Various and Sundry: Now Everything But Photography

I can be bought.

And it can be profitable to the both of us.

I’ll set the price at $1,000,000.

That’s not much these days.  That price won’t buy you many 30 second spots in prime time television.  Heck, depending on the show you’re buying ad time on, you might not get more than a minute.

I’m offering you something better:

My blog.  It’s for sale.  I’ll change the name to “[Your Company's Name Here] Presents Various and Sundry.”  Heck, I’ll buy that as a domain name.  I’ll make you the exclusive advertiser on a blog that updates at least five days a week.

You’ll get better than a million dollars’ worth of press coverage on the deal.  What better story for the tech press to fawn over for a week or two than your company buying up a no name meaningless blog.  It’s an amazing publicity stunt that makes no sense.  It’s PERFECT internet fodder.

This blog doesn’t have a big readership.  It’s definitely under a thousand readers.  It’s probably closer to 500.  It makes so little sense for you to sponsor it that it’ll command great attention.  We can do a joint press release that’ll light up the blogosphere.  I can get on one of those crazy Revision3 video podcasts.  I’d happily be a guest on Net@Nite. TechCrunch would be all over this.  I’m available to do press with all the cable news stations.  I can blog the experience, to boot.  It’s material for me; it’s tons of publicity for you.  I’ll wear a baseball cap and a t-shirt with your company’s name on it when doing all of these shows.

I can even talk to the point that this deal will mark the end of the second web boom.

I am a friggin’ sell out.  Just go ahead and buy me now.  My e-mail address is linked to my name at the top of the right column.

Sadly, someone already beat me to Buymyblog.com.

But I won’t let that stop me.  Others sell pixels for a dollar a shot.  Others promise to do outlandish things.  Some sell space for tattoos on their body, but I’m not going that far. I’m skipping all the work part.  I’m just going to do my thing and take your money, sponsor!
You need something more personal?  I’m going to be a Dad this fall.  I can be a stay-at-home Dad with your million dollars.

Wait, I forgot about the taxes.  Better make it two million bucks, just to be safe.

GoldenPalace, are you reading this? Call me.  I like to play poker, too. . .

Barring all that, I’ll take a Drobo for lesser terms.

Twitter Starts Blacklisting Spammers

You know you’ve made it as a communications medium when you start attracting spammers. On Twitter, the problem is getting bad enough that the service is starting to blacklist people who spam other members. There is already an unofficial site called The Twitter Blacklist that lists 329 known spammers on the service. . .

And, I might add, The Twitter Backlist is powered by Perl. Go, Twitter!

Twitter has been remarkably spam-free in its first year of existence. There’s no way to use the service, as is, to push messages into people’s faces.  You have to friend someone to follow them, but they’re not obliged to follow you back.

That was an early mistake some users made when Twitter first came on the scene.  Used to services like Facebook and MySpace, where large numbers were good and social convention demanded you friend someone back out of politeness, new Twitterers automatically followed anyone who followed them.  They soon learned that you can’t follow everyone.  Sure, you can, but it’s more time than it’s worth.  And if you have all Twitter messages in your feed going to your cell phone, you were in for an expensive day if you paid by the message.

In any case, people are smarter now. As many people can follow them as they like, but they’ll only follow a small number or percentage back. (There are exceptions, of course, and Robert Scoble is an extreme outlier to this.)

But ANYONE can follow you on Twitter.  I get an e-mail every time someone does.  Sadly, half of the new followers I get these days aren’t real people.  They’re new Twitter-related products or services.  They’re scam artists.  They’re spammers trying to work a new system.  I don’t use their product, so why would I care about them?  Still, no harm no foul.  They can’t spam me, so they don’t bother me.  I’d like my Number of Followers stat NOT to be inflated by such barnacles and clingers-on, but it’s not worth the time to go into the settings to ban them.  Though it may be soon. . .

However, at a time when new Twitter services are popping up like moles waiting to be whacked at a carnival, I can’t help but get the sinking feeling that the spammers are coming to Twitter, and it’ll happen via one of these services.

One new service that launched in the last month will suggest new friends to you.  It follows who you’re following and then branches out to who they’re following and presents you with people of interest that others mutually follow.  Isn’t that a handy way for potential spammers to get your Twitter name automatically, without investing much man power into compiling a list of people to follow?  (No, I’m not naming them.  They annoyed a number of people earlier this week by suddenly friending them. They’re spammers, as far as I’m concerned, and don’t deserve the name recognition.)

Even better, this service went and added 8000 users as a friend.  They claim that they friended only those people who were looking you up via their service.  They don’t tell you that when they offer you their service. It’s a back door.  That might not be “spam” in the traditional sense, but it’s definitely “spam” in the Twitter sense.  They’re not following me because they’re interested in what I say. They’re following me to increase their own stats or their own service’s effectiveness.  I’m not quite sure what it is.  Can someone with the Twitter API enlighten me on this?  What privileges does following someone give you that just looking them up out of the blue not give you?

Twitter also has, built in to the web site, a tab to see a list of all the people who’ve replied to you, by prepending “@” to your user name.  Now, a spambot can span the tree of users, compile a lengthy list of those they’d like to advertise to (using a Small URL that looks benign), and get users’ attention by replying directly to them. It’s no problem to send the same message hundreds of times with a different user’s name at the beginning.  Twitter might have some sort of built-in control limiting your number of posts per minute.  I don’t know.  But spammers are a patient lot.  They’ll send all those Tweets out eventually.  And all those people who want to see who’s talking directly to them will end up seeing pages of spam messages, losing all the direct messages sent to themselves. In order to not lose the functionality of the “REPLIES” tab, they’ll have to learn to deal with it.

The era of Twitter Spam is almost upon us.  Will Twitter be able to program around them?  Will it take too much work to avoid them for users?  Could it result in the death of Twitter?  Not in the short run, no. But spammers know how to get what they want.  They always win.  There’s no way to stop them effectively.  It’s sad, but true.  Everything is eventually ruined, often by them. (Have you ever turned off the spam filter on your e-mail or in the comments engine of your blog?  It’s ugly out there.)

Enjoy Twitter while it lasts, kids.

Update: (11 Apr 2008) I’m not the only one noticing this.

I know I missed this post last week, but I’m never going to be able to catch up. So here are the highlghts from the last week.  You can follow the Tweets as they happen, or wait for these updates (theoretically weekly) here.

• CD wallets only exist for the sake of contest giveouts. See PepsiStuff.com for the latest example.

• Rode a Merry-Go-Round with a two year old this afternoon. Who’s the greatest Uncle in the whole wide world? ME. 

• My sister just gave birth. I have ANOTHER niece now. That’s 8 nieces and 1 nephew. I’m never going to hear the end of Dora, am I? [March 31st.]

• I need a night off from my moonlighting job. It’s too much work.

• Subnetting the hell out of some masks right now. [Yeah, I think @robworley was right -- I was masking the hell out of some subnets.  In either case, the result is the same -- mass confusion.]
  

• I think my neighbor is playing Guitar Hero III – “Paint It Black” at the moment. I recognize that chord. . . I used to have time to play it.

• Lotsa new versions of software running on my computer tonight:ImageWell, LightRoom, and Firefox. Better check for an iTunes update next. ;-)

• Good thing about being in a training class this week? Twittering during the day!

• Saw a McDonald delivery truck which had a slogan on the side inclusive of the word “quaity.” The typo is NOT mine.  [I'm still ticked off I couldn't get my phone's camera working quickly enough.  I hate camera phones.]

• Am slightly weirded out to see Oprah using Skype. It’s my wife’s fault. . . 

• Just to specify – it’s my wife’s fault that I know what’s on Oprah. Not that Oprah is using Skype.

• I’m really liking this Firefox 3 Beta 4 browser. Must go download Beta 5 next. . . [And, of course, later that night it automatically updated itself.  I'm using Beta 5 now. Pretty cool, still]

• Crap, NYCC is only two weeks away! WHOO-HOO! My one weekend convention season is almost here! [It's a week and a half away now!]

• Used the old VandS Politics site to test WP2.5 Blew the site away, can’t bring it back. Whoops. Now I’m afraid of using it in production.

• The next version of Windows to break backwards-compatability? Ground-up rewrite? This is promising, if true: http://tinyurl.com/6xlhf5

• Cablevision’s DVR can remember where you left off playing a given show. It doesn’t ONLY play from the beginning anymore. Hallelujah!

• I love how often I pay a bill on-line mere hours before I get an e-mail letting me know that the monthly statement is now available. 

• Yes, the Pipeline Podcast is malfunctioning due to the CBR update. Sad. But we’re working on it. SOMEONE is working on it. . . 

• Just deleted a dozen users who registered at my blog. Clearly, all spammers. 10 were one letter variations of the same name. Why?!? 

• Lorem Ipsum banners. The web is now complete. http://www.lipsum.com/banners/

• I think I might be having a thrisis: http://tinyurl.com/6jldzj 

Now that April Fools Day seems to have killed the RickRoll, let me bring up (*) the Top Five Failed RickRolls — these just never caught on:

• Jessie’s Girl (Rick Springfield)

• Livin’ La Vida Loca (too soon, perhaps?) (Rickie Martin)

• Super Freak (Rick James)

• Learn to Succeed (the audio book by Rick Pitino – this one never stood a chance)

• Garden Party (Rick Nelson)

Finally, the Muppets give us the Best RickRoll Ever.

(*) This is also a good time to post this as I thought I did last week. Crap. This nugget of gold sat in my “drafts” folder for almost a week!  CRAP.

I’m on Twitter. I post there with some frequency. Here are some recent posts, with italicized updated afterwards in some cases:

• Spent three hours hiking today. Took 200+ pictures. They all suck. Every last one of them. And my lens didn’t want to autofocus. Annoying.

• Was disappointed this week by Google’s decision to hide “Reader” in the “More” drop down box.

• The TiVo Rewards Program is ending. This might affect me if I had ever gotten any points through it.

• Went to install Leopard (finally) and realized I lost the disc. Whoops. I think I had it at work last. Maybe Monday night. . . )

• I find the Digg Reel hilarious — there’s a HD feed of blown up YouTube videos. Talk about maximizing the value of your $2000 LCD. . .

• First rule of America’s Next Top Model: If she says at the beginning that she has an unfair advantage, she’s going home.

• Tonight’s master plan: Organize comics, play Wii Zapper, watch Apple TV, accomplish nothing productive. Can’t wait! (This mission was, by the way, successful!)

• Waiting for my invitation to be on Net@Nite next. Just have to figure out my hook. . . 10 years as a comics columnist on-line?

• I don’t own an iPhone, but the SDK tools look so cool that I want to develop for it now. (Then I looked at Cocoa, screamed at the very thought of programming in C again, and gave up.)

• If I boycotted Twitterers whose politics I didn’t agree with, I’d only have to deal with two or three Tweets a day.

• It seems like half the available HD video podcasts come from Revision 3. . .

There was also some eBay drama on Friday night:

• Just placed a bid on a camera lens with 8 minutes to go in the auction. It’s a lot of money. I’m in the lead. Not sure I wanna win. :gulp:

• Surely, I’m going to get sniped on this one, right?

• 3 minutes to go. I’m still the high bidder. Hunh.

• And with one minute to go, I’ve been outbid. I’m not going to outbid the outbid. Whew.

• @Scederlund – Thanks. I really do think it’s the best auction I’ve EVER lost.

The final auction price was $10 over my maximum bid, for the record. I wasn’t going any higher, though. As it was, the eBay price on the lens was only 10% lower than brand new. Why bother with the angst for so little savings?

This one made me crack up, for obvious reasons. With the kind permission of Chris Eliopoulos, I present another “Misery Loves Sherman” comic strip:

(c) 2008 Chris Eliopoulos, of course

• This guy will do some things for money. He’ll take a trip and send you a pic. He’ll write a letter of apology. He’ll think about you. Weird, but fascinating. And, no doubt, a big profit making venture.

• Pictures of an avalanche on Mars.

• Yes, this is incredibly freaky. Blame Johnny Bacardi for pointing it out.

• The Sony Trinitron is dead. The last TV I bought before going HDTV was a Sony Trinitron. It was a great machine, and still runs to this day in my parents’ living room, some 7 years after I bought it, as I recall. Still looks great, too, though it does have an odd tendency to snap out of mono sound into stereo and vice versa without provocation. The stereo sound only sounds good if you’re sitting directly in front of it. Seated to either side, it sounds hollow.

• One man played Wii Fit for a week. He lives to tell the tale.

• Evolution of the TiVo logo.

Here’s the latest batch of Twitterisms from the last week. Visit my Twitter account to see them as they happen!

• @gruber – Monoprice.com for your HDMI cable needs. I think I paid $6 for a six foot cable there most recently. Not that shipping is cheap

• Why would I watch a movie awards show when I haven’t watched any movies this year?

• @justnathan – oddly, the fashion is the least interesting part of the Oscars for me. Yeah, I’ll just catch Go Fug Yourself in the morning.

• Sometimes, you have to realize that it’s just NOT your night for Guitar Hero and walk away. I’m very zen about it tonight.

• @jbacardi – I don’t care WHO August Rush is, I just root for whoever they are/he is based on that NAME along. “August” rules!

• @justnathan – TV is not always right, unless it’s HIGH DEF TV. Then, thou must obey, in extra resolution!

• When tracking an item on UPS.com, you no longer need to check off the box to agree to their T&S. Very cool!

• If the upcoming HULK movie is an homage to the TV series, then they learned nothing from the debacle of Superman Returns. Discuss.

• No MacBreak Weekly podcast this week? This is sad.

• Greatest comic of the year, by far: All Star Batman #9. Brilliant! (See Pipeline this week for why.)

• This week’s ep of One Tree Hill just tried way too hard to do what Dawson’s Creek was doing so well in its second season. Too forced.

• Looking forward to reviews of the new Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS Lens. Might be my next lens. MIGHT be.

• Perusing Soleil. BEAUTIFUL comics. We’ll never see 99% of ‘em in the States. I wanna move to Paris.

• Got the Wii Zapper today. The Wiimote will leave the Guitar Hero III controller for the first time since Christmas tonight now.

• @ronxo – my wife looked at me through LOST and said “I don’t get it.” I didn’t even try to explain it to her. Some people can’t accept it.

• Viveza is now available! Click here for a 15 day free trial. Unfortunately, the final program will set you back $250.

• Bad Microsoft! Bad! This kind of behavior isn’t exactly unique to Microsoft, though, and the end result isn’t too surprising, but that doesn’t excuse it, either.

• There’s at least two reasons I knew that Apple wouldn’t be introducing Blu Ray drives into their laptops last week. First, it’s too soon. Those units that went on sale probably started production BEFORE the war was over. Second, battery life. I can’t imagine that Blu Ray doesn’t suck the life out of batteries, given the way Flash and every other video playing bit of software does at a faster rate than most everything else. Here’s confirmation on the battery life. I still think you’ll see Blu Ray drives on the Mac Pro first. It’s always plugged in, so battery life isn’t an issue there. You’ll likely never see Blu Ray in an Air.

• How to make a better Twitter. First step: Better uptime. Most important step: Get all the people on Twitter to migrate there. It won’t be easy.

• Unbelievably, SCO still hasn’t gone away.

• Happy March, everyone!

Fox Said To Be Exploring Termination Of Google Advertising Deal

Even while parent company News Corp. continues to try to disrupt the Microsoft/Yahoo merger, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) is rumored to be in negotiations with Microsoft take Google’s place as the MySpace advertising partner.

To recap, then: Microsoft wants to buy up Yahoo. It’s a hostile takeover bid.

Yahoo is resistant to becoming part of the Evil Empire.

Yahoo begins round the clock negotiations with FOX Interactive to find a way to make a deal work with them to keep Microsoft away.

But before all this happened, FOX Interactive (owners of MySpace) made a deal with Google for advertising on the heavily-trafficked social network web site with some of the worst design in post-millenium history.

Now, FOX is considering pulling out of their deal with Google to make a better deal with Microsoft for ad revenue, while at the same time trying to work a deal with Yahoo to prevent Yahoo from having to sell themselves to Microsoft.

I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this soap opera. It’s almost as much fun as watching the fall of HD-DVD — a technology Microsoft championed.

Online auction listings down 13% in boycott of eBay – USATODAY.com

The biggest boycott by eBay sellers concludes Monday, capping a week of acrimony after the online-auction site raised fees and changed its feedback policy.

Auction listings on eBay.com dropped some 13% since the strike started Feb. 18 to about 13 million items, according to third-party tracking sites such as dealscart.com and medved.net.

This would be more impressive if it weren’t for the fact that eBay listings are going to shoot back up 13% over the usual numbers tomorrow.

Wanted to give a pointer over to Chris Eliopoulos’ month-old webcomic, MISERY LOVES SHERMAN, available at MiseryLovesSherman.com.
Here’s a sample, shrunked down to fit into my site’s measurements:

:

Full disclosure: I did some design/back end coding on the site, which uses the ComicPress theme for the WordPress blogging engine. I tried writing an engine by myself using Ruby on Rails, but it didn’t get far enough. It was quite the learning experience, though. I learned I suck.

The strip runs every week day and is family friendly. Give it a shot. I think it might give you a chuckle or two, particularly if you enjoy his excellent FRANKLIN RICHARDS comics over at Marvel.

I’ve been a vocal Amazon Marketplace user for a few months now, but there are certain things that aren’t feasible for Amazon. Items that don’t have an Amazon number, for example, can’t be sold through the Amazon system. Also, you’re selling one item at a time, so bundle packages aren’t part of the process. If I want to sell the last year’s worth of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, or package together a couple of textbooks I have lying around, I can’t do it. The individual items don’t have their own entries in Amazon’s database, and you can’t do more than one item per listing.

There’s the limitation.

In the case of comics, you have a periodical problem. Amazon sells magazine subscriptions, but not individual issues of the magazine. (There are a few exceptions, but I’m talking about the general rule of thumb here.) You can’t sell last month’s issue of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN because it’s not there, nor can you sell the last year’s worth, because that doesn’t have an Amazon number.

So for those kinds of things, I’ve been investigating eBay recently. eBay has a couple of good things going for it. First, it has eyeballs. The traffic numbers on eBay are pretty good. It’s the most popular auction site out there, and when you’re trying to sell items with bidding wars, you have to have lots and lots of people interested in buying your item. You need those eyeballs. Second, you have greater shipping flexibility with eBay than Amazon. At the Marketplace, Amazon tells you what the shipping charges will be and that’s the end of the story. On eBay, you dictate that cost, and you can do it any way you want — media mail, first class, Priority Mail, etc. You can charge for the envelope you’re using to make the shipment. Disclose it all, and if there’s a buyer willing to pay it, you’ll make a sale.

The downsides are, as previously mentioned, that it takes more work in dealing with people, and the money goes through PayPal (best case scenario) or separately via check or money order or some other service. Again, you can dictate how you take payment, but the more choices you offer, the more money you’ll make.

But I discovered something while perusing eBay lately – there’s not much there anymore. I’m looking up Completed Auctions figures to see what I might be able to sell some of my stuff for, and I’m coming up blank. Granted, some of the stuff is relatively obscure, but not all of it. Where have all the eBayers gone? Is there an up-and-comer in the on-line auction market? Is there a separate comics-only auction site that all those sales have gone to? There’s still a ton of stuff on there, but the oddball stuff that you used to find on eBay as a matter of routine is missing. What happened?

I wrote all of the above about a week ago, truth be told. After that, something else happened. eBay changed its fee structure.

Guess what? eBay sucks even more now. They’ve lowered the listing fee, but increased their percentage on the final selling price. It’s a greater fee if the final sale is less than $25. This is eBay’s attempt to get more products listed at their site, possibly to help promote the auction business over the store fronts and Buy It Now listings that currently dominate the site, from what I’ve seen. Problem is, all those smaller auctions are resulting in less profits. So either people will find ways to bundle auction items together to get to a $25 price point, or just not list them because the profits are sinking.

Here’s a hint to eBay: If you REALLY want to drive growth in your business, cut the rates across the board. As listings grow, all eBay has to invest in are more hard drives, I suppose. It’s not like every item listed results in man hours of labor or storage. It’s ALL bits. eBay can afford to cut rates in an attempt to gain more listings, more auction listers, and more eyeballs. It’s about time eBay did that. If they really want to grow their business, it’s time to take the price advantage. Lower the rates, increase the number of auctions, reap the benefits.

Cutting listing fees while hiking final sale fees to cover it is just insulting.

In fact, the best thing they could do is cut out the PayPal transaction costs. eBay bought up PayPal. They’ve integrated it into their site to make it the easiest payment method for users. But if eBay is already getting their money from listing fees and final price point percentages, why charge their users twice by making the seller pay for the honor of receiving their money?

Just to give you all something else to read aside from American Idol chatter, here’s some recent Twitter postings, with my editorial comments/updates in brackets italicized afterwards:

• I’ve gotten to the point where I get home from work and have three or four pages of Tweets to read. Might be time to cut back.

• I just picked up the MacHeist bundle. I feel slightly dirty, but I couldn’t pass up the price for a few of these programs. [I need to do screencasting now, don't I?]

• But, really, does App Zapper exist for the sake of being given away in Mac bundles?!? [And slower days on MacZot.]

• This just in — Heath Ledger is still dead.

• Added to my To Do list (long term): Read ABSOLUTE WATCHMEN before the movie hits screens.

• I fear “Story of My Life” on Hard level might be the end point for me on Guitar Hero. Ouch, my fingers. . .

• No, dumb customer who thinks he’s funny, that item is NOT free if the register scanner has a problem reading the bar code. IDIOT!

• I love on-line retailers who accept PayPal. Makes it so much easier. [I Heart Adorama.]

• Given the results of Week 17 of the regular season, the Super Bowl, er, “The Big Game” should be an interesting one this year.

The internet has shrunk the word; it’s 24/7 living out there, across the globe. But the major blogs still shut down for the weekend. . .

Air Plane On A Conveyor Belt episode of Mythbusters is January 30th. You’ve been warned.