St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for June, 2006

The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee approved sweeping communications reform legislation on Wednesday 1that, amongst other things, insures “we are going to have a two-tiered Internet” (Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe), which is the opposite of a principle know as Net Neutrality. This also gives every single ISP out there the ability to effectively censor all web sites. Here some more information about Net Neutrality.

In the same legislation they also forbid cable companies from ala carte’ pricing for cable channels and gave Large ISP’s waivers on Television station liscenses.

The vote mostly went along party lines with the majority republicans voting against the people and in favor of large corporations. The measure is in part a result of pressure from AT&T and Verizon Communications for Congress to simplify the process for them to get licenses to offer television service. They argue it can take years to get permission from thousands of local cities and counties.

Still, AT&T’s corporate political action committee was second in donations to candidates so far during the 2005-2006 election cycle, giving $1.3 million to candidates — mostly to the Republicans who control Congress, according to PoliticalMoneyLine, which tracks money in politics.

The bill included provisions aimed at preserving consumers’ ability to surf anywhere on the public Internet and use any Internet-related application, software or service, similar to a bill that passed the House of Representatives. However the ISP’s are wanting to put web sites that don’t pay whatever fee they charge (which may be different based on a web site or the web site owner’s politics, content, business connections etc), on a slower version of the internet. How slow? Well that’s up to them.

As all Webmasters know, there’s only a short period of seconds for a web site to load before you start loosing lots of visitors.

I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier. Spammers have increasingly taken to displaying the text of their messages in images to defeat e-mail spam filters 1 Currently there are filtering software out there that can read text in images. There is OCR Bridge software that can read text from images (like when you scan a text document), but they are unreliable, especially when used on documents with non-typical fonts.

Of course, some e-mail software doesn’t display images in software and nowadays most e-mail software hat does display images in an e-mail warn you first and ask you if you’d like to display the images by default. I’m not sure that this will work out well for those poor Spammers that we all feel so sorry for!

I guess it’s true that internet advertising goes in cycles. First it was “pay per exposure”. When advertisers figured out that doesn’t work very well, it was changed to “pay per click”. Now that Google and other pay per click advertising systems are rife with fraud reports, they are moving into another system that’s been done before. Affiliate marketing. Google calls it “cost-per-action” it’s really just commissioned based advertising or “Affiliate Marketing”. In other words the advertiser doesn’t pay unless the person who clicks on the advert actually buys something, something in particular.

It’s just a test program at the moment. Participation is by invitation only.

Some interesting and helpful new features have been added to the Google Sitemap program.

Some of the latest addition include:
* robots.txt analysis tool
* quick snapshot of the status of your site in the index, notification of violations of the webmaster guidelines and an easy-to-use re-inclusion request form.
* comprehensive webmaster help center

Disney says ABC free web TV a hit
It’s seems the suits at Disney think they have a hit on their hands because: “The ABC.com pilot program in one month outperformed the results Disney has seen in its nine-month partnership with Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes to offer episodes of its hit television shows for download, without commercials, for $1.99 each.”¹
Well duh! What on earth made them think there was a possibility it wouldn’t be? It’s free! But seriously, experience with really asinine corporations and their web sites has shown me that yes, even a web site with content like this would be easy to screw up. For instance:

• they could make the videos non-downloadable

• whoops, they did that . . .

• whoops, they did that . . .

• whoops, they did that . . .

• whoops, they did that . . .

• whoops, they did that . . .

So okay they totally screwed up a sure fire winner and they don’t even know it. They think it’s a huge success, even though they have presented this wonderful content about as poorly as possible. I’m not sure I can think of any other possible way to screw it up except for one – it could not work at all. I’m sure they have a good number of visitors to the web site and I’m sure they are selling adverts, but they public will soon be done “checking it out” and tire of the problems mentioned above. at least a good portion of them will. They always do.

with unliscened versions of the same content out there that are sooooo much better, most people won’t fool with this much longer. I tried it, and I still prefer to download missed episodes of my shows with bittorrent. Being legal is nice and all, and I don’t even mind commercials but they really screwed up their own content, as large companies are prone to do.

We’ve all heard the rumors. They’ve working on the “Holy Grail” of the computer world. Pieces of inexpensive paper-like material that are disposable and reusable and can display digital content. They’ve come close several times and there are a few projects out there that could, if successful, change the world.

Now they’re saying ¹ they almost have ready something that’s going to do it. It’s the newspaper and magazine people that seem the most interested in it for right now. Without have any real idea what the demand for a product like this the newspapers and magazine publishers have made it clear that they are interested. It seems they feel (or are being led to believe) that using this content delivery method instead of paper will save significantly on the 70% of production costs that are paper related.

I don’t know if I’ll prefer reading my newspaper on a piece of electric paper that can be easy stuffed in a pocket (I’m not fond of newspapers that don’t fold easily and leave ink on my hands), but I do know I’m rooting for this technology.
It’ll create more demand for web designers and computer graphics design.