URL in One - Lee Grey - JCranky

It’s 7:27 on 07/27/2007.

We live in a time when peoples’ opinions have become suspect.

I was just looking through my Amazon wishlist and noticed a pattern. Most of the marketing-oriented books have five-star reviews. I remember the launches of a few of those books. There was the push to drive the book to #1 on Amazon through concerted effort and orchestrated buying. There were the incentivized reviews. There’s the good ol’ boy network (fellow authors of marketing books) scratching each other’s backs.

But if you weren’t privy to these marketing events, you would just believe this is one damn good book. And maybe it is. But, then again, maybe the reviewers never even read it. Maybe they even reviewed it on the day they ordered it from Amazon. Or in lieu of buying it.

The state-of-the-art in Internet Marketing these days is to set up product “review” sites that contain affiliate links to go buy the product. How pure are these reviews? Do you really need to ask?

The really cutting-edge marketers create AdWords campaigns that feign negative or controversial reviews. Click on these links thinking you’re going to get the real “dirt” on a product, and you find, surprise, surprise, that they didn’t like the color of the cover but loved the product, or something equally informative.

eBay feedback often looks like “Awesome seller!!!! Fantastic Value!!!! A++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++” for the purchase of a $5 iPod cable.

Your MLM friends and family will tell you how you’ve just got to get into this opportunity, when they haven’t made a penny and have alienated everyone within earshot.

With more and more recommendations these days, there comes a perk for the recommender. Word-of-mouth has been co-opted to the point that you can’t trust it. You need to scrutinize not only the review, but the reviewer, and the incentive for the review.

Beware the ulterior motive.

It’s amazing what I can see, thanks to the use of domain-specific email addresses. I can see when one company uses another company’s mailing list. I can see when a company doesn’t honor its unsubscribe requests. I can also see when a company’s mailing list has been compromised.  Best of all, I have the power to do something about these things.
I’ve gotten at least five Nigerian scam emails from the yoursqueezepage.com mailing list in the past 24 hours. They’ve been hacked.

Since I know that, I can surgically shut down that address without having to go through extreme measures like changing my email address, so that I can keep the infected email away from the healthy stuff.  It’s a kind of quarantine that doesn’t rely on magic spam filters.  This system simply works, and I’m in total control.

You can learn more about it at http://www.phishproof.com.

I tend to have a lot of tabs open in Firefox at any given time.  It’s not unusual for me to have 20 or 30 open, and I’ve been known to hit 40 or 50 at times.  (I wouldn’t survive without the sessionsaver extension.)

This can sometimes get Firefox pretty upset.  Windows Task Manager shows nearly 1GB of Mem Usage.  And sometimes CPU just hovers at or near 100%.

Sometimes Firefox becomes nearly unresponsive.  This is a sure indication that it’s time to shut down and reboot, but it can take a long time just to get focus under these conditions.  One thing I’ve found that works is, ironically, to lower the priority of the firefox.exe process in Task Manager.  If you set it to BelowNormal, it will usually help Firefox to backburner what it’s doing (must be garbage collection or memory consolidation) and come back to processing UI events.   But it really is a good idea to at least shut down Firefox, if not the whole machine, when you get to this point.

One not-so-funny thing about having a bunch of tabs saved in a session:  I once opened Firefox while at some public place with broadband, maybe a coffeehouse or hotel, I don’t remember.  I had thirty or forty tabs saved in my session, and when the blast of requests came from my machine all at once, the wireless router decided I was up to no good and blocked me from further Internet access.  I’m surprised it only happened that one time.

Did you ever wonder what the problem is with the Internet? Well, you’re in luck, because I’m going to tell you.

No, it’s not that it’s too slow. It’s not that it costs too much. It’s not that you can’t get broadband on your wristwatch.

The problem with the Internet is that it puts us in contact with people with which we never would have had contact before the Internet existed. Now, clearly, this is a wonderful thing, too. The world is filled with wonderful people that we never would have had the good fortune to meet, had it not been for the wonder of the World Wide Web.

However, the world is also filled with bad people too. I’m talking Bad. Evil. Sick. Selfish. Twisted. Scary. And now they have a way into your home, your digital assets, and your mind.

It used to be that such people were far, far away. You never had to worry about encountering them, unless you wandered into the wrong neighborhood. But, today, they’re dropping email into your inbox, trying to install bad software on your computer, trying to steal your identity. It’s enough to make you consider becoming Amish.

That’s one part of the equation. Part two is the fact that the Internet, and particularly Web 2.0, has made everyone a publisher. Everyone is creating content. We used to have three television networks, a handful of magazines, and a few radio stations. Now, there’s more online content than anyone could possibly consume. Blogs, podcasts, videos, social networks, comments on all of the above, etc. It’s as if every moment on the planet is available online from every perspective, not to mention the commentary on it all.

Part three of this equation is the anonymity of the Internet. Since people are not looking each other in the eye and have no need to provide their actual identity during all of this publishing, there is no accountability. Standards of quality, morality, and ethics are easily lowered. So what gets published is far from the best that we have to offer.

Combine these three, and you get the “perfect storm” of social decay.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the Internet is a wonderful thing. It has the potential to do so much good that it is almost utopian. But that can only happen if we as the inhabitants aspire to such high ideals. And with so much that is less than ideal, we face a mighty challenge.

I suspect that society will eventually demand some accountability in the online world, at least in some areas, or the Internet will fail to live up to its potential. I’m not talking about legal reform; I’m referring to social mores that dictate what is socially acceptable and what is considered outside the realm of acceptable behavior. And I suspect that anonymity will begin to become frowned upon.

In fact, I suspect that something like the online equivalent of a Drivers License will become essential for having your blog read, your comments accepted, your email delivered, etc. Preventing anonymity would go a long way toward extending our social values to the Internet. If we don’t bring the same values to the Internet that we bring to our real world interactions, it will eventually fade to nothing more than a source of entertainment and escape, rather than an extension of our “real” lives.

We already see the beginning of this with eBay feedback and new Web 2.0 reputation services. While it seems like a shame to lose the freedom to just be free, a little bit of shame goes a long way toward building a society that really works. Some of us need such pressures to keep us in line.

I happened to spot this in my GMail spam folder. I’ve never seen a character like this in a browser before.  It reminds me of the old days, where individual characters could be constructed by setting each bit.

I don’t understand where my machine would get a font with such a character. I can only think of malevalent reasons for it being there. Any thoughts on how this can happen?  Is this a new virus vector?

I’ve long thought that digital asset management for the masses is going to be one of the big challenges in coming years. Now that our personal photos, home movies, personal correspondence, and most of our productivity are stored on hard drives, the effort and expertise required to management, maintain, and preserve these important keepsakes are beyond the ability of the average user. Even as a tech-savvy poweruser, I struggle with keeping things safely backed up, tracking if things are backed up, making sure that I don’t have too many duplicates, managing multiple versions, etc. I have no idea how my parents handle it, but I’m sure it’s terrifying. It’s a truly complex and dangerous task. All of our important memories are at risk.

Sharpcast has come out with a service that takes all the pain and uncertainty out of the equation, at least for family pictures. Photos from multiple sources are sync’ed (Sharpcast likes to contrast that to uploading), keeping all PCs and mobile devices up-to-date. An entire family or other group can share an album, comment, even chat about particular shots.

Most promising is an upcoming service, code-named Hummingbird, that promises to do the same for all your digital assets including documents. For the road warrior, or simply anyone who transitions from an old PC to a new one, the ability to store what’s important to you in a reliable and remote repository is quite attractive.

I was reading a milk carton this morning (I had already finished the cereal box and spotted the strangest URL I had ever seen. It said organicvalley.coop. I thought “What a poor proofreading job, to put a nonexistent URL on your product package.”

Well, it turns out that there’s nothing wrong with their proofreader. That’s a legitimate domain. You can browse to http://www.organicvalley.coop and read about the people who make my milk. It’s not a fluke domain, either, because there’s a link on there to http://www.farmers.coop.

I checked GoDaddy, and they don’t seem to have a way to register a .coop domain. Where does such a thing come from? It seems so obscure; I wonder how .coop managed to get approved, considering all the other TLDs have been rejected.

More importantly, how do I register chicken.coop?!

Update: Organizations can purchase .coop domains at http://www.nic.coop. Individuals are not eligible to purchase .coop domains.  It appears that someone is squatting (the mind reels with puns) on http://www.chicken.coop.  Darn the luck; it’d be worth forming an organization around that domain name.

What’s happened to GMail?  I used to be able to hover over the sender’s text name and see a pop-up hint showing the actual email address.  That stopped working a week or two ago.  I miss it!

‘Nuff said. Sign up for notification here.