Senator Orrin Hatch announced today that he's in favor of remotely destroying the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet: "If that's the only way, then I'm all for destroying their machines. If you have a few hundred thousand of those, I think people would realize..."
Google Images finally has some halfway decent competition. Altavista, today, unveiled their new image search. Unlike most past attempts at searching for graphics, it does not suck. A quick search for Escher on Altavista returns 13,683 results while Google returns about 15,000,
Google celebrates M.C. Escher's birthday today with a Escher-esque logo and a fantastic use of the Google Image Search.
The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch:
At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don't like dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they just changed it to a white background. Instantly, they started receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people complained, that they felt forced to change it back.
Not content with the initial defeat, the team tried a different strategy. Over the period of several months, they modified the background color one shade of yellow at a time, until, finally, all the yellow was gone, leaving only white. Predictably, hardly a single user noticed this time.
Jakob Nielsen: "Small sites have two huge advantages over big sites: there are many more of them and they are more specialized and thus more targeted. Small sites speak directly to the specific needs and interests of a committed user community, and thus have much higher value per page view. A site on growing blueberries can be a must-read service for people who farm them, and thus of immense value as a place to promote blueberry-farming equipment."
Does anyone know what happened to John Robb? He hasn't posted since May 19th.
Adam Kalsey blogged, "Don't fill your blog with inane banter just because you can't think of anything to say." I disagree. The great thing about weblogs is that there is one for everyone. If you aren't interested, unsubscribe. Update: Adam was talking about business weblogs. Ok, I agree, sorta. But still, the something for everyone rule applies.
Sewage machine company warns about 'Finding Nemo' flushes:
A company that manufactures equipment used to process sewage issued a press release Thursday warning that drain pipes do lead to the ocean -- eventually -- but first the fluid goes through powerful machines that "shred solids into tiny particles."
"In truth, no one would ever find Nemo and the movie would be called 'Grinding Nemo,"' wrote the JWC Environmental company, which makes the trademarked "Muffin Monster" shredding pumps.
Tomorrow's only my first Father's Day, but already this article, Father's Day: A Reluctant Defense, rings true:
Let's say the CEO of Dunkin' Donuts proclaimed National Donut Day and said it can only be celebrated by eating gobs of donuts bought from DD. This wouldn't make the holiday less legitimate or inauthentic than government-invented days like Memorial Day or Veterans Day. Why defer to government-created days because those who proclaimed them are selfless public servants but reject commercial days on grounds of the profiteering motivations of the capitalist class?
It is common for people to dismiss Father's Day on grounds of its commercial nature. There's nothing at all wrong with that, just as there is nothing wrong with dismissing an ad for dishwashing soap as silly. Anyone living in a commercial society develops a sense of skepticism that is essential for navigating economic life. At the same time, one never hears someone say: "I don't celebrate Veterans Day; it is a phony holiday invented by the state to trick us into celebrating the government's wars." Someone who did say that should be a friend for life!
The beauty of a hypothetical holiday of purely commercial origins (National Microsoft Appreciation Day) is precisely that we can see straight through them. That is why they are unlikely to catch on. In fact, if there is a nationally recognized holiday of purely commercial origin, I would like to know about it.
Government holidays, on the other hand, do take hold, because the government claims to speak for the entire nation. It can subsidize the holiday by shutting all government offices (while still paying employees out of public funds). It can spread posters all throughout its monopoly postal service. It can distribute propaganda through public schools and "public service ads." This is real manipulation at public expense.
