Another great one from DP…
Someone asked: what is niche????
Someone else replied: “Generally, a niche is a special place within the scheme of things.” (Wikipedia)
Then Deano replied:
Damn!! I always thought that it was a “a shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display an ornament.” Oxford dictionary - I’ve spent the last year making a site on Dry stone walling - oh well back to the drawing board
LOL! That’s gold! 
Google launched their Australian Sales & Engineering Office in Sydney today. Located on Sussex Street, the new office will act as an English-speaking portal to the Asian web market.
Kate Vale is Google Australia’s head of sales and operations. Four years ago Google Australia was operating from Kate’s dining table. 3 months later she had employed 3 staff, all of which operated out of serviced offices - until now. The new Sydney Googleplex currently has around 12 staff and will be looking to quickly expand their operations.
The driving force behind Google’s R&D efforts in Sydney are Lars Rasmussen (head of engineering), Noel Gorden and Stephen Ma. These men represent 3 of the 4 people who invented Google Maps. They actually developed the technology independently and later sold it to Google before joining the company.
Google Australia will be conducting an extensive recruitment exercise over the coming year and even have plans for educational facilities in Sydney.
I just posted a quote to this web site and had the brilliant idea, why don’t I make a web site that is divided into topics containing the best quotes from web forums!? As yet, I haven’t even investigated whether such a site exists. If it doesn’t exist then I should make it right? I mean, after all, it’d be cool, people would link to it, it’d get heaps of traffic right?
Sure, it would probably do all those things.. but chances are it’ll be extremely hard to monetize.
Think about the psyche of a visitor to this site. They search for a great quote.. Or they’re looking for a funny quote. They find this great site with all the quotes categorized and filed away neatly. Easy to search. Great! What’s left for them to do? Buy something from your affiliate program? What, a book of quotes perhaps? 
What about Adsense ads? Forget about it Jose..
Now the site may be popular enough to generate a heap of traffic making poor CTRs seemingly result in decent money, but wouldn’t all that time and effort be better spent developing a site that has the potential for lots of traffic and a great CTR? Imagine, people searching for product info and you giving them an easy way to buy.. It’s Heaven! 
Another great quote, this time from ken_b on the Webmaster World forums:
Think about every aspect of the subject that could possibly be relevant to your topic. I’m not talking just about the obvious stuff here. The obvious stuff is important, obviously.
Obviously Ken!!!
I don’t know what it is, but the last few weeks have seen a lot of our sites being targeted by comment spammers. Could it be because of the Easter school holiday period here in Australia? Damn script kiddies.. 
I was recently in a discussion with someone about how much a PHP/MySQL developer should be paid. Their argument was that it’s harder to create a good web site design (looks-wise) than it is to code in PHP/MySQL. While it does take a lot of talent to make a nice looking web site, it probably takes even more talent to write good code.
A working PHP script can hide bad coding techniques, which may cost you more in the long run. If it does the job who cares right? You will care when you need to scale the site or add new features.
Back to the original question though.. what’s worth more, design or development? You only have to look at the likes of Google, Hotmail, Ebay etc.. They’re not award winning designs by any means, but they’re powered by some very fancy and innovative code. So IMHO, development is worth more than design.
Just found an enlightening thread on an Adsense forum for those of you who want to know what PHP really is. I don’t know what’s funnier, the question or the answer! 
Q: What is a php? Can you like me to a help page. thanks
A: A PHP is a handy language for making pages on the Internets.
I know English may not be their first language but it still put a smile on my face.. So get going and start making pages on the internetS.. and make sure you you A PHP!
Earlier in the year we reported that Page Rank may be influenced by the topic you’re writing about. In our minds this is almost certainly the case. Even though Goo Theory is only 4 months old, it has recently achieved a PR of 4. That’s right, PR 0 to 4 in just 4 months. And that’s with only a handful of sites linking here.
Contrast this with Formula F1. This site is content rich with many articles and many linkbacks from respectable Formula One web sites. It took 8 months to achieve a PR of 2.
Although we’re very happy with our recent PR change, we can’t understand why the topic of a web site can have such an impact on Page Rank. It would make more sense if the popular topics (like this blog.. you know, nerdy stuff ) made it harder to achieve a good PR, while niche topics would be easier to get a good PR. Alas, Google works in mysterious ways
You’d think all web-based interfaces today would have built-in spell-checkers. I’m sure you’ve been to forums or used CMSs with mods that let you spell check. Unfortunately the majority of web sites don’t have this functionality.
What to do? Download the Google Toolbar. It includes a great feature - a spell checker for any form you’re going to submit. Very handy for out-of-the-box Wordpress blogs, or VBulletin/phpbb forums etc..
You’ve gotta love tenochlogy…
…yes, that was a joke..
Found 2 great quotes on the Digital Point Forums today that sum up my view on most E-Books: