Internet

I have very little time to read general blogs. I visit random blogs of various Egyptians occasionally when a link is passed on to me or when I am lost or something.

I don't know when the topic of this post started to happen, but I am amazed at the amount of foul language in use by Egyptian bloggers currently.

Perhaps it is a meme that I missed, or perhaps something else.

Previously, extremely offensive language was used only by anonymous posters when they tried ad hominen attacks on the blogger. Alaa and Manal's blog had many of these for example.

As I noted earlier, Open Craft knew that I was in Egypt, and invited me to give a Drupal presentation. I chose Drupal performance tuning and optimization, and userpoints as the topic.

Nearly two-thirds of the Canada's households were online in 2006,
with more Canadians turning to high-speed internet subscriptions.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
(CRTC) released its eighth annual Broadcasting Monitoring Report on
Tuesday, which analyzed the country's radio, television, broadcasting
distribution and new media sectors.

The report illustrates how Canadians are increasingly turning to new media for both entertainment and other activities.

A recent survey concludes that 57% of adult US internet users watch videos online.

It is interesting to see that News (37%), Comedy (31%), Music (22%) and Educational (22%) top the list, while adult content amounts for only 6%.

No wonder Youtube is so popular.

More Canadian cities are rolling out free wireless internet access.

Ottawa ON, Fredricton NB, and Whistler, BC have all rolled out free wireless.

However, the largest to date has been in Regina, SK, according to this CBC article.

This cost C$1.3 million upfront capital cost, with a running cost of $340,000 per year.

The bulk of web hosts are still on PHP4, despite PHP5 being out for years. PHP5, and specially PHP5.2, offers a lot of features that make developing in PHP far better than being held back with PHP4's feature set.

So, a bunch of activists in the Drupal community started talking to other PHP based applications to say enough is enough, and push for more adoption of PHP 5.2 by web hosts and projects alike.

Go ahead and Digg the story, and click the banner below for more information.

At first glance, this page seems like yet another blog.

However, once you start reading the text, you will find that it is incoherent, and has a lot of links to terms often associated with spam in emails (e.g. Epson photo paper, Stress, Bloating).

Moreover, the links on the sidebar are all spammy, varying from cellulite removal, hair loss, to Omega watches.

Google launched Street View last week. In a nutshell, it is real images taken by vans, superimposed on Google Maps. The data is available in some select cities, such as New York, Miami, and the like.The level of detail is amazing, seeing people jogging, walking, and more.However, this is raising some privacy concerns. The level of detail is just too close for comfort. A woman has said that her cat is visible behind the window. She asked Google to take the picture down.

Today I got an interesting attempt of search engine comment spam.

Two articles that I came across, one old and one new, point to a new trend of "caching in on the internet".

The first article is one year old, and it came to my attention via an acquaintance (an MBA!) who wanted to copycat this idea. He read about it in Forbes, went ahead and bought some 50+ domain names and wants me to do "internet real estate development" with him. The second article is from the New York Times today.

Obviously, I refused to do that work due to my aversion to content free sites that have only ads on them.