Reverberations

Microsoft, the object of hatred for a large geek pop (and wannabes), is actually far from over. They are as fierce competitor as one can be. Latest evidence - Microsoft creating a YouTube channel for promotion of Vista and Live brands. Significance of YouTube here is that YouTube belongs to its “enemy” Google. That’s atypical for an “an underdog beats the incumbent” story, so it very well might not be one.

Useful feature especially when you need to widen email body, which is pretty often. If only gmail lets me do that without having to resort to greasemonkey.

Something on standardized emails/newsletters over at 37 signals - People don’t scroll…emails.

Clearification - this viral marketing campaign for Windows Vista is very well executed creative marketing stuff coming out of Microsoft. It’s a clever 6 part video series. Not sure, it’s doing any good to Vista, or is viral at all, but I rate it pretty high on creativity scale.

“Time is the fourth dimension…for now”

I loved this “Anthem” TV advertisement from IBM.

Direct link to “Anthem” (Windows Media Player required) :
http://play.rbn.com/play.asx?url=ibmpdc/pdc/open/wmdemand/mar06/
rtoranzo/anthem-v125.wmv&proto=mms?mswmext=.asx

(Remove line break from url to play)

I don’t really mind having ads in applications (Adobe Reader et al), but Yahoo! seems to have taken great ‘care’ to piss me off. New YM client has one big ad banner at bottom, totally obtrusive, distracting and unpleasant, and showing an absolutely useless eBay ad. And I, for one, don’t object to their bundling of Toolbar and Extras, and highjacking my homepage with YM install because I can choose to uncheck that.

I wholeheartedly ensured that I uninstall new YM client and install the old happy-to-live-with YM 7.0 instead. No YM8 beta for sure a(d)s of now.

[Update] Looks like there is a small registry hack to ‘fix’ these ads - just open regedit.exe, navigate to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Yahoo\ pager\ YUrl‘ and create a new string key named Messenger Ad that has the value * (an asterisk). I haven’t tried this yet as I won’t be re-installing YM7.5.

It seems spammers have found the new avenues. First it was digg, then del.icio.us, and now reddit. And this time they seem to use down-voting bots to suppress legitimate posts and up-vote spam to make it more visible. Innovative eh!

While it doesn’t make much sense to spam del.icio.us for Search Engine Optimization, as its pages don’t get indexed by Search Engine bots

<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex" />

digg and reddit both don’t have any such measures AFAIK. As if mail and blog comment spam were not enough of trouble, spamming digg/del.icio.us/reddit is walk in the park - for all practical purposes.

Now, whether ‘Collective Intelligence’ is flawed is a matter of debate. Apparently, whatever is done to facilitate ease of use to the user, equally works for the spammer. There in lies the challenge of user generated content. How insightful!

Dave Winer on 'is Web2.0 a bubble' -

Don’t we all know that web advertising is a scam?

Really?

From an article in NYTimes on a patent application filed by Philips in USPTO-

James Boyle, a law professor at Duke University, said that broadcasters offer a program knowing that only a fraction of the audience watches the commercials. Advertisers, he added, buy nothing more than "an option on a probability," and the viewer is no more obligated to watch every commercial than a driver is obligated to read every billboard.

I'm no Mac user, neither much of an Apple fan. You need to be rich enough to be that. Yet I like all the 'cool'ness surrounding Apple. I use iTunes on Windows and love it, and I use QuickTime (free version of course) and hate it for highjacking my system-tray.

I'm a fan of Apple ads nonetheless (I've almost a gig of those). The latest ones on Apple's Get a Mac page

are great, incredibly irreverent and cleverly produced

as Dave Winer says. Just that you would need QuickTime 7 to play these videos because of the latest H.264 codec, and no updates of old QuickTime would work (You bet, I tried :-)).