ABC News: Silicon Insider: Forbes Fumbles the Blogosphere

So my question is how big money is going to be made through blogs. I’ve always loved using a computer to keep a personal log back to my Kaypro II days, and I love Blogger and WordPress, but where’s the money going to be coming from? Malone makes a good point, that most blogs that do make money don’t make that much, but the overhead costs are so low. I think a focused blog, like one on running shoes or car stereos, is more likely to make money, but I like writing a general blog for my interests. Google adwords is only the beginning for a way of monetizing blogs.

The iBook had a crash again last night, so I removed the 1 GB SODIMM from it, and it seems to be working fine now on 256 Mb of memory. Since I really don’t stress out the iBook with a lot of apps, I’ll probably leave the memory configuration alone or add 256 Mb at the most. I hope I’ve found the reason why the iBook has been crashing.

My office is right by Mercury Interactive and the Veritas offices of Symantec. It was a bad day for the stocks of both companies:

A 19.3 percent drop in Symantec’s shares took the Cupertino security-software maker off the list of the valley’s 10 most valuable tech stocks. Symantec stock fell $4.63 to $19.37 after the company cut its financial forecast and announced the surprise retirement of its chief financial officer. Symantec completed its $10.2 billion acquisition of Veritas Software in July.

Symantec rival McAfee, a Santa Clara maker of anti-virus software, dropped $3.15, or 10.6 percent, to $26.70.

Mercury Interactive, a Mountain View company that makes software to test computer programs, plunged $9.34, or 26.7 percent, to $25.66 for the worst performance in the S&P 500. Chief Executive Amnon Landan, Chief Financial Officer Douglas Smith and General Counsel Susan Skaer resigned after an internal investigation of the company’s stock-option practices.

Two times last night, my iBook just froze and I received this error message telling me to restart the computer. After some research, I found that resetting the PMU might solve my problems. I reset the PMU per the instructions on this page at Apple.com, and the computer seems to be much faster now. More importantly, it didn’t crash at all anymore. According to the page:

“Over time, the settings in the Power Manager may become unusable, which can result in operational anomalies with the computer. Examples include not turning on, not waking from sleep, not charging the battery, or not seeing the AC Adapter, among others.”

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=14449

In addition to Spamassassin, I’ve been running the sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org and relays.ordb.org rbls by themselves. If there were any hits on those two rbls, the mail was automatically classified as spam. Unfortunately, I think there were some false positives in the rbl hits. Now I’m assigning points to rbl hits in Spamassassin, so if a mail gets a hit from a rbl, it won’t automatically be considered spam, but it will contribute to the overall score which might push it over the spam threshold. I’m also using stricter rbls like Spamcop, but assigning a lower score if there’s a Spamcop hit. If a mail gets multiple rbl hits in Spamassassin, this will be a better test than just a single rbl, and it’s definitely going to be pushed over the spam threshold. Now, I only have Spamassassin and ClamAV as my spam and virus blockers for the mail server. Hopefully, this new setup will block more spam and decrease the number of false positives.