Less Talk, More Do » Tech News

On Digg and “Revolution”

Christopher Finke — Wed, 02 May 2007 14:30:57 +0000

Jeff Harrell sums up my thoughts on the matter better than I could have.

“What happened last night wasn’t a revolution, [...] what happened last night is that a bunch of kids on the playground banded together to beat up another kid, a kid they saw as richer or more powerful or more snotty than them. “The teachers can’t expel us all,” they said, so they put the other kid in the center of a big circle and took turns punching him, then turned out his pockets and took his lunch money.”

Jeff’s blog is definitely one of my favorites to read, and this post is a good example of why.

New Mozilla Addons site is was live

Christopher Finke — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:43:13 +0000

After a series of delays, the new Mozilla Addons site (codenamed Remora) went live late last night. Changes to the site include redesigned visual aspects, localization, and an overhauled discussion/comment system, but probably the biggest change you’ll notice is that new extensions do not undergo a mandatory approval process before being available for download.

As extensions are uploaded, they are relegated to the “Sandbox.” This means that while they won’t appear in search results or under their respective categories, the author can still take advantage of Mozilla’s free add-on hosting by pointing users directly to their add-on’s download page. Sandboxed addons can be nominated for general availability by requesting an editor review, but according to Mozilla, this should be reserved for addons that are of use to the general population and enhance the Web browsing experience, and I fully agree. We don’t need the site cluttered with hundreds of “gam3rHax.com Forum Toolbar” extensions that are only used by their author.

As far as my extensions go, ScribeFire and URL Fixer have been deemed public-worthy, and I’ve nominated OPML Support. I’ll probably leave the others (Slashdotter, GoogleTabs) in the sandbox, as they’re not really what I consider “general use.”

Update: It looks like the site has been rolled back to its previous state; I can’t determine why, but the Mozilla Webdev blog will probably post an update. You can still check out Remora at the Mozilla Addons Preview site.

49 important people and a porn model

Christopher Finke — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:44:27 +0000

PC World’s list of the 50 most important people on the Web that came out today includes at #50 Tila Tequila, a model whose claim to fame is having almost 2 million MySpace friends. I mildly disagree with a few of the other choices like

including Nick Denton/Gawker Media (45) without mentioning Jason or Weblogs Inc.
placing Kos (24) above Jeff Bezos (25), Kevin Rose (32), and Sir Tim Berners-Lee (46)
having David Farber on the list – mailing lists are not Web-specific

but including Tila at all is a disgrace. What’s so important about yet another model on the Internet? Here’s a newsflash: MySpace users are not picky about whom they add as friends, especially when it comes to naked women.