There are plenty of sites I read on a daily basis. Well, you've seen the list on the left side of the page. Some of those are important enough to check a couple of times a day. You could call it an addiction, but at least I am not alone in my online addictions.

I can see a use for Quickbrowse though. This paid service gathers your preferred webpages, and combines them into one long page for you to read. You can receive it by mail, so you don't have to go clicking all the sites. It wouldn't be worth the $4/month to me, but I'm not a manager.

Besides Froogle finally having its own domain (well, maybe I just never noticed it before), there are two interesting changes.

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Whether one agrees with P2P file sharing or not, fact is that many people download songs, entire music CDs, game CDs, and even movies. Several things still make it worthwhile to buy an original (to me), one of which being that a good CD comes with a booklet of songs, and a decent packaging.

Sites that offer covers for download enable downloaders to fancy up their illegal downloads. I've always been surprised by the acts of pirates/illegal copiers. They go to a lot of trouble to create a cheap (illegal) copy, and then they want it to look like the real thing, so they spent a lot of time and money on creating nice covers and such. Well, this sure could be helpful.

On p2pnet.net, an interview with Linus Torvalds is listed. I figured this is a good time to start a category “interesting quotes”. I considered adding it for a while, but didn't come across any good quotes yet, so here we go. [Read More!]

Well, it seems as if I am on a porn-kick lately, but trust me, it's all a coincidence. I came across an article (pdf, in Dutch) about Dutch judges and court cases against employees that watched Internet porn at work.

The most important information in the article: it will be very hard for an organisation to fire someone if they don't have a clear policy against this kind of thing. A clear policy, which must've been communicated, and which also mentions sanctions.

Of course this isn't just about watching porn, but also visiting travel sites, booking trips online while at work, and things like that. I guess it is a good thing they're not very strict at my employer. Yet. I know they're working on a new policy, and I wonder what that will be like. Until then, I'll keep visiting my favorite sites while at work (only occassionally ofcourse, and none of them having any porn).

Many years ago, the idea of pay-per-view over the Internet seemed to be the big promise. I've never seen much of it. Ofcourse, old connection speeds weren't exactly meant for this.

Now, with more and more people having broadband, it becomes feasible to offer pay-per-view online. But what? Movies most likely.

The Dutch Yeahronimo offers music downloads with DRM technology. But most of all, they offer streaming concerts and sports events. [Read More!]

I've always been of the opinion that a computer game should be played sitting down. In the beginning, jocks would play sports, people with the limb movement and agility resembling that of the treants in LotR 2: the Two Towers would sit down and play a computer game. And now, now we get more and more games where I'm actually expected to move. What's up with that? [Read More!]

The one thing I like best about Gigablast so far, is that it added my URL in a matter of minutes. So far, Gigablast is a one-man operation, and it has a small amount of sites indexed (almost 201 million, so that's much less than the amount of porn sites out there). Oh yeah, and it ranks you higher if you add their link to your page As a librarian, I thought I shouldn't like that, since it gives an incorrect result base. As a site-owner, I can see the advantages there. My guess is, when the engine is big enough, it'll drop this system of ranking to take care of this skewed rating.

Besides, the higher ranking only happens when the site is tied with a site that does not link to Gigablast. Most importantly, one should never just trust a search engine to determine which site is best, a lot of work needs to be done before we can just blindly trust them.

Be adventurous, look beyond page 10 of search results, no matter which engine they are from.

Yesterday I mentioned some survey that talked about millions of (commercial!) pages of porn on the Web. It was too late to say much about it, but I do have some thoughts. [Read More!]

“[...]N2H2 now has identified over 260 million pages classified as pornography.” Perhaps they are just too prude?