I don’t know that I agree with Microsoft’s Balmer on the biggest problem being that there isn’t a $100 computer. Not saying I wouldn’t like to see a $100 computer, but as this article says, Microsoft would need to reduce their OEM licensing fee to make this happen (or people would [gasp] need to use Linux). Doubtful that $100 Mac computer will be seen in the forseeable future, but I think it might just be possible to see a sub $200 computer.

“The biggest problem we have right now is that people who should be paying for software aren’t,” Ballmer told an audience of technology executives at an industry conference here sponsored by market researcher Gartner. One way to stem piracy is to offer consumers in emerging countries a low-cost PC, Ballmer said. “There has to be…a $100 computer to go down-market in some of these countries. We have to engineer (PCs) to be lighter and cheaper,” he said.

I think bigger problems than low cost PCs are bottom feeder activities on the web like spam, spyware, worms, viruses, and other malicious behavior. Balmer should be seeing that as the biggest problem Microsoft has, not that enough people are not buying computers because of price. Bill Gates identified spam as a huge problem and said he’d rid the web of spam in a specified period of time (2 years), which you can follow along with the reality of this countdown along the left column of the homepage (until it expires, of course). As of this writing, there’s only 446 days left, Mr. Gates. Please hurry up and get Longhorn or whatever the anti-spam plan ready and released. I’ve only been reading about delays concerning Longhorn though, which doesn’t bode well for this being a reality. Hopefully this will change, though 80% of experts think this is unrealistic. We’ll see what happens in 2006.

I wish the RIAA would stup the lawsuits against music fans but it’s doubtful I’ll ever tire of hearing about lawsuits from AOL, Microsoft, Earthlink and Yahoo aimed at spammers.

America Online, Microsoft, EarthLink and Yahoo are teaming again to turn up the heat on spammers. The companies, which make up the Anti-Spam Alliance, announced on Thursday that they’ve each filed new lawsuits in U.S. Federal Court against senders of unwanted computer messages. The companies filed suits in the states of Washington, Georgia and California accusing defendants of violating the federal Can-Spam Act, along with other state and federal laws.

In the meantime, we had to move to comment moderation at Webmaster Cookbook because of spammers and adult website URLs left in the comments. Note to clueless spammers harvesting from blogs: if a site says it’s ‘Family Friendly’ then that means no adult sites.

I get frustrated when people try to speak for me, my family or my business, when they try to over-protect us when we haven’t specifically asked for this extra protection. And when people who are being paid to advertise, forget to respect those who are paying for advertising: grrrr, not hmm. I’m not saying that Webmasters or site owners or bloggers have to bend over for advertisers, but hey, if these advertisers are paying for exposure and conversions than dammit, we have a job, a duty, a mission to provide the advertiser with that service to the best of our abilities.

Yesterday I linked to a post by Jason Calacanis who is the co-founder of weblogsinc.com which Mark Cuban invests in. Mark is a spicy guy who arguably authors the most compelling CEO blog on the web. I wonder if The Benefactor will dial up Mr. Calacanis and remind him not to forget about who pays for the lights? Mr. Calacanis seems to be on some sort of extreme crusade to discourage bloggers from what he deems to be deceptive advertising inside blog entries. He is really, really opposed to a gentleman by the name of Mark Canter who is proposing a program to increase the blog ads inside blog entries. I don’t know Mr. Canter or Mr. Calacanis personally so my views aren’t compromised in this discussion. When I pointed out to Mr. Calacanis how weblogsinc.com formatting Google Ads boxes to look like the site was also a form of advertising deception he responded with:

TDavid… OK, now you’re just being silly.

Banner ads and Google Adsense that are outside of the content box are fine if clearly labeled. They don’t need to be on a different background and font. Those extra steps are for when you put *text* ads in the middle of the *text* content.

If you look at the Google ads–with the nice background color–they are very clearly ads. in fact you can’t run them from Google if they don’t have the “Ads by Google” notice.

No one is ever going to confuse those the way they would the two examples I cited in my arguments above about ADVERTISING IN BLOG POSTS!

Well, it’s a new day so my self-imposed comment moritorium has been lifted.

Jason - it’s not silly, it’s relevant. It’s still a subtle form of advertising DECEPTION which you are employing here with Google ads.

Despite how it might come across, actually I’m not knocking you for doing this because you surely aren’t the only one who does this. In fact, we do this on one of our sites that runs Google ads (not a blog) and I think it’s smart marketing. But let’s be across the board fair here: advertising deception is advertising deception. You’re drawing black and white lines between editorial and advertising? Ok, then let’s go there specifically.

Blog posts contain affiliate TEXT links. User profiles and signatures contain affiliate TEXT links. Links to books people are reading containg (Amazon) affiliate TEXT links. The major premise behind sites like Waypath is inserting relevant (Amazon) affiliate TEXT links into blog entries. Some songs bloggers listen to and reference inside blog posts contain (iTunes and other) affiliate TEXT links. Your post recently about X1 was still an advertising link and promotion no matter how much bold text you wrap around it saying you weren’t paid. You bet you were paid! You are saying you didn’t get any free software to promote this blog? Schwag for pimping the site is advertising as well! That was an advertising campaign (and a clever one at that, BTW) for weblogsinc.com. Loosen up the spincter at least a smidgeon on this whole anti-advertising in blog entries thing because your house isn’t immaculate. Nobody that isn’t a completely hobbyist venture can claim they are free from at least some form of advertising deception.

You do sell advertising here [weblogsinc.com], right? I sure as heck wouldn’t buy advertising for any of my online companies from a place that doesn’t seem to respect the advertiser’s right to be placed in relevant places — up to and including linked to inside relevant blog entries. I’m not saying I expect bloggers to shill our sites, products and/or services where it’s not appropriate or relevant but I am saying if you are talking about something we do than it’s not a crime to link us and you know what, if you get paid via an affiliate link during the process, that’s NOT deception for your readers. It’s not a sellout.

It’s almost like you are anti-advertising or something, but I know that’s not accurate; it can’t be. I can’t believe a guy as progressive as Mark Cuban would associate himself with a place that doesn’t seem to think outside the box when it comes to relevant placement of advertisements. Rather, I think this crusade, though very well-intentioned, is flawed from a business standpiont.

Am I saying to crash your surfer’s browser with popups, java or intrusive flash ads? No. Am I saying to redirect surfers away from content to full page ads? No. Am I saying that it’s NOT a sign the Death Star is home if you place an affiliate links to something you have bought and/or use inside the text of a regular blog entry? YES, YES, YES.

I think I may try ressurecting that awful, deprecated blink tag for exclaiming advertising, advertising, advertising around every affiliate link inside blog entries … not.  Ever been to the zoo? Ever seen some of the more passive animals walking around on the public paths almost mingling with the zoo patrons? It is possible for advertisers and content to work TOGETHER.

The bottom line is what is all this saying to existing and/or potential advertisers, Mr. Calacanis, not only what this is saying to your readers.

Your readers will tell you if the signal to noise ratio is out of hand and the two publications you cited in your examples of using deceptive advertising practices don’t seem to have any recent public complaints from readers about their advertising practices, do they? The next question is what do the advertisers think? Are they happy with the conversions they are receiving from these blogs?

Recently I was asked to work with a well known blog that has traffic in excess of 15,000 uniques a day. By page views they are well over 500,000 views a month. You’d say this is a prime blog to advertise on but you know what’s really happening? They are having difficulty getting advertisers to pay for advertising!

I put up some ads that were performing well on one of our blogs doing significantly less traffic in a prominent spot on every page of this busy blog. You know what the result was? Less conversions (sales) than what we were making on the blog with much lower traffic!

You want to know where that blog currently makes the most advertising money? From their relevant text and graphic Amazon ads inserted within the content of each blog entry!

The reality is advertisers that are sandboxed on many busy site are getting shafted. Now there is a topic of advertiser DECEPTION that is worth talking about and carrying a torch for. Shafted because somebody has all this traffic and traffic is king. That’s BS. Conversions and relevance are king. That’s what put Google on top of the search engine game. Google was far and away more relevant than the other search engines. They’ve lost some of that edge, but that’s a story for another day.

Advertisers don’t need just more eyeballs, they need the most bang for their buck with the eyeballs that are seeing their ads. The webmasters who look out for advertisers and provide them that are doing their job.

Absolutely, YES, the readers are important and maintaining journalistic integrity is important, but if you take money for advertising you shouldn’t treat the advertisers with such disrespect that they are quarantined everywhere on your website.

I fully agree that bloggers should be upfront with their readers about their advertising activity, but I don’t think they have to go to the extremes that you suggest, Mr. Calacanis.

I hope this discussion has at least made you pause and think about the advertiser — or potential advertiser — point of view because you just never know how many of your readers are also prospective and/or existing advertisers.

In my last post, maybe I should have said Yoda instead of Coda.

Apparently the battle for who has the biggest storage in the free email business is far from over. Hellacious Riders, according to an article in Tom’s Hardware is offering their users 100 GB of email storage for free:

Google claims in its promotion of Gmail that users never will have to delete emails again, due to the pure dimension of its service. Hriders.com, based in Irvine, California, believes that one Gigabyte simply is not enough and offers what Google presented as a bug to some users in the week after Gmail’s launch: A whopping 100 GByte.

Because I was skeptical (put me in the group that had never heard of hriders before) I went to the site to check this out.

The first thing I noticed was that the site only advertises a free 10 GB sized email box (see screenshot above) not 100 GB. That’s still an impressive ten times larger than Gmail, but that’s not what the article promised. Also, I’m very doubtful that the web interface and search will be as good as Gmail, but I am checking it out. So next I registered. The registration backend is ASP-based and failed the first time I tried to register. The second time it took and then I began the wait for the password via email. Has been about 15 minutes since I’ve signed up and no password yet, so I will come back and update this entry later after I have logged in successfully and can confirm … or deny the existence of the 100 GB space.

update 10/2/04: A Team Leader from hriders.com commented on this entry indicating that their system “has changed” (though oddly I’m not noticing any visible difference in their registration forms or the ASP script names, so the code changes must be backend) but I do notice the text on their homepage has changed because it now says 100GB instead of 10GB. Hriders Team Leader, thank you for responding regarding my new registration. Is private emailing you necessary for new registrations? The username created is, in fact, my name here so please feel free to check your records with my name and see if you can find out what black hole my hriders.com registration from Thursday 9/30/04 went into and see if you are able to free it up (would love to have my name, if it’s available). Again, the first time it was submitted the system errored out, so I resubmitted and it indicated that it was sending me my password. It’s now been a couple days since this entry and I never received this password. I used the hriders password reminder service at least 4 times and none of those requests ever came either. Is the email address I used during registration good? Yep, tested that. The whole idea here was to be able to register through hriders system and see if it works as advertised for a new user and thus compare it to Gmail. So far just the registration experience has been, well, sort of hellacious, but I do like the fact that a website representative is scanning blogs (and/or search engines, since this blog has good SE presence) and looking for information about the site and responding. I’ll try registering one more time with a brand new username and I will either update this entry and/or write a new entry referencing this one with my experience. Thank you for commenting, Hriders Team Leader (do you have a name, by chance?).

With nary 500 days to go, Bill Gates bid to rid the web of spam “in the next two years” is now growing even gloomier as the web’s biggest internet provider: AOL is saying thanks, but no thanks. The culprit? Those ever so pesky patents and the related licensing concerns as complained about by Apache and other open source initatives recently.

It would not adopt Microsoft’s SenderID protocol because it has failed to win over experts leery of Microsoft’s business practices. “AOL will now not be moving forward with full deployment of the SenderID protocol,” AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham said in a statement.

In some ways I’m sorry to see it going this way. Microsoft is well-intentioned, I think, in this move with SenderID but their desire to ‘own’ vs. grant/give back is what is causing pause from other major bodies. Nothing significant is going to move on this front until these licensing concerns are cleared up. I hope they work through this because something — whatever it is — has to be done about the spam problem; it continues to poison the email well.

Robert Scoble attended the weekend’s exclusive yearly tech event Foo Camp and reported on the truth behind the distribution of Gmail invites:

I met Chris Uhlik of Google. He’s the program manager of Gmail and the Google Toolbar and a few other things. He gave a talk at 11 p.m. to well after midnight. I asked him why they only give out a few Gmail accounts at a time. Remember, I thought it was sheer marketing genius. Turns out it wasn’t. Turns out they don’t have enough server capacity to deal with everyone who wants an account. So, when they buy a new server and get it installed they hand out another round of invites.

Imagine how many gigabytes are being gobbled? I do have a hint for them to help reduce their space: fix the 30 day trash compactor.

Earlier I had written about how Gmail needed some way (before leaving beta) to mass delete messages in the spam bin because at that time the only way was 100 at a time (I erroneously mentioned it as 50 at a time, but there is a way to increase it to 100 at a time and have since been corrected [thanks Mike and Matt]). I even contributed this to Techdirt and Mike ran it along with some insightful thoughts of his own. I agree with him, BTW, that this isn’t something to get “super angry” about, and personally I have never been angry at all actually, just trying to be helpful to the Gmail beta team about making sure they added this mass deletion of spam feature before the product left beta. Also, to provide some level of reality to those users like myself who get a lot of email.

Good news! Over the weekend I noticed the addition of a new feature (well, a Warning: message in bold RED anyway) that promised to auto delete email in the “spam” bin after 30 days. Note the screenshot below taken on Saturday 9/11:



This shows that unfortunately this process has actually not started taking place (see update below), because there is still 207,203 emails in the “spam” bin that are older than 30 days. At least this is the case in my overburdened Gmail spam bin, anyway. So I wonder when this feature will actually be activated? The message is great, and gives me hope, but does anybody know when they are going to flip the switch and turn that trash compactor on? No, I haven’t had time to check into this in more detail but I’m hoping one of our readers might have done so. It will be a cool day when I login to Gmail and those emails are magically — poof — gone.

BTW, just want to thank the readers who commented on my prior entry, offering third party programming solutions (Jim Dabell suggested using a Python script) and/or those who sent the Gmail team a note encouraging them to add some sort of mass delete function. I suspected that there would be 3rd party alternatives to this issue, but I was really hoping that the Gmail team would address this before leaving beta. It appears now that they have … sort of. Just throw the switch.

Update: I noticed today 9/13/04, just as I was publishing this entry that my new Gmail spam bin message count is 205,803 (a reduction of 1000+ emails) … so some of those emails have been devoured by the Gmail system. Perhaps it is set to slowly devour the messages older than 30 days in the spam bin?

I guess some netizens have a unique way of wanting to be unsubscribed from double opt-in email lists. I sent out the Script School Newsletter today (#98) and received this response with the subject line: “u are a a gay freak”:

“fuck off i dont want any sick email from you so stop it or i will kill you” - email rager

Of course this individual was promptly removed from the database, but nevermind the fact that the list is double opt-in and clearly says that users who sign up agree to receive the email newsletter once per week in text right near the signup/enroll submit button. See the screenshot below and tell me if you think this isn’t clear enough (I masked out the IP, but all other information is what you can find on the live enrollment form):

I guess one could argue that this user didn’t contain “information of interest to you” but I don’t think there is anything deceptive about this signup/enroll form. Does anybody else?

Apache and other open source groups are concerned over patents filed by Microsoft concerning Sender ID, which is intended to be a way to positively identify the senders of email.

Many of the license provisions worry open-source developers. According to an analysis done by Larry Rosen, general counsel of the Open Source Initiative, Microsoft’s License would require mail-service providers incorporating Sender ID into their products to tell Microsoft about customers using it. The software giant also has not informed the IETF of potential patents pending on the technologies, and the license is not compatible with open-source development groups and requires users to be subject to U.S. export control laws, the analysis stated

Unless there is some change in the licensing structure, this move clearly puts a kink in the armor of Bill Gates plan to rid the web of spam within two years. Apache is used by a significant number of servers all over the world, so gaining the open source and Apache support for the Sender IP is important.

I’m perusing this webmaster messageboard this morning and I come across this first post from a video producer offering a sample of their material. The video is of them interviewing industry people at a webmaster convention. The interviewer is so misinformed that he doesn’t even know the title of the person running the event (and the video actually displays this mishap), the interviewees are not miked so there are lots of distracting background noises and the interviews are one long, continuous scene. If this isn’t stupid marketing on a number of levels I don’t know what is. Here’s some thoughts:

1) starting the first post at any non-spam messageboard with spam is a major no-no; really bad form.
2) if you are a video producer and are offering a sample, make it one that is not 119 MB in size! Only webmasters with really fast cable/broadband or T1+ are going to be interested in that type of download. Took me 12 minutes to download that and I’m thinking I’m one of very few who bothered.
3) the sample should be of the highest quality possible to demo the skills of the producer. Employ all the video goodies: pans, cuts, dissolves, titling, etc. The video in question above used none of these production tools.
4) consider buying advertising at the place instead of posting a spam on their messageboard
5) contact the owner/webmaster of the site to find the best way to market to that site’s readers/surfers/clientele. Nobody knows the website better than the people actually working in the trenches.

The puzzling part is that this kind of stupid marketing on the web actually works sometimes. The reason we have so much spam in our mailbox is because people buy from spammers. No matter what Bill Gates does to rid the web of spam, as long as people buy from spammers, there will always be spam. The logical answer: don’t buy from any spamvertisement.