Our report Feb 27 may have been a little premature, with the deleted Blogging Times strangely returning in the last 24 hours.

The old template is back at the site, however although the URL and header still state that you’re visiting The Blogging Times, the sites title has been changed to “abc”, both in the browser and feed:

The links in the feed also dont work, taking users to the 404 Not Found screen.

Stupidly, none of the original content has returned either. At the time of writing The Blogging Times has the grand total of 4 posts with hundreds, if not thousands of previous posts remaining lost to the search traffic that they use to bring in.

The new editor goes by the name of Eddie Daroza, apparently the author of The Rad Report, a down market tabloid/ celebrity blog, and it would appear as a consequence that The Blogging Times is headed down market as well, with headlines such as these:

The “Porno” tag is an interesting touch for what was once a news blog of serious note. Admittedly I shouldn’t be one to criticize typos, but these pictures “own” Technorati? I thought the VC’s owned it, but I could be wrong.

I’d ask the sites owner for a comment, but I think he sort of already gave us an answer to where he’s looking to take the site in this video:

Disclosure: I was previously a paid contributor at The Blogging Times

Tags: Howard Linzdon, Blogging Times

Originally posted on March 1, 2007 @ 5:40 pm

US Representatives Rich Boucher (D-Va.) and John Dolittle (R-Calif.) have introduced legislation to the US House of Representatives that seeks to amend the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to make the Act more consumer friendly in terms of fair use of digital media.

The Freedom and Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship (or FAIR USE) Act seeks to make things easier for consumers to use the content they buy across numerous devices, where as today the DMCA legally restricts such uses.

Rich Boucher told the Washington Post that “Without a change in the law, individuals will be less willing to purchase digital media if their use of the media within the home is severely circumscribed and the manufacturers of equipment and software that enables circumvention for legitimate purposes will be reluctant to introduce the products into the market” and has the backing of the Consumer Electronics Association.

ars technica on the other hand argues that the proposed changes do not go far enough, stating that the bill does not appear to propose what many proponents are seeking: clear protection for making personal use copies of encrypted materials, with;

no allowance for consumers to make backups of DVDs, to strip encryption from music purchased online so that it can be played anywhere, or to generally do any of the things that the DMCA made illegal in one fell swoop.

Personally, some changes should be better than none at all, but I’m not American. Any thoughts?

Originally posted on February 27, 2007 @ 7:51 pm

A new version of the Storm Worm Trojan (Virus) is targeting comments left on blogs and forums by automatically inserting links to malicious websites hosting the script when infected users go to post comments.

Storm Worm trojan includes a file that creates a back door to a computer that can be exploited later to steal data or to use the computer to post spam as part of a botnet.

News.com reports that the file is installed via email attachment or by visiting an infected site and quotes Dmitri Alperovitch, principal research scientist at Secure Computing saying that this method of spreading the virus is something not seen before.

Originally posted on February 27, 2007 @ 7:08 pm

Google is currently advertising for a head of national TV sales, a job needing a candidate that will build a “world-class national TV-advertising-sales team and lead the effort to both sell television solutions and shape a next-generation advertising platform.”

The job is based in New York and includes “identify[ing] key strategic initiatives for growing TV ad sales”.

Shortform: if we didn’t know it already (its been rumored before), Google is getting into the TV advertising game.

The $66 million dollar question (or should that be 137.39 billion question given Google market cap as I write this), are they mad or has Google just become so arrogant that their desire to expand has no bounds? They’re not exactly doing well in Radio at the moment, and TV is an even harder market to break into, particularly given the bulk of the US TV ad spend is purchased in bulk and in advance following “ad sweeps”. Perhaps there’s a longer term picture we don’t know about, but certainly if it smells like Yahoo! and it looks like Yahoo! it probably is a repeat of the same mistakes Yahoo made in the past, essentially trying to be all things to all people whilst failing to support their core services properly. Google became the dominant player of the back of Yahoo losing the plot, and we all know there are any number of other startups waiting in the wings to pick up Google marketshare the minute search at Google starts to suffer. One to watch.

 

Tags: Google

Originally posted on February 27, 2007 @ 8:06 pm

In an extraordinary move, the Australian Government is set to censor all publishers of electronic content, including Bloggers, under legislation due to be presented to Parliament in the Autumn sittings.

The Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Bill, a reaction to the famous (in Australia anyway) Big Brother Turkey Slap incident last year will see all publishers of electronic content having to submit all content to the Government for classification prior to publication, where upon the content would receive classification in the same way currently that films receive a rating, with content deemed MA (Mature Audiences) or R (restricted 18+) only being able to be published with approved age restricted access systems.

Todays Crikey subscriber email (not available online) suggests that the wording of the bill would would indicate that it is primarily aimed at providers of mobile telephone and internet content such as online video, however that “nobody has thought through the implications for book and magazine publishers who also deliver content online”.

The legislation, if it passes in its current form (and like Crikey I’m confident it won’t) would stifle, if not destroy the Australian blogosphere and many others working within Web 2.0 and new media within this country.

If it does pass there is also some question remaining in terms of where a blog is published, for example many Australians, including myself, host our sites in the United States, and yet the High Court decision in Gutnick v Dow Jones would suggest that legally such sites could be deemed published in Australia even if hosted overseas, and could in theory be subject to the new censorship regime.

I’d suggest that there will be a lot more to be said about this legislation in the coming months. Certainly it will be a sad day when bloggers in China, Vietnam, Burma, Zimbabwe and other such countries have greater rights and freedoms than Australian bloggers do.

 

Tags: Australian, australian blogs

Originally posted on February 28, 2007 @ 10:14 pm