Hi,
Tomorrow is the birth anniversary of both Justice William Brennan (1906) and Ella Fitzgerald (1917). It is Italy’s liberation from German (1945), it is the day when the American Army met the Russian Army near Lechwitz (1945) and it is the first anniversary of a state requiring license plates on automobiles in New York (1901).
I learned several new things on the Internet recently. First, did you know Sarah Palin created a Facebook page under a fictitious name with the sole purpose of complimenting her official page. And got caught. 🙂
Watch out fellow bloggers, there’s a group out there that deliberately go to newspapers and buy the copy rights for their verbiage and images for the sole purpose (I used those two words twice here) of trolling the Net and finding bloggers that used the newspaper’s images or text and sue them for copy right infringement. Big and small blogs, we are all game for them and their entire existence is to make money off of us. This lawsuit factory has been under increasing pressure from free speech proponents, here’s a link to newspapers Righthaven have under contract so you can watch your sources. I generally use the Tribune Review for most of my source for local activities. But I just take the basic information and represent it in a new form with a link to the organization I am speaking about. Their lawyers have non disclosure clauses in all the suites, but some figures have come out. It seems the smaller bloggers that have settled are in the lower thousands of dollars, who knows what the big national bloggers are paying.
Google’s having a fight with a new Internet segment based on “want to know” searches. The Internet is saturated with users seeking knowledge that a whole new industry has grown up, informational farms. There’s a number of sites out there that pay people to write “how to”s from $2 to $8 per entry. They then combine all these snippets on a site and find advertisers that relate to these individual snippets and pair them. Think query “how do I remove a stain in my carpet” with an ad by a carpet shampoo product. Obviously, at $2 to $8 a snippet, there’s not a lot of research into the answer.
There’s a new exhibit around the corner at Artists Image Resource at 518 Foreland Street. It’s called Rethinking Pittsburgh’s Industrial Legacy and is open Tuesday through Saturdays from 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. through May 7 and admission is free. There’s a piece called Homestead Robot by Matthew Bucholz creates a futuristic robot inflicting havoc in Homestead during the 1892 strike. All the exhibits don’t explore just the past. Patricia Bellan-Gillen explores why fracking should be eyed suspiciously. There’s also some vintage lithographs and one dry point made around the turn of the 19th/20th depicting the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the Johnstown Flood and others.
They announced the winners of the annual Peeps Contest in the Tribune Review and showed their winners in yesterday’s paper. Once again, Pittsburgh’s creative juices were running high. Check them out with the link above.
Thanx and Happy Easter,
ed
