“A lot of people are trying to increase their page rank unethically,” said Dash. “I think if we show them [that] the best thing you can do is to write really good material, then hopefully, they’ll spend their time doing that [instead of] spending time coming up with ways to graffiti other people’s pages.”
So Apple’s doing a big contest to celebrate 100 million songs downloaded on iTunes. They’re giving away 49 20 GB iPods and a grand prize of a 40 GB iPod, 17 inch Powerbook and 10,000 free songs. Not too shabby.
The prizes go to whoever purchases a 100,000th song between 95 and 100 million. So you download song number 95,100,000 and you win an iPod. Not too shabby.
Yet the official rules clearly state “no purchase necessary.” Apparently you can also be entered by using the “Tell a Friend” feature to e-mail a track suggestion to a friend. Yet Apple fails to explain how you can win with this method considering winning involves being the purchaser of a 100,000th song. So either you simply can’t win with the free option (but you can enter!), or Apple’s going to inflate their download count with free entries.
My Mac has bugs, though not the kind you might expect. My 17 inch Studio Display has a few little insects crawling around in the translucent and hollow feet. They look like grains of rice in the picture, but they’re definitely insects, and they’re definitely alive. One is frantically crawling around as I type after several minutes of inactivity.
What I want to know is how did the bugs get in there? I can’t see an obvious opening and the insects sure can’t find a way out. They seem to have forgotten how to use their wings and keep trying to crawl up the slippery plastic sides, which isn’t working.
What I’m really concerned about is the insects dying and being on permanent display in the feet of my studio display. How ugly is that? Perhaps this is part of the rationale behind Apple’s new displays.
The City Pages ran an intriguing story this week about a fictional blogger who duped quite a lot of folks. Plain Layne seemed like a real person living in the Twin Cities and blogging for an audience of 5,000 since September 2001. After the site mysteriously vanished earlier this month, eager audience members banded together to piece the story together.
Turns out a 35-year-old man with a wife and two kids from Woodbury fooled thousands of online readers into thinking his 27-year-old lesbian character was real. Odin Soli considered the whole project “an experiment in creative interactive fiction” and claims he’s not planning to turn the publicity into a book deal. Jason Kottke calls it realtime fiction.
While the original Plain Layne site is no longer live, a few excerpts and a short explanation can be found on Soli’s new site. The excerpts quickly prove how convincing Layne must have been.
Fast Company is supposed to be a cutting edge business magazine, chronicling the quickly changing corporate world. Apparently they’re not fast enough. According to their own web site, you need special permission to even link to their site:
Due to the large volume of requests we receive, we do not have a reciprocal linking program. However, if you like, you may link to us at no cost. This option requires the execution by you and Fastcompany.com of a one-page Web-linking agreement. Please download and sign the agreement and fax it to 617-738-5055, attn: G+J legal, Fastcompany.com. As soon as you receive back the agreement signed on behalf of Fastcompany.com, you may begin linking to our content.
Whoops. Apparently no one told them how the Internet works.
(link via Dan Hughes via Bloggedy Blog)
The backlash against web sites requiring free registration to access content has begun. Bugmenot.com is providing user names and passwords to such free registration sites so users can avoid giving our their personal information. Since many sites use registration to obtain demographics which then allow them to lure advertisers and pay the bills, some are questioning the morality (see the comments) of bypassing registration.
When a site offers content in exchange for demographic information, is it stealing to not give them that demographic information? Is that sort of agreement actually in effect? Is it lying to use someone else’s user name and password to access content? Or is this simply payback for the inevitable way registration leads to spam? Bugmenot.com leaves the moral ball in your court, though they give plenty of rationale and, interestingly, don’t seem to be profiting from the venture (no ads, don’t accept donations, etc.).
As spam e-mail fills your inbox, imagine having to listen to every subject line to filter your penile enlargements from your project updates like blind users do.
Knowing how many people are actually visiting your web site is a matter of fuzzy math. Depending on the method used and the various anomalies, actual web stats could be as little as one-fifth of what’s reported.
Despite the hype, the blog empire isn’t likely to attempt a buy-out of Disney any time soon. According to Wired, Denton pays his writers approximately $2,000 a month on a contract basis, has the potential for $5,000-10,000 per month in ads for a total per blog annual net of $80,000. It’s not chump change, but it’s not media mogul sums either.
Digital manipulation of photos has risen to a level where it’s nearly impossible to distinguish reality from forgery. A questionable photo of a U.S. soldier with an Iraqi child holding a sign has circulated on the net, though no one can be sure what the sign actually said. It’s prompted a military investigation and a host of questions about the trustworthiness of photos, including an interesting scenario where a doctored photo released days before an election could sway the outcome before anyone can prove or refute the reality of the photo.
Wired ran an interesting story last year about forged nude photos of celebrities and a Fake Detective who spends his time debunking them: “These Are Definitely Not Scully’s Breasts.”
A work-at-home dad wrestles with faith, social justice & story.
Fast Company is supposed to be a cutting edge business magazine, chronicling the quickly changing corporate world. Apparently they’re not fast enough. According to their own 
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