I took more than a month off from this blog to study (more on that in the new year). But while I was away, I was bombarded with a higher than usual amount of spam comments and spam responses to my main site’s “information request” function.
WordPress and Drupal are popular enough platforms that spammers have widely shared bots that automatically crawl into your site and issue bogus requests that end up in my e-mail box. What the incoherent and nonsense spam really is trying to accomplish is beyond me. Some is apparently for male enhancement products, but much of it is just a jumble of letters in no particular language and a series of links. I assume the links are the thing the spammers are trying to get people to follow, but… who would? No one I know.
To fight this scourge, I have installed a CAPTCHA routine on my main site. This is a pretty rudimentary version but it seems effective. My spam has dropped to zero since I installed it a few days ago. For those who haven’t heard of CAPTCHA, it is a system that displays graphical letters and numbers in random sequences that theoretically only a human can read and type back in as a response. If you match the sequence, you are granted access to whatever function is being protected (in this case the request for information is actually sent to my inbox).
As spammer technology got more sophisticated, graphical codes were not sufficient… the bots could match pixel patterns and submit the sequence automatically. The CAPTCHA routines became more advanced, and warping the images of the letters and numbers is intended to throw off the pixel-matching algorithms of the spammers. Sadly, the spammers up their game and their algorithms begin to approach the accuracy of a human eye. So the CAPTCHA warping — becoming more drastic to thwart the spam reader — starts to get so that a human has difficulty reading the code. In the example above… is that an ’8′ or a ‘B’ before the ‘A’? It is all pretty silly — the escalation of force that inevitably leads to some sort of doomsday scenario.
For now, I am simply happy that my inbox is no longer drowning in useless messages.
You’ve likely never heard of Brent Oxley. Maybe you will. He has grown his webhosting business from nothing to 200,000 customers in just over six years. His story is an illustration of the persistence and confidence that sets true entrepreneurs apart.
I’ve been hosting this site with HostGator for several years now. It looks like I was one of just a few thousand customers when I first signed up. Poor experiences with other hosting companies had me looking around and latching onto HostGator by pure happenstance. I feel pretty lucky that I have had so little downtime and very fast customer service throughout the business relationship.
This post is really not about me recommending a hosting company (many Canadians hate the idea of having their servers located in the United States), but more a tribute to the “never say die” attitude of great entrepreneurs.
Bill Wyman (not the Rolling Stone but the critic) published an excellent essay about a month ago. It outlines the prevailing mentality in the newspaper industry over the past twenty years. He breaks down the reasons that newspapers are failing:
Consumers don’t pay for news. They have never paid for news.
Newspapers are the product of monopolistic thinking.
Timidity doesn’t work on the web.
The staffs of the papers, from management on down to the reporters, deserve a big share of the blame.
Newspaper websites suck.
As you can tell from the wording of these “reasons”, there is some emotion behind Wyman’s argument. He has experienced first-hand the kinds of attitudes that amount to newspapers shooting themselves in the foot, then the other foot, and now taking aim at their own heads. As someone who has only been peripherally involved in the business (many years ago), I found Wyman’s two-part analysis both depressing and insightful.
His prescription for fixing the problem is right on the money, even though I think the difficulties are too entrenched to easily embrace Wyman’s plan. He recommends hyperlocal, debate-generating coverage that involves the community and puts ease of access as a priority. No matter what, though, surely the days of huge profits for newspapers are over. Aggregators (what newspapers used to be for a community) are so well-established on the Web that any news organization would find it difficult to make inroads. If they were successful, they would still face the much lower ad rates in the Web world. And even if they made those work for them, there would always be unpaid competitors (local bloggers) to contend with.
As bleak a picture as this paints, I still believe journalism as a profession has an important future. If nothing else, patrons may rise up: mega-rich individuals with a genuine interest in uncovering truth and creating community debate.
In what has become something of a tradition, I have talked with friends and family about what’s coming up on television in the new Fall season. The media landscape is under radical change but the television networks still hold big preview presentations for their deep-pocketed advertisers. These tend to happen in May or June. At that time, for viewers, we still don’t know which of our favorite shows have been canceled.
By the middle of August, everything is pretty solid and we know what’s coming. In the past, the best shows would return or premiere sometime in September or October. Anything else was a “mid-season replacement” which was a euphemism for “second-rate”. Now, throughout the year, you can hear stories and rumors about really good shows. I feel that this time of year remains the time when the networks are willing to confirm or deny many of these rumors because they are making promises to their advertisers.
So here’s a rundown of some promising escapist fare that I intend to watch when it airs:
Dollhouse (25 September 2009 on Fox) – survived for a second season by the skin of its teeth but this is the brainchild of Joss Whedon of Buffy The Vampire Slayer fame.
Flash Forward (24 September 2009 on ABC) – Canada’s own sci-fi novelist extraordinaire, Robert J. Sawyer, is the creative force behind this new one. I trust ABC to completely screw it up, but I still have my fingers crossed.
Fringe (17 September 2009 on Fox) – returns for a second season after a really cool first one.
True Blood (still airing its second season, but returns sometime in 2010 on HBO) – this adult fare has been renewed for a third season and provides an alternative to the well-laundered supernatural tales like last year’s Moonlight and this season’s The Vampire Diaries.
I’ll be watching lots of other shows, but very few deserve special mention. Glee (Fox) was much anticipated and really isn’t all that good. NBC, after taking the risky foray into sci-fi with Jericho and Heroes (which is actually returning for a fourth season if anyone still cares) is sticking to Biggest Loser reality, wall-to-wall Law and Order, and not one but two medical dramas to try to fill the space left by ER (Trauma and Mercy). CBS is donning a similar bland franchise suit with CSI-o-rama and NCIS (now with two flavors of its own). I am at least grateful to CBS for having more scripted dramas than reality shows (Survivor is back and remains one of the better reality shows if you simply must watch that kind of crap). CBS also resurrected Medium after NBC canceled it, but honestly that show is running out of legs anyway.
There’s a great site called gotoandlearn.com which is run by an Adobe employee named Lee Brimelow. He has filled up his page with a whole bunch of great video tutorials that demonstrate the power of the Adobe suite of tools.
One of the most intriguing tutorials I have gone through so far is the one explaining the simulation of the parallax effect using Photoshop and Flash. You need the CS4 edition of the tools to easily leverage the 3-D effect that Lee demonstrates.
Note: You can right-click on the image above to Rewind and Play the Flash movie over again.
I have mentioned before about the dangers of soliciting user feedback to guide your product development. If you’re using a product you’re going to have very good ideas about how to improve it based on the way you’re interacting with it today. But truly revolutionary steps forward don’t really come from simple questions like “What would you like to see in the next release of our product?”
However, there are good ways to get your community to provide feedback.
What you’re reading right now is powered by WordPress. This open source personal publishing software has improved significantly over the last few years, and it was already a good choice in early 2007 when I started this blog. Now, WordPress 2.9 is in the pipeline. The developers are soliciting feedback from users in a more granular way. They already know what they want to add in that release, but they turned to the community to rank the priority of each feature. To me, this is a great hybrid approach between wide open feedback gathering and closed-door “developer knows best” approaches. The results of the WordPress inquiries are not really all that surprising, although I definitely believe putting everything into the core is a mistake over time. Feature bloat is the leading cause of software death these days.
With the release of Chris Anderson’s new book called Free: The Future of a Radical Price, there have been a number of debates cropping up all over the Internet about the sustainability of any business model that puts “free” as the price of their core product or service.
Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist in New York City, has been given credit for coining the term “freemium”. (In his latest blog post he reminds us that it was a reader named Jarid who actually coined the term and Jarid in turn said the term would not have gone anywhere without Fred’s backing. As an aside, I love seeing that kind of graciousness on the Web.) Freemium is the idea that you can gain the critical mass of customers — and their trust and confidence — by giving away your quality offering. Then you can offer upgrades or other premium-priced offerings and start to make real money. Fred gives an example where the monetization can amount to only $0.20 to $0.25 per user per month and still be sustainable. Keeping 200 million people happy each month costs so little with today’s technology that this is possible once you reach that kind of critical mass.
In the comments to Fred’s article was this from a comScore employee, Gian Fulgoni:
The challenge today is that online ad CPMs [costs per thousand impressions] are under huge pressure. They are falling far faster then the costs of distribution, production, storage and marketing. Something has got to give. Either am increasing proportion of companies will fail or someone needs to prove that publishers can charge higher CPMs for online advertising if they can show a branding ROI and not just direct response. At comScore, we’re trying to show that the Internet is terrific as a branding vehicle. That is sorely needed if we are to prevent further price erosion.
I had posted the same thought back in May and I really believe it is one of the keys to accepting any sort of free model. Advertising effectiveness still means reaching more eyeballs, even if not all of them respond directly. On the other hand, the people that do respond directly to online ads are more qualified sales leads than ever before. In the past, someone may have seen a little classified ad and had more questions. They would call or write to have those questions answered. Something about the ad had appealed to them, but they were still only “kicking the tires.” Now, an ad click brings someone to a page with far more information about the product or service, so anyone contacting the company after being “funneled” from an online ad is often a much higher-quality sales lead.
Canada Day was yesterday. Coincidentally: I heard news about Ireland’s skyrocketing unemployment rate and saw yet another photograph of Viktor Yuschenko, the handsome leader of the Ukraine who was poisoned and lost much of his good looks earlier this decade. Ireland will rebound. Yuschenko continues to improve each year.
So what do those news snippets have to do with Canada on its birthday? Well, as I look globally, even the small events and crises in other countries remind me about how lucky I am to live in a relatively stable, wealthy democratic country. Our unemployment rates rose and then plateaued. No one is poisoning our leaders.
The banking crisis around the globe now has people looking to Canadian banks for advice. I wouldn’t put too many eggs in that basket, because our big banks have hosed themselves on occasion too. However, as much as I despise paying outrageous fees for arrogant service and the privilege of giving them my money to hold onto, I admit it would really take concerted effort to bring one of the big Canadian banks to its knees. That’s a comforting thought.
I am also heartened by the reputation Canada has on the world stage as a polite, well-mannered nation. Of course there are exceptions, but when US network television shows can get comic traction out of Canada’ politeness, you know there’s something to the global opinion.
Embarking on my entrepreneurial adventure, I strongly believe leaping before you look has many benefits and being kind and sympathetic can only take you so far when trying to get payment out of someone. Yet, I still consider myself a good Canadian: both cautious and polite.
A denial of service (DoS) attack is a cyberwarfare tactic that usually involves bombarding a computer resource with so many requests that it can’t handle them all. In the case of a web attack, the server either crashes or simply spends so much of its time responding to the bogus requests that legitimate ones are not handled or handled so slowly that the site seems unavailable.
In the recent dissident uprising in Iran, a DoS attack was conducted by everyday people who wanted to silence the Iranian government’s lies about what was going on. A programmer in the United States wrote some code that would request refreshes of the key Iranian government web sites every second. People all over could go to the programmer’s proxy and click “start” to conduct an additional attack. It caught on and many of the “official” Iranian sites were effectively shut down: a seeming victory for the forces of freedom.
Unfortunately, as vast and infinite as the Internet seems, you always eventually run into scarcity in one form or another. In this case, dissidents in Iran started pleading with the world to stop the DoS attack because it was depriving them of the bandwidth they needed to get their own message out to the world. In other words, the people the DoS perpetrators were supposed to be helping were actually also hurt by the attack.
I strongly believe that clogging up the Internet (with spam or bogus requests) is wrong no matter how noble your intentions may be.
In his book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson makes a pretty strong case explaining the phenomenon of a “blockbuster”. The lowest common denominator is well understood by Hollywood. Action and excitement tend to draw crowds. Predicting hits is not an infallible science, but it is pretty amazing how well they’ve figured out the movie-going public. We’ve got another new crop of summer films coming up, and the release dates of the action-packed movies are carefully determined for maximum impact.
The Transformers sequel and action-filled “biopics” about John Dillinger and Sherlock Holmes are coming soon. (I know Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character and that Hollywood takes vast liberties even with real people’s biographies. My putting quotes around biopic recognizes these facts as well as my suspicion that it’s not a real word yet.) Even if these movies don’t recoup their investment, they are sure to make millions. The gamble of course is that Hollywood spends many millions making and promoting these movies, so they can still come out in the red after a theatrical release.
As spammer technology got more sophisticated, graphical codes were not sufficient… the bots could match pixel patterns and submit the sequence automatically. The CAPTCHA routines became more advanced, and warping the images of the letters and numbers is intended to throw off the pixel-matching algorithms of the spammers. Sadly, the spammers up their game and their algorithms begin to approach the accuracy of a human eye. So the CAPTCHA warping — becoming more drastic to thwart the spam reader — starts to get so that a human has difficulty reading the code. In the example above… is that an ’8′ or a ‘B’ before the ‘A’? It is all pretty silly — the escalation of force that inevitably leads to some sort of doomsday scenario.
These tend to happen in May or June. At that time, for viewers, we still don’t know which of our favorite shows have been canceled.
So what do those news snippets have to do with Canada on its birthday? Well, as I look globally, even the small events and crises in other countries remind me about how lucky I am to live in a relatively stable, wealthy democratic country. Our unemployment rates rose and then plateaued. No one is poisoning our leaders.