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I’ve added two new menu items to this site, both connected with my YouTube activites.
The first is a simple link to my YouTube channel, which has so far been a glaring omission here.
The second is a new category for YouTube news. This is where I will file posts of relevance to YouTube users, not posts of my YouTube videos. Since I do have a semi-official role on the YouTube help forums, I can sometimes give a little extra insight into certain matters. Not much extra insight, and I am not allowed to tell you about some of the coolest stuff, but some people might find a semi-insider’s view useful. (Everyone else will be bored to tears, of course.)
See, I’ve been thinking about this, and come to the conclusion that a Good Thing to do, if I want to allow people to interact with me outside of YouTube, might be to start a message board.
So I did. You’ll find it at forum.rewboss.com, or alternatively at s1.zetaboards.com/rewboss/index/, if you think you can remember that one.
There’s a section there for unregistered guests to post, if you just want to drop a note, just as long as that doesn’t get abused.
I’ll be adding links to menus and such over the next few days, so that the board will feel more “integrated” in time. And over the next few days (it’s a heck of a fiddly business, as I found to my cost) I hope to redesign it to look a bit more… well, rewbossy.
In the near future — 8 April 2009 — Google will be implementing something called “DoubleClick DART cookies”, which is a fancy name for a little text file stored on your computer.
What this cookie does may worry some of you. Whenever you visit a website with Google ads on it, the cookie records this, building up a picture of what you’re interested in. So if, for example, you visit lots of websites about sport, Google will notice this and serve you with more sport-related ads.
That really goes beyond what cookies are really supposed to do; in fact, when cookies were first invented, they were hobbled to prevent this from even being possible. Basically, a cookie set by rewboss.com can only ever be read by rewboss.com, so it shouldn’t be possible to track what websites you’re visiting.
But this new cookie is set not by rewboss.com, but by Google AdSense itself. Because Google AdSense knows which ads it’s serving to which website, this makes it possible to track your movements through the internet on any site served by Google AdSense. That’s a privacy concern.
On the other hand, it isn’t quite as bad as it might be. Cookies still can’t steal your private information, like your name, address, telephone number and so on. The information collected is difficult to match up to an individual person. You certainly won’t get spam or junk mail, but you will get ads served on the basis not of what’s actually on the website you’re currently looking at, but what kind of sites you habitually visit.
Luckily, Google have offered a way to opt out of this scheme. If you do feel uncomfortable about this new development, go to Google’s Privacy Center and click on the nice big blue button at the top of the page.
I’ve recently been getting lots of automated spam via the contact form, so I’ve had to disable it for now. It seems to have been delivered in batches of about 16 or 17, once or twice a day: not a massive problem, but a waste of my time and something I can live without, thank you very much.
It annoys me to think that thanks to a few jerks who see nothing wrong in bombarding people with meaningless stuff (the title and text were all random letters and numbers, but each contained a link to somewhere) to the point where everything else gets drowned out, the rest of us have to put up with annoying inconveniences of one sort or another. Spammers, of course, will protest that they have the right to say anything they please, but when their freedom of speech makes meaningful dialogue impossible because nobody can find real posts among the trash, it starts to violate other people’s right to be heard, and at that point a line is crossed.
So yeah, sorry about that. I’ll try again after a couple of weeks or so, and if I still have problems I’ll have to start implementing more robust (and inconvenient) measures.
Following on from the problems I had with the quality of my YouTube videos, I notice that my Relaxation technique video appears to have been fixed, in that the normal quality version is vastly improved (although the HQ version is still not being offered). In addition, another problem relating to closed captions has also disappeared.
It could be that there’s some problem which is taking a long time to get sorted out, or it could be that YouTube fixed that one video of mine because I shouted at somebody. (Well, not literally; I used a lot of capital letters in a forum post.) At any rate, my previous video, Sumo, is still exhibiting both problems.
It remains to be seen.