Scott Yang's Playground

TechCrunch: Google OpenSocial to be common APIs for building social apps. Instead of building yet-another social network, Google is releasing something this week that provides a platform to link all the partnered social networks out there — Orkut, Xing, Friendster, Hi5, LinkedIn, etc. It allows developers to write applications for all these social networks using [...]

Agency Fusion’s latest ad campaign, Make My Logo Bigger Cream, where for merely $29.95 you can get not only the Make My Logo Bigger Cream, White Space Eliminator, Starburst Dust, Fluorescentizer, you also get Emotionator that transform your design and website! Funniest ads I have seen for ages, but I think my sites do need [...]

In my pursuing of monetising this blog I joined Text-Link-Ads back in September last year. It was simple to deploy their code and then start to generate income by selling text links — it was almost effortless. So I used TLA to earn some petty cash from a few sites that I got lying around, [...]

Google Finance Blog: Australian and New Zealand pricing data. “We’re pleased to announce the availability of pricing data for Australian (ASX) and New Zealand (NZX) listings on Google Finance.” Great! Time to throw out that dated Yahoo Finance with oversized advertisement and 90′s user interface. Here is the company I work for.

John Linton of Exetel: Why Are Victorian’s So Different? “… Victorian users average twice the bandwidth usage of all other State and Teritory users.”, and that was his experience over 12 years setting up and operating ISPs in Australia. Sounds like the Garden State should also be nick-named “leecher state”.

There is an advantage and a disadvantage living on the southern side of Gardeners Road. I live in Daceyville, where most of my neighbours are of the state housing commission. As I have suspected that it is the reason — I actually do not get many unsolicited commercial mails, i.e. spam. Compare to the Kingsford [...]

One of the best news today — Automattic acquires Gravatar. From the new owner of Gravatar, Automattic‘s Matt Mullenweg: So we worked out an arrangement to transfer the code and service from Tom to Automattic, and here we are. Here’s what we’ve done so far over the past few days: We transferred the Rails application [...]

Do we need another tax cut? According to the latest promise from the Coalition, it seems to be a good thing for all Australians. No doubt that it is more likely the Coalitions need it more than the Australian tax payers, as November 24 the election day draws closer, but looking at the benefits — [...]

A few minutes passed noon today, I received an SMS message from some number I did not recognise. Reminder: Your tax return is due 31 Oct. You can use e-tax at ato.gov.au Please ignore if recently lodged. Australia Taxation Office. Thanks for the reminder from our considering government, not. Is it the first time ATO [...]

John Gruber: Forever is a long time: “There’s only one way to pressure Apple into opening up iPhone development, and it isn’t by developing underground iPhone apps. It’s by not buying iPhones.” You can actually buy an unlocked iPhone in Australia for less than AUD$800 (although I suspect it is going to get more expensive [...]

Just in case you have not noticed, I have not been blogging here as frequently as I used to be. It certainly feels pretty dead here. During the exercise of searching for the killer of my blog, I found that there has been an increasing activity at Twitter, where I wrote “tweets” on things popping [...]