Do you love writing, especially reviews, and pretty good at it ? Now, with a service called ReviewMe.com which has just been launched, you can get paid for doing it.

As with any other good Web 2.0 websites, it’s pretty straightforward.
Advertisers can browse a tag cloud of topics, and see a list of available blogs, along with its cost. Several bloggers than got chosen by the advertiser.

The selected bloggers then got notified via email by ReviewMe.com. They’ll be given information on what to write, and the deadline. Note that at this point, the bloggers can chose not to review it.

Once the review has been written, notify ReviewMe.com via the website. It’ll be then reviewed, and approved (or not). Once approved, payment will be deposited to the blogger’s account.

A new form of blog spam ? Well, I don’t think so. It’s because advertisers can NOT ask for positive reviews. Any advertiser using ReviewMe.com will better be prepared for both positive and negative reviews. This is very important, and as long as this point stays, I’ll be happy to work with ReviewMe.com. (otherwise, goodbye folks)

Actually this is better for the advertisers as well. Customers tend to be silent when they found fault with your product, and just use your competitor’s product instead. You’re left confused, as to why almost nobody is buying.
With help from ReviewMe.com, you’ll get high quality reviews from those who are concerned about the topic, and will enable you to find out the fault with your products. As a producer of several products myself, I personally think this is really great. No more scratching your head in the dark.

However, note that not all blogs will be able to join it. There are certain criterias that must be fulfilled to be accepted. Some of them, I think, are current traffic (from Alexa), Pagerank (from Google), Technorati rank, number of RSS feed subscribers; and probably a few other criterias as well.
It’s not really easy to get in, so don’t be disappointed if they can’t accept you yet. Build your blog, create good content, and who knows, they might invite you instead.

Good luck ! And oh, this is a sponsored post from ReviewMe.com.

Why indeed. From a writer’s point of view, XHTML is a pain, because it’s stricter than HTML. And a few (or many, depending on whether it’s XHTML Transitional or Strict) rules changed too.
All these for what ?

Even the crowd in Slashdot seems to be having problems getting a clear answer to this.

However, XHTML actually does have a huge benefit (in addition to other benefits listed in the discussion above) — it makes your website viewable on mobile devices.

PDA and smartphones nowadays are no longer a rarity. From teenagers to corporate executives, they’re now have and use them on daily basis. And browse the Internet with them.

And only more of them will browse the Internet from their mobile phones.
Even here in Indonesia, I can browse the internet freely using my Nokia 9500 with flat monthly fee of just about US$ 25. And I do browse a lot from my mobile phone

You definitely don’t want to alienate these people.

Adhering to XHTML makes it easy to make your website viewable from mobile devices; actually, pretty much from any browsers. You can even change the whole layout completely in a snap, literally.

So many websites nowadays are not getting traffic from us, mobile Internet users. Their websites are beautiful in Internet Explorer, but shows utter crap or plain nothing on our smartphones.
Don’t let your website to be one of those too !

I was trying to setup a “Save This” link so visitors can easily save any article into their del.icio.us account. However, it didn’t work.

After checking on Firefox’s Javascript console, I saw this error message : “missing ) after argument list“, pointing to the encodeURIComponent() function. It must be me, because after I contacted del.icio.us support, they said they never encountered error like this before. I probably should have informed them that I’m using Firefox 1.5.0.7 on Ubuntu, it might be specific to this configuration.

Anyway, the solution is to use these code instead :

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url=<?php rawurlencode(utf8_encode(the_permalink())) ?>&title=<?php rawurlencode(utf8_encode(the_title())) ?>” target=_blank><img src=”http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif”> Save This Page</a>

Hope it helps someone else out there.

Another interesting comment — it’s funny, but may also contain some truth in it. In any cases - spam suck.

Quoted from comment #16672295 :

Right now, spam goes past spam filters by including a large amount of random nonsense text that resembles English language reasonably well. So we will get spam filters that detect large amounts of random nonsense text. So spam will include text that makes actual sense. Give it twenty years, and your average spam email will consist of 300 pages of text that is better than anything Shakespeare has ever written, followed by two lines begging you to buy viagra. Thirty years, spam will be two hour Quicktime movies better than anything you can watch in the cinema today, with the hero using viagra bought from the spammer in the right places.

Anyway, the real solution to stop spam is to use multi-tiered filtering system.

Bayesian filter, captcha, blacklists, user-submission etc are no longer effective when used on their own. But when combined (example: SpamAssassin, Spam Karma 2), their effectiveness will goes up surprisingly high.

You’ll need to pay attention on the order of deployment though — incoming email should be received by the blacklist filter first. This will cut the number of spam tremendously, so other filtering engines (which are also more resource-hungry) won’t be overwhelmed / won’t overwhelm the server they’re on.
User-submission (example: razor) should be last, you don’t want to annoy your users too much really.

My work is involving more and more PHP-based forms, so I decided today to find a good form generator to save my time.
Here’s my requirements :

1. Willing to pay : I’m willing to pay for the right solution.
2. Easy to use : Some of the script actually make life harder for you, go figure. I was looking to save time, not to spend more of it
3. Flexible : I still need to apply my own style / formatting. The solution must allow me to do this, while comforming to the second requirement above
4. Saving to database : some PHP form makers / generators will only allow you to submit the form to be send by email.
5. Validation : surprisingly, quite a lot of the (even) commercial solutions out there are missing this.
6. Source available : I need the source code available to me, in case of problems / need for further customizations. Some packages doesn’t give you this.

Too picky ? Well, my needs are quite advanced indeed.
Anyway, I spend almost two hours browsing around with no joy, until suddenly …. to my surprise (again), it seems that the best solution for my needs is an open source one - the HTML_QuickForm PEAR Package.

It’s easy to use (see the tutorial for yourselves).

It’s definitely very flexible; it provides 8 renderers and support several template engines ! It allows you to process the submission however you chooses with the process method - by email, to database, or you can also process it straight away in the same script.

And validations… it’s really sweet. You can choose whether to do it on the server or client side. When you choose to do it on the client, it automatically generate the needed Javascript codes for you. Awesome is not descriptive enough word for it.
There are many ready-to-use validation rules; alphanumeric, lettersonly, maxlength, minlength, etc - and the regex rule fulfill any other needs that’s otherwise not available.

With the source also available, it’s really hard for me to look for anything else. But if you think you’ve found something better, feel free to let me know.

Enjoy.

I just realize that there’s a new distro called Oracle Unbreakable Linux.

Oracle, now realizing that they’re completely incapable of creating an unbreakable product, decided to hijack other’s product, and labeled it as unbreakable.
And when it breaks, they’ll smugly point their fingers to RedHat. Dilbert’s boss would be so proud.

This is why I don’t like Larry Ellison as much as I don’t like Bill Gates.

Anyway, if I’m a business owner, I’ll choose RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) over Oracle’s. Because what Oracle’s doing is pretty risky.
An example; if suddenly RedHat chooses to change the license for some of its own products in RHEL, this would keep Oracle from having it. Which would leave Oracle Linux’s customers (you) with an incomplete product.

Oracle, of course, may create its own version of those products. But it will instantly cause their mission to fail :

“We think it’s important not to fragment the market,” said Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect Edward Screven. “We will maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux. Every time Red Hat distributes a new version we will resynchronize with their code.

PS: What Oracle’s doing is indeed legal. But, to me, it’s not ethical.
The company owned by the ninth richest man in the world, hijacking a small company’s product ? That just tells you how technically incapable they are, really.

Cheatsheet (CS) is a / several page(s) of condensed information on certain topic, which acts as a quick reference. It’s very handy because it’s just a page with most of the information that you need already there. Remember your cheatsheets back then when you’re still at school ? Amazing isn’t how much information we all managed to cram on so little piece of paper
It’s basically the same, but these cheatsheet are not for school exams - they’re for life exams : our daily job.

Note that creating a good cheatsheet is no easy task. Some authors have donation links put up on their pages. Therefore, if you found anything useful (eg: saved you lots of time / it’s a lot of convenience / actually saved your butt), consider donating. The authors deserves it.

Here I’ll try to list all (good quality) cheatsheets on IT. If you see something missing, please feel free to comment, and I’ll add it. Thanks.

Read the rest of this entry »

At a glance, Annisa Rania Putri doesn’t seem to be a special girl. Born on 1999, there was nothing special on her birth as well, except that she was born though Caesarian operation. However, when she spoke on an audience on Tuesday, 17 October in Jakarta, everyone’s jaw was on the floor.

To see an Indonesian speaking fluently in English, especially at an age of only 6 years old, is quite something. But I’m sure you’ll say “impossible !” when I declared that this girl also speaks Korean, Arabic, and Dutch. Yet, this is the case here.

In Padepokan Toha, Jakarta; hundreds of people were mesmerized by the speech delivered by this indigo child. She advised people, decades older than her, to fast (this was the month of fasting for Muslims, Ramadhan). This is because fasting will cause people to love each other. As it spreads, peace will prevail. “With fasting, we can get rid of our negative energy, and develop the positive energy which is love”, said Annisa in English.

In her childish style, she continued her messages. People must not lie, she said. To those who already had this as a habit, they must try to be honest from now on. Fasting can help too with this.
“Do not lie, because once you lied, you will keep doing it until you’re old”, she said.

Delivering awesome speech is not her only special ability. She can also design house — she designed a 4 story house in Kelapa Gading area, Jakarta. With no formal education in architecture whatsoever.
She can also build her own computer and operate it.

Accoding to Mrs Yenni, her mother, Annisa’s special abilities began to show around October 2002. She claimed to see a big flower close to their home, but Mrs Yenni couldn’t see anything.

Annisa then started to call her by her name (this is highly unusual in Indonesia).
“(It’s OK,) I’m older than Yenni anyway”, said Annisa.

Hopefully the future will be only even better for Annisa. Congratulations to her family !

Source: Tribun Timur newspaper

From this comment :

Remember: There are only two tools in life. WD-40, for when something doesn’t move, and should; and Duct Tape, for when something is moving and it shouldn’t.

The reply is even more clever :

So does the universe explode if you spray duct tape with WD-40?

I hope nobody will try to do that for our own sake !

It’s 05:30 and I’m already working… ok, let’s start with something light then.

Riyo of Bedeng.com told me yesterday about a website, which I have let my browser opened on since; Vetusware.com. It brings way too many memories from the past.

Back then, BannerMania was dominating the banner-creation scene. Pretty much all banners created by computer back then will either be created by BannerMania, or PrintMaster. It hurts your eyes after a while though, so Broderbund’s PrintShop (and much later, Microsoft Publisher) was a welcome change.

I gained fame in my university after writing an article for campus’ magazine in Assembly language, compiled with Turbo Assembler. It was a small utility written to park hard disk’s read/write head to a safe place, so it won’t crash on a data-laden sector when the computer is shut down.
A lot of my friend was amazed to see first-year student already coded in Assembly. I don’t, since high school I have seen others (high schoolers) doing it for years. Some people are really bright, it’s quite scary.

With help from PC-Tools, I’ve managed to extract data from unreadable floppies. Since floppies still uses FAT12 data structure, it was quite easy to salvage data from it using direct sector access. Still, some people thought I’m some kind of wizard or something, heh.
I prefer PC-Tools v4.23 though (the link above is version 6.0), it’s simple, does the job with none the bloat, and very small at about 100kb (I think).

Being a Pascal hardcore, I was quick to obtain a copy of Turbo Pascal 1.5 for Windows when it was released, and started coding in it. However, like Wordstar for Windows, it’s pretty buggy, and I had to abandon it.

Not many people know this, but Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was a God-send (or, for Bill-haters, Satan-send). A lot of PC was first interconnected via network with each other with this. It was more stable as well than Windows 3.1 (surprise!)
In my previous job using this, we were able to purchase less printers, and started sharing them instead via network. It resulted in a lot of yelling though, “Is the printer ready yet ??”, “Hey, insert some paper there will you”, and so on - until we introduced them to WinPopup. Then people started to annoy each other with it *sigh*.
Well, at least only us knew how to SPAM the WHOLE network,especially when we’re pissed off. Respect mah authoritah !

When VisualBasic 3 showed up, I quickly realized that I can code multimedia applications easily with it. I recorded a few nasyid into WAV files, photoshop-ed a few graphics and photos; resulting in a (back then) jaw-dropping multimedia-rich interactive demo. With lots of buttons, of course.
I donated the demo to the Islamic society in my campus for use in the campus fair (where each society presented themselves to new students). I think they had a lot of new students signed up with them then.

Before WinAmp, we had trackers. Modplay was one of it. It’s really, really amazing to hear your computer playing polyphonic sounds from the internal speaker, which usually only sounded the boring *beep*.
Later I bought Soundblaster’s AWE32, and midi files suddenly sounded so awesome.
Then MP3 came, and everything became obsolete. *sniff*

GIF2ANSI ? What the heck is that ? Well, on the “black screen” (DOS), ANSI was the graphic for the (otherwise) boring console. Believe it or not, just by using text, people managed to create astoundingly great art. GIF2ANSI makes this process simple and a no-brainer for a, well, no-brainer.

ASCIImation is where you can watch StarWars in ASCII. “Awesome” is not descriptive enough to explain it.
And in ASCIImator you can find lots of modern ASCII arts.

Right, I REALLY have to start working now. Enjoy !

I feel very honored when found out that I’ve been chosen as the Indonesian Blogger of the Week by Fatih. Personaly though I don’t think I deserve it. As I found more and more Indonesian blogs, I realized that there are many bloggers who are better than me. Here’s an example. So many others, so much better. I’m glad that the Indonesian blogosphere is growing rapidly, and there are so many interesting things we can find there.
Nonetheless, thanks again Mas Fatih.

ps: the article linked to my old website for my profile, and I just realized that I haven’t setup any page on this blog, not even an “about” page. My bad. As the consequence, if you clicked on that old “about me” page in that article, you’ll see the slim me I’ve gained, err… some weight after those photos were taken. Heh.
Okay, one “about” page coming soon.

I just realized that Akismet marked 4 legitimate comments, today, as spam. That’s too much false positive for one day, no way I’m gonna wade through 24000+ spam to find out the other false positives.
So I installed Spam Karma 2 instead.

So far, looks like this is one quality WP plugin. I just unzipped in plugins directory, activate it, and it works straight away. Most will find no need to change the default settings, it’s already good enough.

Kudos to Dr. Dave for the excellent work. Also thanks to Eko for introducing me to SK2.

Irv Gordon and his Volvo breaks 4 million kilometers milestone : I’d really like my next car to be a Volvo — 4 million kilometers and not a single failed start ! That’s mighty impressive.

Other facts : Zero engine replacement / it still has the original engine (40 years old now!), oil change about every 5000 km, engine tune up every 40000 km.
Well done Mr Gordon.

Boys try to join girls’ team on human-rights ruling : Again, a case of rarity of common-sense. Boys are different than girls (and vice versa), period. Especially at a topic like sport, where the difference is even clearer. Everyone is special, it’s absurd to generalize everyone.

I do wonder what the real reason is for the boys to join the girls team. Perhaps they just want to see how the girls’ changing room looks like, yeah that must be it

WARNING: Do NOT, I repeat, do not visit this website when you don’t have time to spare. Also make sure that no one is around when you browse it, to save you from embarrassment of witnessed while laughing like madman to your computer.

ManiacMuslim.com is a satire website; created by a muslim (goes by name of Hamzah Moin) that discusses about various silly things muslims does. The best thing is it’s really funny, so instead of making people angry, some people can only smile and thought “oh well, he’s right about it”. Most people will succumb to uncontrollable laughter though.

For example; the Darth Vader picture is in an article (among others) criticizing inter-family marriage. In some muslim countries, there’s tendencies to marry with close family, such as cousins. This is permitted in Islam, but not encouraged - however some muslims are going overboard with it. The article criticize it in a strikingly funny way.

More surprises are in this article, about Facebook and its adoption by some Muslims. I’ve already witnessed myself one of the incident (a sister with hijab showed her photos without hijab on Friendster, to our surprise), so I think this article is not pure satire; but mostly based on real events. Sad, but true.

Some muslims are overzealous in their dawa (call to Islam). This article remind us of the potential pitfall of extremism. Made me cringe. On the other hand, this website has the best coverage of the Danish incident. Poor Kinder Surprise never even saw it coming, LOL.

There’s the classic ones as well, such as the Online Nikah (OMG, ROFLMAO). If you’re having problems understanding some of the lingo used there, please feel free to refer to this short guide.

Despite making all kind of fun on (silly) Muslims, Hamzah is actually promoting a conservative & rational Islam. In this article for example, he encouraged people to do Nikah procession like the Prophet did :

This is the #1 justification for every Muslim male on the planet to get chummy with girls. Well more than chummy actually. E-dating… where you first exchange your life stories and pics then move onto feelings and thoughts about one another and become almost lovers when all of a sudden the guy backs off and says “no sister we are just brothers and sisters in Islam… nothing more… teehee.”

I’m sorry brothers but let’s face it… you can talk to 100 women before marriage and think you “mastered the girl situation” but as soon as that Nikkah contract is signed, you’ll soon realize that the “experience” you received from e-dating those 100 Muslim girls in the past was useless. Why? Because girls are unsolvable. Period. Ever stop and wonder why they made the Riddler from the Batman comics to be a male? It’s because if the Riddler was a female then Batman would NEVER be able to solve any of her riddles. The Riddleress would be victorious and that would be the end of Batman forever.

The islamic nikah process is simple, and there’s no need to make it complex :

The whole marriage process done the Islamic way is ample enough time to get to know your potential spouse. No need to instant message each other 4 years before the big day to “get acquainted”. I’d get bored if I already knew everything about my wife after (or before) the Nikkah, wouldn’t you?

Almost consistently in his articles, Hamzah promotes logic instead of emotion, conservatism instead of extremism, humbleness instead of arrogance.

Superior logic, excellent grammar and spelling, and great sense of humor. Even has an article with Batman in it. What more could you ask ?

Highly recommended !

If you’re a blogger, or wish to be, and live in Jakarta; Metroblogging.com would like to have you on-board.

Metroblogging is a unique website where bloggers there are blogging about their own city. I think this is an excellent opportunity to introduce Jakarta (and Indonesia) from our own perspectives.

If you’re interested, [ just click here to apply ].

Here’s the email from Sean :

From: Sean Bonner
To: Harry
Subject: Re: MetBlogs Author Application - Jakarta

Thanks for getting in touch about writing for Metroblogging. We’d love for you to write for us!

Sorry for this form-lettery sounding note but there’s a bunch of stuff I’ve got to tell you so here goes:

At this point, all of our writers are volunteer. While some aspects of that might change down the line, currently we can’t offer to pay anyone for blogging. Hopefully this gets a lot of people a lot of exposure and gets your stuff in front of people it wouldn’t have been otherwise and all that.

The general agreement is this - you own everything you write and can stop writing at any point, but by writing it for our site you grant us permission to use it and keep a copy even if you leave - You own your name, we own the company and site names. You are responsible for your own words. Pretty basic. By replying to this e-mail you agree to those terms.

We’re also counting on you to post several times a week as you said you could in the application. If you don’t think you can actually do that please let us know right away. We’ll be kind of bummed if we set you up and then you don’t keep posting.

I need to know what e-mail address you want to use as your contact, this will be for internal mailings and such.

You are also going to need a short bio for the site, this is where you can brag about anything else you are working on or link to your own blog, or anything at all. When your account it set up you’ll be able to add this at that point, so it might be a good idea to get something ready.

Thanks. Once I hear back from you we’ll be added to the mailings lists right away, but it will take a few days to get you access to the site.

Again, if you have any questions, let me know, and thanks again for being involved, I think this is going to turn out very cool. Thanks!

-sean

http://www.metroblogging.com
http://www.seanbonner.com

PS - The cities that are not active yet (both those listed and unlisted) will be made active in order of what fills up first.
We are trying to get 10 bloggers per city to give things a good perspective,
so please feel free to pass this on to other people in your town
because the sooner we get to 10, the sooner we launch the city.

I was frozen for a few moments when I read the news.
Rob Levin died at age of 50 on 16 September, when a car hit him on 12 September. He left behind a wife and a children, Benjamin.

No prejudice / cynical remarks on him not wearing helmet please; I didn’t wear one when I was cycling in Birmingham - the helmet belt was choking me and I wasn’t able to find one which doesn’t. I’m sure Rob has a good reason too.
I ended up taking emptier routes - Birmingham’s canals sports only people and cyclist, no cars. Rob seems to has no choice on this aspect.

I have a family and kid(s) too, so I’m very sad to find out that they’re (quite deep) in debt. The fact that their son, Benjamin, suffers from ADHD doesn’t help the situation. Yes, I read a lot from his blogs and website tonight.

And, some people still had to make it more difficult for them, by spreading lies about Rob. Unbelieveable, but part of me is happy that Rob is now free from these bullies.

Rob has dedicated 12 years of his life for Freenode. For this duration, he lived in poverty. Yet he believed in it, and persisted. He helped grew Freenode from 3000 users service to more than 30000 users; profiting many open source projects in the process. We may owe this man more than we know.

Rest in peace Rob. You deserved it.

I’ll register a monthly donation through his spinhome website, to help support his family a bit. If you can as well, please do. It’s the least we can do now for him.

Let’s pretend that recently there’s a bubble child just stepped on our world, finally able to get out from its plastic prison thanks to its body’s immunity system recovery.
Having lived all his live in isolation, you’re asked to choose 5 movies to show to him which will quickly get him to understand the world he’s in now.

Which movies will you choose ?

Here’s my list :

1. Living with hunger : If you have easy access to food & clean water, you’re actually a minority on earth.
2. The Insider : Mega corporations are indeed abusing us.
3. Erin Brockovich : to realize the most important fact about legal system in most countries - they are not siding with the weak and poor.
4. V for Vendetta : The government doesn’t always work in your best interests.
5. Kingdom of Heaven : it IS possible for various religions / races / skin colours to live together in peace and harmony.

What’s your list ?

Thanks to Stephen Booth for the idea.

Should be pretty easy huh ? Well, not really… there’s one glitch with Exim4 — by default, it delivers email to “mail_spool”, as can be seen from the /var/log/exim4/mainlog here :

=> wanto <wanto@kantor> F=<harry @kantor> P=<harry @kantor> R=local_user T=mail_spool

Incoming email ended up never arrived in my users Maildir.

The solution :

1. Edit /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf : gedit /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf
2. Add the following line at the end of it : dc_localdelivery=maildir_home
3. Shutdown Exim4 : pkill exim4
4. Reconfigure Exim4 : dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config
   (Follow the guide below if you’re confused what to answer on the questions)
5. That’s it ! Now incoming email will be delivered to your users’ Maildir

I’ve setup this particular server so users can send and fetch email locally.

Email for external destination (Internet) will be relayed through a smarthost. This makes sending huge email very speedy. So they can return to their work quickly and happy (leaving this server working hard trying to send their multi-megabyte emails through a tiny internet pipe *grin* )

With help from Dovecot, they can also send email to each other by [my_name]@office email addresses. This saves me from the headache of setting up a file server AND controlling the access rights.

To set it up this way, follow these steps :
(disclaimer: this is from on top of my head, so please CMIIW)

1. aptitude install exim4 exim4-config dovecot-pop3d
2. When configuring Exim4, follow these steps :
3. Split configuration into small files? NO
4. General type of mail configuration: (there are 6 choices) : mail sent by smarthost; received via SMTP or fetchmail
5. System mail name: Whatever, mine is “office“
6. IP-addresses to listen on for incoming SMTP connections: Leave this blank
7. Other destinations for which mail is accepted: I entered office again here
8. Machines to relay mail for: Enter your LAN network, mine is 192.168.10.0/24
9. Machine handling outgoing mail for this host (smarthost): smtp.gmail.com, or whatever works for you
10. Hide local mail name in outgoing mail? YES
11. Visible domain name for local users: Set to your company’s internet domain name, example : ToughNut.com
12. Keep number of DNS-queries minimal (Dial-on-Demand)? Up to you really, I chose NO because my company got a fixed (always-on) internet access
13. Once everything done, Exim4 and Dovecot will be running. But there’s still one thing left to configure - the smarthost
14. Setup the Smarthost (relay for external/internet email) :

    # gedit /etc/exim4/passwd.client
    # Then put something like this : smtp.gmail.com:my-email@gmail.com:mypassword

15. Restart exim4 :
    
pkill exim4
invoke-rc.d exim4 start


Done ! Now your mailserver is functioning.

On your users’ computer, set up as follows :

• SMTP server : office
• POP3 server : office
• POP3 username : Their username in that server
• POP3 username : Their password in that server

Enjoy.

While browsing Google Blog, I found out about Google Co-op from the blog entry made by GOOG_DOC on Google Blog. At a glance, it may seem that Google is creating a competitor to DMOZ.

Well, not really. In short, Google Co-op is DMOZ on steroid.

On top of that, anyone can become a contributor (an equivalent of editor in DMOZ); which means more freedom for us to choose our source of information.

More on these later, let’s see how we can utilise this, shall we.

How to use Google Co-op :

1. Get a Google account. If you haven’t got one, you can register for a Gmail account. Or click here.
2. Go to Google Co-op Directory
3. Browse to the topic that interest you, and subscribe to any contributor that you feel will benefit you

That’s it ! Now whenever you’re doing search on the topic, you’ll see links from your Google Co-op subscription(s) on the top of the search results. These are links which are supposed to be highly relevant to your query.

So with Google Co-op, you may be able to find the results you’re looking for straight away; instead of looking at 1,483,552 of the results one by one.

You can also contribute to it.

I gave this a try with the “Indonesia” topic. Since it didn’t exist, I had to create the topic first. Here’s the file I submitted to Google Co-op to create the Indonesia topic :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<TopicSearchDefinition version="0.9">
<Title>Indonesia</Title>

<TopicSearchTriggers>
<DataObject id="indonesia-facts" type="facts">
<QueryName value="indonesia facts"/>
<QueryName value="indonesia data"/>
</DataObject>
<DataObject id="indonesia-news" type="news">
<QueryName value="indonesia news"/>
<QueryName value="events indonesia"/>
<QueryName value="breaking news indonesia"/>
</DataObject>
<Query>[facts]</Query>
<Query>[news]</Query>
<Query>about [facts]</Query>
<Query>learn about [facts]</Query>
<Query>teach about [facts]</Query>
</TopicSearchTriggers>
</TopicSearchDefinition>


After creating a new topic for Indonesia, now we can start submitting links on that topic :


<Annotations file="indo-anno.xml">
<Annotation about="http://thejakartapost.com/*">
<Label name="in_english"/>
<Comment>The Jakarta Post - biggest Indonesian newspaper in English</Comment>
</Annotation>

<Annotation about="http://www.zilvan.com/funnyfacts/facts_about_indonesia.htm">
<Label name="fun_facts"/>
</Annotation>
</Annotations>


As you can see, you can put a lot of information in Google Co-op, which is not possible with DMOZ. But of course they have their own strength - DMOZ is simpler to contribute to.

My profile can be viewed here.

Google Co-op is probably the Google’s implementation of the Semantic Web, the next generation of Web as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor. Whatever it is, I found it interesting, and I’ll be keeping watch on it.

Google Co-op is an open service which require quite an effort to contribute in. As the result, there isn’t much in it as yet. But as more people found and use it, and found that you can easily annotate websites with Google Marker, then we may start seeing surprises in the future from this service.

In fascist regimes, books can be banned. We have had some in Indonesia. But do you know that there are banned books in USA ? Go figure banned books in the “most democratic” country. Blasphemy.

Anyway, now we can enjoy these books, courtesy of Google. Well done Google !