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Sean
Since I missed the weekend videos being sick I thought I’d add a video for the day today! Here it is:
The Ultimate Showdown Of Ultimate Destiny
I’ve been getting some seriously messed up comments since the increased traffic from Digg. Some of you might have seen them before I got the chance to delete them and alot are going into spam but there is some pretty scary ones right there, hopefully its just spam, which I think it is as they aren’t directly threatening me but still. Makes me think. Hopefully they’ll just go away I’m blocking certain IP’s now but there is the one guy, name “Mulsim” that just keeps connecting from totally different IP’s with the same message. Anyone know a way to stop this?
Note: Are you getting scary comments? Post them here! 
Well, with my I Have Deathly Hallows Bloomsbury Don’t Care post, I got a nice bit of traffic and a good few new subscribers! Welcome to you all, I hope you stick around! That was the first time I have ever gotten a post Dugg and I have to say I was amazed at the traffic. A quick overview of the traffic here:
| Uniques: | Pageviews: | Hits: | Transfer: | |
| Saturday | 133 | 532 | 2643 | 0.09 GB |
| Friday | 207 | 675 | 3739 | 0.13 GB |
| Thursday | 286 | 891 | 5622 | 0.21 GB |
| Wednesday | 620 | 1563 | 13850 | 0.54 GB |
| Tuesday | 641 | 1885 | 14918 | 0.65 GB |
For my first time to be Dugg, I was amazed! Just goes to show hey?
Thought i’d just have abit of fun today! Hence this! 
Well what can I say? I got emailed a link to download Deathly Hallows, thinking it was fake, I downloaded and poked around. There is no dobht this is the real thing. However being a Harry Potter fan since the books came out I felt obliged to tell Bloomsbury where I got it from, so I emailed their rights department. However, after spending thousands of pounds on getting the books delivered safely, they actually don’t care that its been released and are trying to pass it off as “This is not Real”. I can’t actually publish the email conversation due to their fancy legal signature, however here was the gist of how it went.
Me: I have recived a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, its real, photos taken from the book. Is there anyway I can help you to stop this?
Bloomsbury: Please provide a link and we will investigate, thanks.
Me: The link is http://rapidshare.com/files
Bloomsbury: Thanks for your help, you have an idea I’m sure of the amount of “Real” Harry Potter books on the internet at the moment, none of us will really know till July 21st.
Me: Denying that this is the real thing is insane. Right book, right layout, has all the needs.. It was obviously taken by someone in a bookstore. On Bloomsbury’s behalf this is pretty bad that something like this got leaked. Aren’t you going to do anything about it? I aggree, there is lots of fake stuff out there, but why would someone go and take that many fake pictures and write and publish themselves and alternitive version of Deathly Hallows?
All I can say is that this is insane, not only do they not seem to care, but they try to throw me off with a “it might be fake” response. ITS REAL! I’m a Harry Potter fan, I can tell! The storyline makes sense, the layout is correct, it has everything! Its not some fake email with the “plot” its the REAL thing! You’d think honestly after spending so much money on this book and it being so hyped up the least they would do is actually care about it! So heres I Sean, providing you with the link to download the new Harry Potter book [See Update Seven]. Since Bloomsbury really don’t seem to care!
Update one:
People who don’t think this is real, heres two images, that ARE NOT spoilers, to show you how real they are.
Front Cover [Copyright info]
Very Back Cover [Blank page and book sleeve]
Update Two:
Its been leaked to bittorrent. Now Bloomsbury are screwed! Get the torrent.
If you download the book, please digg this post! Spread the word!
Update Three:
Scholastic [The American Publisher] know and care! They have seeked a subpoena to seek the person who leaked the book! At least someone seems to care. Bloomsbury could have had the decency to update me on this. Lets see how much they “dont care” on release day..
Update Four:
Now this one is interesting to say the least! Email conversation between a yours truely and a Scholastic Representative.Me: I have recived a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, its real, photos taken from the book. Is there anyway I can help you to stop this?
Scholastic: This book has not been released.
Me: I know, I got it online.
Scholastic: I’m aware of that, however it has been leaked online.Now this is what I find wierd, the book I have is 759 [793 if you count every page] pages long. However on Mugglenet it says, Page count: 784 (US), 608 (UK).. I don’t know how JK was counting pages, but this seems a little fishy to me! Then again, if you take out the chapter list pages it does work out as exactly 759, including four blank pages. But we could count it any kind of way. Either Scholastic did fuck up, which I am more inclined to belive or, they released a fake version to stop spoilers.
Update Five:
Five Updates! Not doing bad are we? The torrents have been removed from both Demonoid.com and Mininova.
There is a fake .PDF version on the way around, its obviously not real hence me saying its fake its just fan fiction called “The Seventh Horcrux” this version is not fanfiction. [Well possibly.. who knows, but its not THAT fan-fiction.]
Update Six:
Book turned out to be the real one, interesting or what?
Update Seven:
Looks like the link has been taken down!
Today is the start of a new Series, Free blogging.. Where, and why? Where’s the best place to get your free blog and what do the other competition offer? Well I don’t think it would be fair if we didn’t start this off with WordPress, it being one of the biggest blogging platforms at the moment, so on we go!
Overview:
Sixty different themes to choose from.
Option to add your own domain name.
Option to import posts from Blogger / Another WordPress Blog / Typepad and Moveable Type / Livejournal
Askimet comment spam control.
Option to make blog visible to only those you choose. [35 User Limit]
Wordpress widgets, including; del.icio.us intergration, Flicker intergration, Meebo intergration and Tag Clouds
Cannot edit CSS without paying €15/per year.
50mg Upload Space.
No option to allow FeedBurner to handle RSS.
No option for intergration of Google Analytics.
Free sub-domain: http://blogname.wordpress.com
Thoughts:
Well as you can see WordPress.com has some useful features but unfortunatly, you cannot edit your own CSS or add widgets, therefore you are really “stuck” within the system of default WordPress and your blog cannot really be unique without you splashing out €15/per year. There is a nice amount of themes to choose from however, including k2 Lite, k2 is what is running on this blog at the moment. There is intergration for some external websites that you see most blogs having these days, including Flickr and Meebo. I’m dissapointed to see they have no Twitter intergration though. As far as plugins go you can’t get any, this in my opinion aswell as the no custom CSS is what lets WordPress as a free blogging platform down.
Overall:
Overall WordPress.com is a great place if you are just “starting” blogging, or if you don’t want to have a custom theme or many plugins. It provides a way in which anyone can blog simply, with the standard nuts and bolts and not having to worry about anything! On the upside to this you can export your posts meaning if you start on WordPress.com and decide to go further into blogging and buy some hosting you can always set up WordPress on that and import your posts. For the starting blogger Wordpress is probably a good choice to go for, but for the average everyday blogger it just doesn’t have enough features.
Well to kick things off for this Sunday I’d like to start first with the trailer for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix!
Next up is the “OpenMoko” this will be in my opinion the “iPhone Killer” not only NOT being locked to any network but running linux! Its definately the one I’ll be buying anyway!
Next up, the trailer for the Simpsons movie! Have to say its looking good, definately one to see!
And lastly we have the Bumptop 3D Desktop Prototype. This looks like an amazing piece of technology which I would love to see intergrated into my Ubuntu!
I was just watching the video on Damien’s blog there on this post, and it got me thinking, about the Ultimate News Blog..
This is the video if you care to watch:
Really what I was thinking was having a pretty much open blog, where anyone can post news, obviously you’d set up some way of testing the authors out on their first or second post or something, but this isn’t really where I’m going with this. A blog with a couple of hundred writers, then you have advertising, sponsors.. The money made would then get split through all the authors and the ones with the most popular posts or the post/posts that got the most traffic would get the most money. So lets just say one post from Author Mark brings in 200 uniques, another post from Author Dan brings in 40 uniques, finally Author Sam only gets 2 uniques on his post. From sponsorship you make lets say, €350 for that month. €50 goes to you, towards hosting and what not. Then the €300 would be dived amongst Mark, Dan & Sam. Using simple ratios, Mark with 200 uniques gathered would make €248, Dan would make €49.60 and Sam would make €2.40. The brilliance behind a system like this would be that more and more bloggers would join up, the more bloggers the more news, the more visitors. The more visitors the more sponsorship! Then when you have too many bloggers you could fire the ones that aren’t producing good enough posts. I honestly don’t see why a system like this hasn’t been done yet! Personally I think its genius!
Ok, new little post I’m going to have is “Saturday Links”. This will be every Saturday and will contain a couple of fun / interesting links.
Open Design Community - The Open Design Community (TODC) is a group of Open Source Website Designers providing hundreds of XHTML and CSS based free web design templates available for download. The main goal of TODC is helping to make the internet a prettier place.
The Hole in CDs - Some amazing cd design’s using the hole in the cd’s for the start. Worth checking out!
Why Linux is Better - A website that shows Windows users why Linux is better, and tells you the few reasons why you should stay with Windows.
The Linux Alternative Project - Trying to find a program you had on Windows for Linux? Heres the place!
Ok so the auto-plugin for Feedburner to handle my feeds didn’t work, but no worries, I remember back when that plugin didn’t have to exist and doing it manually anyway so I went and did it manually! Feedburner is now handling all my feeds and I’d be much appreciated if you re-subscribed via Feedburner! For those of you that haven’t subscribed maybe todays the day? Just click the little RSS box up in the address bar if your using firefox, or you can scroll to the bottom of the page and click RSS Entries!
On other news, I’ve started using BlogExplosion again to get some traffic onto the blog! It would be nice to see more people commenting and what not, and I’m also going to start posting posts that are more commentable, a more audience kind of feel! To get everyone invloved! Well, at least thats the plan! 
Digg it! ![Front Cover [Copyright info]](http://slocalhost.com/IMG_3626.jpg){kind=link}
![Very Back Cover [Blank page and book sleeve]](http://www.slocalhost.com/IMG_4078.jpg){kind=link}