Category Archives: Websites

July 5, another amazing day in America from the headlines!

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Today CNN’s online video headlines:

    Pig head thrown into mosque during prayers
    Teen joyrides on train, slips away on his bike
    Kitten survives churn through wood chipper

True, they did include some info about the Korean Missile launches and Israel’s attack on Gaza, but as usual left out the tolls from global catastrophes like malaria and HIV.

Is it presumptuous of me to suggest that American news is becoming a mental garbage dump? Ironic that it’s us and not the networks that are to blame. Networks just put out stories that attract our attention, and for the most part those stories are not reasonably interpreted as news.

The Wired 40. Yahoo as the “McDonald’s” of Cyberspace !?

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Wired Magazine has named their top 40 “wired” companies.  The selection sounded a bit vague and trendy to me but lists are fun.    Wired says this is how they picked them:

We start by looking for the basics: strategic vision, global reach, killer technology. But that’s not enough. To land a spot on our annual Wired 40 list, a business also needs the X-factor – a hunger for new ideas and an impatience to put them into practice.

Notable points:  Google at top of list, Apple second. Yahoo at number 5, the “McDonald’s of Cyberspace” (!?), Microsoft 36th.

Markus is one insightful Canadian Web Guy

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One of the great things about the internet business space is how one person can build an empire with the same revenues / impact / influence as a very large company.

Markus is such a fellow and I’m glad to see he’s blogging about his ongoing adventures creating and running one of the top dating sites in the world – PlentyofFish.com.    Markus provides a lot of detail and insight into how he created the site almost as a lark and now effectively competes with major corporations in the social network/dating space.

With 200 Million page views monthly and climbing, Markus really knows his stuff.  One observation he makes I’m still trying to digest suggests that eventually *only* small companies will rule the internet due to their much greater flexibility and effeciency.     Yahoo, Google, MSN are betting billions that they’ll maintain the huge stakes in the online world rather than small niche companies.   Frankly, I’m guessing there is room for everybody in the expanding online business space.

Ringtone scams using Blinko.com

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Beware Blinko and all other ringtone providers. I recently discovered a 7.99 charge on my son’s part of our many paged cell phone bill. He’s a clever guy and insisted he’d been very careful about avoiding sign ups for paid services, so it appears he was either scammed by a ringtones provider or we were slammed with a ringtones subscription. Sprint actually confirmed that we had not downloaded anything with the service and – incredibly – could not tell me the company that had signed us up.

After getting Sprint to remove last month’s charge another appeared this month. Texting 42222 appears to have “unsubscribed” us from the service we never subscribed to in the first place and Sprint removed the current new charge but refuses to remove older charges I’d not noticed. I think I now got them to block the possibility of this happening again, but I’m very pissed that Sprints “default” position seems to be to assist these scamming Ringtone S.O.Bs.

I’ve learned that ringtones and downloadable phone content is a 4 BILLION dollar global industry (yes – four billion). Incredible, especially since so much of this industry is driven by teens who are either scammed into subscriptions or foolishly spending their parent’s money.
The industry is plagued by scams, the most common of which gets teens to sign up their phone for a ‘free’ ringtone but then have the account trapped in the fine print to pay a monthly charge. If this isn’t bad enough the phone companies, who are making huge profits themselves off this garbage, are not at all helpful in tracking down the scammers or applying appropriate credits.

UPDATE: Class Action Suit against Blinko:
Myles McGuire
Blim & Edelson, LLC
53 West Jackson Blvd.
Suite 1642
Chicago, IL 60604
Tel.: 312-913-9400
Fax: 312-913-9401
myles@blimlaw.com

UPDATE: Based on all the comment I recommend anybody affected by these Ringtone Scams contact the FCC commissioners as follows. Be sure to indicate your phone company and detail how they failed to address your complaints. In my opinion it should be illegal to bill these services without a written, signed authorization from the account holder.

Digg this post

 

Chairman Kevin J. Martin: KJMWEB@fcc.gov
Commissioner Michael J. Copps: Michael.Copps@fcc.gov
Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein: Jonathan.Adelstein@fcc.gov
Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate: dtaylortateweb@fcc.gov
Commissioner Robert McDowell: Robert.McDowell@fcc.gov

To Obtain Information via E-mail

General information, inquiries & complaints: fccinfo@fcc.gov
Freedom of Information Act requests: FOIA@fcc.gov
Comments on FCC Internet services: webmaster@fcc.gov
Elections & political candidate matters: campaignlaw@fcc.gov

To Obtain Information via Telephone

1-888-225-5322 (1-888-CALL FCC) Voice: toll-free
1-888-835-5322 (1-888-TELL FCC) TTY: toll-free
1-866-418-0232 FAX: toll-free
(202) 418-2830 FAX on Demand
(202) 418-1440 Elections & political candidate matters
FCC Phone Directory

Dear AOL, please don’t sue me!

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Maybe I’m just stupid but I’ve become experienced enough with domain issues that yesterday’s mildly threatening letter from America Online’s legal firm “Arent Fox” was more interesting than scary. The last time it was the New York Times’ firm which had one of those really fancy long names with something like ten lawyers in the firm. They told me I needed to turn over “GolfDigest.net” which I’d registered in conjunction with an expensive Golf Digest magazine advertising buy for the tourism group I worked with. In that case they actually withdrew the request and let us keep using the name when I pointed out that Golf Digest had approved our ad using the URL which was in a huge font in Golf Digest magazine. They could hardly claim we were trying to pull one over on them.

However, with a name like Arent Fox you’ve GOT to be good, so I have replied to them as follows:
Yesterday I recieved your letter dated June 19 asking me to turn over WINAMP.INFO to AOL because you feel it violates their service mark and I’m competing with them by placing some search information at that domain.

I think I agree that I should turn this over to AOL – I was unaware they owned a mark for the WINAMP name. But I do want to clarify a few things first:

* This was registered to me by the .info registry only AFTER all copyright holders had been given ample notice and time to register domains they felt they were entitled to – why didn’t AOL do this?

* Since AOL appears to think they should have registered this domain at the time but did not, it only seems fair that I’d be compensated in modest fashion for the time and expenses of registration and renewal. Are you empowered to offer any reimbursement. It does not seem reasonable that I’ve been paying AOL’s domain bills for several years.

Google Sitemaps. My good news and my bad news.

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Elite SEO Dave Naylor was complaining a bit about Google Sitemaps and I've also been unconvinced that sitemaps really does help straighten out ranking confusion.   According to Google Sitemaps my old-and-in-need-of-great-repair Airport Directory has some incredibly impressive sitemaps stats  (e.g.  Sitemaps says I'm number ONE for term "hotels")

Term   |   Rank 

  1. hotels in new york   1
  2. airport codes   1
  3. ord   1
  4. washington dc   1
  5. international airports   1
  6. hotels   1
  7. ord ohare   1
  8. chicago   1
  9. houston airport   1
10. airport city codes   1
11. airport maps   1
12. charlotte nc airport   1
13. john wayne airport   1
14. orlando   1
15. las   1
16. airline codes   1
17. city codes   1
18. major airports   1
19. salt lake city airport parking   1

Unfortunately QuickAid.com does not  rank for any of these terms.  In fact I'm under some form of downranking that means I get little Google traffic at all despite the fact I'm one of the most linked to Airport sites on the web. 

I've seen this type of bizarre sitemaps stat for some time so I'm not sure what's going on, though I do have some framed content and this could reflect the rank of sites appearing in the frames.

The good news is that my NMOHWY.com experiment has been languishing but it may be because I failed to load the sitemap when I moved to new server over a month ago.   I just loaded it now so hopefully my new pages at NMohwy.com will get indexed soon rather than Google showing the old supplemental pages, using old cache dates of June 2005 and similar.

Yahoo 2.0 Trumps Google 2.0 …. again.

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As Jeremy has noted, microformats are slowly but profoundly moving the web to the open, data rich, info cornucopia we’ve all been dreaming about. Yahoo is clearly the leader as “Web 2.0 Stylist” and one wonders if Google is going to be left wondering what hit them as developers and users move increasingly towards the simple but data rich environments Yahoo’s been creating for some time.

I’m beginning to wonder if Yahoo’s challenge in increasing market share, and thus stock price, is counterintuitive. Yahoo has effectively matched Google in search quality and has created a LOT of excellent applications and rich APIs while Google has simply stuck to a few great basics like gmail and search.

Perhaps the choice is simply overwhelming people who are thus choosing to stick with Google’s search interface (still simpler than Yahoo’s). Malcolm Gladwell has noted that when presented with too many purchase options people actually may choose fewer items than if presented with a smaller number of options. Could Yahoo’s problem be that they simply are doing too GOOD of a job ushering in Web 2.0 ?

Update:  When Jeremy over at Yahoo took me to task on this post I realized I’d not expressed myself clearly and it looked like I was talking about a search comparison.  (I’m leaving the post intact since he references it with a lot of comments.)  I was not talking about  Yahoo vs Google in search as much as Yahoo vs Google in the many other 2.0 projects like Flickr, APIs, and social networking features where I think Yahoo is beating out Google but not getting enough credit for seeing the future of the internet more clearly than most.

Airline flight update frustrations..

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I praised Kayak's flight selection service a few posts back, but I'm finding they are listing flights that are not available even after what appear to be many hours of non-availability. However, this does appear to be an American Airlines data problem more than a Kayak one so I'm still bullish on Kayak, but it sure is frustrating to see this note which appears at AA.com:

Check below for errors:

  • The flight you selected is no longer available. Please select another flight or modify your request

Arrgghhhhh!

A detailed study of the many services really is needed. Maybe I'll put that on the list.

UPDATE:  Using Kayak.com which sent me into AA.com booking system I did get an excellent rate MFR to BWI of $384 which appeared cheaper thanat AA.com's rate when I searched there independently of Kayak.  The 384 was over $100 cheaper than Orbitz, Farechase, or TravelNOW.

Kayak vs Sidestep = $200 Savings!

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After gushing over Kayak's great flight search I realized I had not used Sidestep in some time and should give it a try.   In my opinion Sidestep used to really suck, requiring download of software to your browser and in my limited experience did not deliver good rates. 

Now, like Orbitz and Kayak, Sidestep allows easy browser based searching.  However for the 2-3 legged cross country flight I'm currently researching (MFR to BWI), Kayak blows away Sidestep and Orbitz with an American Airlines flight that is a whopping $200 less.  

This could be a quirk due to my rural Oregon location but I'm impressed nonetheless.  I also REALLY like Kayak's intuitive interface and the ease of selecting your previous searches very quickly.    Rates from the big systems are updated three times per day and availability can change even more frequently, so it's a good idea to search using the same criteria several times before you "give up" on a good rate.  Persistence pays in the bookings game and Kayak makes it easier to stay on task. 

Eventually I'll try to do a better more  balanced comparison where I'll pick a bunch of routes and run them on the different consolidation systems to see who wins, but first I'll do a few more of these quickie comparisons such as Kayak vs Yahoo's fairly new offering "FareChase".

Kayak.com shines as airline ticket tool

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My initial experiments with Kayak over a year ago left me unimpressed, but Kayak.com has evolved into one of the best tools for finding cheap flights.  There are several notable features that make it a great way to search for flights when you have some flexibility and want a good price:

* You can select a date range of up to 3 days before and after your departure and return.  Without this feature Orbitz was probably better than Kayak for discount flight seekers, but now that Kayak's got it you are able to get a good fare picture for a range of dates.  

You must sign up for this but all that requires is a 10 second email signup.  A huge hat tip to Kayak's team for recognizing that even requiring a name and address is a barrier to sign ups.  Get all that mundane detail from people later or not at all.

* Also great is Kayak's ability to select different arrival airports with immediate fare updates allows you to fine tune your driving to flying ratios.   Especially helpful when traveling to areas where several major airports may be in close proximity to many final destinations.   BWI, IAD, and PHL for example or SFO, SMF, and OAK in California.