Even though this entry is about a Mac site, this will interest all readers. MacMinute is my favorite Mac site, and I have read it nearly daily since its launch many moons ago. (Here’s a quick history lesson: Stan Flack, MacMinute’s publisher, was the founder of MacCentral. The Mac news circle is a tangled web.) Its best quality is the design. All the news, just one page. Doesn’t sound amazing, but it’s an excellent page.
So great that it seems, another Mac news titan has decided to copy it. The site is called iPodWeek (www.ipodweek.com, I don’t want to give them any PageRank), and is run (according to an anonymous source) by no other than Jeff Valvano. Who’s he? Think AppleInsider. Think MacNN. I’ve heard Jeff is currently #1 at AppleInsider, but don’t know his status at MacNN (although I do know he was on the payroll).
So less “ties of the Mac web” stuff and onto the screenshots. Hopefully Jeff will change his design and these pictures will just show what was. He changed the site again… Looks even MORE like MacMinute. Please email them to let it be known that this can’t happen: email@ipodweek.com.
Update: iPodWeek is the first site to ever be “Mena’d”. There is an out of bandwidth error message. To combat this, I have posted a composite screen cap of the latest design before it went down (with the changes I spoke up earlier). This is a composite, some news items in the middle didn’t make it (I just put a cap of the top and a cap of the bottom together). Enjoy.
Update: I dug around their server (good old “cold calling” URLs baby!) and found more evidence of foul play: www.ipodweek.com/index2.html. You’ll note that the meta link to RSS reads as a MacMinute.com URL, the stories are word for word from MacMinute, and even the main logo’s alt tag is “macminute.com”. Heh.
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It’s all the rage to post about Google quirk’s, so what the heck. Try doing a search for “I’m a X” [example]. On the search engine results page (SERP), you see that “I’m a” has turned into “I’ma”. Yep. Google is sloppy with its contractions. Here’s a screenshot:
In case you’re wondering, all results on the SERP have the same error. TooMuchSexy didn’t make a booboo. If you clicked onto the cached version, a small insight into the crazy mind that Google is comes into light: the query changes to “i ma X”. So can any search gurus explain this one?
After posting on the big “oops did we forget to renew our domain?” scandal over at LinkedIn, I finally decided to register. I first visited several months ago after reading about the site in either Fast Company or Inc., but failed to register because I have daddy issues and need a nightlight to get to sleep. I must say I’m impressed.
The user interface is clean and intuitive. The pages are repsonsive, so much so that Friendster seems even more slow. It’s nearly like using TypePad in terms of speed, but due to the nature of the site, the backend is doing a lot more work.
If you are out of the loop, LinkedIn is one of the popular “Social Software” [see Weblogs Inc.’s site on the subject] sites that aim to hook you up with other people you’d like. While Friendster is now all about getting casual sex with other likeminded hoodlums, LinkedIn is all about the professional. It’s “Friendster for rich people” you might say. Excellent.
Once you join and get a few of your friends to join, it starts getting powerful. All social software sites work off the “6 degrees” theory that is turning out to be true. If you sign up and add all your contacts, including me, I then have more credibility to your contacts than a 2001-esque cold-call.
So do me a favor and add me to your network (just search for “Jon Gales” or the email me AT jongales dot com). I’ll do the same. We’ll all have better networks because of it.
Last night I noticed that LinkedIn.com is now a GoDaddy.com parked page [screen cap]… That’s a huge deal as said site was a major “Social Software” networking site. Major.
Instead of plugging it here, I gave the scoop to WeblogsInc, because they promise on their site they will credit stories. It’s more their kind of story anyway. Well, they posted it, but made no mention of me. Sad.
So if you’re listening Jason, you’re welcome. No hard feelings. I just want a little linkage from the meat space. If it turns out they really did lose their domain name, this is the social software story of the year. It would be nice to have others know I was involved.
Update: Jason says he got it from somewhere else first. He must just have been slow posting the story, as I sent it in > 12 before it got posted. In other news, LinkedIn is back in action. This concludes today’s internet scandal.
Upon reading up on comment spam (and actually getting a few myself), I had an idea for SixApart.
We can block IP addresses from posting comments in TypePad’s admin interface, and for all spam comments I have received, that’s what I have done. Now since TypePad is centralized, in theory, Anil or another SixAparter could write some code that finds common blocked IP addresses. For example, if 20% of TypePad users with > 100 comments have blocked 66.154.0.40, it gets added to a system wide blacklist. Participation should be opt-in, and maybe have a daily email summary of blocked comments.
Obviously the 20% and 100 comment numbers are just placeholders. The reason to only include users with a certain level of comments is that those users are going to be A) more likely to block spam comments and B) more likely to even get said comments.
Thoughts?
This got submitted into the MacMerc news queue today… My my my. I’m not the smartest guy, so if someone else sees something that I’m missing, please let me know.
The way I see it, their technique is for you to give out an email forward addy and when it starts getting spam give you another one. The old one gets deleted and starts bouncing. And? This is A) not new B) horrible to use C) easy to do without them. Who wants to change email addresses every few weeks?
The real way to beat spam is to purchase SpamSieve. It has pruned > 130 spams from my inbox today.
For those times when you need to give your email address but don’t want to (validate an account for instance), just use Mailinator.
Two words Wired: G4 Cube.
Any non-US residents want to try out the iTunes Music Store? Yum.
“The items in the RSS feed for this weblog can be routed to categories.” – Dave Winer
Amazing. Categories in weblogs? Say it aint so! Now if we could just get SixApart to switch over all our domain names to 7 digit numbers [example], we would be really tech savvy.
Why make a new movie when you can use the same texture maps and slap a 2 on the end? It looks good though. Shrek was a great movie, but part of the draw was that it was so creative. The sequel won’t have that advantage.
