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After running around like a chimpanzee with its head cut off (check out the animatronics chimp from WowWee, thus the similie) with the last Wordpress Plugin Competition, I would like to be better prepared.
We are about to embark upon another Wordpress Programming Competition (notice the change in the name) starting at the beginning of December and lasting through the end of May next year. Much of the competition will remain the same but I would like to give authors the chance to strut their stuff and get their code together and published and advertised for everyone to make a good determination.
However, this post is about the judges. If you would like to be considered as a judge, please send me an email with a list of stuff that makes you eligible. Mark the subject as “Wordpress Programming Competition Judge”. Though the judges’ names will not be made public, I do expect you to be responsible, available for a reasonable amount of time (I try to be as accomodating as possible) and try to follow the requested schedule. You will be asked to judge every entry into the competition (be it 10 or a million) but there will be adequate time for everyone to carry on with their lives. I know some of the previous judges expressed eagerness to judge again, if you still feel the same way, please drop me a small note.
It is never too soon to start asking for help in funding the competition. So if you would like to be involved in making this possible financially (aka donate your money/time/resources/advertise/sponsor) please send me an email at mark @ wltc . net
Cliff Notes From the Blog World “I have 400 feeds, and reading those takes me four hours — and I was doing that every morning,” Arrington said. “Since Memeorandum, I use my feed reader significantly less.” I completely agree. The mish mash of live news from the technology world along with a good smattering of code and usability has made Memeorandum a favorite of mine. Now only if I could get WeblogToolsCollection to become one of the sites that Memeorandum caches and gets its news from. Anyone know how? 
If you were ever thinking of running Chitika MiniMalls like the one showed in this post, use this referral to signup. (I do get some revenue from your referral). The ads were at an inopportune time for me and tended to produce about twice as much as Adsense in a given day over the small testing period I had setup. I might use them again in the future.
Various different blog posts, sites and programs will help you tweak these ads to get the best results. Please understand that it is legal to run both Chitika Minimalls and Adsense on the same page as long as Chitika is set to be non-contenxtual.
Link to signup for Chitika Minimalls
I saw a new kind of email scam for eBay that was amusing. I had someone email me the following…
Hello,
I am interested and will like to know the shipping from Chicago IL, handling and your form of payment!!!
Thanks!!!
and since I was not selling anything on eBay and fraud, internet, media and everything in between is my business, I was intrigued. Of course, the link pointed to some IP in france and not eBay but thats the boring part.
Needless to say, ebay needs to find a new way to deliver messages to their customers, one that does not include logging in or sending information via email. How about including some sort of an “email secret” with every email? If that does not show up inside the message, it can easily be deemed to be invalid. PGP comes to mind, but judging from their track record and the pain of installation, it would never fly. I also hear that with the recent acquisition of the Verisign PayFlow business by eBay, they are supposed to buy some tokens (approx. 1 million) from Verisign to assign to Paypal customers. Interesting turn of events.
[Cross posted here and elsewhere]
Mark Ghosh 
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