Commoncraft have posted a clever video explaining in 3 minutes and 45 seconds why RSS is a good thing in terms that almost anyone can understand. Nice use of a whiteboard and dry marker animation with paper cut outs 
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
So, this is cool. I was playing around with Flickr last night and somehow found my way to this tool (http://netomer.de/flickrtools/inspector), created by Nils K. Windisch and is a part of his flickrtools collection.
After you’ve waded through the many cool ego flattering statistical things that the tool provides, you come to a bunch of search options which automatically searches through other people’s blogs linking to your images using Google.
This led me to:
Nick and Curtis, “a bunch of people who love games and gaming”, who have a blog, You NEWB (http://www.younewb.com), with an article about the success of the Nintendo Wii launch in Australia. I don’t think they were there on the night, but as it turned out, I was, and I took a bunch of photos of the crowd as they waited for the doors to open at midnight. Nick and Curtis have used one of my images for their article.
George Wood has a blog, Notes from Sweden, (http://radiowood.com/) which appears to be a commentary by George funnily enough about all things Sweedish. He has a post where he links to a CBS 5 video talking about some new construction technique using a Lego like technology. In it he uses a photo I took of a Lego creation my partner Shi made of the kitchen we’d like to build when we have a large sum of cash lying around looking for a purpose.
Anyways, I’m not complaining, far from it. I’m very happy that my images are being used in this way, and I’m even happier that both of the examples above are honouring the Creative Commons license that’s implied with my images, i.e. non commercial use, don’t mess with the image, and attribute them to me.
The traditional media outlets are pretty pissed about this kind of blogging (publishing) which I guess you could call meta publishing, i.e. taking a bunch of information that someone else has produced, commenting on it, sourcing an image that someone else has taken and posting it as new content, but let’s face it, this is what most traditional media outlets (aka old dirty media) do themselves, i.e. take a Reuters or an AP feed, source some images, slap a slant in the form of some commentary around it and then publish it. That’s news!
Quite frankly, I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the two, except perhaps that most blogging sites don’t require a login before they let you see “their” content. Sure, there’s probably a whole lot more crap being published, but I tend to believe that Google can cut through the signal to noise and find me what I want to see. So, web 2.0 – meta publishing – is cool. I guess this post is meta meta publishing, maybe since I included a trackback with this post Nick, Curtis, and or George will notice this post and make a comment on it – meta meta meta publishing in action…
Shi’s pretty happy that other people around the world may also be imagining the kitchen we’d like to have. Hopefully the more people who think about it with us the more likely it is to happen.
This item appears to be a classic click-through scam spam.
The hapless user gets some mail, thinks “yay, free mac!”, and after clicking on anything in the mail their web browser is launched and is redirected all over the place. Presumably each of the redirects represents a false click on some advertising or something somewhere which brings in revenue for the spammer.
Click to enlarge the initial spam.
Click to enlarge the page seen after the initial couple of redirects.
Click to enlarge the final webpage that is displayed. Kinda ironic don’t you think?
As an exercise I traced all of the redirects and meta refreshes in order.
- After clicking on the spam, the following URL is requested by the users browser:
http://r.rockysoils.com/c/34458/18377/82890422.html?/
dummy@email.address
Which results in the first 302 redirect:
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Location: http://publishers.clickbooth.com/ez/bkdgyfnggey/
&dp=1537637&/dummy@email.address - That redirect:
http://publishers.clickbooth.com/ez/bkdgyfnggey/
&dp=1537637&/dummy@email.address
Results in another:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://publishers.clickbooth.com/geo_tracking_redirect.html?e=dowymcrbxx - That redirect:
http://publishers.clickbooth.com/geo_tracking_redirect.html?e=clqnspiekk
Brings up the page shown in the second image above, and contains a meta refresh command: - The meta refresh request:
http://publishers.clickbooth.com/sw/12072/CD8940/
Brings up another web page which sets 2 cookie and then triggers another meta refresh: - This meta refresh request:
http://www.freepay.com/intl.aspx?x=5284
Results in a 302 redirect:
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Location: http://offers.gratisnetwork.com/rotator/CD114/18 - That redirect:
http://offers.gratisnetwork.com/rotator/CD114/18
results in another 302 redirect, and sets four more cookies http://offers.gratisnetwork.com/sw/1510/CD114/&p=18
Sets 2 more cookies, and contains another meta refreshhttp://ab.vcmedia.com/c/s=64718/c=107930/
returns another 302 redirecthttp://a.websponsors.com/c/s=64718/c=107930/
returns another 302 redirect- Which finally gets us to the last page:
http://ShoppersSavingCenter.biz/?config=2073&src=WC-64718aaa:107930
which is shown in image number 3
