If you live in Canada or Australia you can watch me on Wednesday’s episode of Leo Laporte’s newest show The Lab With Leo. In Canada it airs on G4/TechTV at 1pm and 6pm EST. In Australia you can find Leo on the How To Channel. I recently taped 4 episodes, and hope to become a regular contributor. The show is being produced out of Vancouver and being involved in the production was a lot of fun and brought back good memories of the days when I worked in television. Even more fun, I was able to bring my four year old son Owen to the studio for the taping. While we were taping my segment, Owen was playing Star Wars Lego on the video game wall. Leo was fantastic to work with and I was amazed at how much he actually knows about tech.

On a side note, if you live in the USA, and would like to see Leo back on the air, be sure to give your Cable or Satellite provider a call and request that show be picked up in the US.

Is Tim O’Reilly about to shake up the publishing industry?  Today he announced that you can now  Buy O’Reilly Books by the Chapter!  In the computer book industry this is a really great idea.  For only $3.99 you get to download one chapter in PDF format, complete with a table of contents and index.   I spend a lot of money on computer books.  Sometimes when I buy a book, I am not interested in the 6 “newbie” chapters or introductory content, but instead I buy the book for the advanced chapters or reference.  Many times I will not buy the book because only one chapter looks to be relevant or useful to me.  I fully expect that I will be purchasing single chapters in the near future.  Thanks Tim!

Kirk Montgomery has posted a great collection of links to  free icons for your website or application.

Strobist has a quick DIY project that will help you create a $10 Macro Photo Studio. All you need is a cardboard box, some white tissue paper, some posterboard and a bright light and soon enough you’ll be taking some great still life photographs.

It looks like the Aptana: project is now offering their Aptana IDE with Adobe AIR support.  It provides an integrated development environment for creating Adobe AIR (nee Apollo) applications.   Flex developers should not get too excited as it looks like this project is targeted towards HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and CSS developers, enabling them to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIA’s) to the desktop.  From what I can see this is not a replacement for Flex Builder - rather a way to make it easier to deploy classic web applications to the desktop.

Most of the tech blogging world is probably talking about Apple Safari for Windows (yawn) but I am today blogging about a new browser called SpaceTime.  SpaceTime allows you to visually browse in a cool 3D workspace.  When you search at Google, your results are displayed in a 3D stack where you can easily view the results by shuffling through the stack.  There are similar stacks for image search, Flickr search and Ebay Search.  Currently the browser is Windows only, but a Mac version is promised soon.  I could not find out what browsing engine it’s using, however given that a Mac version is on the way, it is probably not based on IE.

If you happen to use Google Analytics to measure traffic on your site, and you are running  Google Adsense ads, you should check out this excellent script for Tracking AdSense clicks with Google Analytics.  The script is super easy to implement and gives a nice range of reports to identify what pages on your site are performing well with regards to Adsense conversion.

Early last month, Yahoo announced that they were introducing a Robots-Nocontent for Page Sections “microformat”. Simply put you can tell Yahoo! which parts of your page are unrelated to the main content on your page. For example, you might have a navigation bar on your page that has links to other parts of your site, but you don’t want the text of those links to be indexed with the content of your page. This does not mean that Yahoo! does not spider those links, it just means that they will not include that content in the index for the page.

The robots-nocontent is very easy to implement. Simply add a class attribute with the value set to robots-nocontent to a container element and that container won’t be indexed. For example:

<div class="robots-nocontent">Some content</div>


It will be interesting to see if other search engines pick up on this much like they did with Google’s introduction of rel=”nofollow”.  Search Engine Land also has some decent coverage on this topic as well.

Chris Pirillo shares his thoughts on  Internet Strategies for New Businesses.  There are some great ideas on how a businesses should use the Internet to engage their customers through the power of conversation.

Flex 2.0 comes with a great set of essential components for building RIA’s, but if you have the craving for more top quality components, check out flexlib.  It is an excellent open-source component library at Google Code, that contains quite a few components that could be useful in your next Flex RIA.