Geek News Central"So as the alarm clock rang at 4:30 am on a Saturday I got out of bed pissed off about how stupid could a company be for only having limited quantities on an official release day and went to the store. Sure enough 5 other people were already their and the earliest arriving person had shown up at 2. Of course they all had power books out and were chatting away about stuff I have never heard of. So when the discussion moved to me I talked about podcasting and some other subjects avoiding the fact that I was a hard core Windows user that was getting ready to drink the Kool Aid and have the wrath of my readership pound me to pieces." - Heh. That's about the 10th story I've read about Windows users taking this opportunity to get a cheap mac. It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out in terms of market share. Will the mini actually eat into wintel market share or will the majority of people buying it not actually be "switching" but instead going dual platform and using both?
Update: Another story over on cnet with the write keeping the mini in addition to his IBM " I'm not going to trade my IBM laptop for a headless Mac, either"
(Via Dare Obasanjo's WebLog.) - I guess I still don't understand why WE have to fix their algorithm. Can't they figure out what the spam is? Even if this does fix it somewhat I
continue to think that it won't make a difference. When the cost is 0 there's just no motivation to stop spamming.
Podcasting Metrics - A Strawman: "If we’re going to attracts advertisers, sponsors and undewriters to our podcasts, we’re going to have to give them statistics, preferably audited. And if we all use the same metrics we’ll be able to educate media buyers more quickly and accelerate their decision making. Just to get the discussion moving, I’ve posted some thoughts on how podcasters might measure and report their listenership on the IT Conversations wiki. Feel free to add your ideas or comment on mine."
I have to say that I'm amazed that this radical method was so quickly adopted by so many large companies. I guess they felt like they had to do something and this is one of the few things they control that they could do, but I don't think it's going to work. JD has alot of what I'm thinking in his post so I won't cover all that just go read it there.
The main issue for me is that this has essentially been tried in the email world and failed. Here the deterrent is that you won't get pagerank. In email the deterrent is that your mail won't get through because of Spam filters. Just about every person using email on earth now has at least one spam filter running, but guess what? I still get hundreds of email spams a day. Why would they keep trying if they know they can't get through???
Oh yeah because it's FREE. Spam filters just like nofollow doesn't address the real issue which is that as long as there is no cost to spamming me a million times a day they will. Since their cost is zero they will continue to spam and perhaps even more so than before in order to get wider coverage into sites without nofollow or to get actual clickthroughs on sites that do have nofollow and at the end of the day I still have to have some type of spam filters because they're going to spam me and even if they don't get pagerank I don't want their links on my site.
The solution is as it's always been, micropayments. I would pay a penny to every blog I post comments on, no problem. It would be nothing to me because that's 100 comments for $1 plus I'd be getting payments back when people post to me so I'd probably break even or at least be close. The spammer on the other hand would now be totally screwed. Indiscriminate spamming would now be a very costly en devour and therefor at least limit their activity to only the most vulnerable or valuable targets.
GlobeTel announced today a new letter of intent with NASA to provide them with access to Stratellite technology. This is big. I've very bullish on GTEL and signing a deal with NASA is going to give them alot of credibility with other organizations.
Some of you may remember Madgegate (it was only last week after all). I won't retell the story here but Andrew Orlowski of The Register (a London paper) has written up a story on it. He basically bashes Winer and Curry. At the recent Internet and Society conference at Harvard, which I attended, I witnessed somewhat of a fight between Winer and Orlowski. It was evident that they knew each other and didn't get along. More insights into that relationship are availabe via a search of Dave's site.
I've never really had the experience of knowing the relationship between two people before seeing one of them write an article for a paper. I have to say that knowing that info really puts Orlowski's piece in a new light. Actually it goes back to what Dave talks about alot. That "professional" reporters have significant biases and rarely if ever notify their readers.
In this case, with the background knowledge about the two individuals involved it is plain to see the slant of the article, however the reader is given no notice that they even know each other much less that their relationship is stormy. While I actually agree with most of what he wrote I think it's unfair that he portrays it as a piece of news rather than the opinion piece that it is. Actually I think the editors of The Register shouldn't allow a reporter to write an article on someone they have an obvious bias towards though I suppose this would be harder to enforce than it is to write.
on a side note my quote appears near the bottom. It's definitely a sound bite, with only the juicy line taken. He doesn't provide any links which would let the reader see the full text and context of my post.
For those interested, my full quote is in the original comment on the trade secrets site (no way to link right to it, but it's the 7th one down).
I Want My MTV Broadband "I am at my wits end, and will accept anyone's help, even if it literally means busting open the wiring box at the curb to complete the last connection myself." - This is what happens when you take away a broadband users high speed access for too long.
I thought I had solved my comment spam issues but alas it was not so. The spammers got smarter so now I've brought in the big guns. The new WP HashCash plugin uses client side md5 hashes to ensure that a human is making the post. Since I've installed it I've had no spam. If I get popular enough that spammers manually spam me I'll worry about that then :-)
microISV Profile: Phil Wright, Crownwood Software: " I started out charging $199 for a single user licence but over the first year I increased the price on two occasions to become $399. Despite doubling the price the number of copies I sold remained constant. I guess this is because my customers are corporations and not individuals. If a company decides they want your software then the difference between $199 and $399 is not significant. If a software company needs to worry about a couple of hundred dollars cost then they must be in serious financial trouble. Obviously for a consumer market this works entirely differently."