Has almost tripled (up 280%) from a year ago.
Is down 40% since March and 10% since May.Before you start celebrating the latter trend, however, bear in mind that it's part of an annual pattern. According to Secure Computing, "every single year spam volumes increase dramatically in the second half of the year and peak by December/January before declining in the first months of the new year."
The Internet is still in its infancy, relatively speaking, and the struggle over Net bandwidth is still in its early stages as well.
Recently, the bandwidth battle has focused on stingy ISPs in general, Comcast specifically. The company continues to face scrutiny over its network management policies for high-bandwidth ISP customers, particularly those using BitTorrent. Comcast has reluctantly admitted that it arbitrarily blocked certain Internet traffic without warning subscribers.
After pondering the matter for months, the Federal Communications Commission has finally weighed in. The FCC said on Wednesday that Comcast illegally interfered with file-sharing activities on its service and by slowing down BitTorrent traffic, failed to act within the auspices of the law and its agreement with customers.
"Our network management practices were reasonable, wholly consistent with industry practices and ... we did not block access to Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services," Sena Fitzmaurice, a spokeswoman for Comcast told the Washington Post.
Regardless of what Fitzmaurice asserts, Comcast needs to get on the ball and treat its customers better. (My glitchy Comcast DVR -- the third or fourth I've used from them -- is another bone I'd like to pick with the cable giant, but that's for another blog.)
Ultimately, if the Internet is truly going to fulfill its vast potential, we've got to make it easier. We've got to do better with bandwidth/connection issues. And we've got to improve our handling of the increasingly nefarious cesspools of viruses and spam. Comcast should be leading the way on this, rather than sneakily trying to find ways to charge certain customers more.
Yahoo's stock price dipped below $20 today, following a report that billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens has flown the coop. Pickens, angry over the Yahoo-Microsoft dealings, dumped his entire stake of 10 million shares.
"I think that Yahoo management was pathetic," the billionaire reportedly said during a San Francisco Chronicle editorial board meeting he was addressing.
Pickens told the paper that he sold his shares at a loss, as his patience for a deal between the Internet pioneer and Microsoft waned. He declined to reveal the size of his loss, according to the Chronicle.
Yahoo's annual shareholders meeting is set for Friday.
Pickens' share dump is another chapter in the bitter saga. After two months of nasty public sparring and mutual accusations, Yahoo recently made peace with Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor who has been lobbying to take control of the company's board of directors and force a transaction with Microsoft.
Earlier this month, Yahoo announced a settlement with Icahn, who said he will give up his proxy fight to oust all nine of Yahoo's incumbent board members at the company's annual meeting Aug. 1.
It should be a lively annual meeting, with some speculating that Jonathan Miller, who previously served as chairman and CEO of AOL, could be tabbed as the successor to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. Check internetnews.com for breaking news Friday.
I love my laptops, all three of them: my work HP model, and my personal-use IBM and Toshiba. I'm a long-time reviewer of laptops, for CNET, other publications, and one book publisher, mostly in the late 90s and first half of this decade. But I've long been frustrated with a couple of features of laptop hardware.
The biggest issue has been hard drives. I've had my share of hard drives crashes, particularly those in laptops. Or, if not full crashes, then error-prone drives, blue screens of semi-death with hard-to-decipher messages like "IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL," hard drives that take an eternity to boot up, and other strange occurrences.
I haven't been following all the notebook upgrades in speeds and feeds as closely in the past few years. I've been waiting for a winner in the next-gen DVD war (way to go Blu-Ray), and waiting for prices to come down. I've also been waiting for the next trend in storage, and lo and behold it's here -- solid state drives. It's actually been on the scene for a while, so I'm in catch-up mode.
My interest in SSD was sparked by a David Strom article over on Datamation.com, "Laptops with Solid State Drives: Pros and Cons." If you're interested in the future of laptop storage (isn't that all of us??), or you're sick of waiting for your notebook to boot, you should check out the article. The highlights include:
Dell claims that its SSD can improve Latitude D430 performance up to 23 percent and can reduce boot time by up to 34 percent. Other analysts have seen similar results, because you don't have to wait for the drive to spin up or for the rotors to seek the specific place on the platter to read the data.
... The article shows that the newer conventional hard drives, especially those for laptops such as the Hitachi Travelstar line, have several different power-saving states, making them very energy efficient. The tests at Tom's [Hardware] compared several different SSDs and conventional drives, and found that some SSDs, such as from OCZ, provide five times better performance per watt of energy consumed than the conventional drives. Where the SSDs become more efficient is when they are in use more often, such as playing a DVD, or serving up a transaction database.
Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.
The lawsuit asks AOL to produce all information related to the identity of an e-mail address linked to MPD Enforcer 2.0, a blog popular with police officers that has been extremely critical of police leadership at 201 Poplar.
"In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment," the anonymous bloggers write on the site, "Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States....
The bloggers, who operate under the name of Dirk Diggler -- the name of the porn star in "Boogie Nights" -- say their site provides an important service to officers and citizens.
As it should, the lawsuit has sparked protests from free-speech advocates:a
"You can complain about the government, and you should be able to do that without fear of retaliation or threatening actions on the part of the people in these positions," said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based watchdog group.
The ACLU of Tennessee also has cited the right to anonymous speech in expressing support for the bloggers.
Here's hoping the lawsuit is dismissed. Otherwise, other anonymous bloggers hiding behind the names of porn stars real and imagined will be silenced.
Brilliant take on the scourge of digital rights managment (DRM) over at Slashdot.org.
If you've ever tangled with DRM, you know why it's a scourge. Let's say you painstakingly bought and downloaded a movie or song from a web site that uses DRM. Then you wanted to make a backup copy of that song or movie. You wanted to burn it to a disk, or move it to another laptop, or to a portable hard drive or some other device, all of which you should be able to do under fair use laws. With all the hard drive crashes out there, and the hard-drive-eating viruses, it's important to back up your content, right?
With DRM, you couldn't do any of that. In most cases you had to leave the content on the hard drive to which you downloaded it. Plus, when you wanted to hear the song or watch the movie, you probably had to be connected to the Internet to allow the DRM to kick in, which can be a pain in a mobile scenario. Then the DRM gods let you then play the content (most of time).
Then comes the final stick in the eye. The web site that issued the DRM goes bye-bye. It takes its servers offline. The site's DRM beast goes the way of the Dodo, and your content no longer works.
That's what is happening with Yahoo's Music Store. A Slashdot writer points to a great piece on the topic at Ars Technica. It's a refreshingly honest take on DRM:
The bad dream of DRM continues. Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good -- and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. Sure, it's bad news and yet another example of the sheer lobotomized brain-deadness that has characterized music DRM, but the reaction of most music fans will be: 'Yahoo had an online music store?'...
DRM makes things harder for legal users; it creates hassles that illegal users won't deal with; it (often) prevents cross-platform compatibility and movement between devices. In what possible world was that a good strategy for building up the nascent digital download market?
The only possible rationales could be 1) to control piracy (which, obviously, it has had no effect on, thanks to the CD and the fact that most DRM is broken) or 2) to nickel-and-dime consumers into accepting a new pay-for-use regime that sees moving tracks from CD to computer to MP3 player as a 'privilege' to be monetized.
There's some lively discusssion on the topic from the Slashdot readers. This response caught me eye, if you'll forgive the sophomoric language:
DRM itself is retarded. It is completely ineffective against piracy; you can get torrents of the new Batman movie and you can get illegal downloads of every song in the top 40 Billboard list. All it does is inconvience honest, paying customers, and that is past retarded and nearing brain dead.
Pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G is manifesting itself on auction site eBay, where eager buyers are bidding in excess of US$1,000 to get what's turning out to be a hot commodity.
The demand for the iPhone remains high even off the Internet, with lines forming Monday outside an Apple store in New York to buy the limited stock of the devices.
Launched on July 11, the phone sold more than 1 million units worldwide over the first weekend, according to analysts.Wait a minute. Did I miss something? Last I saw it was Apple claiming it sold a million of these things over the first weekend, not "analysts," or even one analyst (unless it was that well-known Apple analyst, Steve Jobs). If I'm wrong, feel free to send me the correct info. But I suspect we can score one for the Apple Spin Machine, which I had expected.
Yahoo announced a settlement with investor Carl Icahn over the online giant's line-up of candidates for board of directors, including the addition of the investor activist himself.
The company said the board is being expanded to 11 members, one of whom will be Icahn, along with two other added positions. ...
The settlement ends a proxy fight for control of the company. Icahn, who bought his shares earlier this year, advocates selling Yahoo! to competitor Microsoft.
Former U.S. President Lyndon Johnson once said of FBI director (and noted cross-dresser) J. Edgar Hoover, "It's probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in." Bostock and Yang appear to be applying the same unified urine theory to this case. But if they think that by co-opting Icahn they will silence him and quell his desire to protect his nearly 69 million shares in Yahoo by selling the company at a reasonable and realistic price, I suspect they will be sorely disappointed.
More likely the pair grasped a short-term solution to avoid a looming battle for control of the board of directors at the Aug. 1 shareholders meeting. This they probably achieved. Great. What next?
That's a question Yahoo has been unable to answer adequately for several years as the online ad market (read: Google) has passed the Internet pioneer by. I'd say the answer is a top-level shake-up (goodbye Yang) and then a sale, both by the end of the year.
A lot of us have been scratching our heads over the San Francisco geek-holds-city-network-hostage story from last week.
Key details of the story are missing. What exactly did engineer Terry Childs do and why? Is the network still working fine, as reported?
Maybe I've watched too many movies this summer with my 11-year-old son, but is this a situation like that chubby network geek in Jurassic Park, the guy who played Newman on Seinfeld, who shut down the whole Jurassic Park network so he could attempt to sell dinosaur DNA to the bad guys? Then Samuel L. Jackson couldn't get the network back up?
We still don't have the full Childs story, but Paul Venezia of Infoworld has gone a long way toward filling in the blanks. In his article, Venezia interviews an anonymous colleague of Childs.
There are some very technical details in the piece about FiberWAN networks, servers, and Cisco certifications that might put us non-network-loving readers to sleep. But many of the details about Childs are fascinating and give a glimpse into the mind of a talented but warped network admin. He sounds like some of the guys I've worked with: brilliant, but lacking the social skills to navigate a highly political work environment. (Sounds a little like yours truly.)
It's also a cautionary tale to managers about how to NOT handle a relationship with an engineer.
Venezia's source says about Childs:
Terry also, obviously, had a terrible relationship with his superiors. I should point out that he's not just a network engineer -- he was the lead network engineer for the entire City. His bosses were all managerial rather than technical, and while the other engineers did not actually report to Terry, they did defer to him in any technical matters. Even the network architect left it to Terry to actually figure out implementation. Terry felt that his direct superior was intrusive, incompetent, and obstructive, and that the managers above him had no real idea of what was going on, and were more interested in office politics than in getting anything done.
[Childs] complained that they spent more time doing paperwork -- change requests, documentation, etc. -- than actually implementing or fixing anything (a common complaint among engineers, I know). He complained about being overworked (which he was, and which his colleagues are even more now) and that many of his colleagues were incompetent freeloaders (also not entirely without basis).You could see him getting red in the face whenever he started talking about his department. And once you were on Terry's bad side (which thankfully I never was), that's where you stayed, and you'd get only the most grudging assistance from him from then on. Whether any of his complaints were valid or not, I can't really say, but I don't think that's as relevant as how Terry felt. ...
As for Terry's character, I can imagine this happening. He takes great personal and professional pride in his work -- to a fault. He can be very defensive if someone suggests there's something wrong with the way his network is set up, and that's been a problem for us (as his customer) a couple of times. Terry has a bad temper.
He's the sort of person who, while his bile is up, won't budge an inch -- and then will call you a couple of hours later and acknowledge that maybe your suggestion was right, after all, or maybe here's an even better way to handle things.
There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid.Whoa. I think I know one software engineer whose blog won't be showing up on any Google searches in the near future!
Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" -- web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people -- and the infrastructure required to support them.
Some of the web properties are useful (some extremely useful - search), but most of them primarily help people waste time online (blogger, youtube, orkut, etc).Sad to say, but I think he sort of has a point here.
This orientation towards cool, but not necessarily useful or essential software really affects the way the software engineering is done. ...And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.But that's OK, because as we've all read in the past year, Google is mounting a challenge to Microsoft in the enterprise arena, right?...
I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.Sergey also wrote that he couldn't figure out exactly what Google managers did, even though they appeared very busy (and cool, no doubt).
I can't write code for the sake of the technology alone -- I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work. Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!This last one, not surprisingly, was the main target of vitriol from commenters on his 1-800-MAGIC blog. Those open source "fanatics," as Sergey calls them, are an excitable bunch.
First came the joystick. Then came the motion-sensing Wii remote. Now get ready for another radical and rather unsettling leap in video games technology: thought control.
Satoru Iwata, the president and chief executive of Nintendo - which is expected to sell about 25 million units of its successful Wii video games console this financial year - has no doubts about the next gaming boom. "As soon as we think something in our brain, it will appear within a video game," he told The Times in an exclusive interview.
"You'll probably need to wear some kind of hat or helmet or something."That's a small price to pay to manipulate things with your mind, I'd say. According to the article, "the world's first thought-controlled game is expected to be launched by the Sydney company Emotiv by the end of this year."
Police forces and other law-enforcement agencies have shown an interest in using thought-reading technology to replace lie-detector tests.There's just something about police and government officials having a device that can read your mind which I find troubling. But I guess it's the next logical step after reading your emails, tracking your web activity and listening to your phone calls.
Yahoo Inc.Chairman Roy Bostock and Chief ExecutiveJerry Yang blasted dissident shareholder Carl Icahn as a "corporate agitator" who would "strike any deal" withMicrosoft Corp. In a letter to shareholders, the(MSFT) to "get his money back quickly." Yahoo board members also said the company is willing to sell the Web portal for $33 a share or higher toMicrosoft in a deal that delivers "certainty of value and closing."
Icahn had accused the
Yahoo board of botching the aborted merger talks with Microsoft , but the company has fired back by portraying him as a greedy investor looking for a quick and easy profit.
"Carl Icahn bought his stock two months ago for an estimated average cost of less than
$25 per share," Bostock and Yang said. "He is well-known as a corporate agitator with a short-term approach to his investments."
They added: "His short-term approach gives Mr. Icahn a strong incentive to strike any deal with
Microsoft that enables him to recover his investment and get back his money quickly, even a deal that does not provide full and fair value to you. Is that in the interests of all stockholders? Clearly, it is not."
Translation: Our company's competitive woes and low stock price aren't the issue here. The real issue is that Mr. Icahn is a greedy, heartless corporate pirate --and everyone knows it!
I'm not sure how that's going to play at the Aug. 1 annual meeting, when shareholders decide the fate of the current Yahoo board. Still, Bostock and Yang have two more weeks to smear Icahn. I think they should mine his Facebook page for compromising pictures or political manifestos, stuff like that. But hey, I don't have to tell two Internet search experts how to do their jobs.
That nice, shiny press release that Apple issued yesterday failed to point out one important fact. Apple counts "sales" as any device it has sold to wireless network operators such as AT&T. The network operators then re-sell the devices to actual end users. According to analysts, only 425,000 end users bought iPhones over the weekend.It's actually one analyst, Gene Munster of Piper Jaffrey, who did some napkin number-crunching based on total stores, hours open and average number of phones activated at each store to arrive at that 425,000 figure. As this Fortune article points out, Munster issued a revised report to clients late Monday saying customer sales may have accelerated as the weekend went on.
The UK's privacy tsar has made a plea to the government not to rush through a centralised database of all UK communications.
Speaking at the launch of the Information Commissioner's Office's Annual Report 2008, information commissioner Richard Thomas said the rumoured database of UK phone and internet communications would be "a step too far for the British way of life".
I mean, it's hard to imagine Michael Chertoff saying, "I think that what President Bush proposes is a threat to our individual rights and freedoms."
It appears that city officials in San Francisco have themselves a sticky problem. And, as detailed in this news report, a seriously unhappy network administrator, Terry Childs, 43, now sits in jail on $5 million dollar bail.
His alleged offense? Locking the city out of its own computer system.
Childs reportedly was fired from his job as a network administrator for San Francisco's citywide computer infrastructure. Or, at least they tried to fire him.
But Childs, who city officials claim has been recently disciplined for poor performance, apparently wasn't thrilled with the idea. And when Terry gets upset, he knows how to express his disgruntled inner child.
He created a password that allowed him -- only him -- to access the city's WAN (wide area network). That's the network that holds payroll files, emails from city officials, and inmates booking records. You know, the information that allows the city to keep functioning.
And no, when the police arrived, he wasn't willing to give up the password. Or actually, he gave them the password -- but not the right one. (This guy has a wild sense of humor.) Hence his residency in the city jail.
Here's a delicious detail:
"As part of his alleged sabotage, Childs engineered a tracing system to monitor what other administrators were saying and doing related to his personnel case, law enforcement officials said."
City officials are, understandably, pretty peeved. At a press conference, San Fran district attorney Kamala Harris said that Childs has committed four felonies. You can almost feel the screws turning on this misguided soul.
So far, the city's system is working without a glitch. But of course without that critical password, there's only one person who can get into it.
City payroll records indicate that Childs' base pay was $126k in 2007, and he earned an additional $22k for being on-call. Clearly, part of his problem is salary: trying to make ends meet on under $150k in San Fran would stress out anyone.
So it's a classic stand off. Childs sits behind bars, and the city is locked out of its multi-million dollar network. My guess is that he'll eventually crack -- there are no PCs in the Big House, so it's a not a place he wants to spend extra time in.
Perhaps the best part of the story are the comments posted along with the report on the SFGate site. Since San Fran is a famously geeky place -- arguably the Geek capital of the world -- the comments reflect a distinct Nerds Rule ethos:
"I think the password is.. dog something. No, not dog, might be vegasbanana29, nooo.."
--thrasherbetty
"$22,534 to be on call and even though he's in jail, the system is still up and running, even though everyone is locked out? Come on, admit it, the money was well spent! Maybe someone should figure out why he's disgruntled and stop making him unhappy. Obviously the guy knows what he's doing."
--mrburns
"This idiot actually got paid for on-call? I want that job!"
--sjjoe999
"Cut the red wire! The red wire!"
--KWillets
Reddit, Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz, Mixx, Newsvine, Propeller, plus five more I've never heard of. Is it just me, or are there too many aggregation sites?
It started as a good idea. Rather than visit your 10 favorite sites, news aggregators would help you quickly find, comment on, and recommend interesting, off-the-beaten-path stories or videos, etc. Then, maybe that "cool" story you discovered could "go viral!" All your fake MySpace "friends" would hail your awesome web surfing skills!
But now there's too many of them. It's just another hassle. Every time I turn around, there's a new aggregation site -- along with the obligatory cute little logo -- posted at the bottom of a news story on a big site, pleading with me to add this story to their precious aggregation site.
Who has time to go to 10 different aggregation sites? And don't get me started on the hassles of RSS. Or LinkedIn. And I don't want to subscribe to your damn blog. Calgon, take me away. Just let me go to my favorite sites and leave me alone, news aggregators. There's so many of you, you're embarrassing yourself.
And who will aggregate the aggregators? Heck, maybe a site that gives you the very best of Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc., already exists.
OK, so I Googled it, and something like that does exist. It's called OurSignal. How fun.
Here's what it does:
OurSignal is the latest site from the makers of CushyCMS, designed to bring you the freshest and most popular news from across the Web. It's a mashup of several social bookmarking sites focused on news, including reddit, digg, delicious and hackernews.
So we'll keep on eye on that headache-inducing site. Maybe it will start a new "we aggregate the aggregators" trend.
Next week's (somewhat related) rant: Why I Hate YouTube.
Yahoo Inc. will introduce a tool for Web developers Thursday that is designed to expand the scale of its struggling search business and help create new competitors to Google.
Right. Sounds like we got a real Google-killer on our hands. This should sway a lot of votes for the current Yahoo board of directors at the Aug. 1 annual meeting.The company said the free tool will allow developers to build customized search services based on its own search technology -- paving the way for new entrants. Yahoo hopes the service will increase the number of searches done through its service and generate more advertising revenue, since sites that incorporate the tool will eventually run Yahoo search ads.
Daniel Lyons is giving up the "Secret Diary of Steve Jobs" and the unforgettable character he created, "Fake Steve," a parody of Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs.
Lyons began the "Secret Diary" blog in late 2006. Even as the blog grew in popularity, Lyons remained anonymous until last August, when he was identified as the blog's author by the Times.In a blog item Wednesday, the former Forbes writer and future Newsweek columnist said he would soon be launching a new site under his real name and publishing a bound collection of Fake Steve's "greatest hits."
Bad firings in corporate America might not get as much press -- or as much scrutiny -- as a baseball manager's demise might, but they can be far more damaging, and not just for the employee on the chopping block. They can tarnish a company's reputation among business partners, vendors and consumers, as well as make it difficult to recruit and retain talent, say workplace experts.The WSJ article offers several examples of "bad firings," including:
A tech VP was fired a month after he had moved his family cross-country and started his job. Reason: Change of plans.
A sales rep who had been exceeding his targets his two months on the job is fired. The new VP who wielded the ax could offer no reason for the action.
A corporate trainer said she got an email from her employer around lunchtime "with instructions to call a 1-800 number. It led to a voice recording saying that the company, a small technology firm, was closing its doors and all employees needed to leave right away."I know what you're thinking. If you're writing the screenplay for "Nightmare Firings In Corporate America", you might want to punch those incidents up a bit. The point of the WSJ article, though, is to offer advice on how to fire people. Specifically:
Do it in person (if possible), in private and at the end of the day.
Offer a reason.
Let them choose the size of their severance package -- the sky's the limit! (Sorry, this option only is for CEOs, and negotiated at time of hire.)This last one strikes me as important. Firing people is 1) hard and 2) no fun. I've fired people, and I've done it poorly. Everyone's nervous, whether the action is warranted and inevitable or sudden and unexpected. For the person doing the firing, you know you're about to do something that could have a disastrous effect on another person's finances. It's nothing to feel good about, even if the decision to dismiss is the right one for the organization.
Consider training on how to fire employees.
Microsoft on Monday said it would be willing to reopen talks to buy all or part of Yahoo, but only if a new Yahoo board is elected, a major boost for investor Carl Icahn's board slate.Which, not to brag, reminds me exactly of what I predicted on Feb. 1, when I wrote:
"Whether Microsoft acquires Yahoo remains to be seen."Just kidding. I would never go out on a limb like that. But I will venture that it appears Yahoo's reluctant hand may be forced. From internetnews:
Microsoft, which broke off talks in early May to buy the Internet company for $47.5 billion, said it would enter into talks immediately if a new board were elected at Yahoo's Aug. 1 stockholder meeting.
Billionaire financier Icahn, a major Yahoo shareholder who is running a slate of candidates to replace the Yahoo board, said in an open letter released on Monday that he had spoken frequently with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over the last week.
"Steve made it clear to me that if a new board were elected, he would be interested in discussing a major transaction with Yahoo," Icahn said.
I bet he would, because in April I wrote a little blog post I like to call Yahoo Is Desperate, Microsoft Maybe More So, in which I cited comments from a couple of Gartner Research analysts (quoted in ComputerWorld):
In a presentation at a Gartner-sponsored conference in Las Vegas, analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said Microsoft has not responded to the market, is overburdened by nearly two decades of legacy code and decisions, and faces serious competition on a whole host of fronts that will make Windows moot unless the software developer acts.Not much as changed since then, other than Microsoft walked away from the deal in early May, figuring (quite accurately) that Yahoo -- which has lost the search battle with Google and which faces a shareholder uprising -- really doesn't have any viable options other than to be acquired.
Internet veterans might remember eight or so years ago, when model Cindy Margolis claimed she was the most downloaded woman on the Net. Her claims were vehemently contradicted by the model/Internet-pioneer Danni Ashe. Much was made of the story, in certain circles, especially the Howard-Stern-fan circles. Ah, the 90s.
Anyway, I was pining for that decade when I read about Mozilla's Firefox 3 browser. The good people at Guinness have certified Firefox 3 as the most downloaded software in one 24-hour period, drawing 8,002,530 downloads on its June 17 premiere. (Never mind that there wasn't really a record to break. Mozilla's got it now, so suck it Microsoft and your semi-retired chairman.)
I love Firefox 3. As Danni Ashe is more feature-rich than Cindy Margolis (just go with me here), Firefox is more feature-laden than the No. 1 browser, Internet Explorer. The tabbing and the built-in search bar at the bottom of the browser are two of my favorite tools.
I'm someone who hung onto Netscape Navigator for as long as possible back in the day. She was my first love, and I resisted IE's flirtations. I resisted until it became obvious that IE was just better.
So it's great that a better browser is back on the scene. Let's hope that Firefox 3 is as good as advertised. I'm interested in how this part will work: Mozilla says the new release warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.
A new study by Forrester Research reviewed 90 blogs run by business-to-business companies in the Fortune 500, and surveyed about twice that many B2B marketers. Like most businesses, these companies want to use the Internet to reach their customers. ...Translation: Most B2B blogs merely are broadcasting corporate marketing propaganda. Hardly surprising, since most of the corporate blogs are launched and run by marketers.
Forrester found that most B2B blogs are "dull, drab, and don't stimulate discussion." Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news.
The bottom line is that the goal of corporate blogs should be to build a rapport with the target audience. Rapport leads to trust, which leads to a positive image, which over time leads to more sales. It's not duplicitous, it's smart, and it's a recognition of the limits and possibilities of the medium.
- Plan the blog and its features carefully (rather than slap one up and start posting press releases)
- Understand your audience's needs beyond whatever your product may offer them
- Encourage conversation and interaction
