The rumors are apparently true. RSS feeds with Google AdSense are coming next week.

The AdSense Code: What Google Never Told You About Making Money with AdSense

That means contextual adverts in your Feedburner RSS feeds, that will be CPM based, which means you get paid on the number of ad impressions – so the more subscribers that you have, the more revenue you will generate.

It’s being rolled out to a select group of Adsense publishers first of all, but then it will be extended to all Adsense and Feedburner publishers in the near future.

Feedburner Adsense is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Why does Microsoft want to buy a failing company like Yahoo for? Like it or not, Google is the main search engine of choice for the overwhelming majority of the online population.

Remember the likes of Excite and Lycos? They seem to have vanished. AltaVista and inktomi got swallowed up by Yahoo themselves.

What Yahoo CAN offer Microsoft are the deals they have with Verizon, and the inroads they have made into the mobile market.

Windows Mobile 6 might not have the best reputation for stability (what Windows OS does), but WM7 is on the way, and more and more people are using mobile phones for everything but making phone calls.

What about the iPhone? Well, the iPhone is rather a cool niche product, but it does really offer mobile computing in the same way that Windows Mobile can and does, and as most of my readers will know, I am no fan of the Redmond giant.

Also many people that hacked their iPhone’s to work on other networks besides AT&T are now finding they no longer work after the latest iPhone updates. Also the iPhone is, officially, tied to AT&T, which is an expensive, slow, network.

Now, Google are looking to get into this area too. It’s well known that Google are bidding to obtain wireless spectrum, and are touting the idea of an open source phone with free (but advertisement-funded) software.

Google’s fear (besides being concerned that a Microsoft/Yahoo enterprise will eat into their market share) is that Microsoft will use their monopolistic powers to subvert the net; to change it slowly but surely, into MS-Net, much as they’ve done already, in the way they’ve stamped their feet at OpenOffice getting ISO 9002 certification for the .odt format, and they way they’ve only adopted the bits they decide they want in the Internet Explorer rendering engine.

Some say that Google is becoming too powerful, and heading towards a monopoly like Microsoft largely is. My own take on that statement is that whilst Google are enveloping the online world, by and large, unlike Microsoft, they are using standards that are already in place, and not trying to bend and change them to suit their own business practices.

What Is All The Yahoo About? is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

OpenSocial is basically three APIs bundled together that allows developers to roll out the same application across a number of participating social networks.

So far, the big draw is OpenSocial’s supposed simplicity and openness. Facebook keeps its data secret and  developers have to use its own markup language, whereas OpenSocial is  allowing developers to work with a simple set of tools consisting of HTML, javascript, and elements of Flash. Here’s how it comes together:

First, there are the “hosts,” who are essentially a group of participating social networks. Google wisely dipped into Facebook’s pool of competitors by nabbing Hi5, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning, Salesforce, Friendster, Viadeo, and Oracle right out the gate.

OpenSocial will work with another group, dubbed “developers” that includes many familar to Facebook’s users such as RockYou, Slide, iLike and Flixster

 It’ll be interesting to see what evolves over the next few months.

OpenSocial From Google is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

I like to live on the edge. I can’t resist it, even though I sometimes regret it. There’s an old saying, I know, “If it ain’t broke, don’t’ fix it”

However, I thought I’d give this upgrade a go. This isn’t my main production machine – yet. However, once I find a few more applications that can replace the last of the Windows ones I’m using, then I will totally switch to a Linux based network, and Ubuntu at that.

Anyway, I have upgraded from Fiesty Fawn, which is the 7.04 release, to the Alpha of Gutsy Gibbon, which is due for final release in October 2007, and will therefore be version 7.10. For those of you who don’t know, Ubuntu is updated completely every six months.

If you’re looking to install Ubuntu on a computer, it’s straightforward. You go to the Ubuntu Web Site – http://ubuntu.com

Download the CD image of your choice, and burn the image to a CD. You can run a “live” version from the CD, to see if your system is compatible. If it is, and you like what you see, you can go ahead and install it to the hard drive. It comes with an email client (Evolution) and a web browser (Firefox) built in, and also with OpenOffice, which is a fine replacement for those of you who currently use MS Office. The whole process of downloading, burning to a CD, and installing Ubuntu took me under a half hour. The actual install time was around 15 mins, which is much quicker than a typical Windows install.

If you’ve already got Feisty on your machine, like I had, and want to upgrade here’s what to do. The whole process took about 30 mins, and is mostly done by opening a terminal window, and entering a few commands. You can cut and paste from this web page if you wish, so you get the syntax correct.

Check you have your correct Linux meta-package installed. For most, this will be called “linux-generic,” but for others, it will be something along the lines of “linux-386″ or “linux-k7,” depending on what kernel you have installed.

Check that any new programs which were added between Feisty Fawn and Gutsy Gibbon are installed. To do this, type the following command into the terminal:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard ubuntu-desktop

Edit the software sources list. You want your system to update from the new Gusty repositories, and not the Feisty ones.

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

In KDE: substitute

kate for gedit

Once opened, you’ll see a number of lines that look similar to this:

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ feisty main

Do a find and replace: replace feisty with gutsy all the way through the file, and save it on top of itself. You may wish to back up the original first, in case it screws up, but it’s unlikely.

Then you need to update the software repositories. Do this with:

sudo apt-get update
Then upgrade all the packages already on your system with:

sudo apt-get upgrade

Some packages will require new libraries, so type this:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
That’s it! Reboot the machine, and you should be good to go with Gutsy Gibbon. Remember though, it is an alpha release, so don’t write me, if it breaks something now or in three months time! I’m not a Ubuntu developer, I’ve just posted this, as a log of what I did, and perhaps to help others, who are as curious, impatient or foolhardy as I.

Getting Gutsy is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

I have always found Google Desktop to be useful. Adam over at Books on Tables sent me the link from the Google Blog. I’d not gotten around to checking all my feeds yet this morning.

I know there are some concerns over privacy issues. Yeah, ok, so Google is going to find the contents of my computer so interesting they’re going to read everything I put on their server?

The Government is going to server Google with a warrant to read what I put on their server? I don’t think they’re really interested in me either.

I have a mutter about the state of the world in general at times, and the way it’s run, but I’m hardly the enemy within, or without, or wherever.

Anyway, it was a breeze to install on Ubuntu. Just clicked on the link, and away we went. The Debian installer took care of it, and within a few minutes it was installed. It’s chugging away in the background in my idle moments, indexing this beast.

Now, are we going to get a sidebar too?

Google Desktop For Linux is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Social networking websites MySpace and Facebook are increasingly splitting along class lines, according to a US academic.

The sites, which allow users to make friends and share pictures and information about themselves, have become two of the most popular destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California, says their populations are now dividing on the basis of social and economic backgrounds.

In a paper this week, Ms Boyd said typical Facebook users “tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively”. MySpace, meanwhile, “is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens” as well as “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”.

Extract From the Guardian UK

MySpace Vs Facebook is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Just in case you’re not aware, or you missed it on your dashboard, if you’re running a self-hosted WordPpress blog, there’s a nice new shiny update out right now, just for you. You can download it right here

It’s got the usual bug fixes and security stuff, and you can read all about it at the WordPress site.

WordPress Update is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

I would imagine that most everyone that has a blog these days would have installed Askimet. It’s such a great little tool for stopping all that inane comment spam. It’s also free for personal use, which probably covers most blogs – unless you’re making over $500 a month from the blog says Askimet. (If only says The Eye!)

At this time of writing my little Askimet widget says it’s stopped over 16 thousand spam comments. Heck, it’s works so well I don’t have to sit wading through lots of idiot messages about Viagra, penis extenders, links for huge boobs, and endless drugs for various other ailments etc. Askimet’s site says that 95% of all blog comments are spam, and I can sure believe that!

Askimet is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

Do you have hundreds or thousands of mp3 audio files? I know I do. I’ve got all my personal CDs ripped over the years, as well as a whole load of vinyl too. Then there are the podcasts that I just can’t bring myself to delete.

How do you keep track (excuse the pun) of it? How can you remember what you have and haven’t got after a while?

I’ve been using a really cool program called Music Express for some time now.

Check it out at  Wizetech

Music, Music, Music…. well and other audio too! is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog

As you may have read in a recent post here on The Eye, I’ve installed Ubuntu 7.04 on a couple of machines here; a desktop and a laptop.

So far I’m pleased with it, and found it much easier to maintain and update than my previous Linux Distro, which was Fedora Core 6.

It’s been announced that Dell are going to be introducing a range of desktops and laptops with Ubuntu 7.04 pre-installed, so it could be that Linux is on the way to finally making the mainstream. If it lands on the desks of office workers, and they like it, it could help to launch it much more into the general consumer market.
[display_podcast]

In this video, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth talks about why he started Ubuntu, Linux adoption rate trends, how previous barriers to Linux adoption for mainstream users are improving, and more.

Ubuntu 7.04 is a post from: The Eye An Eyebeemania Blog