Kevin Chiu

I just downloaded the Wordpress app from the iTunes app store. It’s pretty slick.

Cool, uploading photos works.

I’ll update all of you on the awesome excursion I had over the weekend as soon as I finish with my current computer vision project. For now, check out these photos from the trip.

I was going to keep this idea a secret, but since it would most likely benefit the online community if I release this to the blogosphere, that is what I will do.

Online advertisement companies, Google et al., need to realize something about advertisement and social capital. Building up a readership involves being a trusted source of information that presents itself if a clear and concise way.

Ads are annoying, even if they are relevant. They trade the social capital a visitor has invested into your site into cold, hard cash.

Many sites that rely on ads as a source of revenue place them in locations that can trick a visitor in to thinking the ad is part of a website intra-link or, in other words, a link to another part of the same site. The thin horizontal Google Ad strip that looks like a navigation bar is particular suited to this strategy for this. The AdBrite ads are possibly the best, most annoying version of these stealth ads - they replace several words in the page with links to advertisers’ pages.

However, you may notice that I host no such deceptive ads. That’s because I know what it feels like to click an add thinking that I’ll be brought to a page that was intentionally linked to by the author. I get frustrated with the page author for placing such a deceptive ad.

On the other hand, I am aware that certain individuals enjoy rewarding bloggers for a good article by clicking ads on the authors site, so I actually do leave one up, it’s just somewhere that isn’t irritating or deceptive.

In the entire lifetime of this blog, I have made 31 cents. As you can see, I’m not exactly in it for the money. I just want those few people looking to support quality blogging a chance to do so.

I just noticed that I have no escape route from Blogger at the moment. Previously, I could import posts using a Wordpress tool, but now that tool is no longer compatible with Blogger, and Blogger has no export functionality.