Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Reading List August 25, 2005

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  • Link Selling: A Case Study (John Battelle’s Searchblog) – Should websites accept advertisers who aren’t interested in clicks, just in taking advantage of the website’s PageRank?
  • Google Gets Better. What’s Up With That? (New York Times) – A review of Google’s latest product releases, Google Desktop and Google Talk.
  • Thoughts on 9/11 (Patrick Eakes) – Patrick thinks that the National Geographic Channel’s "Inside 9/11" is well done, and I agree wholeheartedly.
  • User-Generated Market Intelligence (Business 2.0) – A new service called Jigsaw will aggregate the estimates of salespeople on the revenue and number of employees of private companies.  Using the "Wisdom of Crowds" theory this just might work.
  • Hatin’ (Half-life and times via Blog on the Run) –  A tech dude has some ideas about what to do with malware creators and none of them are pretty.
  • Touched (Chewie World Order) – Chewie links to the website of someone who seems to specialize in re-touching photos.  You can visit that site here.  Just click on any of the pictures and then run your mouse over the larger picture that appears and wonder at the powers of Photoshop.  Note, though, that even these people look great even in the before pictures, but a little augmentation takes them up a notch so to speak.
  • Location, Location, Location (A VC) – Why venture capitalists like to invest in companies that are close to home.
  • PR Pros as Eyes and Ears for Customer Service (Micro Persuasion) – Public relations and customer service are beginning to morph.

Reading List August 24, 2005

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Yahoo! Sucks…Today

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So I signed up for a free trial of Yahoo!’s unlimited music plan (YMU).  On the surface it’s a great deal; $5 a month for unlimited streaming music and $.79 per song you decide to buy.  That’s much better than the alternatives like Napster, and to top it off you can try it for 7 days for free.

I should have remembered that nothing in life is free.

To use the YMU service you have to download the Yahoo! Music Engine (YME), which I did last Friday  and then I used it for a day. I was offline all weekend, but when I booted up on Monday the YME wouldn’t load properly.  The program works with Internet Explorer (IE) so basically you have a YME interface around an IE browser window.  The problem was that whenever I tried to use YME I got an "Action Canceled" message in the IE part.  That meant I couldn’t get to the Yahoo! music site, which meant I couldn’t get my songs fed to my computer.

After many attempts I got it restarted and used it all day on Monday.  Yesterday when I booted back up I started getting these weird "Scripting Error" messages, so I uninstalled the YME and then reinstalled it.  I stopped getting the scripting error messages, but I did get the "Action Canceled" message again.

Somewhere along the line I emailed tech support, but a day later I had no response.  Of course there’s no phone number, not even for paying customers (Note: YME is free, but the unlimited service is not and I have to be able to use YME to utilize my paid service).

So I decided to go to Yahoo! groups and see if there’s a group dedicated to YME.  Lo’ and behold there is, and there’s a crapload of messages there (1135 total, 135 in just the last 7 days), and almost all deal with problems with the service.  To his credit there’s a guy named Ian from the YME development team who posts replies there regularly, but the level of problems they’re having with this thing is stunning.  I’ve posted message number 1131, and hopefully Ian will be able to help me.

What’s bugging me now is that I had to put one year of service on my credit card to get the 7 day trial.  While it was working the service was great and I’d like to keep it, but I’m truly irked that even as a paying customer I can’t get around their buggy "free" program. 

And now I can’t find a phone number or any other contact info for canceling the trial before the 7 days is up, which is the only way to keep from getting charged for the service.  I ran into a similar situation years ago with MSN and it literally took me over a year to get the problem solved with them.

I bet if Google had a music service it would actually work:)

If something positive happens I’ll let you know, but for today Yahoo! sucks.

***Update***

I received an email from Mal at Yahoo! Customer Care on Friday, August 26.  Unfortunately the fix he suggests is one that was already posted on the YME group message board, so I’m going to have to reply and let him know it didn’t work.  So I heard from them…three days later. 

I’ll let you know when all is resolved.

Mayor of DC Has a Blog

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Anthony Williams, mayor of Washington DC has an official blog.  He’s off to a slow start (one post a week), but let’s give him credit for trying.

Let’s just hope he runs his blog more like his DMV (the only city agency that seems to work) and less like the city school system (so bad it’s a crime).

Reading List August 22, 2005

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  • The Best Way to Save Gas (Moore’s Lore) – If localized web services got better we’d all save money.
  • Dating the Next Recession (Moore’s Lore) – Dana Blankenhorn thinks the next recession will begin October 17, 2005 when the new bankruptcy law goes into effect.  He makes an interesting and compelling argument.
  • Writer’s Perspective on Amazon’s Pay-to-Download Short Stories (Boing Boing) – Amazon has a new service that allows you download short stories one at a time (I-Stories?), and at least one writer thinks it’s a good thing.
  • Online Bettors Find a New Love: Real Estate (New York Times) – Online exchanges are correctly predicting many new developments (election results, American Idol winners, the capture of Saddam Hussein, etc.) and now they are telling us that real estate "bubbles" in the cities that it is tracking are NOT ready to burst.
  • The Vagina…It Writes Letters (Pandagon via Blog on the Run) – This is a hilarious play on the Vagina Monologues, which I’ve never read but am assuming weren’t that funny.  Kind of reminds me of that ‘detachable penis’ song.
  • "Peak Oil:" Welcome to the Media’s New Version of Shark Attacks (Freakonomics) – Steven Levitt pokes holes in a NYT magazine article that predicts calamitous results from the rising imbalance of oil production and consumption.
  • What Do the Kansas City Royals and My iPod Have in Common? (Freakonomics) – On randomness or the lack thereof.
  • Anatomy of a New York Times Article (Blog Maverick) – Times really are different for reporters.  Mark Cuban publishes the email chain for an interview he did with a New York Times reporter and then links to the resulting article.  Let’s just say he didn’t like the results, and he’s making the process transparent for everyone to make their own judgement.  Why do I think the reporter might not come out on top?
  • Steal this Book (Reveries) – Warren Adler, author of "War of the Roses", thinks the printed book has had a great 500-year run, but it’s about to be replaced by "screen" books.
  • Foxification of Local News (BuzzMachine) – Roger Ailes is going to do to local news what he did to national news at Fox.

Pretty in Pink

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PinklockerroomThe picture to the left is the University of Iowa’s locker room for visiting football teams.  Pretty ain’t it? 

The reporter who wrote about it described it as "Barbie’s Dream House on acid, a pastel nightmare. You feel naked without a little dog in one arm and a handbag in the other."  Even the urinals are pink, or rather "Dusty Rose."

Photo courtesy of DesMoinesRegister.com where you can also read all about this ultimate shrine to manliness, or Pepto-Bismol.

30 Days of Dell – As If $37 Million Wasn’t Enough

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Before I write the next sentence let me just say that I think that in the long run Dell coming to Winston-Salem/Forsyth County is a good thing for the community.  But (you knew there had to be a "but"), you would think that $37 million in incentives would tell everyone who needs to know how appreciative we are to have Dell. 

Some civic and business leaders in Winston-Salem don’t seem to agree as they’ve pulled out all the stops with the 30 Days of Dell celebration.  Tomorrow is apparently the official irony day of the event since the local company that’s become the latest symbol of corporate ineptitude, Krispy Kreme, is serving doughnuts with "Dell Blue" frosting.

Yummy.

Finally, Something Useful to Do with All Those Awful Short Stories I Wrote in College

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Amazon has launched a new service called Amazon Shorts that allows you to download individual short stories for 49 cents apiece.  No longer do you have to buy anthologies to get to short stories, which can only be a good thing as far as I’m concerned.

I think this could actually revive the popularity of the short story and prompt many prominent authors to again write in this style.  Of course it could also prompt old English majors like myself to inflict our horrid prose on the masses.

Cool WiFi Camera

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Hawking_cameraHawking Technologies has a very cool new video camera (picture at right is from their site) that is:

  • Wi-Fi enabled.
  • Has its own IP address, which means it can be checked via internet from anywhere in the world.
  • Unlike other web-cams it doesn’t require a connection to a PC.
  • Produces 30 frames-per-second, high quality video.

All this for the low, low price of $84.

My thanks to bookofjoe for finding this jewel.