Thursday, August 28, 2003

So, what you been buildin' ? I've gotten that question regularly so I thought I'd put a little bit about that here, in the unlikely event that anyone is reading this blog... I call it "Blog Bridge" - it's a new way to locate, peruse, prioritize and dispose of the firehose of information we like to call newsfeeds. What, don't we already have enough of those? Certainly there are some nice ones. In fact I use NewzCrawler daily and have gotten to really like it, in fact, I recommend it! However I thought that now that I find myself keeping up with lots and lots of these newsfeeds (RSS Feeds, Blogs, etc.) I got to thinking that just as perhaps this phenomenon is transforming the way we consume information it was time to rethink the software with which we do it. Side rant: I mean with all due respect, why does every dang thing out there follow the boring old traditional 3 pane user interface with folders on the left, a list of entries on the right and the text of a page below? Starting with the venerable email clients like Eudora, to the not-so-venerable ones like Outlook, it would seem that everyone is doing more or less the same. In fact while I am on the topic, my theory is that MFC and Swing (and SWT and C# and ...) have made it so easy to build a boring old traditional 3 pane user interface that this is where everyone starts. Well I thought to question that assumption and came up with this: (More tomorrow on how it works and why it's cool.)   9:09:05 PM  >  trackback []   comment []

Some mysteries about Spam Referring to the preceding post, here are some mysteries to ponder: Why does my son, who has a hotmail account get NO spam? Here are some theories: 1) His email name is a nonsense word. But then so is mine. 2) Somehow Hotmail knows he is underaged and is able to keep his email clean. 3) He has never posted his email on an orderform or a newsgroup. What does a regular person do when their email becomes totally spam pollutted? Almost no one has the wherewithal or knowledge to get a new email address, move over to it, notify his correspondents of the change What happened in July to cause such a sudden dramatic spike in my spam? Was it just me or did others see something happening around the same time? 12:12:58 PM  >  trackback []   comment []

Spam Attack - It all started sometime in July. Notice this graph from Matador/MailFront how there is a sharp spike in my Spam hits sometime in July. I now believe that my personal email address got on some list at that moment and all hell broke loose. I think I am going to be forced to change email addresses! 12:09:30 PM  >  trackback []   comment []