The Corante Web Hub is awful!

Talk about a wretched Web 2.0 experience! I was so excited a year ago when I was invited to participate in the Corante Web Hub. Not only have I never been paid as promised, I don’t know anyone else who has either. Worst of all though I, and I believe at least one other person, have resigned, quit, said “get me the heck off your site” and gotten NO response! If I was still writing here, all my posts would be getting sucked onto their stupid site. (Oops! I guess this one is, huh???) I’m still listed as a participant. Ken, the editor and a great guy, says it’s not his department to remove me from the site. I’ve sent several emails. It’s really bumming me out. I thought it was a great idea at first, but it became apparent pretty quickly that it was going to get messed up – and now look at the mess I’ve gotten myself into.

Probably not a huge big deal – there’s loads of scraping splogs out there around the web, but I’m amazed that Corante can’t do better than this.

Hi TechCrunch readers!

Hey folks, thanks for stopping by. As you can see, I don’t write here very much anymore – but I’ve still got a lot of posts you might enjoy as intros, tutorials, etc. If you’re interested in seeing more of my work, check out the interviews I’ve done for the nonprofit organization NetSquared. Thanks for stopping by!

One more reason to deal with your w’s

Does your website resolve http://mystupidwebsite.com over to http://www.mystupid…? I don’t know that mine does not! At least both URLs work for me though. Want one more reason to deal with the issue? I was just looking at del.icio.us popular for a particular tag and found a site of interest where the same title was listed as the 3rd most popular and the 6th most popular. Why the same title? Because one is the site with www in front and the other is a w-less URL! If all the visitors had been redirected over to the same URL, that would now be recognized as the most popular URL ever tagged with that tag. That would have been nice. Oh well! Something to remember!

Goog sells Baidu shares

Google sold their 5% pre-IPO shares of Chinese search giant Baidu, it was reported today. I guess that means no buy-out and moves instead to increase Google share in China. Or maybe they’ll just give up on total world domination and work on dominating search everywhere else. For what it’s worth, the shares were bought for $5 mill and were worth $63 mill at the end of May when the sale actually went through. That’s a whole lot of AdWords clicks that don’t have to happen, I suppose. Just a quick note in case it’s of interest; I find anything about non-US web giants of interest.

Google Maps updated – still little in Africa

Much discussion online today about a new, high resolution update for much of Google Maps but I can’t help noticing – there are still almost no cities or anything else beyond national boundries for much of Africa. That’s embarrassing when you’re trying to set up an international map and you realize you’ve chosen a tool that represents Africa as a largely undifferentiated mass.