onfocus

Barn at the Finley Wildlife Refuge

The weblog landscape is about to change: AOL Blogs. (A preview by Jeff Jarvis.)

I'm looking forward to the Open Source Convention in Portland next week. I primarily use Microsoft tools for development, so this should be a good overview of what's happening in the land of the free. I have been working with Perl quite a bit lately and I hope to catch some advice from the experts. The conference seems to include a discussion of open systems rather than exclusively "open source" software, and open systems are something I'm very interested in. The Emerging Topics track looks great, especially Bill of Rights for Web Services on Thursday.

I'm playing around with Google's new AdSense ads on the snapGallery page. You can follow along by watching the "Ad Stats" box directly underneath the vertical ad banner on the right-hand side of the page. It's updated every two hours with the latest statistics for that banner. Since I added the Google ads on June 24th, they've been clicked 31 times and I've made $3.70. We'll see how it goes.

Of course any profits from this experiment will go toward onfocus infrastructure maintenance/improvement—with the savings passed on to you!

An Amazon developer is keeping a weblog about what it's like to be an Amazon developer. [via Anil] I wonder what sort of weblog policies they have, and how closely this is monitored before/after publishing. What if Amazon gave every employee a weblog on Amazon.com?

Slashdot: Amazon Hacks For Fun and Money. [via Erik Benson]

Google's API is down which makes Google Smackdown down. That's a lot of down. This is the first problem I've experienced with Google's API. Update: back up, smack up!

Winged Migration was a hoot. (owl joke.) It made me want to stop eating animals.

Business Week: How Amazon Opens Up and Cleans Up. "Bryar hopes that by setting free much of its internal data, Amazon will transform itself from a retail site and a provider of some hosting and transaction services into the key e-commerce platform." This article also describes one of my favorite hacks from the book that I use all the time—cell phone wish lists. (Amazon Hacks is still on track to be out in August.)