DISQUS

hey Jake,


i'm a bit of a photography nerd, and am currently in the market for a Dslr, i've got rid of all my film ones except for a Nikon FM2.



i'm on flickr, add me as a friend if your on it: http://flickr.com/photos/karllong/

</br... on the subject of reviewing food you should check out yelp.com , also there as karl l



cheers,



Karl

Thanks for your comment Duncan, I wasn't actually calling Elliott a spammer, I was just suggesting that he bares some kind of responsibility for the software that he wrote. Clearly Elliott doesn't like getting ripped off either: http://gadgets.elliottback.com/2006/08/27/i-hat... and even has links to Anti plagerism sites in his footer.

I'm not suggesting there is a simple answer to this, I'm just pointing out that Elliott should bare some responsibility for the software that he wrote. The "Hey, i just wrote the software" does not totally absolve him of responsibility, especially as he gets lots of linkbacks because each post that is syndicated, legitimately or not is attributed to him with a link back.

I hope that clarifies my argument somewhat,

karl

There is a legitimate use for remote control administration of computers, but when it's not legitimate it's called a trojan.

Why not add a feature that prevents the stealing of peoples content? How about a key/value that can be embeded in the publishers rss feed? If you've got an agreement with a publisher you just get them to put a code in their post template that the autoblog can look for when it's publishing. Don't let the autoblog scrape a site that doesn't have a key in it.

Elliott,

What is the purpose of the adsense ID, Amazon ID auto replacement feature for then? Why is there an option to replace the original author?

It seems like an unscrupulous program written for unscrupulous purposes and therefore you, the author deserves some accountability.

Karl

What is the purpose of the adsense ID, Amazon ID auto replacement feature for then? Why is there an option to replace the original author? It seems like an unscrupulous program written for unscrupulous purposes therefore the author deserves some accountability.

Hey Elliott,

that software you wrote is like a virus, and the functions built in to swap out the original sites adsense ID's and Amazon ID's, and the ability to strip the authors information make it all the more nefarious.

I think some of your software is really good, like hashcash, but wp-autoblog so much like a virus in the blogosphere you should think about it.

karl

So Elliot wrote a piece of software designed to duplicate a blog via RSS, and even has functions to swap adsense ID's and amazon associates ID's from the orginal blog and replace them with the hihackers. So he creates software that creates splogs that all link back to him. 9rules folks are constantly getting hijacked by that software, and it always points at Elliot, great for promotional purposes. In many ways Elliot has created a virus, one that is spread via social engineering and that software he wrote should be treated as such.

karl

You might want to try out the hashcash plugin, I had deactivated it a while ago because it interfered with co-comment, but it works great on stopping spambots dead in their tracks.
http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2005/10/23/w...

K

I'm getting really worried now, my host http://mediatemple.com/ is down and so is http://9rules.com, and http://zeldman.com (also hosted on mediatemple also on wordpress). I wonder if it's spam related?

Karl

Yeah, it's been crazy on my blog as well, I'm actually somewhat relieved that it's not just me :-) Most of them are getting held for moderation, but I get an email alert for that so I got a tonne of email as well this morning. Boy, i hope they get this figured out soon.

Karl

I use a TomTom 500 and am totally in love with it. All the maps are contained on a 1gig SD card, and the level of detail is incredable. I was touring the Mississippi delta with my Dad, and the TomTom took us through some dirt roads that went through cotton fields. Had a great time looking at old blues singers grave sites, only problem they don't often have addresses :-)

pics of the mississipi trek here:
http://flickr.com/photos/karllong/sets/668721/

Cheers,

karl

http://goodstorm.com is also interesting as it's first carnation is a T-Shirt shop model similar to cafe press, except they give put a lot more money back in the pocket of the store owner. Lots of non-profits are gravitating to it, but anyone can open up a t-shirt store.

Plug for my tshirt blog : http://tcritic.com

Karl

I just got some crazy traffic from stumbleupon on my tshirt blog, last week over 40% of my traffic was from it? I think stumbleupon favors conceptually simple and narrowly focused sites, that people can make a snap judgement on as soon as they arrive. I think i'm going to post about it tomorrow and put some pictures from google analytics because it's so bizzarre.

Holy cow, great find, and what a great bit of publicity for GM. I bet that is watched more that the latest "bold moves" episode :-)

Karl

Wow, you are not kidding about thiscityrocks.com Robert, that is such a great concept and so well executed. I can't think of a better topic that the live music scene either. Amazingly cheap to do as well, served on youtube, blog through typepad. Man, it just seems like so much more fun :-)

I feel behind the curve, I'm just starting on episode 3 of a podcast and now I want to do a "thiscityrocks" thing somewhere :-)

BTW I wouldn't be surprised if podcasting becomes the term for video and audio in the end, I know right now people are thinking audio, but video podcasting seems a pretty appropriate/accurate term when I have a mixture of video and audio all coming into itunes.

Cheers,

Karl

errr, how about soccer isn't so popular here because you don't have players like Zidane:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-148849...

Or maybe because soccer doesn't lend itself to 15 minute intervals for advertisers.

Karl

Hey Peter, love your blog!

Just thought I'd mention that I signed up for the zooomr thing yesterday and there were about 100 comments so far. Today 325 :-)

Not a bad investment on their part,

Cheers,

Karl

Oh yeah, good call on coComment Enhancer Christian, mind you I wish the comment aggregators would shake out and one definite winner emerge and get embedded in the blogging tools.

I like the little coComment embed you can have in your sidebar, somehow it extends the conversation beyond your own blog and higlights the other blogs your on.

Cheers,

karl

My most recent plugin experiment was with the podpress plugin that i used to get my first podcast up and running. I set it up at customersonfire.com and it worked flawlessly, providing several different ways for people listen to the podcast and publishes download numbers right next to the DL links.

My favorite staple plugins have to be the google site map plugin and the amazing Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Cheers,

karl

Interesting, it seems that myspace strategy is give your users complete freedom to do what they want with their "spaces", watch what they do, duplicate services their members use alot :-)

rather than a walled garden like AOL it's more of a borg like approach. Scary :-)

I wonder if myspace is going to invest in building SecondMyspace when a lot of it's members start getting into secondlife.

Karl

I tend to like business books that encourage critical thinking, that don't take business diciplines as gospel. In the end modern business is a young dicipline, unlike math and physics it does not have thousands of years of track record. Modern business is maybe a 50+ year old dicipline and even then it's transitioned from being an accounting led dicipline to being a marketing led dicipline. If your like me and you think business is becoming more design led as we speak then it's onto its 3rd major paradigm in 50 years, so there is no gospel. Besides gospel means "good news".


So I like business books from Seth Godin, Tom Peters, I also like the Cluetrain Manefesto, and No Logo by Naomi Klein. Also, a brilliant book from a few years ago was called "simplicity: the new competitive advantage" and that was great. More traditional authors I like Hamel and Pralahad competing for the future, Porter On Competition. Probably the number one business book for me right now is The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers by Prahalad & Ramaswamy.

Haha, good for you Rick. My point wasn't to put you out of business, but to point out 25% would be worth talking about.


On the skating topic, would you believe i used to skate with Felix in central park?

Not only that, they are diligent at monitoring the blogosphere as well, I wrote about them and embeded the tool on my blog for fun, and I noted that I got 5% off if I ordered anything. Anyway, the owner commented on my blog withing hours that he would give me 10% for my excelent evangelism.


IMHO they should offer a bigger discount, 10% is still, kind of eehhh. If they did 25% that might get some attention. Mind you as I noted on previous posts the business fear of "what if everyone does that?" often gets in the way of doing anything remarkable.

I'm so glad you picked up on my point about conflict often contributing to deeper and often better relationships.


I thought GM handled it well, and they got a tonne of publicity, I mean it was even on nightline, in the NYT, on rocketboom, it was everywhere.



Mind you IMHO the one thing they have totally screwed themselves with is taking down all the content now the competition is over. Think about all those incoming links that they've squandered with a 404 page now.



My favorite, which was Brokeback Tahoe, no longer exists and I just get a 404 page. Surely GM could have garnered more opportunities to engage with customers if they'd left some of this stuff up.



I guess its the old marketing mentality of "big bang" and diminishing returns vs. the micromarketing concept of small investment in cultivating interest with increasing returns.



Interested in your thoughts on my piece on micromarketing vs. marketing:

http://customersonfire.com/archive/marketing-vs-micromarketing-moving-from-mass-market-to-the-massive-market/



Cheers,



Karl

Wow, thanks Jake. Needless to say I appreciate your comment and compliment. It seems we've got lots of ideas in common, i'll be adding you to my blogrolls. Very cool that you used to work for Lego, good stuff.


Karl