Changes in Project Wonderful

I have another blog, a Spanish one, called Demasiado Personal, where I have the Project wonderful ads I plan to get here sometime in the near future. Lately it seemed like the ads weren't coming at all, and I thought it was because of the world wide economic crisis. Turns out I was wrong. It had to do with a change in Project Wonderful.

The new system divides the world in four areas, 1) United States, 2) Canada 3)Europe and 4) Rest of the world. This is possible because Project Wonderful now does geoip, and through it geotargeting of their ads. So people from each area only sees the ads paid for that area.

This means that although I don't see ads in my blog, I have ads in different parts of the world, and that ads keep on making money for me. Even more, if I get ads in more than one area for the same space, I receive money from both, which is really neat. Now I have 4 ad channels in each ad space, multiplying my possibilities.

I also noticed something else, even when I got ads in other areas, I could get no ads in others, and it's a little ugly and discouraging form people to see the empty ad spaces. So I made a suggestion to Project wonderful to get the winning ad in other channel shown in empty channels, and I threw in some ideas about how to manage two winning bids in different channels (since only one can be shown for free in other areas). Ten minutes later I received an answer telling me that it was an interesting proposal and that they were going to discuss it with the development team.

Of course that made me happy, because not only I have more chances, I also have a ad supplier that knows how to listen, a rare commodity nowadays.

The Boycott

There are several classes of Boycotts, but I think that I may be the only person to boycott coke because they played and played a real crappy song in the radio some years back. I only ended that boycott when coke launched the Final Fantasy IX ad. This happened quite a few years back, but it serves as a perfect introduction for a boycott I started a few days ago.

I had been writing about the need to have an open codec associated with the new VIDEO tag present in HTML5. I had linked the petition to get youtube to support ogg/theora along with a second link that I later removed, a link to the same kind of petition for VIMEO

I had read the beginning of that forum message, and I was linking a lot both what it said and the respectful reaction of the community. But I hadn't read it till the end because it was long and I was writing a blog post. After publishing the post, I went over and finished reading, and at the bottom, I found a message from Andrew Pile, part of the Vimeo Staff. He wrote "Going to close this now since "+1" reposted a hundred times doesn't really help other than to clog up the front page. We fully support Ogg/Theora as an upload format. As for playback, the likeliness of that happening is close to zero at the moment."

Once I've read that, I took out the link from the blog post, in part because the voting was already cancelled. But another big part of that had to do with the attitude. For Vimeo, hundreds of people manifesting their accord with the original poster (that's the meaning of +1, an approval vote) don't serve any purpose at all but to clog up the front page. For them, hundreds of users manifesting themselves to the point where that appearing in the front page constantly is something that gives up a bad image, it doesn't matter that they are not doing anything destructive, that they are only trying to tell Vimeo the road they want it to follow.

After thinking it seriously for some hours, I sent an email to Vimeo. It says "I've seen that although you support Ogg/Theora as an upload format, you don't support it as playback format, as Andrew Pile said it, "As for playback, the likeliness of that happening is close to zero at the moment.".

Allright then, you have every right to do so, but the likeness of me entering your site to watch videos till you change this is close to zero at the moment. I know that I'm only one user, but I know I won't be alone in this.

Good luck and please fix it soon, I'd love to have a reason to return. "

So now you know, this is a boycott, and everyone that wants to jump aboard will be welcomed.

Linux format frees cover art

Due to the ammount of people asking for it, the Linux Format magazine has decided to release it's cover art as Wallpaper. This wallpapers are freed under a Creative Commons licence, similar to the one that protects and frees this blog contents.

This licences are copyleft type, quite similar to the GNU licence, which means that as long as some simple conditions are respected, the content is completely free. So, if you respect them, you'll receive respect and confidence in return. This is what Copyleft means (which make it's opposed to copyright)

I've already downloaded and have one of this wallpapers installed. It's the wallpaper number 4 that rotates every 16 hours (this is a feature of KDE4.x, which is default in my Kubuntu). This wallpapers where you can see great artwork, with an attention to detail that adds to form the whole picture.

I highly recomend them, so visit the page where this wallpapers are released, and remember to ask for the ones you want that are still not featured, as they will add them when asked for.

New in Linux? Coming from Windows? Please read this.

Greetings. You are coming into a new territory. But contrary to the space you used to inhabit, that didn't belong to you, this new territory has a piece of free land with your name on it.

It sounds a little too good to be true, but it is true. There are some things we must make clear, though. This piece of land, your piece of land, is inside a really big terrain of millions of free pieces of land, each one with it's owner.

That's why now that you are moving into our neighborhood, ours, of every one of us, yourselves included, I want to tell you to pay a little attention to the way we tend to act, because if you adapt you'll have a really good time here. And we will be adapting too, you are not the only ones supposed to do so. We will also learn from your habits, and if we find some we like, we'll make it our own.

This is a weird neighborhood, in it we share our tools, and build together. It's something we do freely, without obligation, and that has a lot of benefits. We also like to teach how to use the tools, though you might want to forgive us because we sometimes use a technical language, it's what suits us more. The manuals that come with the tools are sometimes written too technically, but don't worry, there are some neighbors that are able to translate things to more human languages, you'll only have to find them.

This is a really special neighborhood, where the better builders are listened to, a sort of meritocracy. As we have one mouth and two ears, we believe it's common sense to hear twice as much as we speak, because that benefits us. We just have to remember that sometimes they don't want to talk, and that they talk for people that understand them. Once more, please don't complain. Instead, search for the neighbors that are capable of lowering that information to a more human language. That's the best for us all, this way everyone has it's own.

Please, don't demand. Nobody here owes something to you. Just ask nicely for help and you'll receive. We tend to consider important that you tried yourself to build the bed, even when now it seems no mattress will fit it's weird triangular shape. This is important, because by showing you tried and made an effort, you just climbed a few steps in this meritocracy ladder, and you helped establish some common ground to start talking, and talking leads to helping. And helping leads to a good bed to dream on.

Please, help us help you. Let's make this territory a place where every one of us can live in peace and liking it.