- Apparently there are people in Japan who actually *live* in Net Cafe’s — they are clean, they are cheap, they serve food, *and* you can buy clean underwear (the non-school girl kind) if you so choose it. Although such places were apparently built to have fun, kill time, and / or allow salarymen to hang out when they’ve missed the train, there is a distinct population of individuals who have actually chosen to live in them. I read an article about this same phenomenon in the NYTimes or International Herald Tribune a few months ago but I can’t find the link. The interesting thing now is that the Japanese Government is going to try and hammer out a study to try and figure out just how many of these net cafe “refugees” there actually are; the rationale is that people who live there might be a canary-in-the-mine kind of alarm bell for a society that values equality. That is to say, some / most / all of the guys who live there aren’t living there for just fun, if you know what I mean. (2) # // 8.15.07 @ 19:07
- Valeria Maltoni interviewed me recently at Conversation Agent about my experiences at the BlogHerald as ‘new media’ editor. If such things strike your fancy, go ahead and check it out. If however, you would like to read a good blog about how connections, branding, public relations and marketing all mix and interelate, just check out her blog, which is pretty darn fantastic on its own. ;) [disclosure/shameless plug: Valeria also writes a biweekly column at the BlogHerald as well, where she talks about how all of *that* influences blogging] (0) # // 8.12.07 @ 21:33
- Have you noticed a jump in spam lately? I know I have. Heck, even my wife has, and she has fairly good email practices (doesn’t leave it lying around the ‘net for people to spam). Turns out that there is a massive spam surge going on right now, that is part of a massive pump and dump to pump up the stocks of a business called Prime Time Group which operates in Florida. Each piece of mail comes with a .pdf which tries to pump up the stock. According to Sophos, this pump and dump scheme is different in the size and scale of the spam, which, apparently, tremendous — and it must be, if its overwhelming gmail’s spam-catching capabilities. [tip: Computerworld] (4) # // 8.9.07 @ 13:21
- Not wanting to make this a big thing, but as I wrote about it last week (actually, exactly last week), Morgan Webb has neither comments enabled, nor trackbacks set up for WebbAlert. I noticed this today as I was linked to by WebbAlert [but not actually mentioned in the video -- damn, so close! :) ] I find this particularly curious as she clearly reads blogs, since she isn’t afraid to annotate her posts with relevant blog postings. Hmmm … perhaps the better word is “ironic”, since today’s leading news story on WebbAlert was the issue around Google News Comments, and she doesn’t actually have comments enabled. I do wonder why this is. Does Morgan not want to deal with having to moderate comments? [which I'm sure might be an interesting combination of those that are adoring, those that are guardedly optimistic/ encourgaging, splashed with a sprinkle of good ol' trolling] Does she not value the conversation that can budd off her video podcast? Or does she take the Dave Winer / Jason Calacanis / Joel Spolsky position of conscientious objector? (0) # // 8.9.07 @ 13:07
- VideoCafe is rolling out an invitation only beta which will allow bloggers to seed their blogs with raw video footage. Its almost like VideoCafe is whitelabelling the service, the usefulness of which will be determined by the actual footage they release. I’m sure that one of the many questions is why any blogger would bother signing up with VideoCafe when you can just as easily grab embeded video from any number of sources these days. I guess the answer is that these look to be raw feeds that are not labeled with another media company’s logo (but might carry the mark of the company or NGO creating it); presumably as well, they contain content not easily found elsewhere. One example, as listed over here, might be a product launch where bloggers can embed a company’s video directly in their blog about said product. As with all things in life, the proof is in the tasting, so just as soon as I get accepted (crossing fingers), I’ll let you know exactly what these variables are about. (4) # // 8.9.07 @ 1:24
- And in even more Google-ish kind of news (which is kind of stale – but, still interesting to me), did you know that Google Maps is crowdsourcing its dirty work? That is, to get pictures of stores listed on Google Maps, and some basic information therein (what time it opens etc), its relying on people to input that information for them. Its funny (ironic funny, not ha-ha funny) how Google built itself a 150B market cap based on algorithms and mathematics, but finds that the most cost effective way of filling in data points for its Google Maps is paying folks to fill it in for them a la mechanical turk. Although unlike Amazon’s MT, it seems like Google is paying a little more … up to $10 per business more. In the fight for hyper-local search, I think this is a good thing. And not a little wiley as well, as getting local businesses to confirm their position and information on Google will no doubt *also* get a proportion of them to sign up with Google Adwords. [tip: business2] (0) # // 8.8.07 @ 14:42
- Back in 1995, I remember how websites were designed — and that was using a whole lot of tables. Things have changed tremendously since then, and I remember just before going to medical school (around 1999) or so, this thing called “cascading style sheets”, and the importance of web standards. Well, things have changed remarkably since that time, along with many (but not all) incompatibility chestnuts due to the browser wars, in no small part due to Jeffrey Zeldman. I always find that tech (and web) history isn’t always easy to find. If you’re like me and got stuck in a time warp about web design, read this article courtesy of Businessweek to get yourself up to date. Tables died as a way to structure design, and thank Zeldman (and all of his standards zealots) for that. (1) # // 8.7.07 @ 23:43
