I have a project for a designer who also knows their way around CSS, specifically for implementation into the Drupal system.
Know anyone? Ping me! (jake AT communityguy DOT com) or leave a message in this thread. I’d love to talk to you.
Tags: Off TopicIf you haven’t noticed the rush of comments here on the blog lately, let me apologize on behalf of the spammers. That’s right, despite my image captcha verification I’m still getting comment spam.
How, you ask, can an automated tool figure out the text that’s in the captcha image? They can’t. Instead, these are real people posting nearly understandable comments that are almost relevant to the blog post itself. For example:
"
It is very interesting…but Mozilla is no good browser…i use Opera."Many of the spam comments I’ve gotten lately have required a second look to see if they’re real people or not. (Sorry if I deleted your non-spam comment) Ugh. This comes so close to being something cool – i.e. someone from a company interacting on a blog, sharing their opinion and URL. Unfortunately, it’s nothing more than a scam, made possible by overseas outsourcing and Mechanical Turk.
Annoying as this is to deal with, I suppose it’s the price of doing business on the internet. But it’s lead to me to wonder lately – is there a "common morality" on the internet? If someone in the US was getting paid to manually spam blogs, they’d likely know what they were doing was in a moral gray area. But if you living in India, working as a manual spammer, does the morality of this task change? Do you have the same guilty feelings about what you’re doing that an American (or heck, European) might? My guess is that this isn’t as much about location as it’s about income levels. That said, it’s hard to ignore the fact the amount of spam coming from Eastern Europe (and especially Russia), the amount of pirated software in China, and the levels of shady outsourcing coming from a number of third world countries.
Maybe I’m just pissy that my blog’s getting spammed and short of shutting off commenting all together, there’s nothing I can do to stop it…
Tags: Off TopicI almost hate to post about this because I don’t want to continue the discussion… so just consider this a vent of a quasi-political nature.
This week everyone from the Huffington Post to Advertising Age has been talking about Sheryl Crow getting yelled at by Karl Rove.
According to the Huffington Post article from Crow and Laurie David, they were simply being kind, level-headed global warming teachers. Just a few of their take on how nice they were being:
"We felt compelled to remind him that the research is done and the results are in (www.IPCC.ch)."
"We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming."
Kind words. I’m sure that’s exactly how it happened. It reminds me of that guy who finds "religion" of some sort, and starts proselytizing forcefully. You know that guy – he’s not much fun to be around, and tends to do more damage to his cause than he helps.
Here’s the real kicker:
As someone who’s been a (very very) minor celebrity, I completely understand how personal space violation can get under your skin. I can’t possibly imagine how little space Rove has for himself. Just because someone’s (theoretically) hot doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to be irritated when people get all up in your grille. Imagine the furor if some fan tried to touch Crow – she’d have her security team physically remove them, I’m sure.
OK, rant over. Thanks for listening. Let’s all drop this foolish story and get back to the real news of the day: Anna Nicole Smith’s favorite color.
Tags: Off TopicA fun activity – here’s all the states I’ve visited. I’m bound and determined to visit the rest!
Tags: Off TopicHad Kurt Cobain lived, he’d have turned 40 this week.
He died when he was 27.
Ouch. I suddenly feel really old.
Cobain’s death still make me sad, sadder than it should for a guy I never met. In the late 80s I really liked music, or perhaps really wanted to like music. I was in high school at the time, and was at that age where I was trying to figure out who I was. My uncle moved out of his house and onto his boat in preparation for a long-term sailing adventure and give me nearly 400 vinyl albums. There was everything from The Clash to Herbie Hancock to Ray Charles to Mozart to Waylon Jennings. I devoured this collection and found a great many artists that I liked.
But nobody really spoke to me. None of the albums reached up and yanked my stomach and made me want to jump up and dance. I had found great muic, but I was struggling to find my music.
Then came the fall of 1991.
In the span of three months, I had discovered Fugazi’s 13 Songs (my first Compact Disc purchase), Pearl Jam’s Ten, and Nirvana’s Nevermind. I remember the day I first listened to all three of these like it happened last week. I had actually come across the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" single and immediately tried to buy the CD but the store didn’t have them in stock yet! My buddy Aaron and I must have listened to that damn single 75 times in the two weeks I had to wait until Nevermind arrived in stock.
September 1991 – the month I found my music. By the end of that year I had this mudslide of great music coming at me. Faith No More, SoundGarden, L7, MudHoney, Red Hot Chili Peppers.. the list goes on. Hell, I even renewed my life long love for U2 with their Achtung, Baby release.
But to this day I can still work myself into an excited state simply by pulling up Nevermind on my iPod. Thanks, Kurt. I wish you were hear to keep the excitement coming.
Tags: Off TopicOK, OK! We get it, Saint Anna Nicole Smith’s death is a tragic loss for all of mankind. Without her here to guide us through our daily lives, we’re all likely to suffer the pain of a thousand deaths. She left so much unfinished… how can we continue her legacy? I’m not sure it’s possible…
Can we move on now?
Tags: Off TopicAfter several years having the same, marginal design I spent a few minutes last night dusting off the design and moving some things around. Nothing’s missing from the previous sidebars, they’re just now at the bottom of the page. Hopefully this cleaner look will give me a deep breath for my internal voice that has been screaming "You need to redo your design!!" for months now.
I’m going to continue to tweak and improve the design in the next couple of weeks, so if you see something odd with the layout, just drop by later.
Hope you enjoy!
Tags: Off TopicSony.
Once a giant, a seemingly unstoppable force of high quality, well-thought technology, seems today to be floundering under it’s own weight and cluelessness. I’d believe it in a second if you told me that the product design team hasn’t been outside their building in a decade, and has only learned about consumers through marketing reports.
The PSP content pricing foolishness, the multitude of idiotic propreitary formats, foolish technology directions that are outdated before they launch…I swear Sony tries to fail.
And do you remember the rootkit debacle of ‘05? If you don’t remember this story, here’s the quick recap:
Sony knowingly and secretly installed spyware on user’s computers.
Class action lawsuits were filed, and the FTC literally made a federal case out of it. This week it was announced that Sony settled with th FTC. The punishment? Sony is now required to do …well… nothing, really. To call this a slap on the wrist is to drastically overestimate the effect of wrist slapping. Here’s the quick rundown:
There are some fairly solid restrictions laid out by the FTC, but only towards Sony. But what about the rest of the business world?
In addition, the settlement bars Sony BMG from using the information on consumers’ listening preferences that it has already gathered through the monitoring technology it installed and bars them from using the information to deliver ads to those consumers. For future CDs containing such technology, the agreement requires that, before transmitting information about consumers, their computers or their use of the CD, Sony BMG must clearly disclose on consumers’ computer screens what the technology will do, and obtain consumers’ consent. If it conditions consumers’ use of its CDs on their agreement to have information collected, Sony BMG must disclose that condition clearly on the CDs’ packaging.
As I understand it, this settlement doesn’t constitute "case law", which means that once again the FTC is a day late and $150/user late.
The FTC has essentially required Sony to respect their customers. Well, at least in certain ways. Has the FTC kept consumers safer? Nope. Take the mandate from the Bureau of Consumer Protection (a wing of the FTC) is to "protect consumers against unfair, deceptive or fraudulent practices". How does this settlement do any of those things?
It doesn’t. It sends a clear message to big business: "You can do anything you want, and if you’re caught, and if we feel like coming after you, we’ll scold you like a young child, give you a minor wrist slap, then you’ll deal with the rest of the fallout through your own public relations. Good luck!"
Additional info:
I’m throwing my hat in the ring for the 26 Things Photographic Scavenger Hunt. I’ll be updating this list as I mark something off (and post it to my Flickr account). More soon!
I started watching 24 three seasons ago. The first season I watched was guilty, unrealistic fun so I tried it last season. I got caught up in seeing the story through to the end, although it certainly wasn’t "good" TV. It was basically a repeat of previous season’s story line. (i.e. there’s a Middle Eastern terror plot, Jack’s the only one who can solve – and even then only with his MacGyver man-purse)
I was excited at the end of last season that Jack Bauer was on his way to a Chinese prison. Surely, I thought, there’s going to have to be a new direction for the storyline.
First episode just ended, and the answer is nope. Same story. Jack comes back from China without so much as a glance at a Chinese prison or any discussion of the hardships endured. Straight into Jack’s magical ability to get out of even the more tricky situation kicks in and now Jack’s back to normal… just like every other season so far.
Bore-ring…
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Jake McKee is the Chief Strategy Officer and Ant Wrangler at Ant's Eye View, a customer experience strategy practice focused on helping clients escalate their customer experience. With a rich background in customer collaboration, online communities, and fan groups, and Web development, community management, and product development, Jake helps organizations understand how to act like groups of people, rather than soulless money making machines.
