Maybe the Prius isn’t that bad of a car after all

In an article posted by CNN.com about “Drugs found in Gore son’s Prius after traffic stop“:

Al Gore III, 24, was driving a blue Toyota Prius about 100 mph on the San Diego Freeway when he was pulled over about 2:15 a.m., Sheriff’s Department spokesman Jim Amormino said.

Who knew that a Prius could even go that fast? I guess I need to re-evaluate the purchase of my Volkswagen Passat.

“Prius: Environmentally friendly and almost fast enough to get away from the police”

Note: I am doing an experiment – a while back I told you that CNN.com was going live with some interesting technology from a company called “Sphere”. They are linking to blog posts which are talking about CNN.com articles. It appears from the blog posts which are listed that the only thing you need to do is to link to the article. So I am going to see if my post gets presented on CNN.com.

More to come later….

Update 07/05/2007 21:44:

Ok, so I would say that this worked.  I saw 6 direct views from CNN.com so my post must have been displayed at some point, but more interesting was that I was picked up by this website called “Slate” which appears to be a site that talks about what people are talking about.  they were kind of funny as they posted this:

NotronWest at Sweet! echoes the surprise: “I guess I need to re-evaluate the purchase of my Volkswagen Passat. ‘Prius: environmentally friendly and almost fast enough to get away from the police.’ “

I am going to see how far this goes as I post a few more CNN.com responses.

Later

Open source makes money on lead referals

Yesterday one of our inside sales associates noticed an amazing trend in the referals he was receiving. A lot of them were talking about Joomla, an open source CMS which we _rarely_ come up against. CommonSpot plays more in the enterprise space where as Joomla is good for the lower end market since it is an open source solution. So, our sales associate did some digging and discovered this interesting ad on the “Request a demo” portion of the Joomla site:

The text right above the ad reads:

To register for the Backend Adminstrative area you will need to “Register” from the link on the left and follow directions.

Of course, the “link” on the left is an ad for “Register for demo” – except it is our Demo.

Clicking the ad brings you to our Demo registration form. So, one would have to expect that either the user thought that the links in the middle of the page (the ad is right in the middle of the paragraph on the page) were for Joomla’s registration or, they actually found our web site during their hunt for a CMS and decided to sign up for our Demo as well (or maybe instead).

This is all made possible by Google being intelligent enough to know that the content of the Joomla page is that of Web based content management. Since Joomla placed the adsense ad on the page it did what it was supposed to – and in this case – displays ads for competitors.

Thank you Google (and Joomla). Full Page Joomla ad

TV to the Web – Web to the TV???

When the Internet first came around TV producers were reluctant to deliver their content in the new medium. TV was TV and the Web was the Web. At first, many producers looked at the Internet as just that – a new medium for delivery. What they didn’t know was that this was not just a new medium for delivery of existing content, it was THE medium for delivery of NEW concepts.

I first heard about Homestar Runner when I started working with 2 web developers from the University of Alaska. Camie and Melanie turned me on to these guys back in 2002 when we were working on some support issues. At first I was like “Ok, these guys are weird” but after a while I started to really enjoy it. Short clips that lasted under 2 minutes were the staple. Something that the TV medium just won’t support. This was right after Atom Films and a few other early video sites started (No YouTube was _not_ the first video aggregation site).

At the time most TV cartoons were only running on TV. Even the radical Cartoon Network remained popular only from their TV audience. But then the Video revolution hit and TV producers were not scared to publish their content on the Internet. In fact, most of them jumped ship completely because the Ad revenues far exceeded that which they recieved from the Television Studios. Plus, with the popularity of the Flash player, they could push ideas out faster.

So, I naturally thought that the progression would move from the Web back to the Television. I envisioned that artists would use the Internet as a low end pilot system where they could test out their ideas. When one got popular, they would shop it around at the TV stations for that illustrious weekly spot on Cartoon Network or the like. However, it appears that it may not happen this way:

It seems like a foregone conclusion that the hit online animation Homestar Runner and his cartoon friends will end up alongside Meatwad, Space Ghost, Brock Sampson and the other pop culture icons on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim — a block of cartoons for grownups.

Unfortunately for this would-be marriage, the only people who think Homestar isn’t quite right for Adult Swim are the character’s creators, Matt and Mike Chapman.

I would now agree with Mike and Matt. Keep the show where it made it’s history, where it has it’s sharpest fans. It proves to me that maybe the Television is the 2nd medium. That the Internet will dominate and as TV advertisers flock to the Internet, you will see a ration of content larger than ever seen before.

Nice Work Guys! Long live Strong Bad.

Social Bookmarking meets Classifieds

So I have been using Del.icio.us more and more these days. I am not so much using it as a place to store the links that i use on a daily basis but more like a place to store information in a global place that I will someday have time to digest. In addition, I have been very pleased with the capability to “send” links to other people.

I find sending links to other people through Del.icio.us is such a better medium then say email, or even IM. It goes into a central repository, they know who sent it to them, they can share it with other people. It just works. I have even found myself trying to get people I know to use Del.icio.us just so I can send them a link. It just makes sense.

Anyway I had a passing thought today. I am a bit of Del.icio.us “whore”. I want to have more and more people in my network so I am constantly trying to convince people to get an account. Then I thought, well wouldn’t it be funny to have a place where people could post their profile and say something to the effect of:

Technology geek looking for other users to share links with. Must be versed in Web 2.0, Socially Connected, 10 + years experience with the Internet, knows the following terms: RSS, Gopher, Mosaic etc…

Kind of like a Classified or Personal Ad.

I know that I can “discover” people that have marked pages that I have also marked, but it seems a bit weird to send a bookmark to someone that I have never met or talked to before.

Just a random thought.

You Tube, Steve Irwin and things to come…

Everyone is wondering when the video of Steve Irwin’s death (the actual film of him getting stabbed in the chest by a stingray) is going to hit the airwaves. At first I thought to myself “Oh that is going to hit YouTube in a week”. But the more and more I think about this, I have to disagree with myself. I don’t think that this video will _ever_ hit YouTube. Not if YouTube wants to stay popular because the fact of the matter is, watching a famed hero die is not something I want my kids doing. Now I know all about the movements on the Internet to produce a free environment for sharing information. This is not about that.

What it is about though is “Where in the hell did all of those Steve Irwin Video’s come from” Seriously though, I looked at the site today (because I was half curious) and in the last day over 200 videos were posted about Steve Irwin. Most of them are tributes and/or parodies about Steve.  I wonder where the footage comes from?  Do they tivo it and download it to their computers?  Are we seeing the advancements in video sharing as a result of operating systems like Windows Media Server?  Too be honest I don’t have Steve Irwin video footage hanging out on my computer. This is amazing. This guy wrestled alligators. Big alligators. I was actually a bit surprised to hear that it wasn’t an alligator or a wicked poisonous snake that finally got the best of him.

That aside, what I think is truly remarkable is that we are seeing the beginnings of the new medium at work. People armed with their super fast computers, broadband connection, DVD burners and editing software, are now sharing their thoughts and ideas in ways that I could only dream.

Rock on YouTube and please…keep the Steve Irwin death video off the site…please.

Web archive grabbed my old site

I was once the manager of the Boston ColdFusion User Group. It has since been taken over by Brian Rinaldi (three cheers for Brian!). Anyways, when I ran the group, our domain name was "www.bostoncfug.com". Brian has registered "www.bostoncfug.org" and is using that to host content regarding the group. I completed my tenure as manager of the group about a year and a half ago and unfortunately had to let the domain name "www.bostoncfug.com" lapse. In fact, I even took the server down that was originally hosting the site.

This week, I attended the new group meeting (great session about Flex2 if you have not had the opportunity to review you should certainly give it a glance – really cool development environment) and was hounded by this one member regarding the fact that the old site was still up. I assured him that I had let the domain name lapse and that I had even taken the server down. He insisted that the site was available and that it confused some individuals because it contained information from meetings that appeared to be valid. I dismissed the conversation quickly because it was difficult to argue with someone that was adamant.

When I went home that night I tried to bring up the site. After typing in the address "www.bostoncfug.com" I was surprised to see the browser start to connect to the URL. I was waiting for that typical domain squatter page that states "this domain is for sale". You know the generic pages that show up when you type in Goooglee.com or something similar. To my surprise though, the page started to appear. The old page of the site, just as I had left it. How could this be?

Webarchive – The Wayback Machine
As I started to stare at the pages loading I could not help but notice my status bar started to display "web.archive.org" … THE WAYBACK MACHINE!!! I first ran across this site about 4 years ago and was amazed it's archive (Go here to see my first Web site – http://web.archive.org/web/19970724122243/www.uri.edu/artsci/ecn/ ) depth. If you haven't had an opportunity to poke around this site, have fun.

Then I looked up the dns record to see who it was registered to. Apparently "Dotster", the company I registered the domain with, has registered the site themselves and I am not sure if they have some deal with TWBM but it seems a bit odd that not only would Dotster keep my domain name but that would point it at the web.archive.org page of my old site.

What is even weirder about this is that they don't really "forward" people to the site, the browser URL is still www.bostoncfug.com, it just displays data from web.archive.org. Almost as if they have some program written that takes the content from the Archive and displays.

So I guess I owe the gentleman at the meeting an apology, he was correct, for all intent and purposes, the site is still up. Unfortunately, I have no way of taking it down.

I would love to know if anyone has any more information on this.

How much effort does this take to build?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU0xC8M3CwA&search=Super%20Mario%20Reloaded

Ok I have no time at all to even find content like this on the Internet (if it wasn't for mikull.com I would have never found this). How would you ever have the time to build this. Hopefully the person who made this entered it into a contest or received some college credit for this work, it seems like there was a lot of effort put into this. Actually, I thank them, because being a Matrix fan, this was a very entertaining clip.

Challenges of a CMS implementation

Just wanted to give a good ol CommonSpot shout out to the team at Seton Hall. It was a pleasure working with them during the Advanced Developers training. They launched with CommonSpot during the 4^th quarter of 2005 and I must say they have a great looking site (and that is not just because they are using CommonSpot). Anyways we had some good conversations that I wanted to share.

One of the biggest struggles with CMS implementations is the multiple number of teams that need to be involved and the differences amongst those teams. In most CMS installs you will have a Web team. These will be comprised of Developers and Designers. The Web team may or may not be a part of the IT department. So if the web team is not a part of the IT department then you have the IT department themselves. Primary role for this group is to manage the Servers. Main struggles for this group is that they most times they will manage the application servers but know little about the applications that sit on top of the application servers. Not having first hand knowledge of the applications causes difficulties because they know little about necessary settings required for performance or stability. The last group which is involved with the publishing process is either the Public Relations/Marketing group or the Communications group. A less technical group by nature, this group is often responsible for the general direction of the web site. However, since in most cases, they don’t Eat, Sleep and Breath the Internet, they have a difficult time understanding what is truly possible for the Web site. In my opinion, the successful web teams out there have an individual that can coordinate all of these groups, understands technology (Not only what is an RSS Feed but uses them on a daily basis) and communicates sound business ideas effectively.

We also had a few beers and talked about some of the new technologies coming out. We all agreed that we are looking forward to the new “Keanu Reeves” movie coming out “Scanner Darkly”. I put his name in quotes because although he was in the movie and did all of the “acting”, the movie is actually a cartoon. There is a really good article about it in the latest Wired magazine if you are interested ( LINK)

I also have permalinks over to Lee and Mike Hyland’s blogs on the right. Go check them out.

Do you really know what multiplayer games are about?

Ok, this will definately be funny if you have ever (or known someone that has) engaged in TOO Much mulitplayer.  Let me start this by saying that I have (not played to much, but knew someone that did … seriously).  I used to work for this ISP in the town that I grew up (props out to Netsense.net) and back when the Internet first started (at least for me in ‘96), we had the fastest connection to the Internet (duh…we worked at an ISP) and so after work and sometimes during work (with our boss non the less) we would set up a Quake server and frag the hell out of each other.  We hired this designer guy who was wicked into these games.  He even paid like $75 a month for a cable modem before anyone else knew what cable modems were so that he could play Quake.  He even had a clan and created a clan page where they could display all of their major frags and winnings.  As a side note, he was so good that I think he coined the term ’strife’ as a way of moving quickly and efficiently in Quake.  Anyways, I have since lost touch with this guy but I can guarantee that he and the others at NetSense would certainly appreciate this site.

http://www.purepwnage.com/

enjoy.