Barnhard Blog

eBay affiliate manager Sebastiaan Ambtman Benelux does not believe in Banner campaigns. Also e-mail marketing is less preferable. Search engine marketing (e.g. Adsense) and affiliate programs are cheaper and more effective.

Website: Marketingfacts

First responses: Why is Adsense using banners if is it true that banners are less effective? Advertisements in affiliate programs are in fact also a kind of banners, only text based. Is it just pricing that makes banners less effective?

First Quantum Byte built, first step to quantum computer?

West China latest developments and now there is a nice cybercafe lookup for all, worldwide.

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games could switch to an open-source technology platform under proposals to be considered by the International Olympic Committee. via

This could be seen as a huge triumph for open source if it succeeds. Read more at the CNET article.

This old article is part of the new All about RSS category that we will soon start.

RSS, the rapidly proliferating process for syndicating web sites, wins the true mark of popularity: advertising.
Word has it that you can make a living from blogging these days. But very few enterprising essayists are being paid directly for their content—the money is all in advertising. And the best bloggers develop devoted followers, who increasingly use a technology called RSS (really simple syndication), which helps them stay updated on the most recent posts, but strips out formatting and ads.

Those dedicated readers are an advertiser’s dream: consumers who have “opted in,” tune in often, and have high regard for the content alongside an ad. But RSS feeds, which get aggregated in “readers” on a desktop or in a browser, are useful precisely because they are so simplified. Many bloggers feel conflicted about deflowering this territory and serving up ads to their most loyal readers.

Source & more: www.redherring.com

Here’s the cartoon (which you can download) that uses the word “blog” for the first time.

Few cheatsheets of
- Blogger
- Wordpress
- Typepad
- Movable Type
- MySQL via php cheatsheets
Handy I would think.

Google’s Adsense program is now offering the Firefox referal program internationally which means you now get 1 euro for each person that downloads firefox after being referred by you. If you don’t already have an Adsense account with Google sign up by clicking the adsense add on: blog.tijs.org

Typical Sunday evening, Dutch television is protesting, bored like hell. Let’s check Google video (beta).

Tonight I only wanted to watch hyper hyper Asian video’s:

morning musume vs. bob sapp
Chinese man is losing his head
Ayaka no totsugeki Eikawa - Ishikawa Rika - I wan tto go to Hawai
Korean Street Fighter
The Greatest Dance of all Time

Tijs also posted a nice one

Internet goes rails (dutch) , offering wireless web and even webprograms for travellers.

It is a test, but I just so hope they will implement it nation-wide. Brilliant plan.

Will more Dutch people now start taking the train in The Netherlands when they can internet there too?

Fotofuck of one prominent visitor of one of the largest European blog meetings of the whole year, Les Blogs 2. Curious if European bloggers will cross their blog borders a bit more because of it, I hope so.

Update: Just a selection of Videos of the conference
Update2: Link is now dead

Ad budgets’ shift to online is reaching an “inflections point,” after which, within five years, internet advertising will become a $55 billion global market, according to investment bank Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy, AdWeek reports. Rashtchy says his forecast of 27 percent compound annual growth could be a conservative one. “Online is on its way to a 10 percent share [of adspend] much faster than we anticipated, and we believe we are now approaching an inflection point when spending growth could accelerate,” he wrote.

More: www.marketingvox.com

The Washington Post just launched a what I’d call a prism for congressional voting records. Shine a bill through the site and out come the colors.

You can find out the Yes/No/No-vote records by party, state, by legislator, by region (south vs midwest vs northeast), by baby-boomer status, by gender, and… wait for it… astrological sign! Even more useful is the ability to subscribe to a legislator via RSS.

More: http://37signals.com & The Washington Post

Measuring the influence of bloggers on corporate reputation
Found on: Marketing Facts (dutch)

When you are interested in the influence of blogging on your market, you should read the findings of Market Sentinel.
I’ve placed links to two of their most recent publications:

Read the rest of this entry »

“We bought bottles of German mineral water “Tonissteiner” from a package store in Japan and carried them to Eifel region in Germany and released them.”

Mai Yamashita + Naoto Kobayashi, AKA M + N, are a couple of crazy Japanese media artists. They are doing some great work including the rescue of German mineral water from a Japanese shop, travelling back to Germany with them and releasing it back into its native home!

They also did some other cool stuff: Read the rest of this entry »

GTalkr, the Flash version of Google Talk.

Model simulations of corn yield (bu/acre)

Agricultural activity now dominates more than a third of the Earth’s landscape and has emerged as one of the central forces of global environmental change, according to scientists at the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To better understand agricultural’s global footprint, SAGE researchers are tracking the changing patterns of agricultural land use around the world. They’ve distilled that information into computer-generated maps, which are being presented this week at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The exercise is beginning to cast light on some emerging trends. SAGE researchers say they are working towards a new “Earth Collaboratory,” an Internet-based data bank that would simultaneously draw on the knowledge of global scientists, local environmentalists and everyday citizens.

Website: www.sage.wisc.edu [via]

In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions. Almost nine in 10 in South Korea and just over half in France and Britain felt that way, according to AP-Ipsos polling.

Define rare instances, think of the image making impact it will have on the most likely ethnic target group. Will that help the fight against terrorism?

It is really amazing that people are abandoning there humanistic values quite quickly when they face or image a direct threat.

Website: www.msnbc.msn.com

Related: Bush: Prisoners aren’t sent to nations that torture

Ochblog posted another documentary about Iraq:

Dispatches: The Real War on Terror

In The Real War on Terror season, Dispatches exposes both the human and political costs of the invasion of Iraq.

Documentary about Iraq and what’s happening there now. Totally different from what we see on mainstream TV and very educational. Watch at least the first episode cause it deals with some real eye-opening stuff. Info about the program: here (click on the leftside links to read about the seperate parts)

You can get the torrent at their website: www.ochblog.com

click image for link

As you have probably noticed Barnhard Blog is using Google Adsense on its Wordpress weblog.

The idea was to offer visitors who entered our website through a search engine a more relevant website for their query. In the process we could earn a buck or two, to spent on drinks during editorial meetings

Sadly most advertisements are not really relevant to the main content of entries, most of them are generated by the word ‘Blog’. I will therefore probably remove the Google advertisements in the near future.

But before I take such measures I want to give Google a change, so I wrote them a letter: Read the rest of this entry »

The great American hypnosis

…We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true. The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it…

Harold Pinter is winner of the 2005 Nobel prize for literature. This is part of his acceptance speech. It will be delivered today by video as the ailing Pinter has been forbidden by doctors from travelling to Stockholm.

Article: The great American hypnosis on www.theage.com.au

Update: Video of the Nobel Lecture (a must see)

Nephew R. van der Vliet on the left (NPSP)

NRK PRIMA AWARD is awarded to companies who made a substantial contribution to the Dutch development of innovative and environmental sustainable products.

Besides the innovative and environmental aspect, the companies are also judged on their business skills (strategy, management, products and personnel).

Receiving the award from the Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende, also chairman of The Dutch Innovationplatform, is a huge honor. The PM praised the three companies for the fact that they are considered to be the forerunners in the Dutch economy, who also make a commercial success out of their innovative environmental sustainable products.

Our family congratulates NPSP, our nephew R. van der Vliet and his family. We are very proud!

Read the rest of this entry »

After I realised that www.downloadgooglevideos.com got shutdown by google, and all the embedded google videos were not working anymore, I decided to come with a new way to put it on your website. I found one, but it’s not that easy as before, but it’s working. I’ll try to explain here how to do it. If anyone finds a better way to do it, please, let me know!

Example:

Source code on website: www.ovelha.org [via]

Update: Now finally as a new standard feature on video.google.com

Greg Perry addressed a Wordpress option we are searching for quite some time:

What I really want is a sidebar section that displays visitors and a little technical information, such as IP address and useragent. I like the useronline division into members, guests and bots, but find fault with its implementation…Of course, if I want visitors to register as users, I have to offer something worth registering for, and don’t have anything yet. I’d settle for a pattern recognition system that identified repeat visitors, which would hopefully allow me to identify friends and family as they dropped in, but pattern recognition is really cutting-edge programming.

Website: Ramblings

I have been searching for ages for a plugin that just shows the current number of logged-in members and the number of visitors in the sidebar of this Wordpress weblog, the rest is just unnecessary crab.

I don’t get though why such a thing does not exist for WordPress 1.5.2 “Strayhorn”. There used to be the Wordpress User Online plugin but that does not work in the latest versions of Wordpress. Jennifer from www.scriptygoddess.com wrote something but I think that is too much work and I do not see her counter in any sidebar.

I would be very grateful if anyone can help me and my friends out.

Update: Greg Perry from Ramblings fixed the User Online plugin, he is going to write the documentary how he solved the problems.

Update 2: Greg Perry - I have to wonder whether it’s more efficient to just start my own plugin. I guess I’ll wait for the masses to weigh in on that issue. Holy Crap!

Update 3: Greg Perry - This evening I printed out the code and followed it step by step. I can see that, although I have learned from the way the author wrote the plugin, I would do it sort of differently…When I get the time, I’ll start on a new plugin from scratch that I will publish under the GPL. Hovering

Update 4: Greg Perry - I’m sure the author had a good motivation for choosing to use the comment_author_ cookie, and I’m sure it was because he didn’t expect visitors to routinely register when they go to blogs, even ones that they visit a lot. But if someone was interested enough to leave a comment, he or she got a cookie that identified them later. That strategy isn’t perfect, but I think it’s a lot more practical than expecting visitors to register when they visit your blog. Personally, I hate registering, and I’ll only do it if it gives me a distinct advantage. Logging In

Update 5: Greg Perry - I’ve compared my hacked versions of the WP-UserOnline plugin to the released versions and compiled the differences in a text file. I put the file, called “Instructions.txt”, in my online folders. WP-UserOnline Hacks

Update 6: There is a new version of Useronline for wp 1.5.2 (with some minor bug, but it works). The version for Wordpress 2.0 works fine. I want to thank Greg for all his efforts and help. You are always welcome to visit us or ask for help, Greg.

Hong Kong Architecture of Density, an exhibition of large scale color by Michael Wolf

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