Earlier today Google Earth was pulled and “temporarily delayed” after a number of downloads; a number that Google set in advance so the download experience wouldn’t be disrupted.

I remember looking this one over under the free Keyhole trial, and it sounds like there are some new features. It was cool to look at for 15-30 minutes or so but didn’t find it terribly useful when I reviewed it before unless it was in a high resolution area, but time’s change and maybe they have more high resolution area coverage now. A plus and commercial version still exist. I’m guessing that those are still downloadable, but I didn’t try.

We just got back from the mall where we learned that as of Thursday 6/23/2005 Verizon now has their EVDO broadband wireless available in the greater Seattle area! I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, it was great to hear and we wasted no time putting down the $184.95 and committing to a two year contract at $79.99/month + tax. Oh, and there is a $20 activation fee and pro-rated charges so the first bill (due in the first week of August) rolls in at $131.67.

The salesmen told us that this is activated in Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia and the greater Puget Sound area. He said it goes all the way up to Blaine, which is just near the border of Canada.

So I got back home and fired up the CD to install on the M1400 Tablet PC. The install of the software completed withouta hitch. I loaded up the connection manager and then … uh oh. The process froze right when it asked me to install the PC card. Just hung there “waiting for me to add the card.”

The LED light was blue on the card so there was definitely power and Windows made that da-duh beeping sound when you plug or unplug hardware. This was where Windows plug and pray becomes plug and pray. Windows couldn’t find the drivers even when I pointed it to the drivers. I was in the device driver hell. Argh.

So I dialed up Verizon and expected not to get anybody, but a really nice tech support gentleman answered and he was extremely courteous as he tried to help me navigate the device driver purgatory. No such luck on the M1400, it wouldn’t fire with the software.

I suggested that we should my older laptop, a Sony Vaio. The installation of the drivers and software worked fine and then it was onto the connection manager. The process froze up again when it came to plugging in the PC card.

The technician suggested we pull out the card and reinsert. We tried switching between the two different ports. No luck. While he looked manuals and consulted others, the phone call pushed the 45 minute mark and still no connectivity. I kept trying pulling the card out, waiting and then reinserting.

Plug and pray, plug and pray, plug and pray.

About the tenth time — and I have no idea why — it finally did something different and moved onto finding different hardware. We had gotten through the plug and play portion!

After installing all the device drivers it then went in and rebooted. When it came in again, it went to the VZaccess online screen. The UI of this thing is terrible. There is this gigantic Connect button that looks like you would press that to connect but then that’s just an indicator for show, it’s not the actual link you need to press. The actual connect button is beneath it and you click on that to login and get rocking.

The first thing I noticed was that web pages were loading really slowwww. I told the technician. I mean, when Google’s home page isn’t firing fast, you know something is wrong.

He suggested maybe it was the compression software that comes with it and that I should uninstall that. I did that. Didn’t even write down the name (viper?) Something with a V anyway. Did that and then reconnected.

I checked the speed using the Wugnet speed tester: 46.6k … ugh!

Wheels started turning and I’m already thinking: no way is this broadband. It’s like I went in a time machine back to 1997-1998. I asked: could this be right? Was the salesman wrong to tell me that broadband was available in this area? The technician asked for zip codes and I started firing a bunch of them off:

98373? No. 98374? No. 98375, 98445 … all no, no. He went on to say that according to his coverage the greater Seattle area wasn’t activated for broadband service yet.

Felt my heart sank a bit. I wasn’t mad at any part of this conversation, BTW. This was a very pleasant exchange as far as the purchase, the tech support call and my experience. No sense getting mad on this one and anyway I was way too excited and geeked up that broadband was going to be available in our area! My thoughts were that maybe it was just something glitched with the recent launch and that the information I was given was accurate.

The end of the call was that the technician was going to get his hands on a Tablet PC and do some testing and also find out more info on the coverage and get back with me on this tomorrow.

We’re heading out now and I’m taking the laptop to see if I can get true broadband wirelessly anywhere in Seattle. I’ll report back my findings later. I should be able to blog from the road!

Lots of talk about Netflix throttling (thanks Dave). We are still pretty new at the Netflix game, but we haven’t experienced any throttling. We send the movies back on Monday, they receive Tuesday, and we receive Wednesday.

All seems pretty reasonable to me so far, however, several people in that thread point out that it’s always good in the beginning and it gets much worse over time. Any readers experience any Netflix throttling issues?

My wife loved the first generation Roomba when she first received it, but I haven’t seen the little red bot getting much use. Maybe she’d use it more if she could program it to work while we were sleeping?

In August a $60 upgrade will make that dream a reality for second generation and later Roomba users, but not my wife it sounds like. The upgrade includes a pair of virtual walls to stop the robot from wandering, a serial cable for downloading new firmware.

“It’s as easy to program as a coffee machine or alarm clock,” said Gregory White, head of the consumer robotics division at iRobot, which unveiled the Scheduler at Wired magazine’s NextFest technology show in Chicago on Friday. (Wired magazine and Wired News are separate companies.)

The Roomba Scheduler is available for purchase from iRobot for $329 USD as of this writing.

Our business strategy with online advertising is simple but has proven effective: advertise honestly, relevantly and reasonably, and if the advertising saturation is going to be very high then offer a way to buy out of it completely. If you have good content and treat your site visitors with some level of respect then they will stick around and will buy from you. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but someday enough visitors will start doing business with you to make good money from your work. What comes around goes around. Really, would you do business with someone who slaps your face while you are trying to read/use their work?

As a user/reader or whatever you want to call me, I have and will continue to click and buy from advertising that is utilyzed similarly to how we do advertising across our websites. I want webmasters to make money and can and do pay those who provide good content on websites, that’s the way the magic of the web works. Those who live in the fantasy that the web should be totally free aren’t being realistic. I have absolutely no problem with websites making money and enjoy supporting those who do things right.

It’s easy getting caught up in signing up for too many different/competing programs that look cool and then scattering the ads all over what was once a good content site. Too easy to do. This is where the “caution” part comes into the title of this post.

At the same time over saturating content — too much content — with no money plans isn’t a good idea financially either. If visitors are to continue to enjoy your good content then it’s necessary to have a foundation to pay for it and advertising can be a great way to do that. This is one of my beefs with podcasting, actually. All kinds of bandwidth going out the door, often quite wastefully, for a very small (often it’s zero) return in dollars. That is not a long term, viable, sustainable business model. Please don’t anybody try to sell me on the whole hobbyist “it’s not about the money” spiel because for the vast majority of people sooner or later it is always about the money. Roof over head, food on table, hole in the ground.

However, advertising that is grossly unrelated, jammed down my throat and/or intrudes on my browsing/reading experience obscenely will result in me either a) not returning to the site and/or b) not clicking any ad on the site. The website loses with my business if the advertising becomes obscene. I’m just one person voting with his feet but if enough people feel similarly it will begin to impact the income. Sometimes it’s a soft scamper away in the night and other times you can hear the pounding of departing footsteps.

Just clicked through to this blog entry and the first thing I thought was: where is the content? Oh, it’s there, alright, beneath the fold. The homepage for this blog isn’t this way, but the entry page is almost entirely ad-saturated in the entry browser window. I wouldn’t be linking to this at all if the content — once readers get to it — wasn’t worthwhile.

This layout is somewhat reminiscent of this post only in that case:

1) the obscuring advertising wasn’t intentional, it had slipped by the eyes of the webmaster and was removed after pointing this out
2) they were paying for their own hosting and writers so they had real world expenses

This is a free blogspot hosted blog which looks to be penned by one author. The traffic looks pretty good by the Site Meter stats so I’m sure this blog is making some money, but it could make more without being so offensive. Ironically the post I’m linking to is about using Adbrite in association with Adsense to make more money from the blog. Doh!

I wonder how many of those readers are gone before ever visiting the advertisers or the content in the scroll? Sure, some could argue that nobody reads content on the web any more, it’s all done through RSS, but that’s not true. The percentage of website visitors to RSS readers is very high especially when the content in the RSS feed is excerpt-only. About the only saving grace for this blog is the content — once you get to it — is worthwhile and there are no ads (yet) in the excerpt RSS feed. If this blogger adds advertisements to the RSS feed it will become a completely unserviceable RSS feed.

When/if readers do scroll they will see content that’s not too bad, but lookout, here’s the closing message:

I recently installed Adbrite (Look at “Your ad here” on top of sidebar) on this blog - and am still looking for advertisers!

My goodness, this blogger is looking for more advertising?

Have you noticed an increasing, disturbing trend in software sales websites where they intentionally hide the price of the software on the website, but enthusiastic prod visitors to download their trial? I am immediately suspicious of any vendor who will not tell me what the price of their software is and instead make me click through a bunch of order screens to get the answer or download their trial. Put a freaking price tag on the software!

Check out the screenshot above of one vendor I came across this morning that doesn’t want to tell me the price, but wants me to download their trial and check out their software. When you click through their order link you end up at the form shown above asking:

Please fill up the Order Form below and click on submit when the form is filled. Once your form is submitted to us, we will revert back to you with a proper quotation to your email address within 2 working days.

Don’t know about anybody else here, but when they need to send me a quote, I’m thinking the software is very expensive. The last time I got a quote from a company selling software the price started at $20,000. No wonder they didn’t put the price on the website.

It’s a shame if this company was selling single user licenses for under a hundred bucks because I might have bitten if the product was business useful and/or cool. Unfortunately this unnamed, suspect company will never know because this potential customer stopped at their get-a-quote form.

Unless the commercial software is recommended by several other people or from a major vendor then I’m not going to go all Sherlock Holmes on the price, nor download the trial to unlock the mystery. In this day and age of spyware, trojans, viruses and other nasty garbage, I’ve got an extra cynical eye honed in on any suspicious or deceptive behavior — especially when it comes to download new/unknown software.

If they can’t start out the relationship by simply telling me how much their software costs, who knows what else mischief will be unleashed once their code is installed.

What about you? Do you like to see the price of software clearly and plainly available? Is this one way that a new/unknown vendor can help gain your trust?

Matt13.com decided to compare the performance of OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 and Microsoft Office 2003. This isn’t just a quip piece, lots of good details about what made him compare the two like this:

As I read more and more about Open Source Software (OSS), I thought that I should give OO.o a try for a few reasons. The number one reason being that I am tired of waiting 30 seconds for Word to load just to spellcheck a blog entry.

He runs open (unscientific) tests measuring the time and finds the average open time of Writer nearly 66% faster than Word 2003 on average. Scoble, here’s one to take over to the Office team and interview them about with the Channel 9 camera. Will Longhorn do anything about improving this efficiency?

Perhaps a counterpoint comparison could be made showing some super complex document that Word 2003 performed better? You can’t ink in Writer, there’s one downside, I can think of (for tablet users, anyway).

I just wrote last week about features vs. usability. Another excellent example. Nice work, Matt.

It’s a bit awkward writing a post like this because it’s sort of against what I do on the web: I make money on the web. The web is part of my lifeblood and in this post I’m going to sound like somebody who is anti-business, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m all for advertising, really I am. Look around this blog, there are banner ads. There are advertising text links and affiliate links. I don’t have any problem with a site making money legitimately and in fact I encourage bloggers, writers and webmasters to make money on the web. I don’t want anybody to work for free unless they want to work for free.

In saying that though there are still limits — this isn’t a blank checkbook — to which I want to be advertised to as a reader and some sites out there that I enjoy reading are increasingly having their content being disrupted by too much advertising. It’s unfortunate when these sites don’t offer me any way of reading their content except by the ad saturation model. Is this a sign of desperation on the part of publishers? If it is, then it’s pretty transparent and pathetic.

WeblogsInc (WIN) co-founder, Jason Calacanis, has written several times that he is against mixing advertising with editorial because that will make their publication some sort of journalistic sellout. I submit to you now, that while WIN may not have ads or affiliate links inside their often short blog content entries, they do have something worse slipping into their content space.

Take a look at the screenshot above and see if you can see it. Though it doesn’t illustrate mixing ads with editoral, do you find these type ads intrusive? To be fair, it’s not just WIN doing these kinds of overlays, you see them on full page ads (that you have to click to skip from major sites like Forbes and now even ZDnet is doing this sometimes as well). If you click in from RSS feeds sometimes you go immediately to these FPA and then have to click skip, just like most people do on Flash intros. Waste of time and bandwidth.

And yet some people do click on these ads or these publishers wouldn’t do them. I wonder how many click them accidentally? It’s like that X1 spy camera popup from awhile back that infiltrated every browser on the planet … stupid people were buying those cameras or they wouldn’t have kept the campaign running.

If you brush the mouse pointer anywhere near the Circuit City “expand” text in the WIN site then immediately that ad will fill the browser screen and invade the editorial space that Mr. Calacanis finds to be such sacred ground. Sometimes on the page load it fills up and overtakes the editorial.

These are the new breed of popups and yes, they could be axed using Greasemonkey or some other workaround coding, but how about some sort of positive dialogue between reader and publisher where both sides understand what they are looking for?

I’m not looking to WIN or any other publication to be assaulted with advertising, and yet at the same time if I enjoy the content I’m definitely willing to pay for it. We went down this road with popups and look where it took us? Almost every major toolbar now has popup blockers. Programs like GreaseMonkey are borne out of users totally frustrated that they have to constantly read around the not so cleverly placed noise to get to the ever diminishing signal.

This makes it really, really tough being a WIN reader — and the other sites that do this too — because there is increased advertising saturation and so little content. Think I’m wrong? Take a look at the screenshot below when you first visit one of their blogs that I happen to enjoy, Cinematical:

Using Screen Calipers, I measured the content to ad space with no toolbars enabled, which increases the content area. The resolution is 1024×768, although I ran a sidebar which removes about 100 pixels on the right side (not shown). The content shown above: 456 x 175. The adverising space on the right: 380 x 519. There are four different ad panels and two content panels when you visit the home page of the blog above. The top masthead strip advertises their other blogs, so that’s internal advertising, beneath that is a large advertising banner. Beneath that you have a logo 320×72 and then a second full sized Flash banner. Beneath that, finally you’ll see the content, sandwiched between another large flash ad on the right and then a long strip of Google ads between the roughly 60% width content area, which still has Google ads running between the editorial of stories (for a total of three Google adsense ads on each page).

WIN is growing and has over 70 bloggers as of this writing and maybe it’s time for them to consider — or reconsider — offering their readers options to buy out of this over-advertising? I realize paying writers isn’t cheap and I’m really not asking for them to hurt their business financially, but I submit — and it’s just my opinion here — what they are doing to readers is cheap.

They already cripple the RSS feeds because they are worried about theft there, but then they put ads in there too (why place ads with text excerpts of mostly already short content?), and when you land at their site the content — some of which is quite good, actually — is invaded by advertising like the Circuit City ad shown above.

Meanwhile, Mr. Calacanis brags about how they are making $1000 or $2000 a day from Google Adsense and how he must keep their publication sacred from advertising in the editorial and yet their entire page is littered with ads almost anywhere and everywhere an ad will fit, including between the editorial. Mark Cuban’s blog was able to stay ad-free at WIN, so somebody has some pull over there.

Argh. Enough guys, please. Do you really want to punish your readers this way? Be a little different and don’t copy the major news organizations which will be dead with this advertise-them-to-death model within 10 years if they don’t get creative.

Jason or Brian, have you guys given any serious thought to offering a paid subscription option that gets rid of all the ads and actually offers your readers pure content (for their personal use only, not for syndication)? I’m only one reader of a few of your blogs and I’d visit your sites more if you offered a reasonably priced option to get to the content and avoid all these intrusive ads. Please.

If you think every reader loves all this advertising then you are wrong. As you add more advertising and less content you might have a temporary positive cash infusion in the bank account but long term you’re alienating readers and you’ll only encourage people to create programs and workaround which remove and strip all your advertising anyway.

Jason Calcanis also believes:

1. Users should be very, very vocal with web services companies (including us!).
2. Web 2.0 companies listen to user feedback obsessively

There, a user has spoken. Let’s see if and/or how much Web 2.0 WIN is about? Please give us readers, users, whatever you want to call us an ad cancellation option for a fee. Slashdot does. Will WIN?

A month ago I wrote about how to help Skype Developer program dreams come true. I listed seven specific items and though I never heard anything back — email, blog, trackback, Skype or otherwise — I read this morning that they have released a new Skype Developer Zone area:

More importantly this marks the release of our first Commercial Use API and new API Use Guidelines. This means that developers can now legitimately use the Skype API to enhance Skype, build Skype into your applications, and dream up new concepts and services. All we ask is that you follow some simple guidelines to ensure a great experience for Skype customers.

I’ve had the Skype API on my Check This Out List for some time. From a very brief scan of their documentation, it looks pretty thorough and some of my requests for a dream developer area have been answered. Sweet!

Want to know what things you can add to Skype? Check out the Share Skype directory. Fellow developers, there is also a Skype API Developer competition with a deadline of July 1, 2005.

Twice this morning I’ve read things either directly or indirectly using nazi references and I’m not even a quarter through with reading. Just did a search and it appears that I’ve never used that ‘n’ word here on this blog in nearly 2,000 entries and who knows how many words (haven’t run a word count, but I bet it’s close to a million). Haven’t used the other ‘n’ word either.

In the first somebody ended up quitting their job:

The London Daily Telegraph website reports that Peter Kanelos — the Wal-Mart PR manager behind the ad that equated the retailer to victims of the Nazis — has resigned. One wonders what his next job will be.

I’m so not a fan of PR agencies and this is a good example why. They aren’t all bad, I’m not saying that, and sure, large companies do need a PR department, but it makes more sense keeping these people on the inside and part of the organization so they actually have a clue what the company vision is about, now letting them freelance. If Wal-Mart bought off on these ads then they are just as guilty here, so I’m not trying to make excuses for them either. Wal-Mart already has enough bad press, so why invite more?

As for the second reference, it was a blogger who equated those who do not accept one way trackbacks to having Hitleresq behavior. Talk about over-dramatization and a really lame case of perspective.

Look, Hitler slaughtered human beings; it was genocide. That’s a much more extreme circumstance than characterizing who shops at Wal-Mart or whether to accept or not one way trackbacks.

Perspective, please.