Category: Rants & Raves

It figures that the week I’m on a contract writing gig my laptop decides to flake out on me: for some bizarre reason the “e” key is partially sticking and not responding to key presses properly. I was wondering why, when I was writing an article on the airplane, I kept missing the letter “e” when typing. As a touch-typist, you get used to hitting every key with the same amount of force – not too much, not too little – and it’s hard to change the muscle memory in just one finger on one key. I don’t quite know what the problem is, but I can’t risk opening the laptop here (nor do I have the proper tools) so I’ll just suffer through it and try to remember to pound the “e” key whenever I need that all-too-often used vowel.

I’m looking at getting a Sony TX series laptop, largely because the Fujitsu P7230 (the upgrade of my laptop) isn’t all that impressive. I’m holding back though because I generally loathe Sony as a company, and most of their products. I wish Samsung sold their laptops in North America!

Can you find the content on this page? I couldn’t when I visited it – until I scrolled down the bottom half of the page. And notice too how the icons placed next to the Google AdSense links make it seem like the AdSense links are navigation/story elements meant to be clicked on.

I’ve met Mark before, and he was a nice fellow, but I’ll never visit this site again because it represents the worst in what happens when a hobby site, born of a personal passion for a topic, becomes commercialized in an ugly way. I’m not one to begrudge anyone making money online, it’s how I pay my bills after all, but when a site is more advertising than content, there’s a serious problem. When your visitors have to scroll down to search for the content, you’ve crossed over the line from providing legitimate content supported by ads into the dark realm of an advertising site “supported” by legitimate content. When your content is secondary, you have to ask yourself why you’re even offering it other than wanting to make money off it.

Does Mark have the right to hide his content among advertising? Certainly. But does it hurt his credibility when everything about the site is designed to trick people into clicking on ads instead of finding the content they want? You bet it does. I always struggle with the fine line between content and advertising on the Thoughts Media properties, but I find that if I keep my readers first and foremost in my mind, and think like them, I usually end up integrating advertising in such a way that it doesn’t interfere with what people really want, which is the content. And I also hope (and know) that if I ever cross the line with my sites, people invested in them (community and team members) will smack me upside the head 😉 and remind me that I’m not in this for the money, I’m in it because I love technology and community.

That’s right, after years of threatening to go to Gnomedex and harassing Chris Pirillo in person, I finally bit the bullet and registered to attend in August of this year. The $500 USD price tag was, frankly, a lot for me to swallow – I think it’s the first conference that I’ve ever paid to attend. But I’m a fan of what Chris has achieved in the online world and have heard excellent things about Gnomedex over the years: the speakers, the events, and the networking. So I’m going. Are you? If so, let me know and we’ll connect there.

I’ve been getting the following spam, one per day, over the past several months:

we email advertise your charity web site to 7,500,000 people. free.
http://www.emailsolutioncorp.com

I was receiving spam to the address I had on file with GoDaddy for my domain names, so I changed it, and included “nospam” in it, hoping that the spamming software would filter it out as being invalid. The very next day I was receiving spam to the new email address from this same spammer. Amazing. I know there are privacy options for domain registration, but it would cost me $500+ per year given the amount of domains I have, so it’s not really an option.

So what about local blocking of the spam? The problem is that the header is constructed in such a way that there’s no sender information whatsoever. Check this out (I’ve purposefully broken the email address used):

Return-path: <87[[email protected]>
Envelope-to: 87[[email protected]
Delivery-date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:49:51 -0600
Received: from [70.113.28.110] (helo=cpe-70-113-28-110.austin.res.rr.com)
by rampart.thoughtsmedia.com with smtp (Exim 4.63)
(envelope-from <87[[email protected]>)
id 1HUQU3-0000fR-3s
for 87[[email protected]; Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:49:51 -0600
To: 87[[email protected]

Outlook 2007 can’t spam block it because there’s no sender email address or domain. I also can’t create a rule because the email has to have a subject or sender. That IP address traces back to the Road Runner network, meaning it’s someone’s PC with a cable modem, likely infected by a bot and sending out spam without the user knowing (people like that should be blocked from accessing the Internet at all until they’ve fixed the problem).

Other than pressing the delete key, I’m out of ideas. I’m just thankful there aren’t more spammers out there doing this!

My friend Ian Bell runs Digital Trends, a great site, but lately I’ve been cringing whenever I’ve visited it. Why? Because invariably I see the same thing every time: a Pioneer Flash ad that causes the CPU usage of any computer I’m on to shoot to 100%. It’s not just Digital Trends or Pioneer ads that cause the problem: all sorts of Flash ads cause this problem and it’s only ever in Firefox. It’s been going on for years, yet no one at Firefox or Macromedia/Adobe has ever bothered to fix it. Particularly on my small laptop with it’s single-core 1.2 Ghz CPU, when it’s gunning at 100%, the whole system will grind to a halt. It’s getting so frustrating I’m getting close to switching back to IE7.

UPDATE: I did a bit more testing after updating to Firefox 2.0.0.3 and it seems that there’s only certain frames in the Pioneer Flash animation that’s causing the problems. If you look at the Pioneer ads on this page, you’ll see there’s a part where the rain starts falling in the ad…that’s when my CPU spikes:

This mirrors what I saw with some Pocket PC Techs banners that were running on Pocket PC Thoughts for a while – the designer used a special type of Flash animation to move the snowflakes across the screen, and it caused the CPU spikes as well – falling snowflakes, falling rain…I’m seeing a pattern here.

One of my long-standing frustrations in the realm of geekdom is when I run into software developers who, when faced with a problem with their software, point the finger at another company or application and expect someone else to fix the broken experience for their customer. A year ago this month I ran into a repeat problem with FTP Voyager, a product I had been using for years – I’d upgraded faithfully year after year. In other words, I was a long-time customer of theirs with an investment in their product. Here’s the email I sent (remember this is March 2006):

“I reported a bug a few months ago where FTP Voyager uses up 99% of the CPU and it turned out to be caused by the Windows XP SP2 Firewall being turned on. I just installed FTP Voyager on a brand new PC (my old one died) and did an upload, and again I was smacked with the 99% CPU use bug because I had forgotten to turn off the XP Firewall. I’m surprised this bug hasn’t been fixed yet, because asking your users to deactivate security measures just to be compatible with FTP Voyager seems silly, it not downright irresponsible. When is this bug going to be fixed?”

My basic point was that their product was incompatible with the default configuration of a Windows XP SP2 machine. It seemed pretty cut and dry to me: they needed to fix their product. The response I received from one Louis C. Branch of Rhinosoft had a very different line of thinking:

“I don’t consider the XP firewall to be a security measure. It is not a particularly effective firewall and does not respond to configuration as it should. This is not a bug in FTP Voyager, but a bug in the XP firewall implementation. I recommend using the Kerio or Zone Alarm firewalls if you feel the need to put a software firewall in place on an XP box. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

There are a lot of ways Rhinosoft could have approached this problem – having a user prompt upon install that suggested de-activation of the Firewall, or them actually coding their product to work with the XP Firewall (like every other FTP program seems to be able to do). Instead, they pointed the finger at Microsoft and the XP Firewall and expected the customer to deactivate a security feature of their operating system – sure, it might not be as effective as a dedicated product such as Zone Alarm, but it’s better than nothing. And if I did de-activate it, I’d have to remember to turn it on when connecting to WiFi access points on my laptop every time.

This was the last straw for me (I should have seen the writing on the wall when I had to convince them that multi-threaded upload/download was useful) and I switched to using SmartFTP – a program that, interestingly enough, requires no firewall configuration. Go figure.

A few weeks ago I created a post on this blog specifically designed to help people who were in my situation: they owned a Star Trek DVD box set and lost a DVD from it. Since I couldn’t find anything on the ‘Net when I was searching, I wanted to share my success with people who were looking for the same thing. Today I decided to do a bit of searching to see if my blog post was indexed. I was very happy with what I saw:

My post is the #1 result for “lost star trek DVD”, #1 for “lost star trek DVD box set”, and even for “star trek DVD lost” (searching like Yoda they are). That’s awesome and I couldn’t ask for anything more of Google. I created the content, they indexed the content, and now people can find a relevant result for the subject when they search.

The same search in Microsoft’s Live Search doesn’t have the blog entry listed on the top 50 – and Microsoft wonders why more people don’t use their tool. It just doesn’t seem to have the results that people want (need) to see. Yahoo has similarly sucky results. There’s a reason why “the Google” (I chuckle when people call it that) still rules the search world.

I’ve been on eBay since 1999, and I’ve watched it grow and change from a marketplace of mostly individual sellers dealing with individual buyers, to a huge online industry of professional sellers moving 1000’s of items a month. I’ve seen prices get higher, items get worse in quality, counterfeit items abound, and worst of all, shipping charges go through the roof as sellers abused buyers trust by padding their auctions with grossly inflated shipping and handling charges. It’s not uncommon to pay 300 to 400% more in shipping than the actual cost.

The problem with eBay’s feedback system is that it’s completely binary – the experience is either completely positive, or completely negative according to eBay. The reality is the buying and selling experience is more nuanced than that – so over time I’ve found myself doing things like leaving positive feedback with neutral to negative comments. eBay’s binary system has created a sort of “cold war” where buyers are afraid to leave negative feedback for fear of damaging their own feedback rating – and when an average buyer (less than 100 feedback) is dealing with a power seller (more than 5000 feedback) a single negative feedback rating has much more impact on the “little guy”. I’ve seen power sellers with 30 negative feedback ratings in 30 days, yet they still have 99% positive feedback rating because they’re doing 500 transactions a month.

The new eBay system won’t address the issue of buyers being afraid of leaving negative feedback, but if this new system allows for a more nuanced approach where a buyer can indicate that a seller shipped a good product, but charged too much for shipping or took forever to ship, this new system will be a significant step in the right direction.

clipped from www2.ebay.com Hi… I’m Brian Burke, Director for Global Feedback Policy. As eBay continues to grow, it is important that we continue to evolve the Feedback system to ensure it remains a credible measure of trust. For almost two years, eBay has been working on a new project to enhance our current reputation system. Feedback 2.0, which Bill Cobb announced at the eCommerce forum last January, adds a new dimension to eBay’s premier online reputation system, allowing buyers to better rate and evaluate sellers on important aspects of a transaction. Detailed Seller Ratings – In addition to the current positive, negative or neutral comment, buyers rate their sellers on specific transaction aspects — Item Description, Communication, Shipping time and Shipping & Handling Charges. Scores are based on a conventional 1 to 5 scale, with 1 being the lowest and 5 the being the highest rating. The average score for each rating is displayed on the seller’s Feedback Profile page.

Things are blowing up with Review Me, the site I mentioned in a previous post. It seems that there was some sort of loophole (if you can believe the Review Me spokesperson) that allowed people that didn’t actually own a site to submit said site for whoring out inclusion in Review Me. The full story is on Consumerist; it’s worth checking out. The real deal here is that from an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) point of view, this is a new form of “organic content”. Rather than the traditional approach of contacting bloggers/media and asking if they’d like to review the product, the companies involved are opting to simply buy the attention of the bloggers. The bloggers might claim that the actual outcome of the review isn’t tainted by the money, but stop and think about this for a minute: if the blogger writes an honest and scathing review, what are the odds that he’ll be selected by another company to write a review if his last one was anything less than positive? Someone with money to spend is looking to buy good commentary, period.

Because of this story, I spent a minute looking through nine pages of results for the word “thought” just making sure that none of my Web properties were showing up there. None word. Thoughts Media commentary isn’t for sale.

The problem isn’t that people are getting paid to write reviews, the problem is that they’re not disclosing it properly. Look at one of the sample reviews that they show off: there’s no indication that it’s a paid advertisement until the very end, the last sentence. That’s completely unethical, and if I had read that thinking it was the author’s real opinion and saw that at the end, it would make me doubt the sincerity of what I had just read. It would also make me doubt the integrity of the entire blog. Based on the number of blogs that have signed up for Review Me, it seems there’s more than a few people willing to prostrate themselves at the altar of Review Me.

Is it possible to get paid for something and still be objective? Yes. I don’t consider myself a journalist and do not follow the strict code of ethics that journalists are expected to follow – I routinely get invited to events (Mobius, Featured Communities) where my flight/hotel/whatever is covered. The things I write about those events are my honest, un-biased opinions. But I never assume that everyone is going to believe that, so I’m always clear to state up front that I was invited down to those events, and explain what was paid for – that gives the reader the information they need to filter my comments however they wish. I also reveal what I was given at those events. It’s all about the disclosure. Until Review Me requires that bloggers have a statement of disclosure in the very first part of the “review” (and the blogger doesn’t get paid until that happens), this is nothing more than bloggers whoring themselves out to companies looking for publicity and tricking their readers into thinking their “reviews” are something they are not.

I find myself thinking that I can’t trust the opinions of any Web site or blogger that is partnered with Review Me, and I also would think twice about reviewing a product from any company that was playing bloggers to review it – because people might think that my review was paid for like the other reviews. Companies using the services of Review Me may be shooting themselves in the foot with all legitimate media…

Because the blogging boom continues to grow, and because you have things like Pay Per Post and ReviewMe (this is particularly tricky for instance) popping up, disclosure is becoming a popular topic. I think disclosure is a very, very good thing – but like all things, if it’s not done properly it can be a very, very bad thing. I saw this Web site that helps you to create a disclosure policy similar to that of coming up with a Creative Commons License. The problem with wizard-driven output of course is that it often reads as though it were written by a lawyer. I saw this disclosure policy over at ZuneMax, a site we link to frequently from Zune Thoughts, and after reading their disclosure policy I couldn’t help but be left with a negative impression of the site because it essentially says they get paid for every post – which I highly doubt is the case, yet their disclosure policy left me wondering. I’d encourage any blogger concerned about disclosure to simply write their own statement of disclosure rather than using a template-driven tool that makes things sound worse then they really are.