The Best of News Feeds #9

My newsreader is busy even when I’m asleep! Here’s some of the stories that have come my way over the past couple of weeks. A wide range of stories – from Open Source to fires in Lae, WordPress 2.7 announcements to XMAS tales, an alarming story on infanticide and much more!

Tuning your blog

Specky Boy on: How is your Blog Performing? 19 Must Have Tools that will let you know

Quarkbase is a free tool to find complete information about a website. It is a mashup of over 30 data sources and many algorithms gathering information from Internet on various topics like social popularity, traffic, associated people, etc…..

A society slowly crumbles

Kevin on: Infanticide in NG Highlands

In today’s West Australian newspaper there is a report about infanticide in the New Guinea highlands. It seems that women from opposing waring clans have been killing their newborn sons to stop another generation of fighters disrupting everyday life in the villages. They figure that if there are fewer men, there will be far less fighting. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. There aren’t a lot of women out there starting wars……

Technorati speaks

SiteProNews on: Blogging – A Global Phenomenon

If you haven’t read Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, you should. The Blogosphere continues to grow in size and influence and the lines between what is a blog and what is a mainstream media site is becoming less clear with each passing year. The full report can be found at…

More on an alternative to Google

SiteProNews on: 10 Free and Easy Ways to Improve Your Alexa Ranking

Alexa, which is owned by Amazon.com, gives away a free toolbar that you can download and install in your browser. Alexa is then able to keep track of the sites you visit and compute the traffic ranking of those websites, with a rank of “1″ being the assigned to the most visited site….

And the next day half of Lae was pissed!

Malum on: Best Buy Lae goes up in flames

Best Buy Shop in Lae, one of the city’s landmarks, went up in flames at about 12am today and the fire was finally put out by 4am. This was the site of the historical Burns Philip store which was an icon of Lae for many years. By about 1am looters were already drunk and looking for more liquor till daybreak. Before the fire reached the rear where the liquor shop is, looters were already breaking down the windows and doors and helping themselves to anything they could lay their hands on. They included street people to security guards…..

Lift that hood and get your hands dirty!!

Lorelle on: CSS Development Tools, Forms, Layouts, and More

If you are a WordPress Theme designer, or want to dig into your WordPress Theme’s design, check out Blog Oh Blog’s “Rapid CSS Development Tools” article with a list of CSS tools that help make coding and designing easier. The article include forms, layouts, frameworks, optimizers, and more….

Where my mate Anthony once used to teach

Emmanuel on: Including the Excluded

Here are some pictures from the recent construction of classroom facilities at Marienberg. The facility went from an isolated “green field” to a fully functional educational facility in just one day, propelling Marienberg from isolation into the twenty first century. The classrooms are equipped with high-speed Internet access and thin client computers to offer students…

Onya!

Emmanuel on: Australian ISP’s rebuff filtering plan

The Australian governments plans to filter internet use have being rebuffed by Australian ISP‘s (Internet Server Providers). According to the BBC Telstra, which is the largest ISP in Australia has stated that it will not be joining trials for filtering. Which this blog spoke about in an earlier post regarding the planned filtering of Australian internet traffic. The initial trails of the filtering technology was due to take place before christmas. But with major ISP like Telstra going against it, this may be just the spanner in the works that the general public has being hoping for…

The perfect solution for patient identification

TuxMobil on: System76 Launches Biometric Ubuntu Linux Laptop

As big PC companies like Hewlett-Packard finally push into desktop Linux, WorksWithU will give equal time to the industry pioneers that evangelized desktop Linux before it went mainstream. A case in point: System76 continued its long-term Linux commitment today by launching the Gazelle Ultra (pictured) — an Ubuntu laptop with some pretty slick hardware specs and a biometric fingerprint reader for security…

A short history lesson

The Blog Herald on: WordPress Interface: From 0.7.1 to 2.7

Ozh’s got a nice tour of the WordPress interface designs, from the initial release of 0.7.1 in May 2003, to the recently released 2.7 version. Check it out for a walk down memory lane, or just to see how the interface have changed – and improved – over the years…

No kid wants to see Dad pissed – especially not at Xmas

Malum on: Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk On Christmas)

It’s Christmas time again, and the many fathers of Papua New Guinea are going to go out on a drinking, gambling and partying spree without much thought for the children. This Christmas, spare a thought for your lovely wives and children and spend some time with them rather than with your mates. I leave you with the words of this famous song, Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk On Christmas, by the late great John Denver. Merry Christmas to the Daddies, Mummies and Children of Papua New Guinea…

Food for thought!!

IT Tok Tok on: Serious money to be made from cyber crime

According to Spencer Kelly from the Click on the BBC hacking is big business in Russia and other countries in the Eastern Europe. He stated that organised crime gangs are operating profitable scams that involve programmers writing malicious software and viruses. According to a Russian hacker you may create a great virus, but that doesn’t make you a fortune on its own. But if someone could buy it for a couple of hundred dollars. Then convert the infected traffic into cash your earnings would soar. The hacker stated that hackers achieved this by manipulating browser homepages and changing search results to get users to click on their sites and sign up for services…