William M. Hartnett

Santa Clara County pays $500,000 over GIS data dispute – San Jose Mercury News Idiot bureaucrats who attempt to prevent the dissemination of basic, publicly funded government data by charging astronomical fees should be forced to pay the inevitable judgement against them out of their own pocket. "Santa Clara County's move to charge astronomical fees for [...]

Realtors repudiate newspaper ads – Reflections of a Newsosaur "If the near-term prospects for the housing market are grim, the outlook appears to be even worse for an eventual recovery for real estate advertising in newspapers. … there's no perfuming the results of his new poll, which discovered that nearly 6 out of every 10 [...]

No old/new media divide for junk journalism – Ink-Drained Kvetch "The 'old media' may not have gotten this story first, but who really cares? Is this the sort of story we want serious news organizations to hotly pursue in these times of newsroom layoffs, slimmed down news holes and shrinking aspirations for what they cover? [...]

AP Spanks Reporter for Patently True Facebook Post – Gawker "Richard Richtmyer is in trouble with his bosses at the Associated Press for something he wrote on Facebook. Did he burn a source? Trash a story subject? Worse: He mildly criticized one of AP's hundreds of members. Richtmyer made a head-slappingly obvious observation about the [...]

Event Tracking Now Available in All Accounts – Google Analytics Blog "Event Tracking is a feature of Google Analytics that allows you to track visitor actions that don't correspond directly to pageviews. It's a great fit for tracking things like: Downloads of a PDF or file; interaction with dynamic, AJAX sites; interaction with Adobe Flash [...]

Rebranding Microsoft Virtual Earth To … – Virtual Earth, An Evangelist's Blog When you have to explain your current confused branding scheme before addressing your forthcoming confused branding scheme, you must be Microsoft. Live Search Maps is now Bing Maps, and Virtual Earth is now Bing Maps for Enterprise. Nonsense like this is such a [...]

Analytics and AdSense, Together at Last – Google Analytics Blog AdSense accounts can finally be linked to Google Analytics, allowing "you to see more details about specific pages on your site and analyze ad performance." But it still won't tell you which ads were actually clicked. (tags: adsense analytics google) Ford Hybrid Goes 1,400 Miles [...]

Is this the end for Tommy Smyth, possibly the most hated football commentator in history? – guardian.co.uk "That breeze you feel gusting in from the Atlantic is thousands of soccer fans in the United States sighing with relief. For the news is in that Fox Soccer Channel will be broadcasting the Champions League next season. [...]

Cartographica: The Macintosh GIS "Cartographica is a Geographic Information System (GIS) package for the Macintosh. It is used to create, analyze, explore, manipulate and present geospatial data." Could be interesting. Via Steve Doig on NICAR-L. (tags: mapping gis mac software)

Introduction to the ad auction – Official Google Blog Google Chief Economist Hal Varian walks through the auction and explains how your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bid and Quality Score determines how much you actually pay for an ad click on Google's search results pages. (tags: google advertising video economics adwords auction)