I’ve never seen this before. Where have I been? [Courtesy Mitch Ratcliffe]
Spam in every pot
An insidious, (relatively) new form of spam exploits a laxly designed aspect of Windows to pop commercial messages onto your screen and make them appear to be system notifications. Details here. It won’t work if you have a properly configured firewall, and you can turn off the “messenger” service that makes it possible pretty easily. Still, it’s a depressing indication that the spammers of the world will dragoon into service any little nook or cranny of your computer’s technology and turn it into a conduit for worthless commercial messages you will never ever respond to. Makes me wanna holler…
Meanwhile, IBM published this paper by David Mertz reviewing and field-testing several different spam-defeating technologies.
“Smart Mob” hobnob
Howard Rheingold is in The Well’s “Inkwell” conference — which is free to the Web to read — talking about his new “Smart Mobs” book with Bruce Umbaugh, Cory Doctorow, Christian Crumlish, Dave Hughes and other folks.
Markoff on TIA
Must-read John Markoff story in today’s Times detailing meetings held under the auspices of DARPA last summer that considered — only to wisely reject — restructuring the nature of the Net to allow the government to track pretty much everything. One more piece of the growing and increasingly weird “Total Information Awareness” puzzle: “The Pentagon research agency that is exploring how to create a vast database of electronic transactions and analyze them for potential terrorist activity considered but rejected another surveillance idea: tagging Internet data with unique personal markers to make anonymous use of some parts of the Internet impossible.”
An organization is born
The Digital Storytelling Association opens its doors. This is the group forming out of the key people and energy from the Digital Storytelling Festival that used to take place every year in Crested Butte, Colorado, organized by the late and much-missed Dana Atchley. Here’s the group’s definition of digital storytelling. Operating for now out of Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen’s Center for Digital Storytelling but international in scope and ambition, this association should serve as a useful resource for anyone interested in using digital tools to tell personal stories — which would at this point include quite a large portion of the species.
Boxing corner
Computer manufacturers are forever trying to come up with new ways to get us to put their boxes in our living rooms and integrate them with our stereos, TVs and home theaters. Doing so makes sense technologically, with the advent of MP3, online video and so forth; but it has never made sense aesthetically. Apple is the only computer maker to have ever addressed this issue head on (Gateway’s home-entertainment PCs have always struck me as laughable). But this thing strikes me as a step forward: It’s packed with geek appeal but looks more at home with a stereo or TV than your typical ATX Tower beige box. [Link
courtesy Gizmodo]
One note tune; see SPOT crash?
Since Microsoft is the only company left in this tech-industry depression with the money and the ambition to conduct real research and push new types of products, it pretty much gets to call the shots at events like the now-humbled, on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy COMDEX. Bill Gates kicked the conference off with one product announcement that strikes me as fascinating and one that seems ludicrous.
On the interesting side there’s Microsoft One-Note, slated for a mid-2003 release. This is a new twist on the PIM (“personal information manager”) that sounds like it might be fun and useful. (It’s tied in various ways to Microsoft’s new Tablet PC initiative, but don’t hold that against it.) PCs have never done a great job at collecting one’s notes, and note-organizing software like Ecco and Info-Select have never really seized the public imagination. Most of us still use pad and paper. If One-Note does half the things it promises — and if Microsoft doesn’t lock it down too tightly into the company’s use-all-our-products-together template — it could be important.
On the ludicrous side there’s a new Microsoft initiative called “small personal object technology” — or SPOT. Here’s one report:
| The most bizarre announcement was saved for last, which Gates described as the culmination of an idea that began three years ago.
He informed the audience that Microsoft’s Smart Personal Object Technology group has been looking at embedding intelligence into small, everyday devices. Gates showed off a range of fridge magnets, key chains and wristwatches that are automatically updated with the time, current weather and the latest news. More information was promised at next January’s Consumer Electronic Show. Gates said that the company hopes to ship a smart alarm clock based on the technology next year. It always tells the right time, gives a default wake up time based on user patterns, and checks the weather, traffic and news to calculate the user’s journey time to work. |
Typically, the problem with all such “smart device” projects is that the device is too small and too poorly designed to have an intelligible interface. So that in order to program it to do what you want you have to cycle through ridiculous “modes” by punching little tiny buttons, or spend hours reading an instruction manual that has been translated, poorly, from the language spoken by the engineers who created it. I guess the coolness of Dick Tracy watches remains a powerful lure to geeks everywhere, but I will be shocked if SPOT proves anything but a great big money-hole for Microsoft.
Redesign ruckus
Jim Romenesko’s widely read media-industry blog — once known as Media Gossip and now, under the aegis of the Poynter Institute, published under the more staid Media News flag — hs just undergone a redesign, and the readers are howling. Where are the left-hand column links we loved? Why did they mess with a good thing? Why can’t I change the font size? The “feedback” feature doesn’t work right! And so on, and so on.
As a veteran of a half-dozen redesign projects, I think I can guess what was happening behind the scenes at Poynter: The project is rolling down the road, there’s a deadline that has been pushed back once or twice or three times and just can’t be pushed back any more, a lot of what the designers wanted to do is working and a lot still isn’t, the developers are working as hard as they can, and as the deadline approaches triage kicks in: You put up what’s working and you start prioritizing fixes.
As far as I could tell, the Media News redesign went live some time Friday morning and then went offline for most of the rest of that day — during which time my browser showed the old Thursday edition of the page, in the old design. Which suggests that this redesign launch, like most, hit a few bumps in the road.
What most people — even the savvy journalists who congregate at Romenesko’s site — don’t seem to get is that Website redesigns are nearly always slow-motion train wrecks. No matter how smart and experienced the people behind the redesign are, no matter how much testing you do, once you go live you encounter a million and one little problems. You spend the next several weeks fixing them. By the time you’re done, most of your readers have grown accustomed to the graphical and functional changes that first irked them. Many of them start to discover, and appreciate, the actual improvements that the redesign incorporated. The world moves on.
Meanwhile, much of the value in the redesign is often invisible to the public but of great import to the publishing organization — usually (if the managers have done their homework) there’s a more solid infrastructure in place, a good database is storing the content, and more flexible and speedier publishing tools are in the hands of the writers and editors who need them.
I’m not saying that the Poynter redesign is a big improvement, or that some of the complaints aren’t justified. I liked the “old” Romenesko too, probably because I was used to it. But mostly, I’m feeling empathy for the folks at Poynter.org, who I bet need some sleep right around now.
Big Brother redux
William Safire’s must-read column today reprises the reporting John Markoff did last week on the government’s plans for a master database of personal information. You thought online marketers were bad? Admiral John Poindexter (of Iran-contra scandal fame) is spearheading a plan — it’s currently a part of the Homeland Security Act, which is seemingly on the verge of passage into law — for “Total Information Awareness,” a centralized federal spy database with dossiers on every U.S. citizen.
It’s significant that the outcry against this plan is hailing not just from the left but from civil-libertarian conservatives like Safire. Safire, of course, served as a speechwriter in the Nixon White House, where routine abuse of FBI files on American citizens was the order of the day. That era’s rampant and hideous misuse of government surveillance for private political ends should stand as a reminder of the perils in Poindexter’s plan.
(Different Strings has posts on this issue here and here, as well.)
Spam-a-rama
Several years ago, when Salon’s technology coverage was published under the now-antiquated label “21st,” I assigned crack reporter Andrew Leonard to look under the hood of a spam operation. We published Spam Bombers in Sept., 1997. Spamming tools have only gotten more sophisticated since then, and the volume of spam has exploded.
Today’s Wall Street Journal offers an interesting update on our old “Among the Spammers” feature, profiling a “spam queen” named Laura Betterly. It’s a good piece (and this link will let you read it even if you’re not a Journal subscriber — thanks to Slashdot), but it left me with some questions. Ms. Betterly claims that her income from her spam business will be $200,000 this year. Yet each example of a particular spam deal or mailing cited in the article provides a measly payoff. The only deal that seems to offer substantial return — $1,555 in commissions on one week’s worth of mailing for a particular client, which Ms. Betterly somehow extrapolates to a total take of $25,000 — is a spam message that, ironically, sells antispam software.
All of which just makes me wonder whether our friendly spammer is borrowing a page from the playbook of online porn merchants, who have been known to inflate their earnings.