Blogs

Apparently, the Washington Post had a redesign recently and their feeds were modified. Yahoo Buzz also had some changes lately - seemed like they streamlined the site and eliminated some categories. It is one of those “sunset” sites that they’re either planning to shutdown or sell off. Ft. Worth Star-Telegram also had a redesign, but that was probably more than a couple months ago. I didn’t notice until a user emailed me. Feeds for those three sites have been updated across the different categories on the top nav.

UPDATE: Add Deadline.com to the list of updated feeds.

When I heard that News Corp was selling Myspace, I was curious about the price, what with Facebook being valued at $50B (or $75B on SecondMarket) and Twitter at around $5-7B.

I’m surprised that News Corp’s trying to sell MySpace for a relatively cheap price of $100-200M. Most recently, they wanted $100M in stock from Zynga, makers of popular Facebook app Farmville. They were reportedly only willing to offer $50M cash.

Last Thursday, Google launched a new tweak to their search algorithm. It was targeted at content farms, which many consider to be spammy sites whose content are created solely to attract search engine traffic for specific keywords.

I do notice more and more of these sites on Google’s search results. For me, the main offender is ezinearticles.com. Most of the articles I get from there are completely useless. They’re just keywords being repeated over and over again with a bunch of fillers. I can see why Google wants to push those sites further down their search rankings.

For a while I was wondering why sites I visit regularly are getting buggy. When I visit Alexa, the traffic charts doesn’t render unless I refresh the page, sometimes a couple times. On Compete.com, it defaults to the “Site Profile” tab instead of “Compare Sites.” Clicking on the latter tab doesn’t do anything. On NBA and FoxSports, the dynamic slideshows doesn’t rotate, has formatting issues, and clicks don’t work. After logging into Contextweb, clicking on “Selling Desk” doesn’t work either. It’s seems to have trouble loading pages with javascript, jQuery, or Ajax.

While updating Wopular, I noticed that from time to time, the site would locked up for a couple minutes. Most of the time, I would just wait it out. I finally looked into the slow query log for mysql and found the troublesome query.

I’m moving aggregation feeds on the right sidebar of the homepage to the bottom. Feeds affected are Google News, Yahoo! Buzz, and Digg.

Digg was never the same since the redesign. Although I’ve seen improvement in the quality of articles since they started moderating homepage news, it’s still not what it used to be. The community is pretty dead. The norm for number of comments for each article is around 3. It used to be 100-1000 times that.

Yahoo! Buzz will be shut down soon. I’ve also started noticing spammers making it to the homepage - not good.

I installed Android on my HD2 a couple weeks ago. Initially, I thought I would continue to use Windows Mobile 6.5 as my main OS, but just hop into Android once in a while for games and apps not available in WM.

I'm finally taking the Android plunge. Ever since I bought the HD2, I had been keeping track of the development of the Android port for it. Why didn’t I just get an Android phone? Well, at the time, the HD2 was the first smartphone with a 1GHz processor and a 4.3” screen. I also liked the HTC Sense UI and had been using Windows Mobile since I started using smartphones. I was looking more for an alternative mobile OS for additional apps and games.

With all the talk focused on Android, iPhone, and lately Windows Phone 7, I’m glad the guys at Opera haven’t forgetten about the group of us who are still using Windows Mobile 6.5 (or earlier versions). Opera released a native version of Opera Mini 5 Beta for Windows Mobile earlier this year, and being a beta release, it was buggy. Sometime in September, they finally got a chance fix those bugs and improve the page rendering.

That’s how it is sometimes. I wonder if Fall and Winter are the two best seasons for online advertising revenue. At Rotten Tomatoes, it has always been Summer because that’s when the biggest films are released. Outside of movie sites, I’m not sure.