Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Blogs that are on Blogger, WordPress or TypePad can now add the wonderful outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts.It's light, requires no registration and very intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post. Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well. You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment. Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post.

Found on Labnol

It never ceases to amaze me; the stupidity of people. As Charles Mackay wrote long ago in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one.

It seems there are some people who just really do not understand the Internet, and in their rush (or greed) to get rich quickly ignore all the commonsense and warnings of those who like Darren Rowse have achieved some measure of wealth from blogging. How? Darren explains often that his problogger.net website is not his mail money maker, rather his Digital Photography school website is. He provides a real product for real people.

And so to the point of this article, and the nature of the Internet that seems to have been forgotten in the glimmer of fools gold. As Doug McCaughan sagely observes, people use the web for Information, Utility and Entertainment, in that order.

So where are the fools? I think there are two types.

I finally got around to building a new banner for my website.

Spy Journal 1.0 didn't have a banner - except for orange and text.

Spy Journal 2.0 had customised banners for each of the personal, tech, excel and blog websites. Actually they were the same banner but some CSS allowed different colours to show as a margin on each banner.

So yesterday I used some photoshop skillz and put together the banner thats here now. Do you like it? Is it an improvement on previous ones? Let me know what you think.

I am constantly running  a lot of applications, and am using the quad core and 2GB RAM that Vista will let me use (out of the 4GB installed) pretty heavily. I frequently see the cores drop into 80-90% use. RAM usage is often over 90%.

Right now I have running:

File Management

CuteFTP

Windows Explorer (2 instances)

Browsers

Internet Explorer 2 open tabs

Firefox 89 open tabs

Java game Settlers of Catan (playing a game with Judith and Miranda while eating lunch and working and writing this)

Particls - newsticker scrolling

Communications

Outlook

MSN MEssenger - 2 conversation windows open

Yahoo Messenger

Skype

8hands