Scott to Raging Cow: B I T E  M E

Its official -- the true idiots, brain-dead consumer marketers, have invaded blog land:

BUT MARKETERS AT Dr Pepper see the movement as the perfect launch point for a “grass roots” campaign for a new “milk-based product with an attitude,” Raging Cow. The first step is an in-house blog (ragingcow.com); it tells the fictional backstory of the drink, which rolls out in April in flavors like Chocolate Insanity and Pina Colada Chaos. [_Go_]

While I could rant about their stupidity at length, Doc said it well:

One Weblog guru thinks the campaign might backfire. “It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that’s so generally bent on exposing things,” says alpha blogger Doc Searls. “In my view blogs are the antidote to viral marketing.” [_Go_]

So why am I blogging this you ask?  Well I tend to get a fairly high Google rank for some things and I'd really like to for this one so when kids Google for info on Raging Cow they can learn how they're being manipulated.

I'd also like to point out that the damn site lacks a conventional approach to permalinks (i.e. they aren't located at or near the posting but on a separate side panel; not intuitive).  Come on you marketers!  At least learn something about the communities you try and defraud. 

Note: I have no problems with marketers in blogland, I do have a problem with deception, particularly deception of children. 

Found via Dave.

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Slashdot -- Someone Smoking Crack ?

Now I know that the Slashdot audience isn't all that reliable at best.  Yes we all read it but we rarely trust it.  Still I'd expect a little better than this:

The Object Prevalence concept, developed by the Prevayler team, and implemented in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Delphi, can be a great a solution to this mess. The concept is pretty simple: keep all the objects in RAM and serialize the commands that change those objects, optionally saving the whole system to disk every now and then (late at night, for example). [_Go_]

Now that's a cool concept.  So I did the natural thing and went and looked for the code.  Since I'm a php-head, I figured that I'd look there to start.  Nope!  According to SourceForge, "This project has not released any files".  Well I can get by in Perl so I thought "Ok, not my preference but ok".  Nope.  Well I think Python is neat and people I respect a lot like it.  Additionally Guido has just plain guts to make the decision he did regarding mandatory indentation.  Break conventions is hard so I figured I'd look at the Python version.  Nope!  Well once upon a midnight dreary, ... (bag the mock Poe), I did a lot of Pascal.  Nope!  It turns out that only the C# and Ruby versions exist.  I couldn't get the Smalltalk page to come up so I don't have a clue there. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anything about the concept but just pointing out that this posting is essentially wrong on many of the major details.  And, sadly, it doesn't really surprise me at all.

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The Nigerian Fraud or Have You Killed a Spammer Today?

A lot of us joke about hunting down and killing spammers.  Apparently someone has:

The Czech Republic may have become the scene of the first 419-fraud revenge killing.

Michael Lekara Wayid, 50, Nigeria's consul in the Czech Republic, was shot dead at the embassy yesterday morning. The embassy's 37-year-old receptionist was shot in the hand during the melee which began after a suspect opened fire after visiting the embassy to discuss an unspecified business matter yesterday morning. [_Go_]

A "419 Fraud" is the classic Nigerian email, you know the one "If you help me get these funds out of the country, I'll make you rich".  Apparently this scam actually works on people -- 150 brits were recently bilked out of 13 million odd dollars. [_Go_] 

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