Kate Hudson has won an “undisclosed sum” against a UK Enquirer magazine which falsely represented her as being so skinny that her mother Goldie Hawn had said (as a headline): “Eat Something!”

Of course Hawn claims she never told her daughter any such thing. Keep in mind this is the same magazine, er tabloid, that wrongly reported Britney Spears was getting a divorce and had to apologize for that too.

I find it bizarre that anybody believes what’s printed in tabloids. I thought they were intentionally quasi-fiction, half-truth publications, yes/no? I mean, come on, some of the allegations are so out there that you have to wonder. I believe what I see in the tabloids about as much as pro wrestling.

With that understanding which I put out to readers to correct me on, Hudson’s attorney’s remarks don’t sound right to me either.

[Hudson’s] lawyer, Simon Smith, told Britain’s High Court the story and pictures implied Hudson had “recklessly and foolishly endangered her health by deliberately starving herself.”

Maybe just a little bit of hyperbole there, ya think? Maybe down on their luck attorneys can double as tabloid writers.

Caption contest, should we?
Now take a closer look at a totally different picture in the screenshot above. The headline for that picture from CNN could be from daughter to mother or mother to daughter. Do we dare have a caption contest? Should we risk stoking the fires On Goldie’s Pond?

I remember Goldie Hawn fondly as being pretty hot but the picture above doesn’t catch her best side. That’s the way it goes with that unscrupulous camera eye. Her daughter, however? Schhhwing.

[Please don’t sue, ladies, you know we love you!]

The Closet Nerd (nice name) serves up his favorite Windows XP tweak to make things snappier navigating around Windows XP:

It’s probably the simplest tweak I do, but it’s also one of the most effective at speeding up EVERYTHING in Windows.

To enable this XP tweak do the following:

STEP 1. Navigate to START -> My Computer (right mouse click) -> Properties
STEP 2. Choose the ADVANCED tab and then click Performance “Settings”
STEP 3. [Update: first click the “Adjust for best performance” which will uncheck all the boxs and then … ] choose the “Custom” radio button.
STEP 4. Check the following three boxes: smooth edges of screen fonts, use drop shadows for icon labels on desktop, and use visual styles on windows and buttons.

I just tried this out and it makes an immediately noticeable difference with the speed moving around within Windows XP.

The following is a single post in my RSS Reader using Feedburner this morning with seemingly every possible option — actually, I’m sure there are more — turned on in the post:

This post reminded me of my experience with another post from a different blog in my RSS reader recently and there are Things Not To Do lessons from both posts for fellow bloggers: 10 (deadly sins) ads in a single RSS feed post, get out of here.

The above screenshot contains one picture and seven words. That’s all the content in the post. Now check out the other links, most of which are promotional, and which number nearly 20+:

1. 7 6 tag links: design, chair, library, books, made in Italy, Bibliochaise. Head’s up, tag whores: I can see this going under ‘books’ and ‘chair’ which probably lead to other posts, but why the other five tags for readers? ‘Made in Italy’? If we want to run Technorati tag searches this badly then we can launch them ourselves. Very few posts warrant more than three tags. There are almost more tags used here than words in the post. If you need that many tags, sorry it’s just tag spamming. Solution: hide that stuff so it only shows for authors.
2. email this
3. add to del.icio.us
4. Digg this
5. Find related feeds. What is going to be related to a post like this? It’s been sullied by a bunch of promotional links.
6. Add to Technorati Favorites
7. Meneame. How many readers will know what this actually means? For that matter what most of the “___ this” links are used for?
8. Subscribe by email
9. Seed this. Propagate, that’s the spirit.
10. Furl this
11. Spurl this
12. This item is from “Random Good Stuff” Should be titled “Non-random Unrelated Links.” Here is how you can run down the source of this post, if you are really interested.
13. Advertise in this feed. And become the proud sponsor of link #30+?
14. Alexa rank. So readers need to know this … why? What does it have to do with the post?
15. (not linked) This feed has 1187 subscribers. As readers, why do we need to know this? Congratulations on your 4 digit RSS penis. Yes, all your readers are envious.
16. Slashdot this
17. Add to blogroll
18. Blog this. Blog what, how many promotional links you have in this post? Ok, here you go.
19. Track co.mments. I’m sure a post like this will get tons of comments.
20. Include this in Outlook. What about readers who don’t use Outlook? Might want to add: Include this in (insert every email program). Why not?
21. Digg this. A second time! Are you freaking kidding? I guess Digg has become so popular that banging the reader with this request twice will increase the odds of getting dug.
22. Fark this. Need to replace the ‘a’ and the ‘r’ with a ‘u’ and a ‘c’.

How about one more for the road:

- Unsubscribe this. Done.

It might only be week #2, but the Xbox Live Arcade (XLA) is already a major hit in our home. Our kids love Arcade Wednesdays. Our middle son was excited about his achievement with today’s XLA new game, indie platformer designed specifically for the XLA: Cloning Clyde. He already has all 200 achievement points too.

He’s currently #7 in the world and I haven’t even played the game yet. This could get spendy if we end up buying two games every Wednesday (at least with the co-op titles).

While Cloning Clyde is a title designed specifically for XLA, I’m looking forward to the retro titles like Pac-Man. Some other retro titles I’d like to see on XLA someday (preference to those titles with asterisk):

- *Zaxxon
- *Star Castle
- *Klax
- *Scramble
- *Defender
- Xevious
- Pengo
- Moon Patrol
- Donkey Kong
- Dig Dug
- Track & Field
- Toobin’
- Missile Command
- Asteroids
- Asteroids Deluxe
- Centipede
- Elevator Action

My son says he is looking forward to Street Fighter Hyper Fighting and Galaga. What retro games would you like to see on XLA?

- Couchsurfing.com thought to be lost forever after a database problem is back with v2.0 thanks to a community and web caches [via Wired]. Have you backed up your favorite database lately?
- Possible Presential candidate elect in 2008, John Edwards, is using Bittorrent.
- Zillow will share its zestimates with Yahoo Real Estate searches. Meanwhile, Yahoo stock is taking a serious pounding (down almost 20% as of this writing) today on the heels of admitting they wouldn’t be updating their ad platform until Q4 2006 [earnings recap transcript here]. Ouch, I lost some money with my YHOO stock today.
- This was destined to be: YouTube being sued over 1992 riots video being posted (copyright infringement)
- Is the Indian government blocking blogspot, Typepad and Geocities? Dina Mehta, an India local, is blogging the details. Reader perspective: this sucks, use a proxy. Webmaster perspective: yet another reason to stay away from third party hosted sites for any long term serious project.
- Morning Sidekick Radio parody of James Blunt “your beautiful” as “my cubicle” [mp3] via thatedeguy.
- a podcast [mp3] with host Xbox Larry Hryb AKA Major Nelson with an interesting interview on HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray. If you want to listen to the technical difference between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray as well as why the Xbox 360 is going to support HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray. Also, more detailed information about Xbox Live Arcade Wednesday which will be the day that new Live Arcade titles will be released (08:00 GMT). The plan, though nothing official, is to try and make it a weekly gig and if they miss a week we might see a two games in a week release the following. This will be a huge success. It is already. Note, that Windows Media Player users can get an enhanced WMA version of the podcast with automatic URL flips [URL flips automatically change Internet Explorer when Hryb talks about a URL]

The movie The Cave is becoming my benchmark for what’s wrong with buying DVDs online. It’s an example of a subpar movie that is being peddled around the net for too much money. I’ve seen this movie selling for close to $30 that was available at Best Buy for $9.99. Note the Cinemax motto in the screenshot below:

Sorry, Cinemax, your idea of the future doesn’t even work with the Firefox browser.

The future of DVD burning buying has already been here and has been happening without Hollywood’s consent. Although we currently own 459 DVDs — and I only know this number because we keep an inventory of them using Delicious Library, BTW — I have never burned an archive copy of one of them. Whether or not it’s legal to do that these days, I’m not sure. There once was the ability afforded in copyright to make archival copies and I believe we’re still provided that (?) but I’m not sure any more with all the legal activity surrounding illegal internet distribution. Any readers know the legalities on this? I would sure like to think that the $10,000-$15,000 worth of DVDs we own can be copied so we can continue to own them well into the future if the source gets scratched/ruined. Or will they meet the same obsolescence of laserdiscs and VHS? If so, maybe we should stop buying/collecting and prepare the eBay listing now to reap the maximum return? Or will they become more valuable once they are obseleted?

Permanent ownership clause with transfer rights
For me the most attractive buy for digital media and paying more than a physical copy today would be digital media with a permanent ownership clause and including transfer rights meaning we could will our collection to our children or give them away / sell them to others. Why isn’t anybody selling me this digital media deal online? That would be the future of DVD burning (think I’ll leave this one) because the primary legitimate reason to burn DVDs is for archival storage. But take a minute and read the Terms of Service of these online media sites, they are severely restrictive. All of them.

Instead we are getting a more expensive, handcuffed “up to 3 computers and burn to one DVD” movie offer that doesn’t have cover art and packaging and special features/extras. This isn’t worth more money — $19.99+ for any single title movies out there (TV sets, perhaps yes) — especially movies like The Cave. Some online database could be maintained at the point of sale and that authorization of ownership could be given/sold/transferred to another person. This way when we want to give up or sell our right to Titanic which we legally purchased, we can transfer to somebody else, just as we would do with a physical item via eBay. An entire online marketplace could revolve around trading these digital licenses. DRM hasn’t worked like this, though. It’s been an abject failure in emulating physical property.

Unfortunately, I’m not aware of anybody that legally allows such provisions. This is why our family still buys mostly physical media. You can count the number of DRM-laden music tracks our family has purchased on one hand. Physical media has value that can easily be claimed on insurance in case of fire or theft. Value that can be bartered, sold or donated to charity.

Yesterday’s iTunes to rent movies rumor drew similar complaints about pricing but I didn’t mention how it has gotten really old buying the same media on different formats and the solution I see which is offering consumers this digital permanent ownership clause with transfer rights. Hollywood and the record companies keep wanting us to support DRM-encumbered formats for more money and wonder why we are protesting the trend.

Hollywood wants us to buy Miracle on 34th Street on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and the next format. An online permanent ownership with transfer clause like I’m suggesting threatens another half dozen or more format purchase over my lifetime. At least that’s one perception, even if it’s not reality. If they offer something cool that I can’t get with my existing version of the movie, I might buy the newer format version anyway.

Until this changes, the future of DVD burning buying isn’t here yet. They are still living in The Cave.

10:34am PST Doh! I used “burning” instead of “buying” like the Cinemanow webpage says. This goes with my million dollar calculation error in the last post. Argh. Hope this bug-ridden Wednesday doesn’t continue! (and here I used “article” instead of webpage” — what a day)

In Jason Calacanis’ business world I guess when you can’t beat them, you try to copy them, and when you still can’t beat them, you try to siphon the most active content producers promoters from them:

Now, this offer is going to get a big response I know, so we’re going to have to limit to a dozen or so folks. However, I’m absolutely convinced that the top 20 people on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit are worth $1,000 a month and if we’re the first folks to pay them that is fine with me–we will take the risk and the arrows from the folks who think we’re corrupting the community process (is there anyone out there who thinks this any more?!).

Don’t think I’m going out on a limb saying some of the top users of Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace and Reddit will go for the deal Calacanis is offering which is $1,000/month for a minimum of 150 stories a month (3 stories a day). $12,000 per year minimum for what, 30+ minutes work each day? That’s not a bad return. At a dozen people he’s committing to well over a million dollars $150,000 a year (thanks Jeremy, doh!) to buy talent to compete.

It will be interesting to see what the response from Digg management will be if some of their best users will take the money. I’ve noticed since they switched to v2.0 a lot more videos are being promoted to the front page. Haven’t seen as much of the other type news/stories, but definitely an increase in links to videos (or blogs with videos).

Why give any third party site (so much of) your time for free?
In my years on the web, I’ve yet to get involved with one third party site where I’ve given a significant amount of my time creating and sharing content for free that turned out to be a mutually beneficial deal. Over time this has caused me to be more reluctant to share large amounts of created content at third party sites without a mutually benefit deal in place. It doesn’t have to be dollars, it could be splitting the ad revenue or traffic back to our sites. What does Digg give us for submitting articles? Nothing except ego stroking if the story/link is promoted to the front page. If somebody else submits something from one of your sites or you submit your own stuff (which seems to be a frowned upon practice) than the payoff is a significant amount of traffic to your site.

Many times these sites give you no way to take back when you’ve shared with them (why no export function?) — or make it very difficult to do so as Thomas Hawk found out a month or so ago when he wanted to take all his Flickr tagged pictures with him. I agree that perhaps the most important function is export/import in any site where we spend our time, especially if it is derived from our ‘free’ time.

From a popularity perspective, being a star on a highly trafficked third party site can be earned with your time. It’s harder to create success on your own sites because you have to build the traffic first (something that people usually give up on before they succeed). It’s a good part of the reason that blog networks were born and I’m sure we’ll see print newspapers entering the game eventually too. Convince the talent that hey, we’ve got more traffic than you, so come on over.

However, from a longevity and control perspective on the web the best place to share content you create is on servers and sites you pay for yourself. This provides the maximum amount of control over whether the content stays published, server uptime and connectivity, in what forms, and what websites. This doesn’t mean you won’t be plagiarized. This doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t share content with third party sites, but what will happen if/when someday Digg, Flickr, Reddit, etc goes out of business? Yeah, I know, far-fetched. Let’s revisit this in five years. If that does happen then what happens to all the time spent submitting articles and posts? What happens to your prized top 100 rankings at these defunct sites? Stars can burn out literally overnight when their vehicle is gone.

Fortunately in this wild and wonderful web you can own the vehicle and can keep it running as long as you want (or at least can afford, anyway). This value is priceless and something no third party publisher can ever give you.

No, thank you. Guess I’m primarily sticking to self-publishing on the web. This means I probably won’t make the top 100 users list of any third party site (for any length of time, anyway) but I know the bulk of material I’m producing will be available for many, many years to come. I do this to share my content with people who feel passionate about it (like or dislike) and in a place where I cannot completely guarantee — there are no guarantees in life except death and taxes — but can almost guarantee will still be here in 5, 10 and even 20 years from now. And as more community surrounds the projects my company is involved with I will continue to explore ways to let the community take the content with them. It’s my #1 frustration with third party sites: that the content we create there isn’t easy enough to export and publish on our own sites.

Again, none of this is saying or suggesting that people shouldn’t get involved with third party sites, I’m just sharing, as I always do, my own perspective here. Simply put, I think people should keep the time spent at third party sites in perspective. It’s more than the age old, do you want to work for somebody else or work for yourself?

I don’t go to sites like digg, Flickr, etc to work. I come to our own sites for that. When I contribute to those type third party sites I do it more out of love and a sense of giving back to and sharing with the community and sometimes for additional exposure. I suspect many other self-publishers do the same with perhaps more emphasis on the additional exposure part. Those who are submitting 150+ stories to digg are spending perhaps too much free time if none of that love is coming back to their own sites (I’m guessing it is in at least some of those cases but I haven’t studied the top site contributers). It’s good to see somebody offer these people compensation and trying to make it a mutually beneficial deal.

Calacanis is definitely brazen and his style kind of reminds me of the Tasmanian Devil. This is a smart play because he clearly wants to be the content king. He wisely knows that quality rules at the end of the day and after the launch hype died, Netscape wasn’t attracting enough of the people that make sites like Digg attractive and thus not enough quality. Lately he’s been fighting off a swarm of angry netscape.com users who didn’t like the change to the digg-type format. And what about AOL senior management? They have to be peeing their pants with glee over the fact that at least somebody is talking about Netscape Navigator again. Not the browser, but the term.

[Humorous aside: who wants to be asked some of what they do for a living and respond: “I’m a Netscape Navigator.”]

Calacanis is no fool. This is a disruptive play. And this what Netscape needs if it is to ever be a significant player with its new digg-type format. I said it before, they have the traffic. And they have the dollars to throw around. As long as they have those two things, this is a long way from over.

Good luck to all those who take this offer.

Update 8:13am PST: Just after publishing this it occured to me that if too many people want to become content promoters instead of content producers/creators there will be a greater need for more quality content. This is positive for those of us who spend the bulk of our time creating things. Whether it is software, words or whatever. Bring on the Don King diggers and navigators.

Ever have one of those days when … (warning: might want to turn the volume down a bit)

Ahh, the days when the Hulk raged. Lou Ferrigno and Bill Bixby. All 10 episodes of The Incredible Hulk - The Complete First Season (affiliate) available via Amazon for $27.99, but wait, if you are a Costco member then you can buy there for $25.99 as of this writing. We just did and you can tell how inspired I was on video.

Speaking of Bills, today another Bill and a mysterious, kind engineer helped me rescue a couple videos for viewing in my Grouper profile that wouldn’t allow viewing by anybody else, including me.

And while we’re in the old TV show mode, the show that defined courtroom drama with twists in all its black and white glory is available via DVD, Perry Mason - Season 1, Vol. 1 (affiliate). We paid $39.99+ tax and it’s available on Amazon as of this writing for $32.99.

Saw it a week ago and wanted to buy it then, but finally pulled the trigger tonight. Who needs a TV signal when you can get all the great old TV shows on DVD?

Speaking of being TV-less, it’s day 27. NFL Preseason starts soon and it’s going to be tough if I can’t get in on the NFL action. That might be the breaking point.

Back to listening to the Mariners, they might pull this one out in the bronx tonight.

[crossing fingers]

This is big local sports news with a franchise and ownership that has been at odds politically with the city. Will the Seattle Supersonics being staying at/near the Seattle area or moving to Oklahoma City? The speculation is yes, we have lost the NBA in Seattle. Please don’t tell me, and no offense to the ladies, that all we are left with is the Rain Storm (WNBA) [Update: As heard on KOMO 1000 radio, it is a package deal, both the Storm and Sonics are together.]

They have threatened to sell the team after their lease expires in 2010 unless the city gives them a larger cut of any revenue and $220 million in taxpayer-funded remodeling of KeyArena. Since then, they have held informal discussions with leaders in Bellevue and Renton about potentially building a new arena in one of those cities.

I never saw a Sonics game played at Key Arena, although I did see one played in the Tacoma dome. Would like to have seen them cut some kind of deal to keep them somewhere, but taxpayers are getting tax poor supporting these professional teams. People could still be reeling from the aftermath of the Seahawks deal that was voted down and then passed through anyway by the politicians. Then again, look at how good the Hawks did last year. Winning can cause a change of heart and the Sonics haven’t been doing a lot of that lately.

The Mariners attendence has been declining despite arguably the finest baseball facility in baseball. No doubt this isn’t helped by their losing reconds the last couple season, although they are doing better (not the last 11 games though). The division is weak, hopefully ownership will pull the trigger on some big deals before the tradeline.

There is a lease through 2010 at Key Arena, so the Sonics won’t be going anywhere next season, at least unless this group pays off the lease. Not sure if there is a clause which allows prepayment or not. Lots of speculation at this point, but a news conference is scheduled for 3pm PST today and supposedly our illustrious Governor Christine Gregoire is in on the talks with the team. Let’s hope she does better with this then she did with online gambling in this state.

We’ll find out in a few hours.

Class action lawsuits, a grossly underperforming IPO (debut at $17/share, $6.95 as of this writing) and being #1 at the wrong things like overspending on internet advertising. Just give us something positive to write about, Vonage. I have gone from slight concern, to worry to outright disturbed over a company that has provided a service our family and business have enjoyed for over two years now.

The most recent black eye for Vonage is this article that jumped out at me with the headline: How Vonage Funds Spyware. Ouch. Who didn’t figure with all the money they were spending online that some advertising wouldn’t be from legitimate sources?

This article drags out a bunch of soiled laundry with screenshots and then contradicts the title with (emphasis mine):

As best I can tell, Vonage does not specifically intend to have its ads shown in spyware. Instead, the advertising chains shown above reveal that these are generally indirect relationships, not direct spyware ad buys. (In comparison, see my September 2005 report of Expedia directly and intentionally buying spyware-delivered advertising from numerous notorious spyware vendors — a practice that, to its credit, Expedia subsequently stopped.) Yet by failing to take appropriate precautions and failing to diligently supervising its ads, Vonage makes payments to spyware vendors — funding spyware that is known to harm users’ PCs.

This is the side of broker ad buying that I dislike. It’s too easy to end up buying advertising in places you don’t want. With all the money Vonage is spending (over $20 million per month) they could have their own ad department that actively pursues relevant sites and buy direct advertising. Yes, they have an affiilate program but that thing sucked in our tests here, so throw a million at that and make something a lot more attractive. Our company was sending them business at one time and we never made a dime when I know people were signing up through those ads, but instead they are out buying ads through broker that end up indirectly funding spyware vendors. Amazing.

Where should we move our Vonage business too? It’s time for me to stop bitching about them and yet continuing to do business with them. It’s wallet voting time. We’ll consider any other VoIP provider than AT&T. We are looking at Comcast Digital Voice (good/bad?). I’m serious. Suggestions, please?