Miles Wolbe of TinyApps.org has stumbled across a site, StarGeek, that re-posts contents from blogs, larded up with with irrelevant ads. For example, here’s a page that “repurposes” one of my posts.

The site says:

projectGrok is a beta portal CMS written in PHP and driven by RSS content. Using MYSQL tables to store headlines and text from a bank of RSS url’s from your target niche, projectGrok automatically clusters entries of relavant and timely content.

Or possibly it uses other people’s content to try to get ads in articles returned by searches at Google. Hard to tell, but their article on “Keyword Research” is about search page optimization. So I’m suspicious enough to use the “nofollow” attribute when linking to them. If I’m misjudging these folks, let me know and I’ll post a correction immediately below.

BTW, the latest entry in the weblog on their home page is dated 7/13/04 [Technorati tag: spam]

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Gotta love the Blogher conference’s idea of a “do-ocracy“: Want to get a topic on the agenda of this one day event? Do it!

And the political philosophy behind this:

“How do you subvert the dominant hierarchy? You give up control.”

So writes Surfette (Lisa Stone).

Sounds like a great event. I look forward to following along via blogs and IRC… [Technorati tags: blogher do-ocracy surfette]

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Nicj has started aggregating cool snippets from Google Maps satellite photos. For example, here’s Disneyland, Bill Gates’ house, the Grand Canyon, and Mount St. Helens. The site credits the Google Sightseeing site for the idea…where, for example, you’ll find a bunch of people who have spotted images with planes flying through them. [Technorati tags: maps google]

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The Republican National Committee is pushing a podcast of Bob Dole talking about his new memoir, One Soldier’s Story, part of a series on “new books by accomplished conservative authors.”

When I was a kid and there were still liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller, the joke about conservatives such as Barry Goldwater was that their idea of progress was putting an AM radio into their buggies. Haha.

People were making the same joke about Ronald Reagan. But you sure can’t make that joke now.

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The OpenNet Initiative (U of Toronto, Berkman Center and U of Cambridge) is releasing a report on Thursday about the sites China prevents its citizens from seeing. From the press advisory about the press conference:

“Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005” documents the degree to which the Chinese government controls and manipulates the information environment in which its citizens including websites, blogs, email, and online discussion forums. Since ONI last released on filtering in China in 2002, the Chinese government has developed far more sophisticated filtering techniques. Using a distributed testing application run from within China’s trusted volunteers from different locations and network access points, ONI’s report empirical and comparative study of China’s filtering systems. The report also offers legal and regulatory regime that supports and justifies these filtering practices.

These topics are particularly timely given recent efforts by the Chinese government to monitor websites and chat rooms, large-scale arrests of Chinese citizens who post material the government deems offensive or threatening, and the firing of prominent scholars critical of the Central Propaganda Department.

If you happen to be in DC on Thursday, you can mosey on over to Room 285 of the Russell Senate Office Building at 9:30am. If you’d like to get a copy of the report when it comes out, you can send an email to amichel /AT\ cyber.law.harvard.eud. [Technorati tags: china censorship berkman]

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I got a preview DVD of a documentary about Enron that’s about to be released. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will remind you just how shameless the Enron guys were. Rather than dwelling on the thousands of people who lost their retirement money, it focuses primarily on the the conscious, willing, and intentional fraud Enron’s executives executed. The movie takes us step by step through the games the execs played, as if they couldn’t believe that anything guys as smart as them did could possibly be wrong. These were first class bastards.

The format of the movie is conventional: Some talking heads, some insider footage of rah-rah corporate meetings…although the footage Bushes senior and junior shot to pass their good wishes to one of the execs is a pretty startling reminder just how close Kennyboy and the Bush family are. The documentary takes us step by step down the path that led to Enron going from boom in the good sense to boom in the bad sense.

At 110 minutes, it felt a little long to me, and some of the stock footage (e.g., a guy in freefall) and music choices struck me as too predictable. But it tells quite a story. We can only hope that the Enron boys become the smartest guys in Cellblock C.

The movie will be released on April 22. [Technorati tag: enron]

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BlogBridge, the aggregator I’ve been using for a few months in beta, has gone to 1.0. There are a few things to like about it, not least of which is that it’s a free, open source project done by someone I know well and trust 100%, Pito Salas.

Blogbridge is a client, but it stores your info on a server so you can use it on multiple machines. It tries to help you discover new weblogs by noting links in your feeds. You can rate your feeds and this somehow magically gets fed into a community rating system. (I’m not finding the rating system very helpful to me.) You can set keywords and ask to see only posts that contain them.

In short, BlogBridge has been doing the job for me.

[Disclosure: I’m an uncompensated member of its board of advisors.] [Technorati tags: rss blogbridge aggregator]

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I’m on the first of three trips to Phoenix over the next eight days, for three unrelated events at which I’m speaking. Weird.

On the America West ride from Boston, the guy in the seat ahead of me was surprisingly annoying. He was about my age (115+) but he rocked in his seat like a 5 year old. And for much of the trip he sat with his hands clasped behind the top of his seat. They were lovely hands — pale, freckled, soft red hair. But they were 4 inches from my face.

I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to move his hands, but I did “accidentally” brush them with my book a few times as I turned pages. He didn’t seem to mind.

I don’t know why I found this so annoying. But I did. I mean, doesn’t he understand that one person’s back is another person’s front?

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Between five years in the 1990s, how many attendees per year were injured by foul balls hit during baseball games in Fenway Park? A correct answer is any within 10x up or down. Oh, that’s too easy. Make it 5x.

Select between the X’s to see the answer:
X     From 36 to 53     X

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Continuing my mild obsession with Michael Jackson’s face:

If he goes to jail, how many weeks could he possibly survive?

[Technorati tag: MichaelJackson]

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