Ben Shoemate's Notebook

These numbers are often fuzzy: Some deployments are classified, others are temporary, and just because the Defense Department claims 30 US troops in Indonesia last year doesn't mean 1,500 didn't pass through on training missions. Even so, the map, and the associated research, should give you a good feel for what the Pentagon is up to around the world.

The end of summer vacation season is a good time to take up the hunt for a new, better job, as hiring managers can look at firm schedules and determine what shortfalls need filling. Today and through the rest of this week, we'll be taking a look at tips for finding, interviewing for, negotiating over, and succeeding in a new gig. First off is making inconvenient, low-tech job listing sites—the kind without RSS feeds, email alerts, or any other technologies beyond 2001—much more manageable through a combination of a "page scraper," or RSS generator, and automatic RSS-to-email services to make sure you're never near the bottom of the resume stack. Photo by shadytrees.

Lots of state and government agencies list their jobs on static HTML pages that are updated manually, with no syndication feed or user tools like email alerts to help out eager job-seekers. We've covered a number of tools that "scrape" web pages that change regularly and turn them into RSS content, but many of those early-Web-2.0 tools, such as rssfwd, are either regularly down or have instituted limited free trials.

One good solution is the free Page2RSS site. Enter in the page you want to watch—if it's just a re-directing URL, Page2RSS automatically grabs the correct page—and then right-click on the "RSS 2.0" link on the right and choose "Copy Link Location" or a similar option. If you're going to be watching multiple sites, paste that long RSS address in a text document, separating the feeds on separate lines.

PageTiki is a similar service with a nicer, more user-friendly interface, but limits your overall watching time by making each site scan cost "TikiBucks." You'll likely have gotten your new job by the time you run out, but anyone watching a lot of sites might run out before they're ready.

If you're a Firefox user who isn't so hot on the whole feeds thing, the free Firefox extension Update Scanner, which we've previously written about, provides instant in-browser updates for quick response times.

If you're not already using an RSS reader—a web site or software tool that monitors and delivers feed updates—now's the time to get started. Free accounts are offered at the web-based Google Reader and Bloglines, and free software tools like the Newsgator RSS Suite are there for the taking. What's the difference? Well, our own Adam Pash has laid out the pros and cons of each.

Once you've set up your custom-rolled update feeds and loaded them into your reader, you might want to hedge your bets against a day where you're too busy to check it—or the new results come so fast and frequent that they don't show up on your start page. There are lots of defunct and not-free RSS-to-email converters out there—I can tentatively recommend FeedMailer as one that seems to work as advertised, and doesn't appear to be going dead any time soon. FeedMailer lets you set the frequency of your email updates, from as-it-happens to daily digests, and choose whether they arrive as HTML or plain-text mail.

Now you've got pretty universal coverage of low- and high-tech job sites, with a feed reader keeping track of everything that's new and email alerts arriving as a second-chance reminder.

What rss creation tools and email converters can our experienced feed-watchers recommend? What non-RSS page-monitoring tools have worked for you? Let's hear your recommendations in the comments.

Everyone seems to have their own website or blog nowadays. But do you want someone else to tell you your site is down? So what do you do? Corporate IT shops can install some fancy monitoring software suite that can track hundreds of types of software, servers, ports and hardware devices. That monitoring software also normally costs hundreds of thousands for dollars. Most likely, you want to monitor your website for free, or at least cheaply.

Not surprisingly there are a wealth of free and cheap website monitoring services available. Just do a Google search for “free website monitor” and you will get plenty of services to look at. For most of the services, you only need an email address and the URL that you want to monitor. Of course, when it comes to free and cheap you have a wide range of services offered. To make your job easier, we’ve put together this list of 13 services that will help you monitor your website.

Pingdom - Has a good set of cheap packages, but alas, nothing is free. They come highly recommended by just about everyone.

LiveWatch - A German service that allows you to monitor one server free. The free notifications package contains email alerts, 10 SMS notifications, and Yahoo Messenger. The only problem with the service is that it requires a script on the server in order to monitor it.

Observu - A really, really basic service. You register, add a website monitor with the text that should appear on the page and save the monitor. There are no reports and nothing flashy. You will be emailed if there is a problem.

ServerGuard24 - The prices are not that expensive and there is a free plan. However, the free plan only polls every 40 minutes and you need a banner ad for them as well. Otherwise, it looks like a very professional service.

SiteUptime - One free and two cheap premium levels are offered. The free plan allows only one monitor, but it does have a very clean and professional user interface. The service only monitors from location but it does fall over to another location if needed.

Host Tracker - The free plan enables monitoring for two URLs in two different domains. The main issue with the service is that the navigation is hard to work with. It does use the most distributed network of monitoring servers of the services listed, as it currently monitors from over 50 nodes.

mon.itor.us - Yes, it has a cute name, but cute does not mean limited. The service is completely free with email alerting. There are basic reports for uptime and response time. The user interface may look simplistic, but the service delivers with a more complete offering than most.

InternetSeer - “My site has been down for how long!?!” The free offering monitors one URL and polling every hour. The professional plans look to have some really nice features, but the free plan is fairly limited.

WatchMouse - You have to like a service that uses a mouse as its mascot. The free plan monitors one URL every hour. Disappointingly, the premium plans are more expensive than most listed here.

ServiceUptime - They have a nice free service that monitors one URL. There are seven different sites polling every 30 minutes to determine whether your website is alive. ServiceUptime also has a decent reporting package and very reasonable premium packages.

Montastic - Montastic allows free monitoring for up to 100 URLs! Your websites are monitored by two different servers about every 10 minutes. They also have a cute colored logo you can put on your site. Sadly, there are no cute colored reports.

FreeSiteStatus - The free service has nine separate locations monitoring you servers every minute. Various additional features can be purchased for little cost, as well as a service configuration wizard to help you create your monitoring service. One cool feature FreeSiteStatus offers is the ability to create one-time or recurring maintenance windows where monitoring of the servers can be suspended.

Site24×7 - It is free to monitor two URLs that are polled every 60 minutes. This is another service that allows you to create maintenance windows for your server. The premium plans also offer reasonable prices for various levels of monitoring.

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Need to convince your friends of something?

Nothing works quite like, well, propaganda… Especially if it has your face on it.

Maopost, a site dedicated to an extensive collection of Chinese propaganda posters, will seamlessly paint your face (or your friend’s) from any of your photographs into a classic propaganda oil painting.

You supply the photograph and choose one of the 35 suggested posters (or from their entire collection, over 1,500 posters), an artist hand paints you as a socialist hero.

It’s never been easier to insert yourself into (socialist) history. And you’ve never looked so convincing.

Be a Socialist (Poster) Hero!

p.s. Take part in the traveling photo notebook or share your panorama photos or storm photos in our forum!

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The internet has become a great enabler in democratizing information. The elitism of paid information easily accessible by a rich few has been replaced by a wealth of knowledge accessible via a few mouse clicks in our own homes. And yet, for all the positives the internet provides, our own sub-cultural biases steer us to content that often reinforces our own ignorance, as opposed to enlightening our understanding of the world and the people in it.

I sat opposite Amber Case, a cyborg anthropologist at dinner last night. As much as I struggled to understand much of what she was saying, it none the less challenged me in ways I didn’t think possible. She spoke of dimensional space, what we can and cannot see, and asked whether the internet was the 4th dimension. Eric Rice sitting beside me said in response that he finds himself considering what is behind an object or person in seeking to understand the full picture. I’ve since tried visualizing things from the perspective of what I can’t see; I have no solid idea what the purpose of doing so is, but the lateral thinking involved may, with time, help me develop a broader sense of looking at the larger picture in any situation as opposed to what Case describes as a two dimensional view.

I cannot honestly provide a fair assessment of this wisdom having true validity, and some one else that night suggested that there was way too many drugs being taken by those at the table, a call which in the past I probably would have agreed with, and yet I know that in part by chance (I was invited to the table at the last minute) I had discovered notions that I was not previously aware of, a wisdom that was foreign to my own.

There are other stories I could use from my week in Seattle, but I purposely picked the extreme case in terms of thought as a challenge to our understanding of collective wisdom. That knowledge exists, and that we as humans continue our long march towards understanding is a given proven throughout history, but how do we better tap the collective wisdom, and what role does the internet play?

We’ve covered the echochamber of the Crunchmemeosphere previously on The Inquisitr, and yet it is only one particularly small part of the collective echo. Conferences like Gnomedex go some way in sharing wisdom that may not be as well understood or explained, and yet it is the domain of a select few with the money or foresight to attended. The age of Barcamps and Podcamps and unconferences is upon us, and yet like Gnomedex they often suffer from a collective echo imposed upon them by geography. Ross Dawson’s Future of Media Summit drew an audience in Silicon Valley and Sydney together to share and discuss media, but in reaching across continents it still did not open its doors to a broader wisdom to those without the presence, or finances to attend. We have comments on blogs, or discussion threads in video on Seesmic, but do they truly allow us to yet fully tap the collective wisdom?

The answer may not have been invented, nor even technologically feasible, but there must be a better way. Could it be the next generation of virtual spaces, technology that will allow us to fully emerge ourselves into a shared space of reality based sharing where we can collaborate no matter where we are on the globe as if we were actually there? Or is it something else machine enabled that will allow our 2.0 tech world to emerge into 3.0 or 4.0 as a movement of global enlightenment that delivers the collective wisdom as a force for good. Ask yourself that if we are all so smart today why we still have wars, or why people starve, why Armageddon is still a red button away, and we continue to look at our own problems in a narrow perspective when as Scott Maxwell noted when he showed the first picture of Earth taken from another planet, we are but a small spec in the universe.

We may not have the answers, but we can start the movement for change. Listen to opinions and voices different to your own, accept that you do not know everything, and develop your own knowledge further, leading by example. It’s a small thing, but it may be a start.