US Ally and Middle Eastern Oil Giant Saudi Arabia has passed new laws that will see bloggers and others jailed should that take photographs that infringe “upon private lives through misuse of mobile telephones equipped with cameras and similar devices with the purpose of defaming or harming people”.

Short version: take a picture of someone donig the wrong thing to add to your blog, up to $100,000 fine and 1 year in prison.

Reuters reports that camera phones have been opposed by religious police in Saudi Arabia, which banned the sale of the devices for several months in 2004.

Originally posted on March 26, 2007 @ 9:51 pm

Google is experimenting with a new idea. As an advertiser, you only pay if you get the desired results. If not, it’s on the house. According to the company’s remarks, advertisers will only be charged when an advertisement results in the consumer’s taking an action (i.e. buying a product) as opposed to the existing methods of paying based on the number of clicks or number of views.

“We’re optimistic that it will be something that will be very compelling for advertisers,” said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google. Ms. Wojcicki said the system would also give participating Web publishers a wider choice of ad types for their sites.

The ‘cost-per-action’ model is more appealing for advertisers since it allows them to choose what kind of action they want to pay for (i.e. download, purchase, subscription), and consequently reduces their risk (since they aren’t billed for ineffective ads).

The New York Times has further commentary.

Originally posted on March 23, 2007 @ 2:41 pm

Not a week has passed since the official release of Apollo, a platform allowing web applications to run outside a browser, and they’re already in trouble (i.e. there’s competition), reports TechCrunch. Here are three services that offer pretty much the same experience that Apollo does:

1. The third iteration of the popular open-source browser, Firefox, will allow similar functionality through enabling offline access to local datastores
2. Dekoh allows you to bring together the web and your desktop by allowing developers to create applications on their platform.
3. Lastly, Slingshot, let’s developers to create applications that similarly work online as well as offline.

For a look at the differences between the various applications, technical overviews, and more commentary, head on over to TechCrunch.

Originally posted on March 23, 2007 @ 2:10 pm

When it comes to blog or website rankings, you have probably used either Alexa or Technorati. Stan Schroeder proposes a new methodology for ranking that has already piqued the interest of many A-list bloggers.

They have the data. They have the capabilities. Yet, they’re not maintaining any sort of top list of feeds with the most subscribers.

With 600,000 feeds in their roster, the service he is talking about is of course Feedburner. In the absence of any such formal list from the service itself, Stan has compiled a list based on the number of subscribers for each site. Certain conditions and limitations apply.

Here is a list of the chart topping 5:

1. BoingBoing
2. TechCrunch
3. Simply Recipes
4. Interesting Thing of the Day
5. 43Folders

Check out the complete list from Mr. Schroeder.

Originally posted on March 25, 2007 @ 2:48 pm