John Battelle found an interesting service for tracking popular keywords: Wordtracker. Add this to the Lycos 50, the Yahoo! Buzz Index, and the famous Google Zeitgeist, and you have an excellent set of keyword lists for search optimization. A list of the highest priced AdWords keywords would really make this set complete.
Six Apart has announced TypeKey. Due in part to many complaints, they have also put out a FAQ. Burningbird has excellent analyses from both before and after the FAQ release.
While it’s great to see the creators of Movable Type working on new technology, it seems that most of their users are not happy with the proposal of a centralized service for authenticating commentors.
Habeas has infiltrated many popular antispam tools with their “Sender Warranted Email”. Nelson described the technique best:
Habeas thought they had a clever idea: copyright a little haiku, consider any mail that has the haiku to be not spam, then sue any spammer who violates their copyright.The problem is that spammers typically don’t care about these lawsuits and have started including this haiku in their messages. After reading Nelson’s post, I examined the spams that had mad it past SpamAssassin, and he was right—I saw Habeas all over the place. Many others have also noticed this problem.
SpamAssassin gives Habeas a -8 score by default. This is a fair score to give an effective rule, but this rule is obviously failing. So while Nelson recommends giving Habeas a score of 0 in SpamAssassin, effectively removing the rule, I’m giving it a 5, penalizing those who use this haiku: score HABEAS_SWE 5. [via Nelson Minar]
MovieRec records video on the Treo 600 at a claimed 30fps. Video is 160x120x16bit. This is one of the few features the makers of the Treo forgot. The next release will be the one to watch, as it will add the ability to save the videos to an SD card. [via GearBits]
Update: Version 1.03 now supports saving to an SD card.
SmartyPants 1.5 is out. Another incremental update to this already flawless Movable Type plugin.
Update: There was a minor bug with 1.5. Version 1.5.1 has been released to correct the problem.
Amazon.com has added a long list of RSS feeds. While I was hoping to find feeds that listed new items in several categories, it seems that these feeds only list most popular items by “Sales Rank”. Not quite what I was looking for, but at least it’s a start. It’s great to see Amazon moving in the right direction. [via Jeremy]
