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Michael Boyle's weblog

New and Fun from MetaFilter

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It’s hardly news, but Matt Haughey (and the team – Josh Millard, Jessamyn West, and Paul Bausch) has build one of the web’s great online communities over the years. In the last little while, they have been quietly adding a raft of really great community-building features.

One example unveiled today: Profile Photos of MeFites – succinctly introduced by Matt: “updated nightly, a dump of everyone’s uploaded profile photo”. Doesn’t seem like much, perhaps, compared to the latest chump-biting app from Facebook (!) or whatever – but the sum of this plus the rest of the new features is far greater than the parts. In a web full of “communities” that seem to be defined as narrowly and shallowly as possible, MetaFilter is a beacon of what the “social web” can be.

Q3 2007 Internet Ad Revenues

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The IAB and PwC have released revenue survey results for Q3 2007.

Internet advertising revenues exceeded $5.2 billion for the third quarter of 2007, representing yet another historic high for a quarter and a $1.1 billion increase, or 25.3 percent, over Q3 2006. The results, published in the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, are nearly 3 percent higher than Q2 2007, itself the last record-setting quarter. All three quarters in 2007 have set new highs—Q1 at $4.9 billion, Q2 at $5.1 billion, and now Q3 at $5.2 billon. Revenues for the first nine months of 2007 totaled $15.2 billion, up nearly 26 percent over the $12.1 billion recorded during the first nine months of 2006.

I’ve had enough: I canceled my mobile data plan

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I just canceled my Rogers data plan. I finally had a come to reality moment, and I decided that a tiny (3Mb) data plan was actually worse than none at all. When you have a tiny plan, you are always conscious of each and every link you click on and email you download – to the point of distraction, really. And since you pay for overages at an even higher rate, a mistake can be costly. In actual practice, what that meant was that I wasn’t using my mobile data at all. So I decided to stop paying the insane service fee Rogers charges – $25 a month. I’d rather save my money than use a premium service whose very design makes it almost unusable.

I would still love to have a data plan, but one that is a lot more useful than Rogers’ current plans. I wonder if I’ll ever get the chance.

Boisclair for Mayor!

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Nadia has written a post wondering who should be the next mayor of Montreal. Her conclusion – and mine as well – we could do a LOT worse than André Boisclair in that job. Boisclair is dynamic, (more or less) bilingual, young, knows provincial politics well (an essential point for the next mayor), and popular. Popular? Well it wasn’t Montreal that voted massively against him for Premier – that was the rest of Quebec. It’s time to turn to a new generation of politician. Tremblay has seemed bored and devoid of vision for years – Montreal needs someone who actually wants to do the job, and will represent Montreal as it really is. The election is coming in 2009 – there’s more than enough time left for him to turn his attention to municipal politics.

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