r3fresh

Outbrain Recommendations are Advertisements in Disguise

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.

Tags: advertising, blog, outbrain, plugin, problem, widget

The Next Wave of Macs

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.

Tags: apple, hardware, mac, specs, speed, update

5 Old and Tired Fonts (+1 More)

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… More »

Tags: advertisement, design, font, old, typography