Gregg Hilferding

I've made some additions to my /etc/hosts file:

66.135.33.106 gizmodo.com
66.135.33.106 experts-exchange.com
66.135.33.106 techcrunch.com

I already avoid reading these sites since I dislike their business practices. But search engines I use and people I know keep linking to these sites despite my opinions. ;)

When I click those links without realizing the destination, I twinge imagining that I've contributed even 1¢ to any of these sites by loading a CPM ad.

Never again.

Group-financing for art projects. And, most of them have a cool reward for different levels of support! Here are the projects I'm backing to get started. If they all get funded, I'll get the following rewards:

• Thank-You card and i3 Detroit sticker
• Handmade postcard
• Exclusive Akimenko Meats Cookbook

Between this and my Kiva loans, I think I'll always be able to put my disposable income to good use. :)

True wisdom from Marco Arment this week:

We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.

Merlin Mann tries to respond to it, but instead responds to everyone else's arguments about why full feeds are better. But, I guess if you call something a straw man, the only way you "win" is by attacking some other position. What gets me though is this curiously stalker-ish final paragraph:

(I’d also mention, just in passing, Marco, that your two primary businesses I’m aware of rely very heavily on all that expensive content being freely available and munge-able. A magazine article that can’t be reblogged will never make it onto Tumblr, and a more (theoretically) monetizable world of teaser-only websites and feeds turns Instapaper into a beautifully-implemented PR aggregator)

Ad hominem, Merlin.

From the Google Blog:

Answer highlighting in search results

Consider the example, [empire state height]. With today's improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This might be cool for Wikipedia, but it totally screws every other website owner.

If you have a website that deals with anything Google's algorithm has decided is a "fact" then watch out, your traffic is about to drop. Google's destroyed a lot of niche online markets but this is a broad attack against all sites.

The future of this feature is that you never have to leave Google at all.