Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission issued it’s first change the policy on endorsements in over 30 years. From this point forward, if you accept any form of payment for a post, you need to disclose it. PCWorld.com sums it up: Bottom Line: If you receive gifts, money or any other type of compensation from a product manufacturer or service provider you have to disclose it. For the record, it’s always been my policy that if there’s any possibility of conflict…
For some time, I’ve been looking for the next compelling thing in social media sites. For that next development that transforms the way we interact, that re-envisions forums, chat, photo galleries, articles, etc; in fact a redefinition of the way in which we communicate online altogether. For the past couple years, I’ve watch as vBulletin, my favorite forum software, basically did minor incremental releases, remaining essentially the way it was in 2001. Wordpress has done better, yet still, the fundamental blog/cmslite experience remains pretty…
Let’s say you own a business. It’s a small business, and you’ve tried very, very hard to build it into something. Along the way, like most businesses, there have been bumps, but for the most part, you’ve got a bunch of customers who love you. Then one day, right in front of your door, someone puts up a huge billboard, and on it, they will allow anyone with anything to say about your business to put up whatever they want. …
As I was in the local public library picking up a little something to read on Saturday, I realized there was an interesting parallel between that and Internet file sharing. What does the library do after all; it loans books for free to people. The same books which both publishers and authors base their entire commercial livelihood. Thus if the picture the music industry draws of the dire future for music if file sharing is allowed continue were really a…
My 11 yo daughter called me while I was driving home last night, to ask me to pick up a newspaper so she could start her weekly current events assignment for school. Without thinking, I told her “you don’t want a newspaper for that, you need to get the information of the web where it’s up to date.” Now I’ve worked with newspapers on and off since my days atthe University of Vermont, and I worked for Atex where we…
The folks at Automattic released a security update for WordPress today due to a very specific bug: …a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. While this isn’t an incredibly nasty…
I’ve been a huge fan of vBulletin forum software since I first installed it on Reel-Time.com in 2001. In the intervening years, I’ve seen software come and software go, but vBulletin continues to chug along. Over the past 10 months, I’ve spent a lot of time working on a massive vBulletin site, http://www.splitcoaststampers.com and I’ve got to admit, I’m finding the vBulletin experience somewhat lacking. Perhaps it’s just that so many of the same old foibles remain in the core…
I read an interesting post this morning by Michael Hickins on The Faster Times that posit that “Internet Isn’t Killing Papers, We Are“. His basic premise: that the tech industry, and the web in particular with with the dotbomb era and sky high salaries and insane stock packages, inflated journalist salaries well beyond their regular levels. Why? Because salaries had to be adjusted for the stock options that artificially inflated the potential compensation packages offered by the dot-com start-ups. How…
One of the things that is most missed in the Social Media rush to “join the conversation” is that in many cases, by offering a plethora of places to get our content, we’ve turned the tables. Our readers who used to find us now expect us to find them. Even though I write on my blog, I’ll often get the comments for that post on my Facebook page, or via FriendFeed or Twitter, or on some other blog somewhere that…
I picked up a great explanation of the great divide between business speak and tech speak at Rands In Repose today entitled “The Words You Wear.” The engineering burden is that when it comes to the product, we know how it works. Everyone else outside of engineering has vastly less working knowledge of the product; they don’t need that depth for their job. The engineers know the intricate details of the system, the people who built it, and what it…