We’ve been without TV for 274 days and I’m still curious over the American Idol vote hacking to keep Sanjaya alive. This interests me for a couple reasons. One because Sanjaya is a local teen the same age as our oldest son (17) from Federal Way, Washington. Two because I think it’s funny that it took this long for organized attempts to manipulate Idol voting to hit a fever pitch.
Votefortheworst.com, Howard Stern and others are fueling a movement for Sanjaya. Stern’s crew has been producing some very funny spoofed endorsements saying “vote for Sanjaya.” Conversely, “J” on MySpace has gone on a hunger strike as long as Sanjaya is not voted off. Either that’s an effective weight plan, a compelling way to boost your myspace traffic, stupidity or some combination thereof.
The crotchety judge Simon Cowell reportedly has vowed to quit if Sanjaya wins, but his contract says otherwise.
How long will Sanjaya last? I’ve never heard Sanjaya sing so I don’t know what his pipes are like, but something tells me he’s got to be more talented than William Hung if he made it into the part where the audience votes.
Bummer seeing Sanyo having trouble as they are one of the brands I’ve looked favorably upon over the years. Alleged creative bookkeeping has caused an investigation and their Chairwoman Tomoyo Nonaka resigned yesterday unmysteriously over “personal reasons.”
Sanyo has been cooperating with an investigation by securities authorities into suspected window-dressing of earnings. Local media reports have said Sanyo wrote off losses of 190 billion yen ($1.63 billion) at its subsidiaries in 2003, but reported the losses as 50 billion yen ($429 million).
I wonder if they had reported the 190 billion yen loss would the stock backlash have been as bad as it will be over this investigation and chairwoman resigning? Investors, ok I’ll speak for myself, tend to be more disturbed by deceit and dishonesty than poor financial results. I still own Yahoo stock despite pretty lousy results in 2006. I may not like a lot of things Yahoo has done and have written here about this disappointment, but if it ever appears that they are doing anything dishonest with the numbers, I’d be selling quickly.
Yahoo stock results in 2007 should be easier to improve upon 2006 results. Everybody has bad months and good companies can have bad years too.
Didn’t we learn as children about the importance of honesty? The best financial advice for companies is to tell the truth even when it is bad and yet we keep seeing stories where people are doing — or are accused of doing — otherwise. Time and time and time again. Enron was a painful reminder for too many people that lies on financial statements rarely go away.
Important to remember innocent until proven guilty, but does news like this change your opinion of companies? Or do you see it as the action of a small few and not representative of the company at large? If the investigation turns up financial foul play, the brand will likely be tarnished for me, what about you?
More doubts cast over the reliability of Wikipedia, this time in reporting the correct status of a famous actor and comedian’s heartbeat.
Actor-comedian Sinbad had the last laugh after his
Wikipedia entry announced he was dead, the performer said Thursday. Rumors began circulating Saturday regarding the posting, said Sinbad, who first got a telephone call from his daughter. The gossip quieted, but a few days later the 50-year-old entertainer said the phone calls, text messages and e-mails started pouring in by the hundreds.
Sinbad will get over this case of wiki vandalism. Maybe the vandal had seen too many Sinbad movies.
(har, har)
I’ve been finding it a bit challenging avoiding Wikipedia Google results, which might be a sign that Google needs to re-evaulate if Wikipedia information is as valuable as the engine thinks it is. Just because a lot of people link to something or even if they click on it doesn’t mean that it is the most relevant.
Update 11:50am PST: Did some checking around and with the CustomizeGoogle Firefox add-on it’s easy to filter out results from sites like Wikipedia as well as remove that annoying click tracking and more.
Hmm first covered Topix.net in November 2005 (pictured above) and here’s how they look today, a year and four months later:
Tomorrow? They will likely be emphasizing topix.com. Let me disclaim before getting too far that this blog has been treated very well by Topix.net. Their algorithm has an almost uncanny ability to pick out what is news and what is not from this blog, something that often changes from post to post. I’m impressed.
But I’ve never been impressed with their .net domain name.
Something mentioned here repeatedly — especially when reviewing other sites and services — is the importance of business sites owning their .com. This is a drum I’ll keep beating until the vast majority of domains purchased are no longer dot coms (likely never). You can take all the .us, .tv and so on, they are worth a tiny fraction of the value of the .com. Sure there are exceptions like the absurdly difficult to type de.licio.us, but the advertising has been out there for 10+ years and people think dot com by default. Places like the podcast/videoblog company podtech.net are leaking traffic to type-ins and only helping to freely promote their .com counterpart.
Topix.net is another site that launched without owning the .com. They must have realized the error of their ways and paid $1,000,000 for topix.com, Rafat Ali reports:
About 50 percent of visits to Topix come through a search engine, and about 90 percent out of that is through Google…Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10 percent, that would essentially be a 10 percent loss in ad revenue, CEO Rick Skrenta said in the story. Topix will run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search results.
There’s a serious, important business financial lesson to be learned here. If/when you have the choice to choose a business/product/service name, get the .com domain first. Even if you aren’t opening for business for a year or more, you need the domain early on. Get a blog setup and write about the process of launching your business.
Choosing the right domain name
If you are an already established business offline starting develop a presence online you might have to come up with a creative take. Just remember some simple guidelines for choosing good business domain names below. Some of these don’t apply to non-business sites and depending on how you classify this blog (personally I don’t classify Hmm as a “business” site), you’ll note we’ve violated several of them.
1. Keep the size of the domain as short as possible, preferably under 10 characters and using one or two words
2. Watch for domains using combinations of words that spell something very different than intended (therapistfinder.com anyone?)
3. Tread carefully with gimmicky domains like Flickr without the ‘e’ — you know people are going to flicker.com which is one of those domain parking for $$ pages.
4. Avoid using words in domains that can be shortened like “you” (MakeYouGoHmm is a bad example: we’ve had to purchase numerous domain variations because of mistypes). Worse is: ‘for’, ‘4′, and ‘four.’
5. Keep words in normal order for example on yesterday’s Hmmcast I mentioned bandboston.com as possibly the worst domain name for a rock band that sold millions of albums. Bostonband.com would be better, but that was already taken.
6. Be careful with names that can be easily pluralized by mistake (a few mainstream publications have wrongly linked to this site as makesyougohmm, hence we bought that one and redirected too)
7. Using more than one hyphen in the domain looks like spam (bad example: this-is-my-domain.com), it is preferable to use words without hyphen like makeyougohmm instead of make-you-go-hmm. We do have an established domain that uses a hyphen and don’t own the non-hypenated domain which I wouldn’t do again if I could start over. We’re sending type-ins the other way, but it’s not the same amount of bleed as not owning the dot com. Consider it a tradeoff for a really good name if you can get the-name.com as opposed to thename.com. Also it pays to see how good the non-hyphenated name is as you might have/build a much better site with the hyphen.
I’m sure there are plenty more suggestions other webmasters could recommend. Please use the comment or trackback area below to add to the list.
So my domain name sucks, now what?
If you don’t have the money to buy the .com for your domain and stuck with a dot com domain that could be improved, you still have options.
Time is perhaps the biggest enemy, so buy a better one and work at building the new name ASAP.
The longer your site is establishes itself with a lousy domain name, the more time consuming and difficult it will be to migrate to a new domain. Will there be search engine listing problems? In the short term probably yes, but what’s more important long term? Making it easy for both new and experienced site visitors to find you without being bookmarked, or being a hard to remember and type domain name?
Eventually your existing domain can become a redirect and the search engines will learn. The content is what drives pages over time more than the domain name. Of course there are other factors like a tedious directory structure that/looks/like/this.html.
At the end of last year we switched our group blog project from a third party free hosted blog service to our own domain and server. Our group had spent nearly a year adding content to the blog elsewhere. It took Google less than a week to adjust their engine to point to our own new domain and other sites continue to build up the new domain.
Best of luck with your domains both new and existing being easy to remember and type.
MTV owner Viacom is suing YouTube now owned by Google for 1 billion bones over an alleged 160,000 infringing clips on YouTube. I own Google stock and will be monitoring the impact on Wall Street.
In a statement, Viacom lashed out at YouTube’s business practices, saying it has “built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google.”
So far Google’s comment is “no comment” but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them post something on their official blog in the coming days. Google has faced legal friction on many fronts since their IPO and it makes me wonder how long before the good ship takes on too much water? YouTube has been a copyright infringement haven that they overpaid to acquire. I wrongly believed they had — or would quickly develop — a revolutionary algorithm that could filter out the copyright infringement.
It’s easy to find copyright violations on YouTube. I found the David Lee Roth band concert which said video and pictures could not be taken and yet YouTube had almost every song they played on it from different venues taken by fans and uploaded without permission. Months later, the videos are still up on YouTube. Not good.
Until this morning, and pondered back in January, the lowest Vonage stock (VG) had gone was $5.02.
As a federal jury deliberates on the Verizon patent lawsuit, VG has dipped to a record low of $4.91. You can track VG updates at Google Finance (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock).
One investment advisory firm said the lawsuit is important because it spotlights the extent to which VoIP relies on open standards rather than proprietary technology. “The outcome of the case against Vonage will likely spill over to the larger VoIP sector,” said Stifel Nicolaus & Co in a report.
We still have a Vonage business account with fax service but canceled our second account some time ago in a switch to Skype which to date has been a good move. This weekend we’re going to be testing our new Sprint USB broadband modem with VoIP. If all tests go well, we’ll be dropping the local telco’s overpriced DSL and required phone line at our secondary business location. We’re still keeping the telco at our primary office offline business, a one 12+ year established line.
I like VoIP which has saved our home and business a lot of money over the last few years. Will be curious to see how this lawsuit turns out.
Update 1:55pm PST: Jury rules against Vonage, orders $58 million to Verizon. Stock hit as low as $4.50. Vonage is appealing.
Forget basketball, the real March Madness could be happening next Sunday, March 11 at 2am, in the form of a Daylight Savings Change.
Devices from the tiniest BlackBerry to the largest mainframe computer must be updated to ensure their internal clocks “spring forward” by one hour at the right moment rather than on the old date, which has been written into countless programs. Similarly, they must be reprogrammed to revert to standard time a week later than usual, on Nov. 4.
Who do we blame if this results in technological confusion? Congress, of course!
Google Calendar + Google Homepage + events We’ll get back to this March daylight savings stuff in a second, but something more productive first. Have you checked out AmbientClock (free gadget)? If you use Google Calendar and the Google Homepage you can see your events at a glance, including help with drive times commute. Pretty handy. Thanks Lifehacker.
No daylight savings concerns here, you?
I’m not worried that I’ll wake up next Sunday and find any of our computers confused. My wind-up watch, which needs to be manually set will be wrong, but it’s showing the wrong date now too (pause to change from the 30th to the 3rd). The Washignton Post story makes it sound a little like another Y2K scare for some businesses:
At T. Rowe Price, about two dozen information-technology staffers have been coordinating with more than 160 vendors to make sure the 200 computer applications used in the Baltimore brokerage firm’s offices will operate seamlessly March 11 and beyond.
Yikes.
Perhaps a little hyperbolic, but just remember Y2K? The biggest non-event event in recent computing history. Back to basketball, the real March madness.
Maybe I don’t want to visit New York after all. The city can’t be all that bad, but then I still vividly remember the James Herbert novel The Rats.
An ADF-owned KFC/Taco Bell was closed by New York health inspectors last week after TV news crews peering through the windows recorded about a dozen rats skittering across the floors and climbing on tables and countertops. The restaurant wasn’t open at the time, and officials later said construction in the basement might have stirred up the rodents.
As someone who worked in the restaurant business at one time and fortunately never experienced any public relations meltdown to this degree, this is not going to be easy to rebuild business at these restaurants when/if the health department signs off on them. We had the occasional mouse sighting, which freaked a few people out, but nothing a call to the Orkin boys couldn’t resolve. It’s rare seeing one rodent, much less multiple ones. And the fact that a TV crew could document the sighting on video is even more unsettling.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of this story, once you get past the rats, is they got a clean report from the health department. The health department in our area was brutal — and that’s a good thing. I clearly remember this inspector making our lives miserable during his routine inspections. At the time he seemed to be a nuisance, but in hindsight I’m glad he was that way. It’s not only the right thing to do, it’s job security keeping a restaurant in compliance.
The rats have to go somewhere, I’d just like to think it’s never going to be “skittering across” the table where I’m chowing down on a burrito.
This Van Halen reuion stuff is getting crazy. Here, we thought the group could/would/should put aside their personal differences and do a rocking reunion tour with the Roth fronting and the trio of Van Halen brothers backing, but the word now is it’s not going to happen. That’s not an official word, but a lot of publications are reporting it.
Perhaps even more strange is Roth saying the Van Halen brothers might not even attend the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony on March 12:
Roth said, “We have fragile politics in Van Halen; please accept that as a partial answer. But I don’t know if the Van Halens are going to go….I hope they do, but right now, I just don’t know. Hope springs eternal.” Roth told the Times that he, original bassist Michael Anthony and the band’s second lead vocalist, Sammy Hagar, would all attend the Rock Hall ceremonies.
This is really disappointing for countless Van Halen fans. These guys need to get back to making music and touring and quit all the drama already. This might be selling a few more CDs but it’s not making new fans for the band and it has to be alienating at least a few seasoned ones. Pissed about this garbage? Vent away below if you like. It’s time for an Eruption of VH talent.
Maybe by now you’ve heard about the astronaut, Lisa Nowak, who was arrested on kidnapping and attempted murder charges over an astronaut love triangle. Ok, I’m making up the triangle part, but Ms. Nowak’s fate is destined to be decided by the courts. Now you might be wondering what this has to do with duct tape and the answer is the NASA rulebook for handling astronauts gone insane in space.
Seriously.
It turns out NASA has detailed, written procedures for dealing with a suicidal or psychotic astronaut in space. The documents, obtained this week by The Associated Press, say the astronaut’s crewmates should bind his wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him down with a bungee cord and inject him with tranquilizers if necessary.
Duct tape scores yet another useful application. I’m sure the duct tape guys will be psyched. Not psychotic, hopefully, but if they are then all their captor’s have to do is go NASA style and use duct tape.
MTV owner Viacom is suing YouTube now owned by Google for 1 billion bones over an alleged 160,000 infringing clips on YouTube. I own Google stock and will be monitoring the impact on Wall Street.
Forget basketball, the real March Madness could be happening next Sunday, March 11 at 2am, in the form of a Daylight Savings Change.
We’ll get back to this March daylight savings stuff in a second, but something more productive first. Have you checked out 
