Ottawa Business Journal: The idea behind Iotum is to bring leading edge applications found on enterprise call servers, such as presence and find-me-follow-me, to small- and medium-sized businesses and home-based offices without breaking the bank.

Randy: I didn't understand what Alec was doing till I read this article. Great idea! Iotum is financed by Brightspark Ventures.

Pics of a Python eating a Kangaroo.

http://www.scribblybum.net/157968.htm

A new search engine has emerged that is not only as fast as Google, but also resolves to the same IP address and appears identical.

http://466453.com/

Cory thinks it's leet-speak or some sort of hacker number-letter substitution code. I suspect Cory doesn't have a telephone keypad nearby.

Bookmarked for later viewing.

http://www.brickflick.com/?page=gtalc

Rest in Peace.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/03/31/schiavo/index.html

Here's a test. Visit this blog. If you can see text, then you're either female or gay.

http://nflcheerleader.blogspot.com/

Waxy: Wordpress is a very popular open-source blogging software package, with a great official website maintained by Matt Mullenweg, its founding developer. I discovered last week that since early February, he's been quietly hosting almost 120,000 articles on their website. These articles are designed specifically to game the Google Adwords program, written by a third-party about high-cost advertising keywords like asbestos, mesothelioma, insurance, debt consolidation, diabetes, and mortgages. Why Wordpress? The Wordpress homepage has a very high Google Pagerank of 8, largely because every Wordpress-powered blog links to the Wordpress homepage by default. The high pagerank affects their ranking in Google search results, making context-sensitive Google ads very profitable. This, in turn, makes Wordpress very attractive to advertisers.

Randy: I applaud Matt for his business savvy. I don't understand this idea that software developers are not allowed to come up with creative ways to pay their lunch.

Cool Star Wars movie trailer with a chocolate twist.

http://us.mms.com/us/mpire/

Brad Templeton: [Copyright is] basically the legal exclusive right of the author of a creative work to control the copying of that work.

Randy: DRM is a form of copy control that the author imposes on his work. It's the author's exclusive right. Fighting that exclusive right is fighting against copyright. Ken? I'm thirsty!

Dave Winer: In my discussion with Brad Templeton of the EFF, I asked him to map www.eff.org to one of my servers, and map his original server to backend.eff.org, so I can filter it. I'd add links to their content, and see if they object. If that isn't a problem, I'll start changing the words, and see if that works for them. Then I'll put my name on their work, I imagine that would be okay too. Why not? I'm just being creative! Then I'll change their positions to be more in tune with the entertainment industry. Somewhere in there, there's got to be a line. I'm thinking of mirroring Cory Doctorow's Creative Commons-licensed book and crossing out his name and replacing it with mine. Then I think I'll go to a printer and print up a bunch of copies of my book and stand on a corner in Times Square and sell copies. Maybe a book publisher will offer to distribute it for me. I'll be interested in talking with them.

Randy: Can I get an autographed copy of your book Dave?

Tim Bray: We at Sun and our esteemed competitors up in Redmond are engaged in a grand experiment: what happens when you dramatically increase a company’s transparency? Initial results are pretty good for both of us. Apple’s approach is of course, exactly the opposite. They control the message, nothing that’s not part of the message can be said, nobody is allowed to say anything except for Steve, and they’ll sue your ass if you step out of bounds.

Randy: I think the key point here is control the message. It's not that you are some kind of great citizen because you let your employees blog. In fact, business is business, nobody is trying to be a great citizen and forsake their business. The truth is that control the message translates to limit the message. In other words, you're not taking advantage of all your marketing channels. Loser!

Got some more Wallop invites today. The email from Microsoft contained the following line of text and html.

<%@ Page language="c#" Codebehind="Registration.aspx.cs" AutoEventWireup="false" Inherits="Wallop.Web.Registration" %>

This is not the first Microsoft service that has sent me this stupidity. Is this intentional? For those that don't know, this is an ASPX directive, i.e. source code.

Dave Winer: The issue appears to be copyright, and it appears that the EFF believes there should be no copyright. My position is that copyright changes with the development of worldwide networking, and all creative people must have some right to the work they create, or else, truly, the incentive to create will disappear.

Randy: Dave has been making some great comments today. Here's one I totally agree with. Without copyright (and patents) the value of creativity is diminished. Without copyright (and patents) there will be less creativity, as the creatives find a more profitable career.

The Washington Post compares the Desktop Search alternatives.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2606-2005Mar26.html

An earthquake (8.2 on the richter scale) in Indonesia has raised fears of another Tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/03/28/indonesia.quake/

Update: Upgraded earthquake to 8.7.

TSN: Despite the likes of Dany Heatley, Vincent Lecavalier, Alexei Kovalev, Alexei Morozov, Ilya Kovalchuk, Slava Kozlov, Denis Arkhipov, Alexei Zhitnik and Darius Kasparaitius, AK Bars managed only five goals in the four games against Lokomotiv goaltender Marc Lamothe - a 31-year-old native of New Liskeard, Ont.

http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/news_story.asp?ID=119209

Randy: Thanks Wade!

I have to uninstall Yahoo! Desktop Search. After about one week of use, it just hangs when launched. This is the second computer that has produced this flaw (of two computers I actively use). That can't be good.

Update: A re-install does not necessarily help. Maybe I'll try re-booting. Yikes! Reboot didn't help either. ArggG!

AP: Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it was acquiring leading collaboration software company Groove Networks Inc., and naming its founder, Ray Ozzie, as Microsoft’s chief technical officer.

Randy: Wow!

Video - Gates discusses acquisition of Groove. Bookmarked for later viewing (no audio at work).

click to enlarge

I just got a notification from Orkut. It must be weeks since I logged on and months since I've posted. I decided to check out what's new on Orkut. 'Bad, bad server.' Somethings never change.

Dave: FYI, it's been 1000 days since I smoked. Yaha. [cut] What I miss is the high, and the pain. It's when I feel a rush of self-loathing that I wish I could light up. I think we all have moments when we don't like ourselves very much. A smoke is the perfect companion for that feeling.

http://archive.scripting.com/2005/03/10#notThatIveBeenCountingOrAnything

Randy: Congrat Dave!

Dexit: Dexit and SST will create a service that combines the Dexit prepaid payment service and SST loyalty product into a single offering.

Dexit: Revenue was $686,725 and $1,757,280 for the three-month and twelve-month periods ended December 31, 2004. In April 2004, the company signed an exclusive merchant license agreement with Bell Canada and received a payment of $2 million in license fees, of which $500,000 was recognized as revenue in the fourth quarter.

Randy: Maybe Dexit (Debbie Gamble, x-Opencola) should be talking w/ Points (Grad Conn, x-Opencola CEO)? Also, note that substantially all of the 12-month revenues $1,5 million of $1,75 million were from one agreement w/ Bell Canada.

David Sifry: Well, this has been an interesting and stressful few days, with a lot of charges thrown around the blogosphere about Technorati and Niall Kennedy, our Community Manager. As sometimes happens in the blogosphere, things have gotten a bit overblown. [cut] putting trademarked logos of companies in our industry into provocative images - on a Nazi soldier helmet, and in a pool of blood next to a dead soldier [cut] My mother is a holocaust survivor, so I understand how emotionally charged and easily misinterpreted these images can be.

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000297.html

Randy: Dave does a good job of explaining Technorati's view on the Niall Kennedy's blog thingy.

This is another thing I hate about tags. There must be thousands of Mount St Helens pics out there? But how does the community agree on a tag. I guess they don't.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/mtsthelens/

BetaNews: Microsoft has given a name to its Windows Messenger successor: Office Communicator 2005. The new communications client, formerly known by its code-name Istanbul, integrates IM, voice, video, telephony and Web conferencing capabilities into a single interface and makes them accessible in Microsoft's Office applications.  Communicator serves as the preferred client for Office Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005, which streamlines business communication and is the core of Microsoft's real-time collaboration vision.

Tim Bray: Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career:

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you’re more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you’re an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you’re in marketing, you’ll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10. It’s a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

Randy: My favorite is #4.

• GM
• Sun Microsystems
• Microsoft
• Google
• Yahoo!
• Boeing

Randy: Nothing new here to subscribe too! Got the bases covered.

My SPAM rate has increased substantially this month. It's up over 300+ SPAM per day for the last 30 days. Just a few days ago it was at 250+ SPAM per day (last 30 days) and about a week ago it was around 200 SPAM per day (last 30d). Google collects most of it, so no worries.

Update: I think I figured out why. Google is no longer deleting SPAM that is 30 days old. The SPAM is counted in your 1GB storage. Do you have to delete it manually now?

Richard Koman: SiliconValleyWatcher has confirmed that Yahoo, through its advertising network Overture, is testing "YPN" a competitor to Google Adsense--the hugely profitable advertising network.

Randy: A little competition is gonna help the bloggers get a better price.

For later viewing.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/05/north_korea_promotes.html

Buzz Marketing: Niall Kennedy works for Technorati, a blog-tracking service.  Kennedy has a blog, on which he just posted about how corporations may start taking extreme steps to suppress blog posts from employees.  [cut] His employer’s response? According to Kennedy, he "...was threatened with ‘serious consequences’ for not seeking corporate approval for a weblog posting relating to an industry issue. Tomorrow will undoubtedly bring many conversations about if employees are allowed to have their own voice and write weblog entries without passing through an executive mouthpiece first."

Randy: This seems too dumb to be true. Niall Kennedy explains in more detail on his blog.

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/archives/2005/03/whose_voice_is.html

On a related note, Mark Jen, famed Google employee who was fired for blogging, has found a new job w/ Plaxo.

When I found out that a new episode of Dr. Who was leaked on the Internet, I had a hard time finding it. All that I can find is these stupid bitTorrents. Arggg! For my readers who tolerate bitTorrent, please download away and report successes and further URLs (non bitTorrent).

http://www.torrentspy.com/search.asp?mode=torrentdetails&id=185913

Richard Koman interviews Cory Doctorow.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/03/04/corydoctorow.html

I'll spare you the details. Just watch it.

http://www.brooklynbrothers.com/movies/un60.mov

Update: Sorry, don't watch it with anybody around. This is plainly obsurd. Anybody that would put this on public TV is an absolute moron. The people who produced it should be fired.

Mike Davidson: I recently found myself in the position of wanting to register a domain which was owned by someone else. The domain was set to expire in a week, and I figured there was a decent chance that the person who owned it wouldn’t be renewing it.

http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/03/how-to-snatch-an-expiring-domain

Randy: A very well written story about how to get acquire an expiring domain. Mike should write Internet thrillers. A fun read.

Steve Rubel: if you want me to take a look at something to link/comment on, please post it to del.icio.us with the tag "micropersuasion" and include your pitch in the extended entry.

Randy: A great idea for organizing emailed link pitches. I have to wonder if it'll work. The tendancy to pitch via email (and SPAM) is out-of-control. I currently get about 300+ emails per day.

NYTimes: Mr. Graff, 23, may be the first blogger in the short history of the medium to be granted a daily White House pass for the specific purpose of writing a blog, or Web log.

Randy: Mainstream!

John Battelle: the new version of Google Desktop will include APIs for any Windows application developer, letting anyone plug their application into GDS.

Randy: Very cool! But I have to wonder, how do you make money with open and free APIs? MSN, Yahoo and Google have all released search APIs that don't contain ads. Where's the value, other than creating more Netscape-like failed dreams?

Couple months ago Scoble said he was unsubbing from Martin Schwimmer's blog. Was he just given us something to talk about? He's linking to Martin again.

PIA: Users are installing plug-ins [...]
FF: Sweet, that's awesome.
PIA: [...] No, you don't get it, these plugins they're installing modify my pages [...]

http://bitsko.slc.ut.us/blog/autolink-firefox.html

Randy: Ken hits the nail. Dead!

the Onion: Recent Gmail convert William Ramsak, 23, said Monday that his "heart goes out to" friend Kelly Oldenburg, who still sends e-mail through an MSN Hotmail account.

Randy: I've had Gmail for a long time and use email a lot. I get about 300 emails per day. My Gmail is at 220 MB, still below the Hotmail limit. The advantage of Gmail, is the lack of <BLINK> (yes ads) and the simple interface that responds to clicks subsecond, not subminute on a broadband connection.

Peter C.W. Chung: Pat-rights named the technology as Internet/Remote User Identity Verification, earned a US Patent 6,665,797 therefor, and world-wide patents pending. In the end of 2003, Apple indicated in its communication to Pat-rights that Apple had no interested in licensing it and maintain silence ever since then. [cut] Pat-rights is going to launch a series of legal actions against iTunes.

Tim Bray: I thought I’d try out AutoLinks close to home, so I went for a tour around ongoing and Textuality, but I couldn’t easily find a page with anything that lit up an AutoLink. Next stop was the Wikipedia, which is well-supplied with addresses, ISBNs, and the like. No luck; anything that might have matched was already linked, the Wikipedia’s like that. I did manage to tickle a couple of spurious-link bugs. So I thought “Well, how about some arbitrary page” and did a Google search for “arbitrary” and, once again, no luck on the first few pages. Aha; one was a blog. Blogs have blogrolls. This has to do the trick. Miss. Miss. Miss. I’m getting really tired of the toolbar’s “Nothing found” message. Oh, crap, Instapundit, now I’m snarled in the right-wing blogosphere. The media hates America. “Nothing found.” Palestinians don’t deserve a state. “Nothing found.” Europe is corrupt and irrelevant. “Nothing found.” I could go on, but I can’t imagine you’d enjoy it any more than I did.

Randy: AutoLink is just some software that nobody uses and does very little. Thanks Tim for showing us the truth.

Dave Winer: Chris Ridings proposes an opt-out meta tag for content mods.

http://www.searchguild.com/autoblink/index.html#metaElement

Randy: This is an awesome idea! And just maybe it'll put this issue to rest.

Lloyd Axworthy: I know it seems improbable to your divinely guided master in the White House that mere mortals might disagree with participating in a missile-defence system that has failed in its last three tests, even though the tests themselves were carefully rigged to show results. [cut] Sure, that doesn't match the gargantuan, multi-billion-dollar deficits that your government blithely runs up fighting a "liberation war" in Iraq, laying out more than half of all weapons expenditures in the world, and giving massive tax breaks to the top one per cent of your population while cutting food programs for poor children.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/westview/story/2610442p-3026695c.html

Randy: Lloyd's my new hero. Cory always finds the best material.

Martin Winer: Hotmail has descended slowly, without note, into a state of completely unuseability. The problems are with accessing messages, sending emails, and the dreaded blue screen of email death: "The Server Is Too Busy". Hey Gates, I know you're a busy guy, but can't you even make servers that have time to talk to me?

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=33710

Phenix Rising: Without further ado, my list of The Ten Most Important Elements of a Corporate Web Site:

http://phenixrising.typepad.com/phenix_rising_steven_phen/2005/03/as_we_blithely_.html

Randy: Sound advice for Corporate PR.

Update: Steve has another list for you Corporate PR types. Top Ten Criteria for News and Top 5 for NOT News. I love top 10 lists. Subscribed.

http://phenixrising.typepad.com/phenix_rising_steven_phen/2005/03/what_is_news_ne.html

Robert Dvorchak: A sports advisory company and a Wall Street buyout firm have proposed purchasing all 30 NHL teams for as much as $3.5 billion to create a single business entity that would have franchises operating as equal divisions.

Randy: That's only slightly over $100 million per team. The average team is likely worth twice that.

This looks awesome. Bookmarked for later viewing (or hearing).

http://www.broom.org/epic/

Richard Koman: By a strange series of links (starting with Scoble's Crossfader post), I see (via Mark May) that ASCAAP has updated its latest internet license to include a reference to podcasts. So podcasters are explictly included among those expected to shell out to play music.

Randy: Do podcasters truly believe they should be exempt from paying music license royalties?

Hey, it turns out that I was once fired for blogging, or so I've been told. Funny thing is that I've never ever [1] been fired from any job. But an x-cow-orker informed me that my old boss is telling the employees I was fired for blogging. Funny thing is that I left voluntarily because I thought the management team was lacking.

[1] Actually, I was once relieved of duty at 724 Solutions, but they re-hired me the very next day. Does that count?

CNet: A federal appeals court partially reversed a lower-court decision that had exposed Microsoft to $565 million in damages. [cut] The appeals court said the lower court had incorrectly kept Microsoft from showing the jury the Viola browser. That browser was written in 1993, a year before the filing date of the UC patent, by Wei when he was a student at the University of California at Berkeley.

Apple.com: Apple is now hiring for the Apple Store Yorkdale in Toronto, set to open in 2005.

http://www.apple.com/ca/retail/jobs/

Randy: Thanks Dave!

via Flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32099449@N00/5756586/

GroovyMother: Drag this bookmarklet onto your toolbar, and hit it every time you read his rantings.

Randy: Done and done and laughing! Gotta hate MAX_LENGTH. Didnt seem to do anything in Moz or IE, but I get the point. Funny the same.

I dont' know why, but I like Hummingbirds more today than Sunday and even more than just one month ago.

http://community-2.webtv.net/hotmail.com/verle33/HummingBirdNest

MediaPost: By some reports, this was 10-15x NEXT year's revenue; 25-30x NEXT year's EBIT. The reactions:

• "The bubble is back!"
• "Newspapers are dead, so Dow Jones and The New York Times have to do SOMETHING, and few properties of size are out there. It's the hail Mary!"
• "Only an industry player could justify this price--there must be a ton of synergies under the covers; otherwise this makes no sense."

Seems there are a lot of Yahoo! timelines in the blogosphere today.

• Milestones in Yahoo's history
• Yahoo: Remembering The Early Days

Tomorrow is Yahoo!'s the 10th anniversay.

Bell Phone Monkey: These customers think I care about their longstanding services, new ones, or any problems associated with either of the two. Everyone is special, and they all think that I am Bell Canada. They think that I am the resolve to their frustrations.

Randy: It must really suck to be a phone monkey for a crap company.

This last month has really convinced me that Bell Canada is a really bad company, not deserving of their monopoly. It first started when I was weirdly billed on my Bell Mobility plan. I called over and over and sometimes remained on hold for more than an hour at a time. Turns out, Bell Mobility was having trouble w/ their billing system and they got so many calls that they couldn't handle them all.

Then about a month ago, I decided to try the Bell Sympatico 3-months free plan. A few days after they delivered the goods, before I had time to connect the software, we started getting automated calls threatening to bill us if we didn't connect the software. The automated caller would leave a number we could call them back on. I called the number and the automated attendant told me their service wasn't working. I called a few other times and never found myself talking to a person.

Here's a vote. In the next few months, I'm moving. I will not be getting Bell Canada long distance service and I'm sticking w/ Rogers Cable Internet. For any politicians that might read this blog, Bell Canada should lose their monopoly for their purely crap service policy.

ManagerGuy: Actual, honest to god query letters I've received in Hollywood.

• "When a guy rents the spare room in his beach house to beautiful, thong-wearing, bowl-game-watching, nursing student..."
• "When a New York City hooker assumes the identity of her psychologist twin sister in order to pay a debt..."

and much more. Subscribed. Thanks Grad!

http://queryletters.blogspot.com/

NYPost: T-Mobile stores in New York are selling out of Sidekicks (a handheld device that stores information online) despite — or more likely, because of — that fact that celebrity phone numbers and naughty pictures were stolen off one belonging to bad-girl heiress Paris Hilton.

Randy: There's no such thing as bad press.

Fred von Lohmann: Imagine I have a butler whom I task with going through what drops into my mail slot each morning. His job? To annotate my snail mail. He goes through the advertising circulars and researches whether better prices are available anywhere else. He gets me a map of every return address. Maybe I ask him to anticipate needs I don't even know I have yet.

Cory Doctorow: Wanna support youself? Install the plugin that rewrites every ISBN with your own affiliate ID.

Randy: Now here's a great idea. Write a generic browser helper object that allows users to create their own Web browser butlers.

Jeremy Zawodny: Developers often ask what it would take for us to offer a Web Service API to Yahoo! Search. [cut] Before today I always had to give vague non-committal answers. In reality we were already working on it.

Randy: Very cool! I really like the way Yahoo! structured the rate limiting. Instead of basing the rate limit on the Application ID, the rate limit is based on IP addresses. Limiting via Application ID prohibits writing any real commercial applications (ex. Technorati and Google API). The limit via IP address will make life difficult on users who share IP addresses with many other users, but without a call limit, Web Services are vulnerable to badly written and aggressive clients.

http://developer.yahoo.net/

Unhappy Birthday: Did you know Happy Birthday is copyrighted and the copyright is currently owned and actively enforced by Time Warner?

http://www.unhappybirthday.com/

The Register: Microsoft has set up an online business networking forum for its resellers.

Shawn: Hi Randy, I have been reading over your articles and just wanted to send a note of appreciation for placing your hard work out here for  people like me to peruse.  I was first brought here by a Google search on "ADO C++" and that article helped me tremendously, as did your article on finding
memory leaks. Thanks again and happy coding!

Randy: Thanks Shawn! He's referring to my online articles. It's time I started writing again :)