onfocus

There's a fun article about the Hacks Series in the Chicago Sun-Times: 'Hack' books a big boost to long-suffering geek culture. Mr. Ihnakto sums up the meaning of the series well: "The books pay homage to the spirit that the word 'hack,' enjoyed before it was co-opted by malevolent idiots: a 'hack' is what happens when sublime understanding of a concept allows you to do something wholly wonderful and unexpected with a technology."

There's even a mention of Amazon Hacks after some good-natured ribbing. (Wal-Mart and Burger King Hacks? Come on! Everyone knows McDonald's has the tech-friendly wireless networks. ;) "...it's good stuff if you're unaware of the community aspects of Amazon users, or are looking for ways to integrate Amazon content into your Web site."

TypePad is go! (Congrats everyone at Six Apart!)

Someone built their own Segway, and showed exactly how they did it. [via Rael]

1. Start a weblog.
2. Add Google AdSense ads.
3. Make money.

Matt explains why targeting is crucial for this to work. That's why this site made $28 in the last three months, and PVRblogs makes enough to buy an aeron chair each month. It bothers me to think that advertising is going to be the way to pay people for their work on the web. I thought we could do better than television.

Traditional book publishers should also read this article. It could be more lucrative for an author to keep a weblog on a subject than write a book on a subject.

Matt's written up a great Amazon Hack: How to send something not on someone's wishlist to that someone. He used it for a great joke too.

I was trying out Google AdSense ads on a couple pages of this site, but I've removed them because I don't agree with their new draconian terms of service. I used to publish my ad stats so everyone could see how much money I was making from the ads, and that's now prohibited under their terms. (Now that I'm not bound by the terms I can tell you I've made $28.56 to date.) I also don't like that anyone can be barred from the program for secretive, seemingly arbitrary reasons. You also can't mention their terms of service if you're bound by their terms of service. I think that deserves a big collective WTF?.

Google gets just about everything they do right. That's why this behavior is so puzzling. (more at kottke, metafilter, boingboing.)

Anil Dash asked me some great questions and I tried to answer them. You can read me mouthing off about weblogs, journalism, scripting, Amazon Hacks, and where permalinks come from in the first Six Log Interview.

There's a TypePad-specific Amazon Hack (that isn't in the book) on the way...but you should still buy Amazon Hacks to get all of the hacky goodness. ;)

Howard Dean seems to be hopping on the cluetrain with his Net Advisory Net. (The name is almost a recursive acronym like GNU.) The initial roster includes prominent blogospherians Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, and David Weinberger (a Cluetrain author). It's the intellectual property/social software/non-bs dream team. [via boingboing]

Another snapGallery: surreal scenes of Hurricane Isabel at Langley Air Force Base.

The Crazy Signs of Scotland. A quick snapGallery with "Interesting and silly Scottish signs from a North American perspective." (And I thought Canadian signs were confusing!)