Today on the Blog Network
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Blog: Check out the latest postings from the CNET Blog Network.
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What's new in search? Found in the forums: But Is The Traffic Any Good?; What is Your Best AdSense Tip?; Ranking Without Links; and more.
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Plus: Verizon boosted by wireless, fiber...Nintendo outlook positive...Sun reports increased quarterly profit.
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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Jobs recaps the news. There's MacBook Air, iPhone tweaks and iTunes movie rentals. Is there one more thing? Nope.
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I just woke up in Paris, it's 5:34AM here, but back in California, it still never ceases to amaze me, the day hasn't yet flipped. You guys haven't even gone to bed yet! Now that's amazing to me. What perseverence! Keep up the good work everybody.  I just started posting a couple of twits that really should be a blog post, so let's get started. First at some point, after a suitable period of mourning, I'd like to rasie the issue of what's to happen with Marc Orchant's web presence. Which of course is a way of focusing attention on all of our web presences.  None of us like to think of it, but truth is none of us are going to live forever. Yet if you read this, it's likely that you're creating a digital body that can and imho should continue to exist even after your physical body stops existing. People are humble, no one wants to come out and say their work has any value that's worth preserving past their death, but come on, we know that's not true. If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be writing on the web. As would Hemingway or Faulkner, Vonnegut or Mailer, John Lennon or Dylan Thomas, Carl Sandberg or Robert Frost. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. You think there isn't any great literature out there on the web? I wouldn't be so sure about that. What if there is? And what if a baby born today becomes a great creative force? Or what if there's a social disaster like the Holocaust? Did you know that there are preserved diaries from pre-revolutionary America? Writings of ordinary people can be of enormous help to historians. And if we believe in citizen journalism (I do) why not citizen historians? Shouldn't we be thinking out into the future? We should! With all possible humility, I'd like to tell you that a few days after I die my entire web presence will likely disappear. My servers require some attention from me from time to time. The first time that happens, poof, there goes 10-plus years of Scripting News, and all the docs for the OPML Editor and the OPML spec, the XML-RPC site, to name just a few. Anyway, within a couple of months it will all certainly disappear, unless someone pays my hosting and DSL bills. Maybe someone will, but isn't it ridiculous that that's what it depends on? And when my sites disappear so will my uncle's. He died in 2003. His site is still accessible because I keep it that way. When I die, who will will take over for me? I'm sure the world will survive without his writing, but why? If I love the memory of my uncle, and I do, what can I do to reserve a place for him in the archive of the future. It seems such a small thing, but it's most of what remains of his life.  And what of academics, Nobel Laureates and others? I know for a fact that a great university (Harvard) has no plan to protect their web-based work after they pass. It's so ironic that the web offers an archival solution for non-digital work, yet the web information is more fragile than the physical stuff. Preserving our digital heritage is going to require some foresight, some planning, but it seems possible and we surely can do much better. Marc's fate awaits us all. While we're still alive, there's still time to solve this problem. When we're gone, it will be too late. Part of his legacy can be that he helped focus us on this issue, and his life work could be a great test case. Do we want to see his work preserved? And if so, how will it be done? PS: The RSS 2.0 site will likely persist, because I gave it to Berkman, and then used it as a test case to learn about future-safing. It seems likely to continue to exist, knock wood, praise Murphy, as long as Harvard exists.
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By NO BYLINE  Some of our favourite things on the world wide web at the moment...   WHEN KILLER PLANTS RULED BRITAINwww.youtube.com/watch?vPART two in an occasional "when they made proper scary telly" nostalgia series: Day of the Triffids.
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News, Infocus, Columns, Vulnerabilities, Bugtraq ...
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Readers opine about saving the world, animating pornography, spreading ideas on the net, and doing science in America. Plus: Links to our most commented-upon blog posts.
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As I said above I'm glued to the TV, but I'm also on Twitter, and blogging, and email, and IM and I'm subscribed to hundreds of RSS feeds, and I've been noticing that slowly the TV news organizations are integrating new Internet services with their TV offerings. They're all getting started, and eventually I'm pretty sure they'll be where Yahoo is now. The thing is, it works. For example, newmediajim is a cameraman for NBC News and he's on Twitter and sometimes I'm watching the other side of his camera on MSNBC and twittering with him before and after. A guy named creepsleepy is a radio guy in Manchester, interviewing presidential candidates, wouldn't it be great if I could listen to his interviews while he twitters his progress? Well, there's no doubt that soon we'll be doing that. We're finally really at the convergence so many have predicted for so long. With the help of a few members of the community Yahoo can get there first. BTW, I read on the NY Times site that Yahoo is going to open up more to developers. Hmmm. If you want to impress end-users and shareholders run it in MSM. If you want to get through to developers, use the developer blogs. Let us have the story first, otherwise you don't seem very serious about it.
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English-derived neologism bids for world domination God alone knows what Cervantes would have made of it, but the English term "blogosphere" has slithered onto the growing list of neologisms shoehorned into the noble Castillian language, joining chatear, chip, formatear, Internet and mÃ³dem in a burgeoning list of tech and net-based foreign vocab.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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Arriva il BlogDay, per far comunicare culture diverse. Le regole? Linkare i vostri cinque blog preferiti. E poi lasciarsi andare
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Huckabee wins GOP caucuses in Iowa .... Giuliani relies on Sunshine State strategy ... NH doubts it will ID push poll culprits before vote ... Romney supports fellow Mormons by using their businesses ... Jesse Jackson and wife split over endorsements ... Judge won't delay Florida primary
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Daily Blog Tips has put together a list of 30 traffic generation ideas as compiled from 30 different bloggers.  Of course, you don&#8217;t actually have to be a blogger to take advantage of some of these ideas, such as participating in the comments of other blogs which are read within your industry, article distribution and [...]
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The PHPWomen have posted a reminder about the mailing list that they're going to "dust off" and start using again (and suggest you do too!).   There's just the one list currently (as hosted by omniti) but there's lots of subscribers. You can check out the signup page for more information on the list and get access to some of the archives of previous topics.
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I found this news piece a bit interesting when sifting through the press wires this morning; Technorati Japan has worked on an amazing study which shows how Japanese bloggers are writing about and communicating with companies via their own personal blogs.  One fascinating aspect of the US and Japanese blogging markets is that there is [...]
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roundup Plus: Newspaper sites take up paid search ads...Microsoft IPTV to woo Swiss test group...Sony speeds up Memory Stick cards...Real touts one week, 1 million songs.