All work and no play

I just read in Zack Lynch’s blog Brain Waves about a new tool for organizing thoughts, information and notes, in almost any format. It is called DEVONthink, and it seems really promising. Only problem is, for me at least, it is a Mac only product.

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Web CEO 5 is a software package of ten tools that helps you promote your site in search engines, intelligently analyze your visitors, and easily maintain your online estate. I read about this tool on E-guiden — a Norwegian web site about profitability online.

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The last few years, Tari Akpodiete has collected every banner ad she has come over. She is now making them available for the public at her web site Banner Report.

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It will be interesting to follow the inpact of the Writing style guys at Wired. They just decided that:

Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet. At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.

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Time Magazine just had a decent article summarizing the history of the weblog phenomenon. This may of course be seen as yet another credible argument that blogging has gained significant influence in the media universe, but more importantly the article presented two new tools that makes it easier for readers to identify the good and most read or linked stories, and to create a personal digest of up to 50,000 blogs.

Kinja.com: sample and subscribe to 50,000 blogs, ad to your personal digest and read them like a personalized online newspaper.

Blogdex.net: presents the most contagious, or fastest spreading ideas in the Web-log community. It is like a top 10 list of the most popular entries.

Check out VisitorVille: Web Site Intelligence for Creative Thinkers. It may look a lot like SimCity, but it is actually a powerful tool, measuring up with the industry leaders like WebTrends and the like.

VisitorVille is described in this Wired article:

VisitorVille employs a graphical, urban metaphor to present information about customers’ real-time Web-traffic flow. A company’s entire Web presence is seen as an urban or suburban neighborhood, with each individual Web page presented as a building. The more visitors on a site, the taller the buildings, and the brighter the lights on each floor.

Continuing the metaphor, visitors who have found a site using popular search engines arrive in the “city” on virtual buses emblazoned with their logos. And each visitor is represented by a small avatar that, when clicked, presents a passport that offers several pieces of information about the user, such as her or his IP address, where that person came from and more. Avatars from dot-com domains wear a suit. Those from dot-edu domains dress as students.

They have a pretty low entrace fee of only 30$ per month for smaller sites. Be sure to check out VisitorVille before you buy in to one of the more expensive options. VisitorVille may have exactly what you need, and it’s probably more fun as well.

Other web site analysis tools with a visual approach are for example ClickTracks.

In his speech on the merits of George W. Bush and his helpers in the White House, Al Gore used a lot of metaphors to describe how he views the current state of affairs:

[ENG] – He planted the seeds of war, and harvested a whirlwind. And now, the “corrupt tree” of a war waged on false premises has brought us the “evil fruit” of Americans torturing and humiliating prisoners.

[NO]
- Han sådde krigens frø. Han høstet en tornado. Nå har det korrupte treet fra en krig utkjemptet på falske premisser bragt oss den onde frukten av amerikanere som torturerer og seksuelt ydmyker hjelpeløse fanger, sa han.

A Wired article describes the latest weapon in the the run for becoming the next President of the USA.

An effort by conservative bloggers has pushed the candidate’s campaign website to the top of the result list when the word “waffles” is typed into Google.

Google-bombing has fast become a popular prank on the Web. Bloggers have found they can manipulate search results by hyperlinking unsavory labels to individual pages. The trick also works on Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista.

The Internet has since the 2000-race established itself as a key factor in the battle between the candidates. It’s become a major battlefiled. Just look at Howard Dean. He was sucsessful online, but failed offline. This latest tactic shows the vast amount of veapons that exist and proves that any sucsessful candidate must constantly monitor the web to assess the opponents next move, and be ready to respond.

The XXXchurch is on a mission to help people overcome the temptations of pornography and onanism and bring them to God. As they explain in this article on Wired.com :

“(We) saw the church really doing nothing about the issue of porn, so we decided to step up and do something,” said Craig Gross, 28, who started the XXXchurch with Mike Foster, 32, in 2002. “We wanted to do it outside the context of a normal church so we could attract both secular and church people.”

The site — which advertises itself as the No. 1 Christian porn site — features downloadable bible studies, a virtual prayer wall and free software that records sites visited by Internet users and sends the log to a third party. There is also plenty of practical advice. Here’s what the pastors recommend instead of self-gratification:

“Remain calm and tell yourself, ‘You don’t own me, masturbation! I’m taking my life back!’ (or something of that nature). If that doesn’t work, you can pursue alternatives like chewing gum, blasting John Lennon’s song ‘Cold Turkey,’ eating chocolate or whatever helps you best (not masturbation).”

If your interested in testimonials on this, check out the blog Free To Be Pure. There, you will find personal insights such as:

Many times we will take purity and set it up in it’s own little world, and seperate it from the rest of our lives, as if purity is something deliberately designed to be harder to gain than anything else. But it’s not. It’s a part of Christian living. Time and time again, we are commanded to be pure. Through out the OT, God continually demanded purity from His people. Why? Why does God want us to be holy, to be sanctified as the NIV puts it in 1 Thess 4:2-4? It’s because God Himself is holy, in His very essence, He is holy. There is absolutly nothing in Him that desires sin. In His holiness, He wont have an intimate relationship with someone that isn’t holy. But His heart is to have close friendship with us anyway.