Looking at some of the ads that Google Adsense has put on this site has revealed a few interesting blogs that I thought I would comment on.

We have friends and relatives that live in Florida and we’re also very interested in meteorology. Years ago, I subscripted to a mailing list of storm chasers, and I greatly enjoyed reading their writing. Today, one of the ads from my site pointed to http://weatherbug.blogs.com/. This is an interesting blog with some even more interesting links. For example, there is a great discussion of hurricane prediction models here

A second link that I found particularly interesting was http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/files/story2670.php. It starts, “On September 12, 2001, Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor of Le Monde, famously wrote, “Today we are all Americans.” Three years on, it seems that we are all anti-Americans.” While it places some of the blame on the Bush regime, it also notes that “Anti-Americanism’s ascendance also owes something to the geometry of power. The United States is more powerful than any country in history, and concentrated power usually means trouble. Other countries have a habit of ganging up to balance the reigning superpower.” This particularly resonates with my experiences playing Risk as a kid.

There was also a link to http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=18&styleid=1. This is forum that claims to ‘debate theology … seriously’. Topics include discussions about the end of the assault weapons ban, trustworthiness of the media. On a first glance of the subjects, it appears as if there are people arguing both sides of the issues which is refreshing. However, I haven’t had time to read the posts closely enough to determine the quality of the debates.

Providing an interesting contrast to this is http://www.emptyisform.com/ which ‘offers news and commentary on social issues, politics, technology and world events with a hint of Buddhist-informed view’. They have links to sites such as DailyKos and Eschaton. Their most recent entry starts off, “Ralph Nader recently noted that more Americans die each year from poverty, hunger, pollution, dangerous jobs and poor access to high-quality health care than from acts of terrorism.” An earlier entry starts off with “Questioning a politician's patriotism these days in America is more damaging than expressing doubts about their sexual preference.”

There were also some interesting links to other types of systems out there. For example, PubSub looks like an interesting new RSS reader. Unfortunately, it doesn’t install well on old NT boxes and it requires a reboot of new machines, so I haven’t had a chance to explore it in detail.

Another interesting site is Faces.com. They bill themselves as “a unique online social network which helps you meet new friends with similar interests as well as getting to know your current friends better!” Their emphasis on photos and video, together with comments about some areas containing ‘adult content’ makes me a little suspicious, as does the difficulty finding information about the people behind faces. I wonder if they are like Multiply. I will explore them a little bit before I send out ask friends to join it.

One final system that was advertised that caught my eye was http://my-expressions.com/. They are trying to get people to spend $3/month on their photoblogging software. I can do my photoblogging here well enough, and I expect that once I upgrade to the CivicSpace version of Drupal, the images module there will do more than enough of what I want.

Reading through the Google Adsense ads on the site has been interesting, and I would encourage people to look at what ads come up with which articles and explore the more interesting ads. (Of course I get something like three cents each time people do that, so I have a big vested interest in this as well.)