Curiouser and Curiouser!

Just say no to GMO

Euro vote ends GM food ban. The European parliament passes controversial laws that in effect lift a ban on genetically modified foods. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]

Oh crap.  The huge multinationals win again, presumably many MEP's pockets have been well lined over this one.

What I don't understand is how they get away with this 0.9% labelling requirements nonsense.  I mean doesn't this really say "we have no idea where the GMO's are because we can't really control them"..?

Oh well.  Don't blame me if you kids develop udders or cloven hooves.

SmartBarXP.

SmartBars are just applications that cling to a side of your screen like the way Windows Task Bar does.  I typically use it to quickly access folders and applications instead of navigating the Start Menu.  I found two SmartBars via Scoble, SmartBarXP and Desktop Sidebar, and decided to try the SmartBarXP (looked better than the other one).  Nicely done although it's not quite commercial product quality yet.  It comes with 14 gadgets ranging from MP3 player and system resource monitor.

SmartBarXP's main problem is that it is too big and slow for a program intended to be running all the time.  It eats up 24 to 32 meg of memory and responds slowly when interacting with it.  I thought it might be written with .NET, so I took a look at the binaries and found that it was written in Visual Basic 6.  You can build nice programs with VB, but not when you need minimum impact on memory and CPU.

[Don Park's Blog]

I find applications like SmartBarXP take up way too much time & space and all the gadgets tend to be 1-minute wonders that I never actually use.

On the other hand True Launch Bar has been a real productivity boon for me for over a year now.  It's like the Win2K/XP quick launch bar only much better.  You can add buttons which popup menus, folders, or run programs.  Oh and it has gadgets too if you want them.

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Recommended.

Ad's by Google.

GAAAH!

Three times today I have clicked on a link in my aggregator and seen Google Ad's appear on the page.  This is getting insidious.  If it weren't for the fact that I don't get remotely enough visitors to make it worth my while I would join in.  As it is I'm thinking about starting the boycott campaign ;-)

A more serious comment perhaps is that I think the Google ad's are really boring.  I know they've gone for text ad's in order to keep down bandwidth and distraction but the net result is, well they're dull.

But I think the clincher is what Paolo mentioned earlier.  The ad's are choosen by Google.  When we chatted about our own idea on the way back from BlogTalk we definitely had in mind a service that let the blogger choose which specific ad's they wanted to use - this might actually only be 1 or 2 but that's fine.  It was about letting you advertise only those brands that you really want to stand by.

Putting generic Google ad's on your site says something about your relationship with your readers.  Firstly that you are trying to monetize them and second that you are optimizing the site for your own interests rather than theirs.  It's true that both of these points were probably in the small print of the unwritten contract from the start, but the ad's brings them into focus.

I will be interesting to see if people (myself included) are seriously using AdSense in 12 months, and, if so, what AdSense will look like by then.

Too many gardeners spoil the hibiscus

WikiGardener - Joi Ito Wiki. Quote: "Wiki gardening is the process of incrementally editing a wiki space to preserve continuity, make additional connections and links, and otherwise clean it up to be more consistent"

Comment: via this Clay Shirky piece [Serious Instructional Technology]

Wiki Gardening (I've seen it called Page Refactoring on programming related Wiki) is both a blessing and a curse on the Wiki concept.

It's a strength because it means that someone can come along and summarize a point, rephrase to help build consensus or just plain weed out the old & the irrelevant.  Wiki's without a gardener quickly become a mess.

But herein lies the curse.  Unless you are lucky enough, like Sam Ruby of the Echo wiki, to have a conscientious gardener what's going to happen?  What if no-one wants to do the weeding (like in my back garden) or if lots of people with very different views decide to weed the same patch?

I'm not quite sure what point I'm making yet.  But I'm definitely thinking a lot about the interface (at a conceptual level) between weblog and wiki and the benefits they could bring to each other.