stuart test blog

I love YouTube! You can find some of the most amazing and funny clips on the site. Without YouTube I would never have seen these…

• Microsft iPod parody
• Chris Bliss the juggler. (To appreciate this, you should watch this one first.)
• Natalie Imbruglia – “Torn” being ‘signed’ by a comedian
• Robot dance

Plaxo have made a couple of high visibility blog posts today saying that they are restricting the amount of automatic emails (a.k.a. SPAM) get sent out by users of their service. This seems like a good thing but it’s the way that they went about it that is leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.

A summary of Todd Masonis’s post today reveals the following facts:

• Plaxo have known for a long time that they were spamming people
• But it’s OK – they were only spamming people to build up their customer base
• Now that they have enough customers, they’ll stop spamming you
• They also want to be good net-citizens, that’s their other reason for stopping the spam
• If you had joined Plaxo sooner, they would have stopped spamming you
• And by the way, it wasn’t Plaxo spamming you – it was their customers.
• (Did I mention that they’re not sorry about it either?)

I’ve been using the Plaxo service for the last couple of years and have unintentionally spammed my entire address book a couple of times, and have been flamed for it too. Especially from the people that I have no reason to stay in contact with! Plaxo have always made it too easy to spam your address book – I have never seen a warning message pop up that says: “You are about to send out hundreds of emails – are you sure you want to do this?”

But moving on, they say they are going to stop the spam and that’s a good thing. Apart from that, Ive always enjoyed using their service – it works great for keeping your Outlook data synchronised between multiple computers or profiles. Let’s hope that Plaxo hasn’t caused too much of a bad name for itself among the influentials.

UPDATE: Plaxo have now made a public apology, see my post here.

The beta @ amanzi site looks at a controversial change to Firefox in the alpha Bon Echo version. The tab close button has been moved onto each tab from it’s orginal static position on the right. Lots of people have already been complaining, while others prefer each tab to have their own close button. What do you think???

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This is part 2 of the beta @ amanzi review of Windows OneCare Live – Microsoft’s antivirus/backup/tune-up application. The article covers how easy it is to backup files, but not so easy to restore them. As always there’s lots of screenshots.

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I’ve just posted a new article to the beta @ amanzi site showing off the new Firefox 2.0 Alpha 1 with screenshots showing the installation and new features of the freshly released alpha.

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It’s been a while since I’ve last posted, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. I’ve been working on the Blogtown site a bit recently too and I’ve just released a major overhaul to the front page and registration system.

I’ve opened up registrations for now, but may suspend them again depending on the number of new blogs that get created. The site is still running on a shared server for now, but I’ll be looking to move it onto a dedicated server once there’s a bit of activity happening.

This is part 1 of the beta @ amanzi review of Microsoft’s antivirus offering for the home user. Overall the software looks good but is let down by a couple of small glitches, and one bigger glitch that lets you unzip viruses to your desktop!

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This is big news in New Zealand! Internet auction site, Trade Me, was sold today for $700,000,000 (NZD). The sale makes Sam Morgan (founder) one of the richest men in NZ.

Read more: http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3594845a13,00.html

I’ve been getting a few comments on the site recently which I always enjoy. Not all the comments have been positive, but that’s OK – it’s all about engaging conversation.

I highly recommend to anyone commenting on this site or any other blogging system to use coComment. It’s a free service that you can use to track your all the comments that you leave on blogs in one central place.

As with all good Web 2.0 services, it has RSS and social capabilities – you can subscribe to a feed of all your comments, and can also share them with others. You can see all my comments (not many actually) here: http://www.cocomment.com/comments/amanzi. You can also get a fancy comments box which you can place on your site like this:

Just read about another new Technorati feature on Robert Scoble’s blog. It’s called Technorati Favourites and it allows you to upload your blogroll into the site and keep tabs on your feeds from there.

I’ve added mine already and you can find them here: http://technorati.com/faves/amanzi

To add my site to your favourites, just click on the button below (assuming you already have a Technorati profile of course.)