Tom Coates hasn’t used his blog since 2008. He tweets all the time though. The only significant thing done on his domain in 2009 was the addition of a prominent link to his twitter page.

Blogging is dead. Long live blogging.

Imagine this situation (details not altered from a true story):

• Your credit card expires in February
• Your Xbox Live account comes due in September
• You purchase an Xbox Live Gold card from Amazon for $25, half of what Microsoft charges
• Microsoft tries to debit your expired card in September anyway
• Microsoft fails to charge you, and immediately cancels your Gold account
• Microsoft refuses to allow you to use your Gold card because you have a $50 payment overdue, despite the fact that you never received the service you didn’t pay for in the first place.
• You are basically dealing with the TSA agent here who refuses to realize you have a point.
• You get bumped up to a specialist who very quickly realizes you have a point and waives the fee so you can type your Gold card code after being on the phone for over a half hour. Woo!

God, I love Microsoft.

Live.com was such a bad search engine that Microsoft took to bribing users to use their search engine with rebates on purchases made via their search engine. So they then tried rebranding it all to Bing. Yeah, because renaming it will improve the results.

So, Bing.com’s results still suck, but you can cash in on the instant rebates pretty easily. So, let’s say you see a Buy It Now auction on eBay that catches your eye. Wanna save some money, usually ten percent (sometimes more, sometimes less)? Here’s the trick.

1. Open a new tab and search Buy It Now on Bing.com.
2. You should see some sponsored links at the top, and at least one should be for eBay, and have the words “Bing Cashback” next to it. Click that.
3. This starts a new session with MS’s Bing Cashback cookie. You now have 60 minutes to make a purchase using eBay, PayPal, and the Buy it Now feature.
4. Reload your Buy It Now tab, and you should see this image at the top: If so, you can save whatever percentage it says on your page.

It’s simple to follow their instructions on getting the money, and they walk you through it easily. Use a real email address, though, because they will send a verification link to that address.

Go shop, save money, and cost Microsoft money that they should have spent on improving their search engine.

This post inspired by Why I’m switching from Twitterrific to Tweetie.

I like some parts of Tweetie. The parts I don’t like far outweigh the parts I do. I don’t like that, while you can indeed use selecting a tweet to dim it (akin to marking it as read in Twitterrific), it automatically selects the top tweet when updating, marking unread tweets as read. I don’t like that the write new tweet box HAS to be in a separate window. I don’t like that you can’t hit the right arrow button and open the link in the tweet you’re viewing. I don’t like that if you mark a tweet as read, and it’s a mention, it’s not also marked as read in the mentions window. A tweet that’s read should be read universally.

I like that there’s multiple account access, even though that’s horribly broken. I like the URL shortener, even though it’s sometimes a URL lengthener.

Most of all, though, I don’t like that it has a menubar item you can’t turn on or off, and likewise cannot be reduced to ONLY a menubar item like Twitterrific can be.

I’m probably going back to Twitterrific soon, but I might keep using Tweetie for my secondary accounts.

For this demonstration, we’ll use @jX, @shadytrees, and @Tom. Because that’s what happened.

Tom and jX are reciprocal. Tom follows shadytrees and jX follows shadytrees. shadytrees does not follow tom nor does he follow jx, so regardless of his @reply settings, he would not see a tweet addressed in this format:

@Tom @shadytrees text

However, because Tom follows shadytrees and sees replies to people he’s following from people he’s following, both shadytrees and Tom will see a tweet addressed in this format:

@shadytrees @Tom text

I seek a smarter twitter client that allows multiperson replies (well, two is simple here, but doing it for more people that don’t have a follow network is technically impossible in a single tweet), and figures out when a person such as jX wants to reply to both shadytrees and Tom to address shadytrees first so that Tom will also see it.

So, this is the third Gawker post in a row, but it’s just so frustrating when they’re laying people off and shuttering websites when they pass up BLATANT opportunities for revenue like this:

Notice there is no referral code there. For every click though that leads to a purchase of anything in that session, Gawker Media will receive ZERO PERCENT. They do this all the time, either their sites copy a link from someone else and that person gets a bunch of referral purchases, or like this, there’s no referral code at all. They could be making anywhere from 4 to 8.5 percent of the purchase price of books, magazines, TV and movies that they link to. That’s potentially thousands of dollars, maybe tens of thousands for sites like IO9 and Kotaku. But no, no referral codes, and that’s a lot of missed money. This is why Gawker is failing, huge opportunities left lying on the ground.

Gawker, a company that’s had to fire about half their staff due to the ‘economic downturn’, has given Cheap College Gamers quite a hefty sum of money! Owen Good posted sunday coupons deals today, and linked to an xbox 360 with the Amazon referrer tag “mmbevigaotst-20″. Do a little googling and you’ll find a page on Cheap College Gamers (page linked to above) filled with links to amazon using that referrer tag.

Kotaku, a Gawker subsidiary, could be making quite a sum from Amazon commissions. Instead, some guy is making $16 (or more) per person that buys an Xbox via his link, and also cash from OTHER things people buy as long as it’s during the same visit to Amazon (which, usually, is quite a surprising amount).

I’m sure Goldenchild is very happy for the free money that you gave him, Owen Good. Nick Denton, you are a failure. (Valleywag won’t pick this failure up, for Owen writes there too)

Several of these link to fake Wii Media Download like sites which advertise Games for your Wii

You do know you can block those sites in AdSense, right? Please, do so. Also, if you wanted to make money all the amazon links in this article would have referrer tags in it. Think about it, your authors actually EARNING YOU MONEY. I know, you don’t understand things like “profit”, but you should try it sometime.

Whew! What a long title! Yep, I’m doing it to help Google out, sorry.

Long ago, I was trying to do some crazy shit with Automator and it involved Variables. I might have been doing some renaming stuff, don’t recall exactly, but I found this helpful macworld article titled THE SCRIPT IS IN THE FOLLOWING LINKED ARTICLE, COMMENTER “Gi” Automator Power: Variables and looping. It isn’t as easy to find as it should be, because its title isn’t as informative. The thing is, it does exactly what Textcast does, for free.

What does Textcast do? It apparently can turn Text, E-mail, and RSS feeds into personal podcasts (I don’t know if it has a built in webserver for RSS, which would be neat). The thing is, the automator script in the article above can get an RSS feed, and turn the text of the articles into mp3s, which are then inserted into an iTunes Playlist… exactly what Textcast does, but for $25 less. (By the way, you can have the say command piped into an mp3 file, like say -v alex -o audiofile.mp3 -f textfile.txt and it will have alex output the contents of textfile.txt to audiofile.mp3.)

Save yourself $25 then spend it by using our Amazon searchbox on the right to get something you REALLY want. For example, iLife 09.

There’s a neat thing called “Time Capsule” which Apple started pushing recently… Problem is, if you’ve already got a backup disk, you probably would like to keep your backups in order without starting anew. After all, what if you DID delete something you’d like to get back someday already? As far as I know (and I did a lot of research, but several months ago) there’s no way to port a Time Machine Backup Disk to an Airdisk backup (they use sparseimages or something).

An interesting note is, if you connect an external drive (like this My Book, similar to the one I use) to an AirPort Extreme (I have the 100mbit one, sadly), start the backup, then cancel it and connect the disk to your Mac (like my MacBook), it will start to back up to that sparseimage.

The annoying thing is, I would really like to just convert my time machine backup into one of those sparseimages, so I could turn it into an AirPort Disk and back up wirelessly. I think someone could make a few bucks selling (or asking for donations for) an app that did just that.