordPress: “A WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media for your WordPress powered blog.”

Once setup, this plugin transparently integrates with your WordPress blog. File uploads are automatically saved into your Amazon S3 bucket without any extra steps. Once saved, these files will be delivered by Amazon S3, instead of your web host. Any image thumbnails that get created are saved to Amazon S3 too. You’ll also find an “Amazon S3″ tab next to your regular “Upload” tab, which allows you to easily browse and manage files that were not upload via WordPress.

Thanks to a comment the other day, I was reminded of a another useful add-on tool I came across a while back, JS-Kit. They have Ratings, Reviews, Comments, and Polls you can add to your blog or website.

Seems like a nice service, and the designs are unobtrusive and understated. Would love to know if you are using this service and what you think of it.

We migrated two more blogs from BlogHarbor to PressHarbor last night, please visit:

• Adventures in home working
• SAST Wingees

who posted about their migration experiences here and here.

If you are currently blogging with the Blogware platform and have been thinking about making the move to WordPress, we’ve got the solution for you!

Disqus is another add-on commenting service, I guess the most famous in this area would be Haloscan… Dave Winer is now using Disqus at www.scripting.com, I’m very interested in services like this and Disqus seems to have some advanced features…

I am sitting here in room S219 at BlogWorld Expo and was expecting to see Om Malik (www.gigaom.com), Mike Arrington (www.techcrunch.com), and Leo LaPorte (leoville.com) talk about The Cult of Blogging but Om Malik “couldn’t make it” and Mike Arrington “forgot all about” BlogWorld Expo.

So now we are listening to Leo interview iJustine while interjecting with stories about when he was using The Well and lynx and gopher. Yawn.

If I had Dave Winer’s chutzpah I would stand up and call bullshit on this.

Update: Om Mailik had a bad back, and Mike Arrington said he “never agreed to attend the conference“, although he apparently did agree to attend as long as Blogworld paid his airfare and hotel but some signals apparently got crossed later on, according convention organizer Rick Calvert. Arringon says in his blog post “the first I heard about the event was early this week” but Calvert shows emails from Arrington confirming he will attend… Gotta love it!

I am here at the first BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas and blogging now from the “Blogger Lounge.” Should be a great couple of days, there are what looks t be thousands of people gathered and dozens of companies.

Big shout out to two of our BlogHarbor/PressHarbor bloggers (both started blogging on our BlogHarbor platform and migrated recently to PressHarbor, to our new WordPress hosting service) who are speaking at the event.

Matthew Cerrone, publisher of MetsBlog, is speaking at several presentations in the sports blogging track.

And Des Walsh, who blogs with us at Thinking Home Business, spoke at several presentations yesterday at the executive track.

If you’re here, let’s get together!!!

New York Magazine asks: What would it take to send the U.S. economy—and New York’s—into free fall?

They point to the following 5 threats to our economy:

1. The Bottom Continues to Fall Out of the Housing Market
2. The Derivatives-Related Meltdown, Part II
3. Consumers Run Out of Steam (and Take the Economy Down With Them)
4. That the Rest of the World Decides They Don’t Need Us and the Dollar Tumbles Hard
5. That We Don’t See It Happening Because It’s a Slow-Motion Train Wreck

Check it out. Via NJ Real Estate Report.