St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for December, 2006

Some cell phones let you view a few websites and call this “browsing the internet”. Some of them let you go to any site and it’ll pull the text only out of it , but that the exception to the rule. We’ve all heard that cell phones were going to start carrying adverts. Evidently no cell phone company wanted to be the first one to do it.

After all, that would just show little you respect your paying subscribers. The people you were already making a fortune off of. It would tell all potential new customers just how greedy you were. They would know that cell phone company is so greedy that it would sell you out for a few pennies (per cell phone) more profit on top of the hundreds of dollars in profit they make of you every year.

So should I tell you now? Not yet I wanna give you a couple hints first:

• This company is so good at being evil they somehow didn’t get caught up in the scandal were certain phone companies let the Feds tap and record every single call on the network, listen for keywords and/or patterns and then listening with a human to the ones they felt like. You know the one the President even said “might” be illegal. They avoided this scandal even after they came out with a twisted non-denial after the story broke.
• This company was also at the forefront of the push for anti-net-neutrality legislation. That’s where they plan to censor the internet by only providing good service to web sites that pay them whatever fee they want, and charging unpayable fees to sites they don’t like.
• It’s a company that won’t hire people if they have a common name or ever had any credit trouble or been convicted of serious crimes, like misdemeanors (o wait misdemeanors aren’t serious crimes, o well too bad for Americans who want jobs, I guess the jobs will have to overseas since Americans aren’t qualified).
• This company also bribed legislators (whoops they call it political campaign donations), to pass a law that allows them to sell cable-like television services without having to negotiate with the communities for licenses. Which means they also get out of the whole “must somehow provide a service to the community rule” Serve, smerve they say!

   

• This is the same company whose abuse report e-mails don’t work. Effectively banning all forms of reporting people on their network who spam, threaten people with death because they didn’t like what they said in a forum, use the internet to deface web sites, perform denial of service attacks on web sites and such. Why not make the e-mail address return a no such e-mail address error, they aren’t going to do anything about it anyway.

   

• This is a company that uses sales tactics like bill stuffing for their business partners, boy are they surprised a few months after they buy an ad in the phone book! They sure make them sorry they ever did that.

   

• This is a company that performs bill-stuffing on it’s phone customers too

   

• This company sometimes sends out past due notices to customer with current accounts (and of course, charge late fees, reinstate fees etc fees), just for fun evidently

   

• This is a company that tries to pretend DSL is as fast as cable

   

• This is a company that won’t tell you the price of an ad in the phone book, they have to send a salesman. Of course right,because the salesman are the only one who know how much things cost right?

   

• IF you buy DSL with this company they will install spyware on your computer. Of course they don’t call it that, but it’s difficult to remove and connects to the internet when you don’t think it’s running and sends some kind of data to somewhere.

   

• This companys privacy policy says they will share your personal information with anyone who is a “marketing partner” and any company whom they feel they need to in order to perform business.

   

• If you order DSL from them, you will be charged for it for at least a year, even if your phone lines can’t accept it.

   

• Sometimes this company will use this trick on people who cannot have DSL without rewiring their house “your phone wire could not be tested for DSL until your billing information was in “the system”. Guess what happens when your “billing information (the main part being your CC number)
• This company disables “Blue-tooth” on their phones because you might use it to share files with other Blue-tooth users
• This company sells “unlimited” broadband wireless internet access cards, by unlimited they mean less than a certain amount of bandwidth and only web browsing and e-mail. Anything else is a violation of their TOS and will get your account cancelled and of course you’ll have to pay a steep early termination fee.
• You may not get ringtones, games, java apps for your cell phone from any but this company if you are a cell phone customer. Of course it’s not spelled out anywhere, they just change the phones so it doesn’t work and blame it on the manufacturer.
• Several web sites criticizing this company have already been assigned to slow-lane of the internet even though the slow lane hasn’t even been made yet! (that’s the anti-net-neutrality thing, if you have a web site and don’t pay us whatever custom-fee we charge your site will assigned to the slow-lane, oh and we’re not going to even set a price for you . . .
• This company uses blacklists, and credit reporting as a weapon against it’s customers, employees and the public.
• This company plasters its employees SSN over everything!
• This companys HR department has a separate super secure entrance inside it’s buildings. Hmmmm, why do they feel the need for the extra security ion the HR department?

OK I starting doing a little research for this article and I got overwhelmed by all the stuff I found above. I didn’t think they were that bad when I started this article. I could go on and on with the list, but there’s only so much time and I think you get the point. I’m betting you want to know who this company is.
One last point before I tell you. Industry insiders say that these ads on cell phone only web site are just the start. In the near future they will be using the GPS chip hidden in your phone (you didn’t know they kept track of where you go and store that data, no one knows whatthey do with it either), to serve ads to your cell phone, making it ring, when ever you come close to an advertisers point of business. Isn’t that thoughtful of verizon!

quoted story

While Howard Dean is the example of how to do an internet campaign right, and Tom Delay new internet venture is an example of how to do an internet presence really poorly (he just need to go hide, not solicit comments from the public and then insult them when they do). Most candidates are finding that the internet is nothing but a positive when comes to a campaign tool.

Republicans have mastered e-mail as the new form of direct-mail campaigns, raising money and pushing a GOP message. Democrats have excelled at raising cash through small-scale donations and making the Net their version of talk radio.

“You have an inexpensive way to have a conversation with people with the propensity to turn out and vote,” said Rick Davis, a McCain adviser who managed the Arizona Republican’s 2000 presidential campaign. In that race, McCain predicted that “in the next few years the Internet will completely turn political campaigns upside down.”

Lesson learned, potential 2008 campaigns say.

Former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the first major candidate to do podcasts when he was running for president in 2004, has recruited Dean’s Internet communications director. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who leads the Democratic pack of prospective candidates, hired a pair of online writers for her successful Senate re-election campaign this year and has amassed an e-mailing list. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., is quickly building his own mailing list and using others’ lists to raise campaign cash. He raised $800,000 for Sen. Robert Byrd (news, bio, voting record), D-W.Va., this year using a MoveOn.org list.

Major advantages of using the internet to campaign:

• You get to communicate the message you want to voters, not a 30 second version on the radio, or the 4 second clip the news station picked out of your message.
• The Press knows where to look for your comments
• The voters know where to look for your comments
• Detailed explanation of your stand on the issues and your opponents
• The creation of your own mailing list, which is the first step in . . . Well if your reading this your a politician and you know how important contact info is.
• The ability to react to news and opponents quickly
• Being able to reach so many people for so little money
• When people read a news story, and your site is mentioned, they can go right to it and you can get the message you want to them, when they see a TV news spot and they want more info, they just have to kinda wonder. All they hear is the 4 second clip the news station picked out of your message.

Mike Connell, who ran
President Bush’s Web strategy in 2000 and 2004, said campaigns still do not spend enough on online efforts despite the obvious returns.

“Too many dollars are being wasted on traditional broadcast advertising,” he said. “It used to be three major broadcast networks … Now we’ve got an entirely fragmented market, people spread across the entire spectrum of content.”

Campaigns are eager to substitute online video for a broadcast version.

“Clearly online video is rapidly chewing away at traditional TV time,” said Nikko Mele, Dean’s campaign webmaster from 2004. “We are taking time usually spent watching television and watching the Web. It’s not clear how campaigns are going to take advantage of that.”

Why aren’t some of the local candidates here in Central to Southwest region converting their web sites into votes?

• It’s not enough to just set up a web site and be done with it

• Although that’s a good start and in a lot of smaller races a web site alone or a better site than your opponents will give you the advantage

• I have a simple and effective method for that

Gee all I need now is a candidate to work for . . . Anyone interested?

A lot of graphic designers and web designers have been thrust into the video editing arena lately with the rise in popularity of video viewed on the web. While most of them just say “I don’t edit video” (I even heard one say that videos can’t be edited by anyone except a film studio or TV studio – liar!), others are willing to learn. I’m fairly good at it myself, but it’s always a complicated procedure and there are no shortcuts. Here’s a perfect example of how not to edit a video to remove something you’d rather not have the viewer see.

Again, there are no shortcuts. It takes expensive software, patience, alot of tedium from someone willing to spend the time on it and lot’s of computer processor time.

In case you haven’t heard about James Kim, The father of the family that was stranded in the mountains of Oregon when the road they were traveling on was snowbound, here’s the sad tale:
James Kim, an editor at Cnet.com, struck out on foot to find help for his family. He was found dead after a few days of searching. His wife and two daughters were rescued. While he may not have been a hero in the web publishing industry, he certianly was hero none-the-less. My thoughts and prayers go out to the Kim family.

A lot of people just don’t get it. The internet is and it’s billions of web sites are alot like being out in public. There are bad people out there. Would you let your 12 year old wander around in times square by themselves? Evidently a lot of parents would. They certainly let their kids wander around on the internet by themselves, without supervision.

What brings all this up? Well MySpace.com has just announced they’ve ripped of a version of someone elses software that allows them to find registered sex offenders with myspace profiles. Sounds good whuh? Well here’s why it’s actually pretty lame and a stupid idea to boot:

• It can only detect the sex offenders if they are using their real name and real address and that address is current with the sex offender registry.
• It lumps sex offenders in with sex predators. Don’t think there’s a difference? The difference is huge! Sex offenders are people that were convicted of crimes like peeing in public or buying a porno mag in a backwards county that prohibits them. Sexual Predators are people that have been convicted of things like raping children. Big difference, like I said.
• MySpace.com, which is owned by the same evil bastard that owns fox news is alluding that this program makes it safe for children to post their personal info and communicate with adults they don’t know. Well I’m sorry that just ever be the case. EVER.
• It does nothing to stop the collecting of information on people under 13 – a violation of federal law (shouldn’t it be 18, the age which one can enter a legal contract, which using a lot of web sites, including myspace.com requires?)

Well then what’s a good parent to do? It’s simple. Supervise your children, teach them good internet practices, and teach them internet realities such as it’s almost impossible to verify the identity of someone posting on the internet without a court order, or meeting that person, in person. A tactic I use with my kids, is to not let them have internet access in their bedrooms, but only in the common area of the house, where they won’t feel like they are in private.

What’s a good web publisher to do when planning a web design of a social networking or other user interactive site? That’s simple too. Don’t collect info on your users, and warn the ones that say they are under 18 repeatedly about the few dangers of the internet. And never imply you’ve verified the age and/or identity of web site users. It just can’t be done (no, not even with a credit card).

This week in Hong Kong, the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency, representing 191 countries and 650 companies, is putting on the telecommunications industry’s biggest gathering, called ITU Telecom World, attracting about 70,000 people. But some of the conference’s attention will be focused on the role of the International Telecommunication Union itself. Should it concern itself with Internet governance — a role that its Western members find particularly objectionable — or should it focus on ground-level issues, like access to telecommunications in developing countries?

Hamadoun Touré of Mali, who was recently elected secretary general of the agency, its highest-ranking official, favors the latter approach.

“I wouldn’t want to see the I.T.U. trying to take over Internet governance,” he said at his first news conference.

But underlying tensions about the direction of the agency, which has its origins in the era of the telegraph, have troubled it since the Internet became such a prominent part of the world’s telecommunications networks.

In simpler times, the agency’s role as a global arbiter of radio frequencies and standards helped make it possible for the telegraph and the telephone to cross borders. But with the spread of the Internet in recent years, its basic standards were adopted voluntarily as more and more computer networks joined in worldwide and data traveled over the existing telephone infrastructure.