Tried to make my old RSS feed redirect through an .htaccess file and hosed the blog for an hour.
Will try again. Hearing from longtime readers who figured I gave up around the middle of September thanks to my brilliance in laundering the feeds through Feedburner.
Will try again later.
Method for presenting advertising in an interactive service – US Patent 7072849
Yesterday I posted about IBM’s patent claims against Amazon. The New York Times mentioned IBM held the patent for online advertising. Here, from Patent Storm, is the abstract and full text. Stephen O’Grady at Redmonk is blogging about IBM’s patent stance.
“A method for presenting advertising in an interactive service provided on a computer network, the service featuring applications which include pre-created, interactive text/graphic sessions is described. The method features steps for presenting advertising concurrently with service applications at the user terminal configured as a reception system. In accordance with the method, the advertising is structured in a manner comparable to the service applications enabling the applications to be presented at a first portion of a display associated with the reception system and the advertising presented at a second portion. Further, steps are provided for storing and managing advertising at the user reception system so that advertising can be pre-fetched from the network and staged in anticipation of being called for presentation. This minimizes the potential for communication line interference between application and advertising traffic and makes the advertising available at the reception system so as not to delay presentation of the service applications…”
Taking Up Space On a Hard Drive
The smartest guy I know is blogging. He’s also shy, so I won’t drop his name, but if you ever want the smartest perspective on gadgetry, consumer electronics, and digital media — this is the guy.
“Marketers call me an early adopter. I own the first gen Newton, iPod, and Treo. My home currently sports a sonos system, hacked Tivos including a brand new Series 3 cable card model, and various flat screens including a Pioneer plasma that is already 4 years old. Nowhere to be found is either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, the new competing formats for 1080 lines of rich high def goodness.”
What Your Web Site Can Learn from Starbucks | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
This is like a knife to the heart for me. Last weekend I treated a couple family members to my employee discount for new Thinkpads. Off we go to the website and one gives up and picks up the phone. “Dude, your website really sucks.”
We know. And we’re working like fiends to fix it. I won’t throw anyone under the bus, but it’s incredibly irritating to be the guy out on the sidewalk telling the sailors to come inside the bar, only to have the bar be dark, out of beer, and filled with other pissed off sailors.
“I want to buy a new laptop. I used to buy IBM ThinkPads and was really happy with them. Lenovo took over the ThinkPad range. Last year I went to the Lenovo site. I was a loyal customer. I wanted to buy from them. The Web site was awful. I went to a competitor.
“This year I read really great reviews of the ThinkPad T60 and X60. I go back to the Lenovo Ireland Web site. There’s a graphic on the homepage that has a picture of two laptops, with the heading: The power of 2 in 1. I click on the image. This site is sooooooo ssssssslow.
“Finally, I arrive at a page with the heading: “Lenovo care,” which has nothing to do with selling me a laptop. I want to buy from Lenovo, but this site is making it really hard for me.
“Starbucks knows–at a most senior management level–that in a convenience society, convenience is king. How long will it take other senior managers to realize that their sites have a direct impact on their organization’s performance?”
I’ll repeat my offer to anyone willing to pick up the phone. Call me. Email me. I will make your order happen.
Matt McAlister » Scaffolding web sites with Ruby on Rails
Matt’s been messing with Rails and likes it. I’m jealous and need to get my geek side going. I like his proposal for a new acronym to replace LAMP with RASH.
“It’s mindblowing how much power this environment gives to people who aren’t true coders.”I have a feeling I’ll get stuck and frustrated with what I’m trying to build. But I’m very hopeful Ruby on Rails will get me closer than I could with open source PHP tools. If nothing else, I’ll get a sense for this new trend.
“Programming seems to have about a 3 year fashion cycle that also intersects with influxes of new ideas for web applications and a full cycle of students coming out of university. Now we’re at the early stages of a creative explosion on the Internet enabled by things like Rails, open APIs, storage solutions like S3, and JSON. And you can also wrap an idea in any number of different business models in even less time than it takes to build the product itself.
Maybe instead of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), we now have RASH (Rails, APIs, S3, Hosted).”