Spam Subject Line of the Moment: Episode 4

Forget about the trouble with your male instrument.

Friends don't let friends play the bagpipes.

Spam Subject Line of the Moment, Episode Three

...Revenge of the Spam

If your warrior of love is too small, you may lose this war

"Warrior of Love?" Isn't that the new reality show on Fox?

No, wait.

Wasn't that what Captain Planet called his sidekicks?

Um um, no...

Oh! Maybe you mean this Warrior?



Heh. Steamy.



The fine print, obviously. Image found via Google Image Search at Barnes & Noble. Warrior of Love was written by Rebecca York and Ruth Glick, and is published by Harlequin Books. Image is copyright the original authors, and will be removed upon request. It's used here for the purposes of parody.

Spam Subject Line of the Moment, Episode 2

You deserve to not be ignored by women!

See there, isn't that nice? Not all spam is bad. Sometimes, it can offer valuable affirmations.

Not that I'm ignored by women. Not at all. I'm engaged, so I have a woman who has to pay attention to me, contractually.

1-900-NERD-GIRL

This video made me laugh. One, because it's a pretty savvy parody of the low budget 1-900 commercials that used to come on during USA's Up All Night. Two, because it makes a D&D "saving throw" joke. That's exactly something I'd like, as K. would say. Enjoy.



Original Link

Spam Subject Line of the Moment

Flinstone porn toons

Ewwww...Does anybody actually go looking for this stuff?

If you do, please don't reply in the comments.

Updates and Announcements!

Haven't posted here in a while, but that's because some things have been brewing on the home front.

I finally took a vacation at the end of July. Went to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for a camping trip away from phones and networking. Came home refreshed, but media starved.

My mom has been sick for a little while, and went in for surgery last week in St. Louis. We had known that surgery was a possible treatment for her, but the doctors decided to move more quickly than anyone expected. I was thankfully able to take some time to travel down to St. Louis and see her. She's recovering well, and we're all hopeful that this course of treatment will lead to permanent resolution of her maladies. Love you, Mom, and thanks to K. for being so supportive.

In other news, I have been given the opportunity to join CNET Networks' TechRepublic as a regular blogger covering topics related to computing support and the technology help desk. TechRepublic is aimed at IT professionals and offers content that keeps them up to date on various issues in the industry, so I have been a regular visitor for quite a while already. I'm really excited to be joining the team!

In light of this development, this blog will be evolving a little bit. I began Lizard Robot in hopes that it would let me exercise any writing skills I might have, maybe with an eye towards trying to write about technology more formally one day. This hope has become realized much faster than I had ever expected. I'll still be posting here, and many of those posts will be about technology and gadgets, since my interest in those things is personal as well as professional. I'd like to keep things here less formal, though. Please, if you're interested in IT or Computer Support, please check out my work on TechRepublic. You can find a link to my posts on the Lizard Robot sidebar, or bookmark this page.

Craigslist blocks Listpic due to usage violation

I discovered Listpic a while back, I think linking to it from LifeHacker. In case you never got a chance to see it, Listpic analyzed Craigslist ads and created a gallery page from the ads that contained photos. It was great when we were looking for furniture, and it apparently came in handy for those who wanted to browse personal ads (a use-case that didn't occur to me).

Craigslist is a great site. Power to the people, grass roots movement, down with newspaper conglomerates and so on. But let's face it. The interface has never been great. I understand the effort is in keeping it lightweight, but Listpic performed a valuable function for me. It saved me time.

I'm never going to buy furniture--or a car, or a computer, or a Hummel Figurine--sight-unseen. I feel like anyone who wants to sell something online who gives half a whit about getting their junk out of their garage is going to attach a picture. If a seller can't be bothered to post one, I'm not going to bother looking at their ad. With Listpic, I could browse their Gallery of items listed on Craigslist and only click through to those posts that interested me, rather than looking in the Craigslist listings for the icon indicating that an ad contains pictures, then clicking through to each and every ad individually.

Browsing Craigslist proper, I wasted a lot of time looking at ads that I never would have clicked through to if I'd had a picture preview. Listpic let me take advantage of the the years of evolution responsible for the development of my visual cortex. Most humans with full use of their sight are much better at quickly scanning a group of photos than scanning separate lines of text. I always figured that Listpic was letting me evaluate more products than I ever would with the standard Craigslist interface.

Well today I learned from the Download Squad that Listpic has been blocked from accessing Craigslist due to what are known as Terms of Use violations. This means that Listpic is dark for the time being. It seems that Craigslist's justification for the blackout can be summed up in a few bullets:

• Listpic uses ads. Craigslist doesn't, and their community is against the use of their content by other sites to generate revenue.
• By scraping the ads and pictures from Craigslist, Listpic is leeching a significant amount of bandwidth that Craigslist has to pay for.
• The Craigslist Terms of Use allow them to ban and fine(!) anyone who republishes or aggregates more than 100 ads without permission.

So let's state the obvious. Craigslist is completely within their rights here. It seems pretty clear that Ryan, the developer behind Listpic, probably didn't read the terms of use and probably didn't ask Craigslist if it was okay for him to reprint their ad content. That's just a dumb mistake. CYA, my friend.

But Craiglist is not handling this situation well, either. Ryan is claiming that he wasn't contacted before receiving the cease-and-desist letter from Craigslist. That seems to fly in the face of the informal, "rootsy" image that Craigslist cultivates. The backlash in the Craigslist forums also indicates that Listpic was providing a service a lot of people appreciated, and there's a lot of testimony that it contributed to people using Craigslist more than they had before. But apparently this is one sticking point: how many people use Listpic anyway, and how much of a bandwidth impact are they having?

In one response to the forum users calling for his head, Craigslist founder Craig Neumark states that the main reason for the shut down was bandwidth related: Listpic was using too much. But then, a few hours later, Craig says in a post that they can tell only a very few people use Listpic. Does this make sense? I'm not privy to traffic figures for Craigslist or Listpic, but this just doesn't pass the sniff test. Listpic has been around for at least 9 months, as the date on this post from the Consumerist proves. Has Listpic's bandwidth imposition happened so dramatically, and in such a short period that the Craigslist Server Admins have only just noticed that someone has been scraping their site, a few thousand images at a time? Maybe someone at Craigslist needs to hire new admins to monitor their web traffic (I am available, Craig...email me). Maybe it just took Craig and Co. a while to figure out what to do, but I find it hard to believe that no one at Craigslist knew what was going on. It's clearly not just about reprint rights or bandwidth usage, or even advertising. All of these things have been going on for 9 months, with nary a peep from Craigslist.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up the Craigslist TOS statement on Archive.org, to see if there was anything hinky going on....maybe Ryan was caught unawares with an unannounced update to the TOS. I'm not accusing Craigslist of changing the TOS just because of Listpic, but I find it interesting that the last version of the Craigslist TOS at Archive.org doesn't mention the $3000 per day fines that the cease-and-desist letter does. In fact, that version of the TOS--logged by Archive.org on Dec. 26th, 2005--doesn't even have a section 19(f), which outlines the fines Ryan may be faced with.

That's not to say that Ryan's off the hook. Even in 2005, you couldn't use Craigslist ads without permission. Oops.

Listpic was a great idea. Craig says that a major problem they had with Listpic was the monetization of Craigslist content through web advertising. Maybe that's not okay according to the terms of use, but it's an idea very much in the 'spirit' of web 2.0. Google uses their index of web content to provide search results, and then display ads relating to those results. This is a leveraging of other people's content to gain revenue. Sure, if I run my own web server, I can tell Google that their bots aren't welcome, but Google doesn't ask permission before they index sites. They assume that if you aren't blocking them, you're okay with their use of your site's content. Interestingly enough, though, Google has realized that having people use their tools in innovative ways only adds value to what they do. The give-back from Google for the use of all that web content comes in the form of all the open APIs that Google allows other people to use, for free. Those are the tools that make all those neat Google Maps mashups possible. There would be no Listpic without Craigslist, but Listpic was giving back to the Craigslist community. This sounds like a very symbiotic relationship, and one that made it a lot easier for the community to access its own content.

Here's how to remedy this situation. Ready your pencils, lawyers and executives.

Craigslist should integrate the Listpic functionality. If it's too much of a bandwidth hog, make it only available to paid members, and continue to offer the lightweight version for non-paying users. Ryan has some prior art in the graphical display of Craigslist ads, so I feel its only fair to offer him some sort of deal. If he's a good coder, then offer him a job. If that's not feasible, then maybe Craig can license or outright buy the Listpic code. Oh, and Ryan, if Craigslist fines you (or deducts that amount from any contracts), pay up and don't complain. Next time, you'll read the fine print and ask permission.

Finally, Craigslist should reconsider its policy regarding usage of ad content, especially when it clearly adds value for the communities of past and future Craigslist users. Craig Neumark says that the Craigslist community has decided that their ads shouldn't be used for revenue by outside sites. Well, everybody's gotta pay for their bandwidth. Craigslist is not a charity, and it's not like Listpic was a link farming site, reprinting Craigslist content and attaching ads to it without giving anything back. Listpic added something that the community found valuable, even if it was operating outside the terms of use. I think that it better serves the online community if people like Ryan, those with innovative ideas, are brought gently into the fold rather than threatened with blackouts and thousands of dollars in fines. Otherwise, Craigslist starts to look more like the coercive newspaper syndicates it has replaced than the user-centric community it purports to be.

Moblogging...

Blogger supports posting via email and devices, I have discovered. So, here is a picture of pig neon.

Click here to visit the Lizard Robot MoBlog.

"Heroes" Season Finale Tonight!...

And in honor of that event, I'll post a link to a novelty gallery that captures the Heroes characters as Mii avatars on the Nintendo Wii console.

Click on Hiro below to link to the original article at IGN.com.



Enjoy the show!

Letter to the Editor...

I have had a letter to the editor published in the most recent InformationWeek, issue 1,139. My letter was written in response to an article in last week's IW, entitled "Message To Cell Carriers" (link goes to the original article). You can find a reprint of my letter as it appears in the magazine here, but the letter that they printed was edited a little for style and content. I'll post the original email that I sent IW here.

To: iweekletters@cmp.com, mediarelations@t-mobile.com
From: William Jones

Dear Editor,

I feel motivated to comment on the article printed in the May 14th issue of InformationWeek, Message to Cell Carriers, by Elena Malykhina and Richard Martin.

In their article, the authors miss the fact that the US Register of Copyrights recommended an exemption to the DMCA that allows customers to legally defeat provider locks on cell phones. The exemption took effect on November 27, 2006, and will be up for renewal in three years.

In order to put this new freedom to the test, I contacted T-Mobile to see if I could unlock the new BlackBerry Pearl I bought from Amazon. T-Mobile support responded that unlocking my BlackBerry was absolutely something they would help me with, once my account was 90 days old. All I had to do was ask.

I realize that handset subsidies are one of the major marketing tools available to carriers in the US wireless market, and I have no problem with my carrier asking me to wait a reasonable length of time before freeing my handset. In this case, T-Mobile's willingness to unlock my phone without giving me a hassle has earned them a loyal customer. I thought that this example of T-Mobile's effort to put customer service before restrictive business practices should be recognized, given that your article tends to paint all wireless carriers with the same unflattering brush. We should recognize when a wireless company is doing the "right" thing, if we want the industry to improve.

William Jones
Technology Coordinator
Chicago, IL

The frustrating thing is that the real point I was trying to make has been edited out of my letter before the mag went to press. Maybe this is because I did some pretty clear T-Mobile cheerleading there at the end; I can see why the editors might want to strike that bit for the sake of appearing more balanced. The problem is that the original article that I chose to respond to was pretty clearly biased against wireless carriers, laying most of the problems with the US industry at their feet. While the carriers are certainly culpable, a fundamental part of bringing corporate change through activism involves acknowledging--even praising!--a company when they show a positive shift in policy. A case where a major carrier like T-Mobile is willing to allow customers to unlock their handsets without any significant trouble undermines the implication made in the original article that the only way that cell providers can retain business is by restricting customers' freedom. I'll voluntarily stay with a company that treats me well, and so will most other people. That's the point of my letter: that we should encourage customer service as an alternative to retention policies grounded in customer lock-in. Because it can work.

Office Superfriends Space

Something my friend Nick sent me long ago which sprang from my email archive like a viper. It made me laugh today, as it did so many years ago. Here's to you Nick!