Netcraft: Bush Campaign Web Site Rejects Non-US Visitors
The official campaign web site for U.S. President George W. Bush appears to be rejecting web requests from outside the United States, limiting access to the site to Americans.

Netcraft monitors web site response times from seven locations, including four within the United States and three in other countries. Since Monday morning, requests to GeorgeWBush.com from stations in London, Amsterdam and Sydney, Australia have failed, while the four U.S. monitoring stations show no performance problems.

It's true. I can't get on the site, I'm getting an "Access Denied" error. This must be the most stupid move in the short Internet history.

There's a lot of discussion going on among bloggers of all lists about Marc Canter's proposal to pay bloggers to write about a product on their sites. Many bloggers are against this idea, starting from David Weinberger, Stowe Boyd and Jason Calacanis.

I cannot say if this approach to on-line marketing will work, but I'm not worried about the blogosphere integrity as others seem to be. I think that we are a group of smart people and that most of all we understand the value of being connected and how reputations are build.

Let's say that, for example, David Weinberger would start writing about some specific product, telling us that he's getting money for this. I assume these wouldn't be gratuitous links to a site, we are not talking about click through here, these would be posts discussing advantages or disadvantages about this product from David's point of view. Would be David be biased about this product? Of course he would! Just like he is when he talks about his PC or his weird power problems at home.

The key here is that I trust David, I know that he wouldn't lie to me. It's not because we've met a couple of times, it's because I have been reading what he writes every day for years and I think that whatever decision he would make about his weblog would be open and honest.

The same could be said for many other bloggers I read and of course the the contrary is also true: there are bloggers I don't trust regardless of who might be paying them or not.

What I mean is that I believe that the power of the relationships that we develop day by day in the blogosphere is stronger than a few dollars spread here and there by a marketing campaign. Yeah, some of us might end up being corrupted, but this is only a digital version of life, it's not perfect.

During my trip to England, last week, I have used more than usual two very good web services: Flickr and BlogLines.

Since I set up my mobile phone to upload pictures to Flickr I have been moblogging from time to time. For the 4 days I was away it was quite cool to be able to share pictures with friends and family in real time. Here's the slideshow of the pictures I took while on the go (RSS feed of my pictures is here).

Connecting from different newtrok at different locations I wasn't always able to get to my copy or Radio running on my G4 back at home, meaning that I could not read my aggregator. The good news is that I quite easily managed to fetch my mySubscriptions.opml file from my weblog and get all my news on my Bloglines account: in a few minutes I was back in the flow.

Even now that I'm back I keep going to Bloglines, it's a quite cool service.

Everything is packed, especially my hard disk. I have downloaded a whole bunch of podcasts I have not been able to listen to (this is a big issue with podcasts) and I'm kinda looking forward to be stuck at the airport or on the airplane in order to be finally able to listen to all this stuff.

See you in London.

One year ago I posted a list of Italian blogger girls posing nude. In the next 2 days I got the all time traffic peak of this site. :-)

Thanks to Steve Kirks for his excellent "On This Day" radio macro.

Yesterday my dad called my home phone from China using his Mac and Skype (and paying next to nothing). I used my cameraphone to take a picture of my old-style home phone and post it on the fly. I keep finding all this extremely cool ;-).

Matt is working on something that has been bugging me for a while and I have been calling RSS archives. What I think that it's missing in today's weblogging infrastructure is a way to point to the xml version of an item, basically having a URI for an RSS item similar to what a permalink is to the html version of every post.

It's important to consider that our RSS feeds contain only the last 20 or 25 posts, currently there is not an RSS (or anyway XML) version of everything contained in our sites.

Creating an xml version of a post is relatively easy, it can be an RSS document containing only one post. The challange is matching this version of the post with the html one.

My original idea was embedding some code in the html page, just like it's done today with rdf code needed for trackback, the code should allow to turn an html permalink to a RSS permalink. Matt's approach is an opml index file, which is quite interesting.

Now I'm wondering if anyone else would be interested in the development of this idea. I guess that RSS developers should find this concept quite useful.

Okay, okay, I am listening to Adam Curry's Daily Sourcecode. Yeah, it's cool, very cool. :-)