June 2004 High Water Mark
~1643 visits, and almost enough to buy a $tarbucks.
As seen on The Canadian Marketing Association's (CMA) CMA e-Communicator - June 2004
"The Next Killer App Online" Is Here - And It's Centrsource What is CentrSource: It's an online utility where consumers can go and respond to virtually any advertisement in their local area, whether its television, print,online or in-store. All at their convenience with total privacy and security. With no intrusive pop-ups or banners. What it means to Advertisers: CentrSource offers dvertisers permission driven responses that link their online and offline content in a way that is completely complementary - and there are no set up fees or admin fees to use the utility. You only pay when a consumer "raises their hand". And it takes literally minutes to set up. |
Economist.com | The future of advertising
More people are rejecting traditional sales messages, presenting the ad industry with big challenges
...
The advertising industry is passing through one of the most disorienting periods in its history. This is due to a combination of long-term changes, such as the growing diversity of media, and the arrival of new technologies, notably the internet. Consumers have become better informed than ever before, with the result that some of the traditional methods of advertising and marketing simply no longer work.
...
There are plenty of alternatives to straightforward advertising, including a myriad of marketing and communications services, some of which are called “below-the-line” advertising. They range from public relations to direct mail, consumer promotions (such as coupons), in-store displays, business-to-business promotions (like paying a retailer for shelf-space), telemarketing, exhibitions, sponsoring events, product placements and more....this part of the industry was worth some $750 billion worldwide last year, estimates WPP, one of the world's biggest advertising and marketing groups.
...
After the technology bust it was easy to dismiss the internet. But the phenomenal success of many e-commerce firms, such as Amazon and eBay, shows that millions of people are becoming comfortable buying goods and services online. Many more are using the internet to research products, services and prices for purchases made offline. Some 70% of new-car buyers in America, for instance, use websites to determine which vehicle to buy—and often to obtain competing quotes from dealers.
...
Such consumers can be targeted by internet advertisers and, in some cases, their responses accurately measured. A surge in online advertising is being led by paid-for text-links dished up by search engines such as Google and Yahoo! The response rate from people clicking on paid links can be as low as 1%—about the same as direct mail, which remains one of the biggest forms of advertising. But there is an important difference: internet advertisers usually pay only if someone clicks on their link. This is the equivalent of paying for the delivery of junk mail only to households that read it.
..
How are companies and the advertising industry responding to these trends in media consumption? Some people do not believe they amount to a sea-change, while others are simply hoping it will not come to pass on their watch, reckons Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP's chief executive.
This is my implementation of John Conway's (Game of) Life, written entirely in Javascript (or ECMAScript, if you will), titled Jeff's Pretend Life
includes source code, under the GNU General Public License, and links to other resources.
also under the Computing/better mousetrap category is a javascript library to makes writing a Javascript application easier.
A great Job! Someone should hire this guy, fast!
I missed it the first time but Ray Slakinski posed the some questions via an email to Local Halton MP Candidates.
WE should all be doing this
It's tough to find information about the WIPO, but Cory posted on Boing Boing a great resource inculding a first time peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published. As he wrote when it started
There's no transparency into this process for most of the world. The doors are locked, the minutes are sealed, and you need to be accredited just to sit in the room.
WIPO Broadcast Treaty: consolidated three-day notes
The Broadcast Treaty is a proposal from a WIPO Subcommittee that's supposedly about stopping "signal theft." But along the way,
this proposal has turned into a huge, convoluted hairball that threatens to make the PC illegal, trash the public domain, break copyleft and put a Broadcast Flag on the Internet. The treaty negotiation process is unbelievably convoluted and hard-to-follow, and they've just wrapped up the latest round in Geneva. But for the first time, a really large group of "civil society" orgs were accredited to attend. Me and another EFF staffer and the Coordinator of the Union for the Public Domain created a heavily editorialized impressionistic transcript of the meeting (EFF mirror, UPD mirror),
trying to untie the knots in the negotiation. This is the first time that a really exhaustive peek inside a WIPO treaty negotiation has ever been published -- get it while it's legal!
Cory points out that NDP supports bad Internet treaties as reported in the The Star and by CIPPIC (Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic) in it's look at Election 2004: Internet Issues
In particular :
The NDP endorsed the Committee's recommendations on swift ratification of the controversial WIPO Internet treaties, and even more surprisingly, it gave its approval to an extended licensing scheme for educational materials, despite the heated opposition from the education community.
Andre Guirard submitted a great idea to the SearchDomino tool shed, a way to read/set document fields from view without writing a agent for each field you what to change.
He has code for R5 and R6, however I found I small boo boo in the R5 code in that
REM "Formula for R5";
choices := @DocFields;
fieldName := @Prompt([OkCancelEditCombo]; "Field Name"; "Enter Field
Name."; ""; choices);
FIELD DUID := @text(@DocumentUniqueID);
oldValue := @GetDocField (DUID;fieldname);
newValue := @Explode(@Prompt([OkCancelEdit]; "New Field Value"; "Please
enter new value (use ";" for multivalues -- don't put space after ;)."; @Implode
(@Text(oldvalue); ";")); ";");
adjValue :=
@If(@IsNumber(oldValue); @TextToNumber(newValue);
@IsTime(oldValue); @TextToTime(newValue);
newValue);
@If(!@IsError(adjValue);
@SetField(fieldName ; adjValue);
@Prompt([YesNo]; "Change field value"; "New value not of same type as
old value. Set field to text?");
@SetField(fieldName ; newValue);
""
)
oldValue := @GetField(fieldname);
,but there is no @getField function in R5.0X. So I've attempted to correct this by using FIELD DUID := @text(@DocumentUniqueID);
oldValue := @GetDocField (DUID;fieldname);
Via: Charlie's Diary comes word that Mr. Stross has advance copies of the hard cover of his new and soon to be published novel Iron Sunrise, the sequel to his great Singularity Sky novel.
Charlie quotes the June 28'Th issue of Publisher's Weekly which ran a starred advance review. It goes like this:
Best known for his short fiction, Stross shows that he's a master of the novel form as well in this exciting sequel to 2003's acclaimed Singularity Sky, serving up compelling space opera and cutting-edge tech with a tasty dash of satire. In the 24th century, a McWorld ("bland, comfortable, tolerant ... boring") called New Moscow apparently has been destroyed by trade rival New Dresden -- but not before New Moscow launched its own Slower-Than-Light (STL) counterstrike: a massive ship accelerated to 80% the speed of light. The U.N., now central Earth government, knows New Dresden was set up. They need the STL's recall code, now known only to a handful of New Moscow's ambassadors -- but someone has been systematically assassinating them. U.N. special operative Rachel Mansour and her husband, engineer Martin Springfield, must protect the last living ambassador and find out who's really responsible for the whole mess. Stross skillfully balances suspense and humor throughout, offering readers -- especially fans of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod -- a fascinating future that seems more than possible.
Which is not bad, for a summary that completely omits the major characters and main subplot ... not to mention the talking cat sidekick.
Via vowe dot net comes word of
A tracker, a marker, and a sniper. Professional hunters, feared for their astonishing skills. Their target is a very special one...
Cory Doctorow talks (via Boing Boing) to Microsoft Research about the problems with DRM (Digital Rights Management) and why DRM is bad for society, business, and artists.
The Short answer is :
Cory explains each point in a easy to understand manner, with small words even a elective representative can follow. The straight goods in ~17 K. Let's see if Microsoft and others are listening....
- That DRM systems don't work
- That DRM systems are bad for society
- That DRM systems are bad for business
- That DRM systems are bad for artists
- That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT
clevercactus is in first public beta release, even if it missed Bloomsday by a day.
clevercactus share is a private and secure environment to share files with people you know. It is simple and easy to use, it is free for individual users, educational institutions, and non-profit corporations, and it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Groover for the rest of us?
one of 2 very anticipated tools (Chandler being the other)
Via A List Apart, a very nice and practical example of using CSS to get that 2 or 3 columns look (Look Ma, no Tables!) which is so very suitable for most Content web sites (Blog or regular marketing content site), and 99% of the rest of them too.
So well explained even I think I know what's going on.
For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.
So here is The Two Things
A few favorites :
The Two Things about Accounting:
1. The trial balance must balance.
2. There's a lot of "grey area."
...
The Two Things about Software Engineering:
1. There is no such thing as bug-free software.
2. Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.
...
The Two Things about Teaching History:
1. A good story is all they'll remember, not the half hour of analysis on either side of it.
2. They think it's about answers, but it's really about questions.
..
The Two Things about Engineering:
1) It's all about tradeoffs.
2) The tradeoffs are all about money, time, and quality.
..
The Two Things about Economics:
1. Incentives matter.
2. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
..
The Two Things about Blogging:
1. Everyone who runs one is a kook.
2. Everyone who reads one is a kook.
I've been accepted and have added Google Adsense see Lower right)
Let the hundreds of nano-dollars roll in!
Monty Python: Fellowship of the Ring
A nod's as good as a wink to a blind bat! ...SAY NO MORE!!
Via The Bitter Endl
Development phase, by its old name | Truly representative name for the phase |
---|---|
Analysis | Dream |
Design | Guess and Waffle |
Build | Hack and Play |
Test | Wobble and Groan |
Deploy | Push and Pray |
Support | Duck and Deny |
VIa the The New York Times (free registration required) is a interesting article on Googles AdSense.
The article starts about how technology has changed how we measure and think about intelligence : speed and accuracy in handling numbers was a mark of intellectual distinction until the appearance of calculators. No more. And retaining facts, names, and dates still is (hence "Jeopardy"), but Google and the Internet is quickly eroding that. The article does not mention that this has been going on for a long time; Homer no doubt complained how reading and writing was destroying civilization as evidenced by the decline of 6 hour memorized poetry. And remember how Chess was the mark of "smartness", well your likely too young to remember how 40 years ago Chess playing and AI were linked together. And I'm not even going to touch spelling and spell checkers, in case my own spell checker takes offence.
The article then goes to the heart of the article; the board ways computers are changing our mode of thought and interactions in unexpected ways.
As Ebay is changing the small business - by changing the smallest business of all: the yard sale, and blogs are rewriting the rules of publishing and journalism, so to is AdSense changing the rules of Advertising and the business models that make the small scale publishing/journalism business possible. And it does so by connecting web sites with ~150,00 potential advertisers without adding sales staff, or prepare media kits. Hers the key paragraph:
Why does that matter? It completes the publishing revolution brought on by the Internet. The first stage was the liberation of the reader, who, thanks to browsers, could look at publications in any part of the world. Next was the liberation of would-be publishers. Thanks to blogging tools, anyone can present his or her views online. And now, thanks to automated ad sales, small publishers have a more viable hope of creating a business, and keeping independent voices, than they did even a year ago. A. J. Liebling's wisecrack that "freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one" takes on new meaning when technical and financial barriers to creating a Web-based press drop so low.
"Free expression" has always been freest when it has rested on a solid business base. Technology's latest unexpected effect on culture may be to help revive a diverse exchange of views.
Via Slashdot comes "Campaigning for Copyright in Canada" from Digital Copyright Canada (tag line : All Canadian Citizens are "Rights Holders" ) and Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic with a List of Issues and Questions to button hole your candidates
They has responses from 2 parties out of 5 (so far) on these issues and questions.
They also provide background details on the questions raised, but in the Time Honored Tradition of us ADD internet types here's the list :
Via Boing Boing comes word of a Reservoir Dogs/Star Wars mashup by the same fine folks who did Trooper Clerks, and while you're waiting here always Stuck in a Room with R2
Via MetaFilter comes Republican Survivor. Hint : you dn't have to fill the "email" field, just click on the button or link.
Don't forget to checkout the Cast of Characters
Something to do till we find out who gets 'voted off the island', in the Great White North
I've discovered a very nice piece by Richard S. Tallent : Rules for Successful Consultants, to Summarize
Via Hack the Planet:
[ ] The Singularity
[ ] Inscrutable artifacts abandoned by post-humans
[ ] Humanity oppressed by condescending post-humans
[ ] Humans vs. post-humans
[ ] Longing to return to the abandoned/destroyed Earth
[ ] Uploads/Downloads/Backups
[ ] Culture clash between people who back up and people who don't
[ ] Blowing your head off with a plasma blaster
[ ] Direct neural interfaces
[ ] >3-dimensional GUIs while jacked in
[ ] Humans getting computer viruses
[ ] A galaxy-spanning web of teleportation gates/portals
[ ] Getting irradiated while retrieving a priceless artifact
course for tv or moives it would be a much shorter list....
Yet another update on Cisco's Linksys WRT54G: Threat overstated, finder of vulnerability says, apparently NOT the end of the world, just western civilisation....go back to sleep. under WifI
posted by Cory Doctorow, via Boing Boing comes word of TheyWorkForYou a project from the FaxYourMP team. It web-ifies the British Parliamentary record and makes the entire thing commentable, searchable and permalinkable.
Stuff like Voting record, Performance data, how many times Spoke, Attendance, how many times they votes against their party.
Brilliant! We need this is Canada, before the NEXT election. Boy would I love to have a printout of the voting record and notable quotes from Hansard of my MP when she rings the front door!
Thank you for your Sacrifices of 60 years ago. And not to forget The Dieppe Raid.
InfoWorld asks : Merging the phone system into the enterprise network makes perfect sense. But is it worth the investment?,
The short answer : Yes, if you are putting in a new phone system or replacing an existing one anyway, otherwise the cost may not be worth the saving or new functionality.
Here's their 411 On VoIP
They also have a useful Enterprise VoIP glossary: (glossary are they secret weapon of added value!)
The image still haunts, because of the events that followed, and because so little has really changed.
Peking Duck comments on Nicholas Kristoff, an eyewitness, as he recalls and refects in the NYT on the June 4 massacre at Tiananmen Square:
The night was filled with gunfire — and with Chinese standing their ground to block the troops. I parked my bike at Tiananmen, and the People's Liberation Army soon arrived from the other direction. The troops fired volley after volley at the crowd on the Avenue of Eternal Peace; at first I thought these were blanks, but then the night echoed with screams and people began to crumple.
Glenn Fleishman reports that
"According to InternetNews.com, a tech consultant discovered that even if you turn the remote administration feature off on a Linksys WRT54G -- the single bestselling Wi-Fi device in the world -- you can still remotely access it through ports 80 and 443. Linksys sets the HTTP username to nothing and password to 'admin' on all of its devices by default. Web site scanning from anywhere in the world to devices that have routable Internet-facing addresses would allow script kiddie remote access, at which point you could flash the unit with new firmware, extract the WEP or WPA key, or just mess up someone's configuration and change the password."
Vinny points to Chu Yeow's redemption in a blog: Your own private CVS repository
It might be at a low enough level for yours truly, if I stand on my tippy toes. Maybe...
Via Metafilter comes VoteSelector Quiz Just answer the questions below to determine which candidate and his or her political party most closely matches your political views.
Either that or they are Alien stomach bursters! via Defamer
Update May 15 2005: Welcome! (and how did you find out about this page?
See also : Ka's evil twin : Astonishingly fucked-up car commercial;
Need directions?;
Inside Jack and Totally Gridbag;
Feed the Models
or Late 4 work or
Wok boarding;
Kikkoman from the Planet Soy
or Jaws in 30 seconds or
Alien in 30 seconds or
The Shining, The Exorcist, The Titanic or
SpiderMan in LegoLand
or Lots more under Humour links
Via TechDirt comes word that my federal MP Sarmite Bulte thinks that the "user rights" established under the Copyright - known as exceptions, that allow users to freely use portions of copyrighted work for such things as research, private study, news reporting, and criticism - lead to "freebies.
It looks like Bulte's committee is trying to narrow Fair Use to it's most limited interpretation - if not eliminate it altogether.
Is this another example of politicians fixing the law?
Perhaps she can spend some of her summer reading up on The Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture.
I talked to her yesterday. I'm thinking I should try to get another word with her. Given it's "Election Night in Canada", it's my best chance for ~4 years.
No your eyes have NOT gone all buggy! I've applied a new template, the TicTac by Mr SimpleBits : Dan Cederholm.
I expect to continue too tweak the template over the next thousand years to my dis-liking. For the record, it was very easy to do. The hardest part was figuring out which parts of the "old" customization to keep, where to put them, and how to make them work best with the new template look and feel.
Lotus the First Twenty Years, brings back many (suppressed) memories.
Wonder what the next 20 will bring? Via Vowe dot net