Google have started beta tests of an API for Adsense – they’ve had one for adwords for quite some time.
Although the beta is limited to sites with more than 100k pageviews per day with some other criteria:

To be eligible, your site must register users who then maintain their web content through your site. The types of sites we’re looking for include web hosts, blog hosts, Wiki hosts, forum hosts, and web publishers.

The API site includes documentation and a signup form
(via)

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Over the past year or so most of the blog engines have defaulted to using the nofollow tag in comments.
This tag basically tells search engine spiders not to follow the links. While this can be handy if you want to mention a competitor it’s not so useful when you have genuine contributors to your blog’s comments.
While I can understand the reasoning behind the introduction of the tag’s usage I still feel that blog authors should be able to choose whether or not to turn it on or off.
Movable Type allows you to turn it on or off easily, but WordPress doesn’t.
Up until recently I was using a plugin to turn the damned thing off, but I’ve now had to turn it off the hard way – by hand.
If people take the time to comment on my ramblings then the least they should get is a small bit of “link love”!

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Darren came across this very interesting plugin for WordPress which:

Pretty cool

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Just posted this on the company blog

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Keith Bohanna has put the domain web2pointzeroconference.com up for auction on ebay.ie to raise funds for it@cork
I’m currently the highest bidder, though I hope that the auction generates some more interest.

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Google have finally made Picasa available for linux users (via).

There are three installer packages available which should cater for most linux distributions:

• RPM
• .deb
• .bin

As I’m using Ubuntu on my desktop I opted for the .deb.

The package file is just over 20 MB, so it doesn’t take that long to download.

Once downloaded all you have to do is double-click on it, provide your password and off it goes to install itself.
 
On Ubuntu it creates an icon under the Applications > Graphics menu.

The first time you run it you need to agree to the usual licensing stuff and after that you can play away with it to your heart’s content.

It’s got some nice little features and was able to find all the photos on my desktop.

The various effects and filters that come with it are pretty handy, but I couldn’t see any simple way to export photos to use on my blog. It does have an option to export photos to a web page using its own templates, but when I chose that option the resulting photos were horribly pixelated and looked awful.

I’m not 100% sure where Picasa fits into the “mix”, but it’s quite handy.. if nothing else it makes pulling photos off my camera that bit more intuitive than the standard gnome tools, though it can’t really come close to other image editors for basic operations such as resizing and cropping

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I mentioned Krystian’s blog a few weeks ago. He’s now blogging in English as well.
Hopefully he’ll be putting more of his photos online as well

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The Amazon UK affiliate program now offers “Self-Optimising Links” – I’m not sure who comes up with these abuses of the English language, but the concept behind it is quite attractive:

With Self-Optimising Links, associates can now automatically display the products and content that best match their websites.

The links themselves come in a variety of sizes and offer a number of customisation options so that you can get them to fit into your site’s style.
The only thing that isn’t clear immediately is whether or not this form of contextual advertising would breach the Adsense terms of service. In some regards I could see it causing issues, whereas in others I don’t see as much of a conflict.

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O’Reilly publish some really good technical books, but that does not give them any divine rights.
Their latest “clarification” on the it@cork debacle that I mentioned earlier is really not helping matters:

We’re not claiming exclusive use of “Web 2.0″ in all contexts. Our service mark applies only to “Web 2.0″ when used in the *title* of “live events” such as conferences and tradeshows.

So if I organised a get together of some Irish IT professionals and called it say “Web 2.0 Meetup” or anything with “web 2.0″ in the title they could come after me as well?
My understanding of trademark is not comprehensive, however, from what I do know a trademark holder would have to prove several things including the basic “possible confusion” bit. How the hell could anyone in their right minds confuse a small Irish IT organisation’s conference with that of an American publisher?
Even if they did confuse it how the hell can they send threatening letters when they don’t seem to have an actual trademark in Europe? (application for a trademark is not a trademark)
From a PR perspective I really would not like to be in O’Reilly’s shoes.. They’ve handled this really badly.
On the plus side I’m sure that IT@Cork’s membership will receive a boost and that the event will be sold out

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I am rather amused and mildly shocked by O’Reilly’s threats against IT @ Cork (of which we are members).
Of course they are now back peddling madly, but I still think it’s incredibly heavy handed and ill advised. Unless the trademark was registered in the EU it would have no bearing on Ireland anyway, so I would love to know what they had applied for.

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