link - o- rama

• I'm starting to see billboard advertising for RedTO. It looks like a Toronto focused Directory Listings and search engine will a Dead tree based Business Catalog Book, coming out in June 2004. Or is it a Toronto based Business Catalog Book with a Website? The people behind it are called Red Media Corporation at http://www.theredpages.com/, so a guess the have ambitions beyond Toronto. Are there any Colors left?


• As reported in the Globe and Mail > On-line sales in Canada surged 40 per cent last year, fuelled by the increasing prevalence of high-speed Internet access, Statistics Canada said Friday.


• IBM developer has a article on Object-relation mapping without the container, Develop a transactional persistence layer using Hibernate and Spring
  exploring 2 hot framework tools that let you do strong db intergrate without ugly EJB's.


• Via Boing Boing comes HowToons, comics and video how-to projects for kids, with a good mix of mischief, smartassery, and science. I'm thinking of building the marshmellow gun for my summer get together with my brothers kids!


• Google is going after local Ads now: : Via TechDirt it seems Google AdSense is allowing businesses to specify that they only want the ads to show up for people in a certain location. Previously, businesses could specify only what country they wish to target, making the program prohibitively expensive for smaller merchants. The article talks about issues in display the results.
  
  This is in addition to the Local searching that Google is (quietly) testing here http://local.google.com/lochp (USA only right now)



• Came across a Blog of a guy (fairly) new to Japan called Japan Window, sub titled " life in Japan and my ongoing attempt to figure out what is going on here.." nice mix of text and images. The white text on Black back ground is very hard to read.