Outbrain, an embeddable rating and “recommendation” widget for your blog or website has found a place at the end of each of my posts. The guys behind Outbrain have been great; allowing me to try out new features and even helping me with formatting issues. I have been extremely happy with Outbrain and what they are offering until I noticed that the “recommendations” portion of the widget is not what it seems.

Before something drastically changed at Outbrain, the recommendations widget would show similar blogs at the end of your blog post. In exchange for putting the recommendations on your blog, you would expect to have your blog show up on other Outbrain users. This in theory would give you a little more traffic, but it’s not true anymore. The Outbrain recommendations now include more popular blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo, but neither Engadget or Gizmodo have the recommendations widget on there site. (Where’s my part of the deal?)

So I am involuntarily putting free advertising on my blog without ANY chance of getting ANYTHING beneficial in return? Yep. Outbrain has either made an error (I hope) or worse they’ve been selling recommendations links. If they’ve done the latter, expect my use of the widget to cease. It’s too bad to see something like this happen and I’m hoping it’s a mistake.

I have currently turned off the recommendations portion of the widget until this conflict is cleared up.

Readers, what do you think about Outbrain’s new recommendation/advertising widget?

Update: An explanation post.

The iPhone 3G may have taken all of the attention away from Apple’s computer line, but later this year all eyes will be back on the macs. What to expect in a few months:

-Blu-ray drives will be available on every mac computer (including Mac Mini). Blu-ray drives with burning capabilities available only on Macbook Pro and Mac Pro (at first).

-The Macbook Pro will lose the old style keyboard for the new chiclet style similar to current Macbook. RAM maximum will be increased to 8GB.

-Macbook will get a full refresh. New look, still no metal like Macbook Pro. RAM maximum will be increased to 6GB.

-Macbook will get the multi-touch track-pad like Macbook Pro and Air.

-iMac will get its specs updated.

-Macbook Air will get specs updated. Larger hard drive. Quicker. Same price. External USB drive won’t have Blu-ray.

-Cinema Displays will still be expensive and will remain unchanged.

-Going off topic, iPod Touch will see a price drop of about $50 dollars. iPod Classic won’t be updated.

Fonts. We see them every day. We use them for work. We see them in advertisements. Like anything we use regularly, fonts get boring. There are thousands of different fonts on the net, many of them free to use, but society seems stubborn of finding new fonts. This unwillingness to change leaves us to look at the same fonts over and over again. Here are five of the worst fonts… Read the rest of this entry »

In the beautiful Seattle airport last weekend and I decided to purchase the most current issue of WIRED. Browsing through the countless hard liquor ads I found a celebrity startup section about half way through. To my surprise, the beloved David Caruso of CSI: Miami fame has a startup called Lexicon Digital. Now if you watch CSI: Miami you’ll know David Caruso plays a total cheesebag investigator who has difficulty keeping his shades on. From what I’ve come to know of Caruso, I was expecting Lexicon Digital to be very interesting.
Read the rest of this entry »

Digg has changed. And not for the better. I’ve hit my breaking point with the popular, “democratic” news site and I’m nearing the end of using it. There isn’t one reason for ending my time with Digg; it’s been a mixture of four main problems I’ve been having with the site.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blogs are a dime dollar a dozen now and when I see a promising blog introduce itself to the internet only to lie deserted until the hosting plan isn’t renewed, I get irritated. I’m not going to name names, but I have concocted a (YES or NO) test for maybe bloggers.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve obviously noticed the new look and for the most part I’m done tweaking everything. I wanted to have green in the site because when I see green I think fresh and that’s what r3fresh.com’s all about, fresh design. I’ve also trimmed the excess junk and added a few plugins that will (hopefully) speed up the site overall.

I also wanted to thank the readers, commenters (not a word), and subscribers.

Feedback would be greatly appreciated. Leave some in the comments or twitter me, @LOR3N.