Archive for December, 2007
Over the past few months many people have been using a popular site called MySpaceGrab to download songs from bands profiles. The site simply asked for the band’s MySpace URL and then presented you with a link to download each song. Today, somebody asked me if it’s possible and I told them “yes, these guys have been doing it for a while.” That’s when he noticed that the site simply has a message saying “This Site Has Been Stopped. Please Click Here
And Fill Out Your Details In Order To Support Us.”
I’d have given you a link, but the “click here” is a sleezy link to a debt professional website.
The way the site worked was pretty simple. The MySpace flash music player is simply calling another file on the server. You can’t see the link to the file on the page, nor can you get it from the page source. Instead, you have to monitor the requests your web browser makes. The easiest way is to look at the URL in the bottom status bar as it’s loading (easy in safari) or you can get some fancy firefox extensions.
I’m not 100% sure if MySpace or the RIAA were responsible for shutting down the site. If I were in this position, I’d make sure that a copy of my code somehow got posted on all the free php scripts websites. This way, it would force MySpace to actually fix the way they play music. I think we all agree that the code base of that site should probably be completely re-written.
It’s also an interesting legal issue here as well. Simply obfuscating filenames is NOT a secure way of doing anything. http://dnasab.net/wp-class.php Security by obscurity is not security. It’s the online equivalent to hiding something in the woods and hoping nobody finds it.
While I don’t condone using a site like this, I also don’t condone getting legal protection to step in because you can’t figure out how to solve your own problems in code. It’s very similar to the whole ticketmaster captcha problem.
I also want to point out that I don’t condone illegally downloading music in any way (file sharing, ripping cds for friends, from myspace, etc) As somebody who writes software for a living, I wouldn’t want you to steal my stuff so I don’t steal yours. (in fact, you’ll find the CDs for all 5,000 songs on my ipod collecting dust in my spare bedroom.)
In the case of MySpace simply putting the files online with obfuscated names so that anybody who stumbles onto the name can download it though, it’s hard to blame those who take it. I mean if somebody left a $20 bill on my porch, I’d probably take it.
December 27th, 2007
ABC news just released a neat little quiz that asks you close to 10 questions about Iraq, Healthcare, Immigration, and Energy, and then matches you to the candidate who agrees with most of your positions.
I know that the actual election won’t have anything to do with those issues, instead focusing on more important things like skin color, gender, 9/11, and who looks sexier in a cowboy hat, but it’s still nice to see all the candidate’s views out there so you can compare them to your own.
Go ahead, take it.. then come back and tell me who your candidate is. According to the quiz, I should vote for Ron Paul.
December 20th, 2007
UPDATE: I Created My Own Fail Pictures Site: FailPictures.com
Earlier today I was reading an article about how Lynne Spears’ parenting book is now on hold after her youngest daughter, 16 year old Jamie Lynn, just revealed she’s pregnant. Shortly thereafter I saw this thread over on Fark.
Readers of the popular website uncov will no doubt recognize some of the failure pictures in that thread. So there’s my question. Where do all these pictures come from? Some of them are utterly hilarious – yet I’ve been unable to find a repository of failure pictures.
There’s a website idea for somebody. Catalog and index all these failure pictures so that they’re searchable. Perhaps even a fail picture of the day? You could basically just copy I can has cheezburger. Man, that site needs an easier to type URL.
So is there already an archive of these pictures? Where can I find it? If not, who’s going to make me one?
Oh yeah.. about the pregnancy. One way to keep somebody who’s rich and famous in your life forever is to make sure you get them pregnant. I’m not saying I advocate it, but it worked for K-fed in the end right?
December 19th, 2007
UPDATE: This feature is no longer available, the demoxi software is no longer supported. I also am no longer affiliated with txt2day, however I’d be more than happy for you to visit Text Sendr to send your text messages.
If you’re a frequent user of txt2day you may have realized a pretty significant change today. Since joining Demoxi, I’ve been working on making widgets for our identity product. Today, we officially launched my first widget: txt2day text messaging.
That’s right, now you can send txt2day messages right from your desktop – ad free! In addition to txt2day, by downloading Demoxi you’ll also get a secure messenger with built in translation, a desktop translation widget, cookie manager, and a neat form filler that remembers your passwords, lets you drag and drop to fill forms, and even automatically generates and remembers secure passwords for you (if you want it to.)
Of course, all of this data is encrypted and stored only on your hard drive!
December 15th, 2007
I was sitting at dinner the other night with some of the board members and investors of worldlingo when we started talking about some of my translation sites like translatebritish.com that translates British to American.
Naturally, we started talking about word differences between cultures. You know, often confused things like lift vs elevator, pavement vs sidewalk, and the like.
It just so happened that we had people at the table from Germany, Australia, the US, and England. We were also eating Mahi Mahi that was served with a side of zucchini. When nobody ate (and most of us didn’t even recognize) their zucchini, we started talking about what it’s called in different places.
It seems that zucchini is hated among all cultures – so much so that they can’t be bothered to come up with their own word for it. Our American word is a derivative of the Itallian zucchine. The Germans seem to have also adopted the word zucchini.
The French didn’t even bother naming the edible part, and simply call it by the plant’s name: courgettes. The British couldn’t be bothered to name it either, and settled on courgette as well. It’s also the same in Holland.
The Spanish must actually like the green vegetable, as they’re one of the only languages that has it’s own word: calabacÃn. The same can’t be said for Portuguese though, who also borrowed the American zucchini.
I’m often amused by the language differences among cultures, but I thought this case was extremely amusing. Maybe it was a product of the wine.
December 14th, 2007
(originally posted on Shoutwire, reposted here for archiving purposes)
It seems I can’t open up my RSS reader lately without coming across an article about online advertising. It may be simply because my job title has the word “marketing” in it, but it’s hard to deny that the talk about ads has been ever increasing.
Whether it’s ISPs inserting ads into Google or simply replacing ads on webpages with their own ads based on your browsing history, I’ve been seeing lots of articles pop up lately.
In addition to the naughty things ISPs are doing, there’s the whole debate over things like the adblock plugin for Firefox.
Some have even gone so far as to say that blocking ads should be illegal – that it interferes with what the publisher wanted you to see and deprives them of revenues.
Obviously this won’t work. How do we police ad viewing? Do we send cops to your house to make you watch commercials instead of going to the bathroom?
While I find this idea absurd, I do believe that users have an ethical reason for not blocking ads, as well as a personal greedy reason to view them as well. Lauren made this point in a comment on one of those links above, but I’d like to expand on it.
Wait, did he just say that it would somehow benefit me to view ads? Yes, yes I did. Here’s why:
I’ve long taken the position that Adsense is NOT a business model. In fact, I’m pretty against showing ads in a lot of cases (like this.) Anytime a 3rd party like Google can totally eliminate your revenue with a single key press, you’re better off looking for a way to diversify your business. It doesn’t make sense to (pardon the marketing speak) keep all your eggs in one basket.
Still, despite being a very poor choice of business model, many sites choose to adopt it. I can understand that too, as there is a lot of money made from ad based sites. I know, I once used that faulty business model to make about $50,000 /year for 15 minutes worth of work. Maybe that’s why it’s so tempting.
Regardless of why or how, that’s the way the web works now. Look at all your major sites (this one included.) Gmail, Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. They’re all ad based.
That’s where the problems with adblocking or replacing come in. If ISPs continue to swap out ads, the sites lose money and seek out more extreme annoying ads, or start looking at other ways to make money.
The same goes for adblock. Shoutwire isn’t free to run, and you can bet you’ll see changes if the day comes that the ads stop making enough money to cover the site costs.
If Firefox and IE were to suddenly start shipping with adblock turned on by default, we’d see a web3.0 revolution. Every ad-revenue based website would go kaput.
We’d be left with a “pay as you go” web. You’d see companies charging per email you received. You’d see monthly subscription rates for Shoutwire, and Digg. You’d see signup fees for MySpace and Facebook, or possibly pay per bulletin.
Is this the web we want? Right now we have tons of content available to us for free, yet many still bitch about the advertisements they show. Sure, we’d like to get it all for nothing, but by doing so we may just be damning ourselves further down the road.
If you run a website, now might be a great time to explore a non-adsense based revenue model. For the rest of us though, I say it’s time we stop blocking ads and start shocking the monkey, exploring the benefits of the x-10 camera, and taking more perfect lover quizzes.
December 14th, 2007
I’ve been in Washington most of this week visiting the Demoxi office. Since I’ve been here last, they moved to a new office. The views out of the windows are really incredible – so incredible that every office is on the same side of the building.
Check out the view out of some of the offices here:
Near the right there you can see the base of Mount Rainier. The peak is hidden by clouds, but was clearly visible on the plane ride in.
About 2 offices to the right of this picture is a view of Lake Washington.
The sunset over the lake was an amazing view.
Craig and I walked into downtown Bellevue last night in search of food, and we came upon the Mall where all throughout the streets were what appeared to be high school band members handing out candy canes and popcorn before forming a parade with music. Apparently they do this every night in December.
I’d love to get out here in the summer sometime and actually have enough time to go visit the ocean (I’ve seen the Atlantic, and the Gulf of Mexico, but not the Pacific)
Right now it’s about 45 degrees here and everybody is cold, (especially Craig from California on our 6 block walk to the Cheesecake Factory) but that’s actually warm compared to Detroit where I can ice-skate on my lawn.
Speaking of my lawn, Google released Street View for the Detroit area. Here, you can see My House. That picture seems to have been taken a few months ago, while I wasn’t home, on trash day. Also, that’s not my address on the map (I’m well aware of the security threats, but my address is plastered all over everything anyway)
I just wanted to do a quick update. I’m working on a lot of things right now, so hopefully I’ll have some more interesting posts in a couple of days.
December 11th, 2007
One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen among web2.0 companies is complete failure at using ads to monetize their websites. While I’ve always firmly believed that Adsense isn’t a business model, that hasn’t stopped me (or many others) from making a small fortune off of it.
There are times when ads make sense, and times when they don’t. It’s always possible to make money with ads, but sometimes it can actually be more harmful to your site. The problem is, many companies don’t seem to know (or care) how to tell if the ads are really worth it.
Let’s look at some examples. Popup ads pay $3.00 CPM (that’s per thousand impressions.) For a site that recieves about 3,000 visitors / day you’d make a maximum of $9/day (roughly $3,000 per year.) Of course, thanks to firefox, popup blockers, and the 24 hour visitor cookie, the actual payout here is more like $3-$4/day. That may seem like decent money, but in my opinion it’s not worth pissing off all of your visitors for an extra cup of Starbucks each morning.
The same goes for “malicious” ads. A website I frequent recently began showing some ads that tried to download viruses when you view them in Internet Explorer. After browsing one day and encountering 15 warnings from my spyware program, I fired up IRC and seeked out the site developers.
Upon telling them about the ads, this was their response: “We contract ad space to various companies, and they can put whatever they want there. We can’t afford to cut off any advertiser relationships because we’re currently not profitable.”
I can sum up that reasoning in one word: FAIL!
That particular administrator just doesn’t get it. Eventually his site’s traffic is going to continue to plummet as people get sick of the viruses and popups, and he’s going to have to resort to more devious techniques to make money from his reduced traffic. It’s a nasty cycle.
In addition, he also faces getting banned from search engines and being listed as malicious in all the spyware / anti-virus programs. If left alone for long enough, his domain could be blacklisted causing his corporate email to be automatically deleted by recipients. I’ve seen similar happen at a company I used to work for after somebody sent spam spoofed as our domain.
I agree that sites need to make money, but if you’re considering monetizing your site you need to be smart about it. Launch first without the ads. This will allow you to not only build a user base, but to build trust. Then, when you put in some useful, non-obtrusive ads, people won’t mind.
I’ve done something similiar on noslang.com. You’ll notice there aren’t any ads on the home page. Testing showed that putting ads here made me an extra $10/day or so, but it also greatly reduced the average number of pages that users visited. By putting ads only on the pages that are 2 or 3 levels deep, I’ve noticed that users click more pages of the site, and repeat visitors are up. The very limited ads still manage to make a profit after hosting and everything is accounted for.
Here’s another great example:
One of my favorite types of ads are those on fark.com. Catering typically to the type of crowd who doesn’t click ads, Fark came up with a classified system. For $40, anybody can place a text ad on the right with comments enabled. That’s the key- the comments and interaction draw even more eyeballs to the ad. It’s been making them millions (according to the business2.0 article a few months ago)
So before you decide to monetize your website, ask yourself this: Is it really worth $3 to piss off my visitors?
December 3rd, 2007
