MediaTemple not here when we need them
March 22 note added:
I’ve been in touch with the owner of Motiono.com and we’ve resolved our differences amicably. The DMCA takedown notice has been removed.
MediaTemple does the right thing
I’ve posted a few critical stories regarding MediaTemple’s new grid server product lately.
- MediaTemple GridServer is a disaster
- MediaTemple GridServer is buggy
- bizhack now on media temple grid server
But I’m happy to be able to post good news: now MT is doing the right thing. I just got this email:
Dear John,
Our records indicate that you recently opened up a support request related to an open incident, wide-spread problem, or known issue relating to (mt) Media Temple’s new (gs) Grid-Server system. We want to apologize for the inconveniences this may have caused you.
We are compensating you 3 months of service as a concession for the troubles we may have caused you and your site. No action is required on your part. In the next 24 hours this will appear in your account in the form of a credit.
We will be announcing GRID MASTER RELEASE (v.1.1), and version upgrade which fixed hundreds of bugs and will dramatically improve your overall experience with this system.
(mt) Media Temple wishes to thank you sincerely for your patience during the course of these incidents. We believe the (gs) Grid-Server is an amazing system with new technology that has only begun to reach its real potential. Please look forward to announcements in the next few days relating to our new master release.
Thank you again.
Best Regards,
(mt) Media Temple
Hosting Operations
Good move, Mediatemple. Stuff happens, errors occur: that’s reality. I’m looking forward to good continued service from MT.
Tags: MT, mediatemple, customer, service, john koetsier
Selling with 9/11: disgusting free Xbox 360 offer
Few things are more revolting than trying to cash in on death and disaster. So I wasn’t too impressed when I saw a Flash banner ad based on the 9/11 terrorist attacks for freeplay.com.
I took a screenpic - you can see it to the right. The twin towers are in the distance; there’s a jet plane aiming at them, and the ad invites you to take it out by click your mouse and firing at the airplane.
When you do, of course, you go here. (Note: some affiliate gets credit when you click that link - you can also just choose this link to see the same thing without benefiting someone who’s running these kinds of ads.)
It’s an opportunity to get a “free” Xbox 360, and like all these sleazy come-ons, you have to complete one “offer” (e.g., sign up for a credit card) and suck up to 10 of your friends to do the same thing in order to get the free product.
Is it appropriate, however, to use a depiction of an event that killed thousands of people to promote a two-bit MLM-ish scammy marketing offer?
No.
Tags: 9/11, new york, 911, xbox360, advertising, sleazy, john koetsier
Kontera: creating in-text irrelevance
Checking the score on the big game? You must be looking to buy a football. Reading a review of a new movie? You must be interested in picking up a new flat-screen TV. Getting the news of a heavyweight boxer’s murder in Jamaica?
You must be interested in buying crayons for your restaurant.
You’ve run across Kontera - a contextual text-link pay-per-click network focused on “creating in-text relevance.” There’s only one problem: irrelevance.
When you focus on individual words as the unit of relevance, you generate irrelevance, as seen above. Only by focusing on the entire post, story, or page can you have a hope of generating anything but the most accidental form of relevance.
Such as an advertising network assuming that if you see the words “Don King” on a webpage, you must be interested in locating this individual.
Perhaps he’s a long-lost classmate. And it’ll only cost you $9.95.
. . .
. . .
Note: Kontera competitor Vibrant Media can probably be put in the same category.
Tags: kontera, advertising, PPC, adsense, adwords, john koetsier
The internet doesn’t suck as hard as Steve Maich
Sometimes you see a story so mind-blowingly moronic you just have to flame it. Today, that’s Steve Maich’s Pornography, gambling, lies, theft and terrorism: The Internet sucks.
It’s a long - very long - tirade against the web. It’s full of inaccuracies. It’s loaded with hyperbole. It’s jammed with bombastic nonsense. And it doesn’t even have the lovable stylistic cantankerousness of a Nick Carr to make it halfways bearable.
In short, it sucks. Here’s why:
Dark fibre sitting idle
According to Maich, the soils of the earth are just bursting with dark fibre:
They’re all still down there, out of sight and all but out of mind — hundreds of millions of miles of hair-thin strands of glass … And almost all of it sits empty, dark and idle — an unseen monument to every unfulfilled promise of the Internet.
Wrong: dark fibre is being lit up all over the place.
Internet not changing anything
According to Maich, the experts who predicted the internet would change many of our modes of communication have been proven wrong:
Billions would flood into cyberspace, changing everything about the way we communicate, educate and entertain.
They’re still selling the same old line.
Wrong. Over a billion have flooded onto the net. More are coming. And all of them are communicating, educating and being educated, and entertaining and being entertained in ways too numerous to count.
YouTube is just pirated media and assorted garbage
According to Maich, Google’s purchase of YouTube was stupid, and YouTube has absolutely no value whatsoever:
On Oct. 9, Google bought YouTube — an Internet site used primarily for the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material and minute-long clips of people singing karaoke in their basements. This titan of new media, we’re told, is worth US$1.65 billion. It’s just the latest step in our long descent into cyber-madness.
Wrong. Content owners are starting to see that keeping their content locked in digital barns is just letting it age poorly, making no money. They’re starting to do deals that will see returns with viewing.
And on Google’s “cyber-madness?” It was more than paid for the very next day.
The web is the seedy, wrong-side-of-the-tracks part of town
According to Maich, you wouldn’t want to go anywhere on the web at night, or without a bunch of friends to protect you:
The idealists who conceived and pioneered the Web described a kind of enlightened utopia built on mutual understanding, a world in which knowledge is limited only by one’s curiosity. Instead, we have constructed a virtual Wild West, where the masses indulge their darkest vices, pirates of all kinds troll for victims, and the rest of us have come to accept that cyberspace isn’t the kind of place you’d want to raise your kids. The great multinational exchange of ideas and goodwill has devolved into a food fight. And the virtual marketplace is a great place to get robbed.
Yup - it’s just like the real world: good, bad, and ugly. Get used to it. But be aware that while there’s bad areas, they are far outweighed by all the good neighborhoods.
(And by the way, if you use a Mac, you’re less likely to get hijacked.)
You can’t find any answers online
Maich says that good information is impossible to filter out online:
The answers to the great questions of our world may be out there somewhere, but finding them will require you to first wade through an ocean of misinformation, trivia and sludge.
How does he manage to tie his shoelaces? Is he able to chew gum and walk at the same time? Has he never heard of Google? Wikipedia?
Where there’s a lot of information we need good filters. Thanks to Google and others, we do - and they’re getting better all the time.
Web users are crude and stupid. So’s the web itself
Maich has very little respect for the billion or so people who are online:
Let’s put this in terms crude enough for all cyber-dwellers to grasp. The Internet sucks.
We’re crude? Can’t grasp complex topics? Friend, read a few blogs. There are more intelligent things being written online than virtually any other media today.
Experts who say the internet is a massive force for change are naive
Maich doesn’t believe the “hype:”
… Experts competed with one another to see who could attach the most outrageous superlative to the nascent technology … Bill Gates, in a famous editorial for the New York Times, called the Internet a “tidal wave” that “will wash over the computer industry and many others, drowning those who don’t learn to swim in its waves.”
Indeed it has, Steve. Indeed it has. Perhaps you haven’t noticed iTunes. Or the fact that investment in desktop software has been moving to online applications. Or Salesforce.com. Or .Net. Software-as-a-service. Regular security updates over the web. The multi-billion-dollar instant giant that is Google! The innovation and service we see in 37signals. The rise of a nothing like MySpace to a challenger of traditional media. The examples are too many to list.
The internet is not a significant invention
According to Maich, the internet is less significant than household appliances:
This year, the National Academy of Engineering released its list of the 20 greatest engineering accomplishments of the past 100 years. The Internet ranked 13th, but even that ranking seems laughably generous. For instance, it came in just ahead of imaging technologies like the X-ray, MRI and radar — breakthroughs that have allowed us to look inside the human body without breaking the skin, to predict the weather, and to see things invisible to the human eye. Has the Internet achieved anything remotely comparable? Next on the list are household appliances. Try going back to doing the family’s laundry by hand for one week, and then see if you’d gladly trade your Internet connection to get your washing machine back.
I know ignorance is invincible, but the fact is that the internet ties together many of those weather stations that help us predict the weather. Here’s a trivial, personal example - that power has even hit the average joe.
What’s more important - clean clothes or knowledge? Knowledge, after all, is a life-saver. And not just in one situation, either. I’ll take knowledge, thank you very much, and there has never been a better invention for sharing and communicating knowledge than the internet.
The internet is nothing new
Maich sees no new technology in the networking of computers and servers:
The trouble with the Net, he says, is that it has produced precious little that is really new. Just about everything that’s accessible through the Web was available through other means before. Email is fine, for instance, but it pales next to the achievement of the telegraph, which shortened the time required to communicate over vast distances from weeks to minutes. The internal combustion engine, refrigeration, even air conditioning, had profound impacts on our lives, making the impossible practical. The Web does nothing of the sort. Emails replace faxes and phone calls. Online shopping replaces sales that used to be made through a catalogue. And for all but the most socially isolated, every hour spent trolling through chat rooms replaces an hour that might otherwise have been spent in real, live conversation.
I’m sorry, but here’s where you lose ALL credibility and betray yourself as just a lonely crank with an axe to grind.
I mean, comparing email to the telegraph - where you had to walk to some office, pay some money, enter some funky code, and send messages letter by letter (each costing you more) to someone else who would have to get a paper representation of your message delivered from the telegraph office in their town - is just beyond stupid. I could make similar arguments regarding faxes and phone calls and shopping, but I’m just too tired.
Nothing new under the sun
We’re not actually doing anything new, says Maich:
Even in the research and academic communities, which always had the most to gain from the Internet, Gordon says, the advantages should be kept in perspective. “It has made collaboration and communication faster and more efficient, but we’re still doing the same things,” he says.
No, of course not. We’ve always been able to videoconference with people a globe away. We’ve always been able to write a document with someone 500 kilometres away at the same time in the same application on the same document. We’ve always been able to send the plumber a picture of the pieces left over when we finished “assembling” the dishwasher in about 30 seconds. And average individuals with almost no income have always been able to publish to an audience of thousands with no more effort than writing a letter.
It’s the end of paid content
These guys all go to the same sources and get fed the same tripe:
In 1995, the U.S. government’s top copyright officer, Marybeth Peters, called the Internet “the world’s biggest copying machine.” She didn’t know the half of it. At the time, slow connection speeds and weak processing power meant the Web was still essentially a print medium. Within a couple of years, however, the full force of the Web’s assault on intellectual property rights would come into focus.
There is more content being produced now than ever. Every new technology means content industries have to adapt to new ways of doing business. The VCR was going to rape the movie industry. The reality is we’re entering an attention economy and content providers have to catch up - and they’re starting to.
There are inaccuracies online
Unbelievable as it may seem, Maich says that there is some stuff that is wrong online:
On Wednesday, July 5, Ken Lay, the former chairman and CEO of Enron Corp. died in Colorado. The news first hit the wires around 10 a.m., and at 10:06 Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows users to update and modify entries, proclaimed that Lay had died “of an apparent suicide.” Two minutes later, somebody changed the entry to say Lay had died “of an apparent heart attack or suicide.” Less than a minute later, some cooler head intervened and corrected the entry to say the cause of death was “yet to be determined.” At 10:11 the entry was changed again, this time asserting that “The guilt of ruining so many lives finally led him to suicide.”
Yes, it’s true. But sir, as we’ve seen in your lousy error-ridden article, that also happens offline. And, as Nature showed, Wikipedia accuracy actually rivals that of Encyclopedia Britannica.
The internet is full of rank amateurism
It’s distasteful, really. Those plebes, why won’t they learn their place?
In the place of hard information, the Net has ushered in the era of the amateur commentator. Rather than reporting the news, the Internet actually excels at allowing millions to analyze the news of the day on their blogs and message boards … Sounds spectacular, but what’s the great value of a participatory marketplace of mass speech if so few have anything to say that’s worth buying?
Bloggers broke the Sony DRM issue. Bloggers broke the Foley scandal. And bloggers are breaking more and more stories all the time, as well as providing the most insightful analysis you can find.
. . .
. . .
What’s the point?
I could go on and on, knocking down Maich’s points one by one. But what’s the point? It’s fairly obvious, I think, that he’s not being intellectually honest.
Instead, he’s picked a position and is sticking to it, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
Pathetic!
. . .
. . .
Other people discussing this post:
- Valleywag: The Internet Sucks
- Media Angler: Heretics at the Modem
- Mark Evans: Does the Internet Suck? Evans vs. Maich
- TechDirt: The Internet May Suck, But So Does This Article
- Matthew Ingram: Maclean’s goes trolling for controversy
- Deep Jive Interests: The Internet Sucks? About as much as TV, Movies, Gaming, the Telephone, the Automobile …
- and last, but not least, the Techmeme discussion
Tags: steve maich, macleans, internet, blogging, web, john koetsier
Bandwidth: 14 cents/gigabyte
Bandwidth sure is cheap these days. I just saw Scoble’s post on his vlog sponsor which mentions in passing that bandwidth is now going for a measly 14 cents a gigabyte at CacheFly.
Wow. I remember $3/GB, $2.50 if you used a lot just a couple years ago. Times sure are changing fast.
Tags: GB, gigabytes, hosting costs, bandwidth, john koetsier
Get Flocked
Flock has just come out with new buttons. I have to display the one I suggested (down in the comments):
I’ll stick it in the theme somewhere, but for complex and boring reasons, not yet.
Tags: flock, flockstar, get flocked, browser, john koetsier
Monster phishing scam
I’ve had a resume up on Monster.com for years. Haven’t done much to it for most of them.
So I was surprised to get an email today purportedly from Monster telling me that I need to download some file to ensure “security.”
Naturally, the link does NOT go to monster.com, but instead to some executable file on this blog. The actual link is http://www.krazynonsense.com/blog/MProtectOne.exe. Whether the owner of that blog is an identity thief or just got his/her blog owned I don’t know. Viewing the raw source of the email, you can tell that it actually came from u15165024.onlinehome-server.com - IP address 217.160.240.148.
But wow.
I mean, how do unsophisticated web users survive? The email looks real. Has a Monster logo. Appears to come from Monster. The message is written in a credible manner (if you don’t know anything about browser security). The program name, Monster ProtectOne, sounds like something an MBA-wielding marketer would come up with.
I’m glad I have familiarity with internet scams, but my dad would click on this in a heartbeat.
I’ve gotta get him a Mac.
[ update ]
I haven’t found anything on Google about this scam yet, so I’ve let Monster know about it via the live chat feature they have on their site - very cool.
Transcript:
Received:Hello John.
Received:Thank you for contacting Monster Customer Central. My name is Sebin. How may I assist you today?
Sent:Hello, I just got emailed a phishing scam email that purports to be from Monster.com
Sent:I’ve posted the details here: (link to this post)
Sent:Please inform someone in your technical/security team
Sent:(sorry for contacting you, but this was the only way I found on your site to actually let someone know about this problem)
Received:Sure I will do that..
Received:Thank you for bringing this to our notice.
Sent:if they want to get a copy of the actual email from me, my email address is john@sparkplug9.com
Sent:you’re welcome
Received:I will get back to you with the details..
Sent:have a great day.
Received:Is there anything else I can help you with?
Received:You too..
Received:Thank you for using Monster..
Sent:ummm … no, I don’t think so
Received:Bye.
Tags: phishing, monster.com, virus, identity theft, john koetsier
AdWords newbie
My wife and I are thinking of redoing our roof, so I naturally turned to the web as my first place to research the project.
But why did on earth did an Australian home improvement site come up in the adwords section? I happen to live near Vancouver, Canada.
Someone is an AdWords newbie. Someone needs to learn about restricting your ads by country and region. Someone just wasted 50 cents or a buck.
Tags: adwords, geotargeting, google, marketing, john koetsier
2 reasons Chapters Indigo sucks
I sometimes shop at Chapters Indigo. But only when I have too … like when I get a gift certificate from IDC Canada for participating in one of their research studies.
I hate shopping there, because the site is always, without exception, slow. I have never had it respond quickly. Double plus annoying. Plus, the selection is never what you get at Amazon. And you can never find as much information about what you’re buying as at Amazon.
But 25 bucks is 25 bucks, so every month or so after dutifully filling out my survey, I head on over to Chapters to find something to blow it on.
And here are two things I particularly hate:
- the never-changing email address requirement
See that - you can’t change your email address. And yup, that’s the one I had three years ago. Yay. - the buy-more-or-we’ll-gouge-you-on-shipping shipping charges
Yes, that’s $8 in shipping for a DVD and a CD. In other words, almost 50% shipping. You can get free shipping, but only if you spend $40 or more … which I usually end up doing, thereby encouraging the perpetuation of the system I am now whining about. Hmmm.
Please, please, IDC: move to Amazon gift certificates.
. . .
. . .
You know, I guess if you actually count all the reasons above, there’s actually 5 reasons why Chapters Indigo sucks. What can I say - bonus day at Sparkplug 9.
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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