Category: Uncategorized

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Won’t Get Fooled Again

Pete Townshend is blogging. Cool.

Why? Even cooler. Townshend:

“On Saturday the 24th of September, the fifth anniversary of the day I sketched out the plot by the Atlantic in Florida, I am beginning a serialization of the novella of The Boy Who Heard Music on the internet. This will be a text only offering posted on my diary pages at http://www.petetownshend.com and also on the Blog site so that comments can be posted by those reading it.” (emphasis added)

Connecting with your customers/audience? Building a community? Pete gets it.

(BTW…I’m teaching my five-year old to do the windmill…)

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Spam Messes With Your Karma

Social network provider iKarma has taken the ubiquitous “Terms of Service” document to a new level:

“4. Violations. In addition to any and all remedies at law or in equity, any intentional violation of the Terms shall give iKarma the right to immediately suspend or cancel Services or Accounts without further liability. Furthermore, User specifically agrees that any intentional violation shall result in immediate liability for liquidated damages in the amount of Ten Thousand Dollars ($10,000.00) for breach of contract.”

Become a customer, violate the ToS, pay ten grand. A new business model?

(Thanks to alert reader Steve Duncan for the tip!)

UPDATE: iKarma’s CEO Paul Williams responds in the comments at Lornitropia:

“Our attorney assured us that this was becoming an accepted method of thwarting b[l]og spammers. The amount we set was set based on the $5000 it would cost to simply hire an attorney to sue a persistent spammer and another $5000 for the discovery and court costs. If you or your readers REALLY have a problem with this we would be foolish not to change it. But I think everyone is tired of spam and frustrated by the technological limits to solving the problem. Spammers won’t stop till site owners go after them. Site owners can’t afford to go after spammers till there is an economic incentive to do so. I welcome your thoughts.”

UPDATE 2: It appears iKarma has removed the $10,000 language from their ToS.

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Bloglines Issues, Workaround

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There seem to be some issues this morning with the Bloglines aggregator. Upon logging in, all my subscribed feeds were missing. This is not a good thing.

However, clicking My Feeds > Edit brought the list back. (Note: Clicking My Feeds > Edit and scrolling down gives an option to export subscriptions to an OPML file for backup. Highly recommended.)

Now, it appears that although the feed names are visible, they are not being updated. This is also not a good thing.

Others trying to determine what is going on can be found here:

Technorati – Bloglines
Peter Fleck
Life Hacker
The RSS Blog

Update: It looks like Bloglines is now adding new posts again, but anything that was unread (but not flagged) has been marked as read and is now in the vault of history. C’est la vie…I suppose if a post that’s been missed is important, it’ll show up again in the river of news at some point…

Tag:

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The Mercury News Gets Interactive

Kudos to the San Jose Mercury News for their new online section called Interactive. Currently focused on the arts/entertainment beat, the Merc has set up nearly 20 weblogs for reader feedback…comments, critiques, reviews, etc. In addition to the central location for pulling everything together, they’ve wisely set up “channels” (i.e. dedicated blogs) for:

  • Concerts
  • Fashion & Style
  • Gaming
  • Hot Lists
  • Movies & DVDs
  • Music
  • Radio
  • TV
  • Teen Views
  • Your Reviews

Similarly, a half-dozen or so of the Merc’s reporters in the section have been given blogs of their own from which to build a following, such as Marian Liu.

Even just limiting this experiment to the typically “softer” arts/entertainment section of the paper, there are some interesting implications. The Merc gets the opportunity to act as host for a number of very active and passionate customer communities. And, if they’re smart, the various providers of music, movies, gaming, and other areas have another venue in which to get unfiltered feedback from their customers. Nice.