Archive for April, 2007
Notes from the Spam Arms Race
I’m not a fan of captcha - those little letters and numbers you have to type to validate your identity on forms all over the place - and I think it’s often done poorly, but it does serve a purpose: getting in the way of automated spam applications that try to pound out site registrations, [...]
Newspapers on the Web
Here’s a New York Times article about the thirty most popular newspaper web sites in the US. (They’re number 1.)
The results aren’t too surprising; to some degree, site popularity seems to be driven by a paper’s circulation and reputation, as well as the size of the area they serve. So up in at the [...]
MLB Merchandising: Play Ball
Now that the season is upon us - that’s The Season, by the way - I’m getting a lot more e-mails from MLB and the Red Sox making sure I know about all of the wondrous merchandise I can buy.
Personally, my favorite items so far as the multi-lingual Red Sox caps and t-shirts.I would, in fact, [...]
Web 4.32 rev 0.831
Over at Digital Axle, Ana Yoerg talks about the latest “stick a number after Web” absurdity: Web 2.5.
I had enought trouble with “Web 2.0″ but I’ve grudgingly come to admit it means something. Of course, “2.0″ is just a nifty way to say “this has become something different” - in this case, something truly interactive [...]
The Many Faces of Parago
Since the last installment of my Circuit City rebate tale, I’ve gotten more email from Parago, the company that Circuit City uses to make sure they don’t have to honor their rebates.
As of that last post, on April 5, I’d received an email informing me that my check would be mailed in 7-10 days, followed [...]
Time Delay Email from Microsoft
When Microsoft introduced the Zune last November, I was curious about it; the hardware actually sounded like a decent product, and I wondered what they’d done with the software. So I downloaded the Zune software, installed it, poked around a bit with it, decided that it was not terrible but vastly inferior to iTunes, and [...]
Just how much packaging DOES a stylus need?
Sure, I occasionally cast an envious eye on my friends who are toting Blackberries. And I occasionally cast an envious eye on my friends who are still using a FiloFax or some other paper-based means to manage their schedules. But when it comes to technology I’m a second wave adopter, hold-and-use kind of consumer.
My nothing-fancy [...]
The Road to Nowhere - Education Department
Paleo-Future, a blog devoted to what the future used to look like, regulary runs clips from the CD-ROM that was packaged with The Road Ahead by Bill Gates back in the 90s. That was an attempt by Gates to show how information technology was going to change the way we live. Apart from the embarrassing [...]
It’s All in What You Call It
When Bank of America scooped up one of my credit cards by buying the credit card business from the bank that had it before, I was happy; I use BoA already and their online banking is excellent. One of the nice features is that you can download everything into Quicken, saving you the trouble of [...]
The Special Language of Business
Some fun for a Saturday morning: Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language offers The Devil’s marketing dictionary. It’s marked Part One; I look forward to the next installment!
Meanwhile, have some fun coming up with your own additions. My favorite:
Call to action. The mating cry of a salesman in written form.
Technorati tags: Jargon
