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Digg goes bigg

Digg.com has just received  $2.8m in venture capital funding from Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape pioneer Marc Andreessen and Greylock partners.

Just the two first names should tell you that this is a company to watch. I've called Digg a Slashdot killer before, and I still stand by that assertion.

The site uses a voting mechanism (a vote is called a "digg") that allows its visitors to pick which stories should be on the front page.

The service has plenty of bugs to work out – currently the majority of stories on the front page are in the "man bites dog" or "20 cool wall papers for your desktop" category, that personally I couldn't care less about. But you can't argue with the masses. They will also face ever more Digg Spam – site cheating their way to the front page by recruiting a group of people to dig their own stories.

Digg's value lies in the fact that it allows for the smallest of blogs to reach a massive audience – 500,000 per day for Digg.com at this moment, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Of those 80,000 are registered users who are able to 'Digg' stories.

Digg's background is foggy – the site is a project of Kevin Rose, formerly of TechTV.

Tags: pierre omidyar, marc andreessen, greylock partners, kevin rose, digg

October 28, 2005 at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Forbes digs into the blogosphere's underworld

Forbes magazine current issue features a cover story on the dark side of blogs. Blogs can break companies, careers and politicians, as the publication illustrates.

The story makes some spot on observations. Blogs have made it easy to publish both positive and slanderous content. Nothing new there, but it's now easier than ever to do so.

Example 1 from the story:
Industry analyst Sara Radicati wrote a critical report on IBM Lotus Notes. Blogger Ed Brill launched an attack and rallied an army of consultants who make money from selling the application and undermined her authority by claiming the study was paid for by Microsoft.

Example 2:
Circle Group Holdings developed a fat substitute. The publicly traded company was on its was up, until an anonymous blogger attacked the company, calling its CEO deceitful, unethical and a pathological liar. Investors got scare and the stock plummeted. It turned out that the author of the slander pieces was a former stock broker who is under investigation by the SEC for taking part in stock price manipulation scemes.

The examples are fair enough. But reading the article, I kept feeling that the complaints are those of the old world versus the new world. Of a world that understands and embraces blogging (sometimes for the wrong reasons) versus one that shuns away from it.

The story actually goes on to illustrate how you can defeat attack bloggers at their own trade. Circle in the end found an ally in the  FinancialWire online news service – they too had had a run-in with the blogger by the name of Timothy Miles. Together they dug up some dirt on him and put it out on the internet, fighting fire with fire.

These cases more than anything illustrate that companies need a blogging strategy. You need to have established a presence online so you can be ready when you need to be.

If an attack comes, clients and partners will look for your side of the story. If it isn't there, you're screwed.

Attack blogs are just like bullies in school. They're only successful it they catch you off guard. That is why Robert Scoble is such a huge asset to Microsoft – because they are probably the most attacked company in the world.

In the process, your blog can provide a powerful tool in advertising your company and your products. But that's something that Forbes forgot to mention.

Tags: blogoshpere, forbes

October 28, 2005 at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Performance issues for Silicon Valley Sleuth

You might have noticed that performance of this blog has been spotty at times. I'm sorry.

This blog is hosted by Six Apart, and they are in the process of moving their data centre to a new facility. This is causing the occasional outages.

October 28, 2005 at 06:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Foreign call centres screw up big time

Outsourced call centres are degrading customer satisfaction, a study by Harris Interactive has found.

Consumers who have dealt with foreign call centre agents loath them more than consumers who haven't. This signals that these outsourced call centres do even worse than individual expect.

"Organisations that outsource call centres overseas may also have to contend with damage to their brand and reputation," said the Harris Interactive study.

47 per cent of the adults questioned in the study have less respect for companies that use Indian or other offshore call centres and another 50 per cent doesn't trust giving them financial details, fearing identity theft.

Was there nothing good to mention?

Why yes. A full 4 per cent said that the foreigners were friendlier than domestic agents and 2 per cent found them more helpful.

Photo: Janet Arndt

Tags: offshoring, outsourcing, call center

October 28, 2005 at 01:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Hotmail ate my email

Take a look at some forums for large broadband internet providers, and you'll see users complaining that they are unable to send emails addressed at Hotmail or MSN. It takes a good observer however to notice the problems, because the email doesn't bounce. Instead it will simply vanish as if it never existed.

Microsoft too is puzzled by this issue. They were notified about a forum where Apple  ranted about the problem on Tuesday. They have been investigating the problem ever since, but refuse to provide any background about what is going on.

The Hotmail outage doesn't just affect Apple users. Subscribers of Comcast, Rogers and Cogeco (all broadband internet providers) too have reported problems with sending email to Hotmail and MSN.

When presented with these problems, email security experts all have the same conclusion: spam filters gone bad.

In these days of botnets, broadband providers are the number one sources of spam email messages – one source told vnunet.com that Comcast is notoriously bad in curbing spam originating from its network. So the likely cause here is that whenever Hotmail gets fed up with one provider, they tweak their servers and make it harder for that one provider to reach them. This will then cause the provider to investigate what's going on and ideally have them call Microsoft – but in some cases (like Comcast's) they take more drastic measures and just shut down their servers.

"These things almost become like a comedy of errors," Andrew Lochart, director of product marketing for email security vendor Postini told vnunet.com.

It might be funny to Mircrosoft and the providers, but as usual the users are caught in between.

Tags: Microsoft, hotmail, spam, botnet, Comcast, rogers, cogeco

October 28, 2005 at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Apple accused of copying iPod ad

Apple is under fire for copying its latest iPod TV commercial featuring Eminem off an earlier add for Lugz boots.

The two use similar colours and concept. And given that Apple prides itself with its focus on unique design, admitting that the company copied the ad would be a moral defeat.

Apple's advertising agency ensures that it is merely a coincidence. And the Mac faithful are gathering behind their idol.

If there is any truth to the rumours, I doubt that we will ever find out.

Lugz

iPod

Tags: apple, lugz, ipod, eminem

October 27, 2005 at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Catholic school adds 11th commandment: thou shalt not blog

The Pope John XIII catholic high school in the state of New Jersey has instated an immediate ban on blogging for its students, according to a report in the The Daily Record.

The school's principal reverend Kieran McHugh told the 900 students that the personal journals attract sexual predators. Students have to cancel their MySpace, Typepad or Blogger accounts or face suspension.

The Catholic Church is an authority in knowing how great the threats from child molesters really is. The institution after all for years moved around child molesting priests between its parishes in an effort to cover up the sexual abuse scandal inside its church.

Mind you, McHugh isn't telling students not to blog from school – his blogging ban extends to after school hours.

"I don't see this as censorship," McHugh told The Daily Record. "I believe we are teaching common civility, courtesy and respect."

The story goes on to quote concerned parents and other parties who voice their fear of the gore that is apparently spreading on these blogs – that most parents never heard about until the ban. Of course something like that would never happen within the walls of a respected institution like the Catholic Church… oh… wait.

Never mind the free speech violations that the ban is obviously violating. The Pope John XIII high school is a private school, meaning that they board can come up with any rule it wants.

But then again, if the Church is fighting a new trend, you know it has to be good.

Forgive me father, for I have blogged.

Photo: Michal Adamczyk

Tags: blog, blogosphere

October 26, 2005 at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Blackberry bug sends mystery emails

The BBC has been hit by bug in its BlackBerry software that caused the service to copy fragments of other people's emails into messages.

Research in Motion confirmed to vnunet.com that the problem is caused by a bug in its BlackBerry Enterprise Server software version 4.02.

The bug could turn out to be a painful mistake by RIM. The company is facing increased competition from Good and Microsoft in delivering email to portable devices. While RIM has gained user loyalty with its robust and proven service, messing up email delivery could quickly kill that image.

Tags: blackberry, palm, treo, Microsoft, good

October 26, 2005 at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Google gone wild

Blogs showed their ugly sides once again today, with their failure to check facts and taking baseless speculation for fact.

Screen shots emerged of a new Google product called Google Base. The information to some seemed to represent a new online classified advertising service – especially because it offered to "post" information about several categories including "vehicles".

Not being stopped, the false prophets once again started their lie machines. Even The New York Times' John Markoff couldn't resist.

If only they had taken the effort to check their facts and visit the official Google Blog, where product marketing manager soon revealed that the service in fact allows publishers to submit information to the search engine to augment the information that Google already collects with its spiders.

Oops.

PS: Markoff actually quoted from the Google statement, but did so in a way that very much questioned its contents.

Tags: google, blogosphere

October 26, 2005 at 06:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Are online gaming economies getting out of hand?

A gamer has paid $100,000 for a virtual space lot in the online role-playing game Project Entropia.

While it is common to players to sell virtual goods in  massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), I've never before heard of so much money being shelled out for virtual goods.

Project Entropia is different from most MMORPGs in that players don't pay monthly fees to play the game and can download the client software for free. Instead the developers sell virtual tools and arms that you need inside the game for real cash. And in this case they even sold an entire space resort.

The new owner can make money by renting out the 1,000 apartments on the property, its mall and billboards. He gets to tax for hunting and mining rights. And all that money he can change back into real dollars.

But the buyer has few guarantees that his investment will be worth anything. What if developer Mindark of Sweden tomorrow decides to pull the plug on the game? What if a space invasion tears down the apartment complex?

The game developer allows the laws of the economy to kick in by auctioning all goods. But what's next? Nothing is keeping the game developer from staring a bank that creates loans for the games' currency: the Project Entropia Dollar (PED) (which has a fixed exchange rate of 10 PED for one dollar).

Last month a gamer was arrested in Japan for hacking into a computer game and robbing fellow players. Now if you hack any game, I would target a thriving economy like Entropia's – so far $150 million was spend in 2005.  While the hacking is illegal, no laws prohibit a mugging in the game because nothing is actually being stolen.

Am I the only one that starts to have visions of The Matrix here?

Tags: MMORPG, gaming, entropia, mindark

October 25, 2005 at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack