How Not To Blog

Wow. Not only will they make money from donor donations, Terry Schiavo's parents will also fuck over donors by selling their personal data to a marketing company.

Talk about taking advantage of human kindness. Do they think these people had to give money to support a brain-dead humanoid and her plight? Middle America is such a sucker for a sob story. At least a dead pope is worth crying about, but crying over someone very few people cared about or knew existed a few months ago is pathetic.

I'm sure they'll get a million or so for "their story" to be made into a television show, if they haven't already.

Here's a quote from the New York Times:

Pamela Hennessy, an unpaid spokeswoman for the Schindlers, said she was initially appalled when she learned of the list's existence.

"It is possibly the most distasteful thing I have ever seen," Ms. Hennessy said. "Everybody is making a buck off of her."

They are worse than the lowlife scum who run the "Terry Schiavo Blog"

Oh, Flickr. I really want to love thee. But it's been nearly a week, and you haven't 'approved' my fckng account yet. I suppose now that you've been bought out you don't need to tend to very basic administrative tasks anymore. Do you really want me on your bad side, oh Fuckr? I can be a real pain in the ass, you know.

Illiterate is right! Who the fuck quotes news two years old as if it were just yesterday?

I think this is a great idea! Google was definitely getting clogged up with numerous weblogs linking to the same main article. Removing the weblogs from the main search index would allow the truly authoritative articles to be shown first. Then, should the searcher want commentary about an article he could go to Google?s Blog tab and find it. I wonder if they are thinking of developing their own blog search or if they will buy and intergrate Technorati. Either way I?m looking forward to it.

pointing to the article, Google to fix blog noise problem, from May 2003.

On top of that, it's a stupid idea. Which is why it was never implemented.

So.. this is what advertising has come to?

Searching Yahoo personals through Google you'll get a result list of Yahoo personals profiles that match.

The format is:

site: profiles.yahoo.com KEYWORD KEYWORD KEYWORD...

A search for single teachers in Dallas gives us 25 results.

Supposedly, searching site: profiles.yahoo.com on Google brings back 631,000 results. Searching site: profiles.yahoo.com on Yahoo brings back only 175 results.

Who says Google doesn't have it's own yodel?

Thanks to Razvan Antonescu

Direct marketers will love the new Yahoo! 360. It appears that someone could easily create a script that will extract the Yahoo user ID from the "Friends" pages, and send out highly targets emails to 360 users based on their interests found in their profile (or just plain old non-targeted spam).

Just hold your cursor over the "send an IM" text to see what I mean. [Update: disabled!]

Hey, there, Marc Canter. Do I have a good deal for you!

[Update: 4:20PM]

Randy Farmer says on his blog that the 'leaked' Yahoo ID problem has been fixed. First day out of the super private arena and into the elite arena, and a big bug has already been squashed.

Wow.. I'm almost impressed. Except that it's not 'fixed' at all. The links have simply been disabled. Well, better that than the other.

Glad to know the good folks at Yahoo read this shit.

Who cares what's in your bag?

Show me what's on your mind.

You knew it had to happen.

Don't get me wrong, the iPod is great, but the PSP is about to show that the iPod is played out in its current form. Apple can make some tweaks to the iPod's design, it can strip out features and make a flash player (the Shuffle), but as a music player, it's basically cooked, there isn't really anywhere to go except down in price.

What is the PSP?
-WiFi (802.11b) built-in; 100-meter range with a transfer rate of up to 2mbps
-Email
-Play MP3s
-View digital photos
-P2P file-swapping
-Instant Messaging (IM)
-Read books
-Web browser
-Bring media over from your Tivo
-Convert any video file into a PSP video file
-Download and play (mostly) illegal movie torrents

Add a keyboard

And Possibly...
VoIP (rumor)
Future PDA functionality
Camera attachment
GPS
Word processing

...all craftily disguised as a portable gaming device.

Which is cooler, someone going into a cafe and listening to music with their iPod, or someone going into a cafe and sharing photos that they're downloading in real-time with their friends from a photo website, and sending an instant message to their family, and then doing a whole lot more, including listen to music?

For now, Apple is lucky that only a 1-2GB Sony Memory Stick Duo is available. It's two totally different markets, but I think the PSP is appealing enough to Apple's future market share (or what it hoped would be its future market). The iPod still serves only 1 function.

But if I were Steve Jobs, I'd be scared shitless right about now.

There really are more important things to focus so much media attention on than one brain-damaged person.

However, I don't expect any mainstream news channel or newspaper to steer off course from a story that middle America is eating up.

Here's a story from earlier this month about a man whose family couldn't afford to keep him on life support. This is a story that barely gets mention outside of the Texas press. He'll probably be dead in a couple of weeks because of the inability to pay or receive Medicaid/Medicare.

But who the fuck cares about an old man? People aren't "made" to care about the plight of a specific elderly person unless that old person is famous.

Jigsaw is in the business of buying and selling contact information to/from you.

For every good contact you give them you may get about $1, depending on what it goes for in their marketplace. They use a points system whereby buyers can buy points for $0.20 - $0.12 and sellers can sell points at $0.10.

All contacts in their database include a person's phone number, email address, and title. They don't say anything about how another person might feel having their private information traded back and forth like it was a stock. I guess they would refer to this as "pre-emptive networking".

What's next? Will I be able to sell my friends' contact information for $1 each, too? Sign me up! I've got a list of people I don't particularly care for.

The problem with people receiving spam is usually that they use only 1 email address. They give everyone and everything [email protected] and then complain that they get too much junk in their inbox everyday.

Here's my solution:

1) Register a domain at an inexpensive registrar. (If you pay more than $9, you're getting ripped off.)

2) Spend $3/month for a hosting account like this one where you can get 1GB of space and a catch-all email address.

3) After you're done signing up and pointing the domain's DNS setting to your new host, set up your email client (with many modern hosts it's a one-click process from the control panel if you're too stupid or lazy to figure it out by yourself).

4) Now, here's the most important part. When you give someone an email address, make it unique. If you register at Corbis.com, for example, use [email protected] in the registration field.

5) Receive email as you normally do, in Outlook Express, Eudora, or whatever. When you see that you are receiving spam addressed to a particular email address go to your email control panel at your host (or using Outlook) and BLOCK that field. Example: if company X has sold your email address (which, inventively, you provided them with [email protected]) then you can just filter out any email coming in that has that email address int he "to" or "cc" field.

6) shut up about spam

My spam count (over 10+ domains and countless email addresses) is never more than 3 per day because of this very method that I have been using for years and years. Works like a charm.

C'mon CNN. You're still lost in the 90s for some reason. Still licking your wounds from an ass-kicking by a stupid fox? Is there anybody there?

Do something about it! You need a make-over. Big time! Start by changing your logo. It screams out, "NINETIES! I AM PATHETIC!"

Educated dumbasses.

I suppose the only job a washed-up actress can get these days is playing herself.

I bet they bought her at a discount rate. Heck, she's probably doing it for free to get some publicity.

Watch out! If her show is successful we will see the return of Gary Coleman, the other midget from Fantasy Island (or is he DEAD?), and Corey "Crack Head" Feldman.

Hollywood is out of ideas again. How about a line of television shows based on successful movies if you can't think of anything?

If you haven't seen it already, check out the Paris Hilton Sidekick Simulator. A friend of mine, Albany Supereight, sent this to me. It's pretty damn funny.

One solution to the 'Happy Birthday' copyright.

Sing it in Spanish.

?Feliz cumplea?os a t?!
?Feliz cumplea?os a t?!
?Feliz cumplea?os a ......!
?Feliz cumplea?os a t?!

and if the federalis bust down your door and hassle you for a bribe and your virgin wife is out blowing someone else, try this version on them...

? Cumplea?os feliz!
? Cumplea?os feliz!
? Cumplea?os feliz!
? Cumplea?os feliz!

That's right.. sing the song backwards!

Or, just give ASSCAP your middle finger like we all do with every other song.

Here's the history behind the song.

Less than 3 days of sitting on the toilet thinking what am I going to do with my life, registering a domain just for the hell of it, then launching How Not To Blog to unleash hell like Maximus, one of the blogs down below gets a mention on Corante.

...If you like a bit of bile with your breakfast, it's worth checking out the site: How Not to Blog launched on March 1 and in less than 72 hours, has already given Bronx cheers to Google, Jason Kottke, BoingBoing and the Apple iPod Shuffle.

Makes me sound like a bat out of hell. If my calculations are correct, I will be burnt out after 18.5 days. Like a horse going too fast out of the gates, or grandma getting up too fast out of bed to make your bile breakfast.

I didn't know anyone was reading this shi7, especially not within so little time. I guess there's just no privacy nowadays. The problem with most blogs is that they're usually dishonest about their surroundings. And that's strange because normally in faceless social interactions people are much more honest because of the enhanced sense of anonymity. But I guess when you have your name plastered everywhere on your blog you gotta kiss some ass to build up your cred points. Or perhaps I'm confusing angst with honesty, and not realizing the true value of social capital. Geeks have to make up for their lack of social grace somehow, so it might as well be kissing ass online.

Unfortunately, I have no Bronx cheers for Dominic Basulto or Corante New York. I don't even know the kok-sucker.

Look forward to more oddly self-congratulatory posts like this one. At least for the next fortnight.