March, 7, 2005 archives

la downtown news takes a look at the different downtown tour operators. it’s not strictly downtown, but the museum of neon art bus tour sounds great.

well, that’s a logical reduction of this article from the new york times about how $200,000 is the new $100,000 when it comes to salaries.

an interesting thing to think about is how you would change your spending if your income suddenly doubled. would you spend twice as much, or work half as long? (or somewhere in between?)

matt haughey noticed a bogus blogspot site in his spam. when i was on the suicide mission known as homepage.com (second-generation geocities), it was software pirates that caused us huge problems with their automated signups. i can imagine it’s only worse with the spammers and scam artists these days.

i’m surprised that blogger doesn’t seem to have done much to prevent this. you can see the automated crap via searches at blo.gs for things like “herbal” and “hilton”.

it would be helpful if services like blogspot published information on sites that are deleted as well as updated, so services like blo.gs, technorati, feedster, pubsub.com, etc could drop the sites from their databases, too.

great quote from this article on the fight to cut cotton subsidies from the washington post:

“We have a farm program for two reasons, and cotton doesn't fall into either. One is food security for the American people and the other is national defense,” Grassley said. “Napoleon said an army moves on its stomach. I can’t eat cotton.”

i’ve finally gotten through the first wave of emails from people interested in blo.gs.

one of the reason i kept blo.gs going as long as i have is that i’ve liked having it out there as an independent service. it’s always been a neutral ground as far as the various vendors of blog publishing software, or blog search engines.

there’s one other crowd of people interested that i have very mixed feelings about: the “search engine optimization” folks.

there’s four components to the site that has people interested:

1. the database of users
2. the database of blogs
3. the ping.blo.gs endpoint
4. the service

my impression of each interested party is strongly colored by the interest they demonstrate in each component.

fortunately, it appears that there is enough serious interest from people and companies that i would be happy selling out to that i won’t really have to wrestle with this issue too seriously.

and here’s one thought that i passed along to a couple of people: united airlines lost $326 million last year, so perhaps your lowball offer “because you’ve lost so much already” (paraphrasing) would be even more attractive to them.