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July 2005, Week 2 Marketing Archives

Friday, July 15, 2005

SpreadFirefox.com Hacked



SpreadFirefox website hacked earlier this week.

I just got an email from admin [at] spreadfirefox.com saying the spreadfirefox web site had been hacked on June 12. Here's the email...

On Tuesday, July 12, the Mozilla Foundation discovered that the server hosting Spread Firefox, our community marketing site, had been accessed on Sunday, July 10 by unknown remote attackers who exploited a security vulnerability in the software running the site. This exploit was limited to SpreadFirefox.com and did not affect other mozilla.org web sites or Mozilla software.

We don't have any evidence that the attackers obtained personal information about site users, and we believe they accessed the machine to use it to send spam. However, it is possible that the attackers acquired information site users provided to the site.

As a Spread Firefox user, you have provided us with a username and password. You may also have provided us with other information, including a real name, a URL, an email address, IM names, a street address, a birthday, and private messages to other users.

We recommend that you change your Spread Firefox password and the password of any accounts where you use the same password as your Spread Firefox account. To change your Spread Firefox password, go to SpreadFirefox.com, log in with your current password, select "My Account" from the sidebar, select "Edit Account" from the sidebar, then enter your new password into the Password fields and press the "Save user information" button at the bottom of the page.

The Mozilla Foundation deeply regrets this incident and is taking steps to prevent it from happening again. We have applied the necessary security fixes to the software running the site, have reviewed our security plan to determine why we didn't previously apply those fixes in this case, and have modified that plan to ensure we do so in the future.

Sincerely,
The Mozilla Foundation



There is a post on the Spread Firefox blog from today at 1:44 AM [PST I assume] that discusees the site being down and describes their investigation and the nature of the hack.

...we've been down for a few days. We took the site down to investigate an attack on the site. It appears that a part of Spread Firefox was hacked in an attempt to use it to send out spam. It doesn't look like the attacker accessed any personal data on the site, but to be safe, we're encouraging all of our users to log in and change their passwords. If you have an account with Spread Firefox, you probably received an email about this with instructions for updating your password...


I must admit this is a bit disturbing but I'm not all that concerned. Although Apache is a solid server, it's still a piece of software. Software will always be vulnerable to manipulation and such.

For those interested, here are the headers returned from SpreadFirefox.com


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 13:16:16 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=18091fe87ca26363fd9fc11f04b7716e; path=/
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate,
post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Last-Modified: Fri, 15 Jul 2005 12:45:03 GMT
ETag: "2e80ab3db7e4b0a86a6b209be509986f"
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8


Posted By Jason Dowdell at 09:35 AM
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Thursday, July 14, 2005

Hey David Sifry & Technorati Team - Thanks!

Recently Technorati's taken a beating in the blogosphere about slow load times and lack of completeness with results. Then last night I thought things had sped up a little bit but wasn't sure if it was the 2am traffic lull that was responsible for that.

Then David Sifry posts this response to the blogosphere. He took the initiative and called the buzz around Technorati's issues "great feedback and comments". I'm glad Dave chose to address the buzz in a way that made the most sense.

What Dave Said
First he and the Technorati team began working even more fervantly on the issues at hand. Secondly, once many of the issues were taken care of he made a statement on his personal blog... I'm guessing one will be forthcoming on many of Technorati's employee blogs as well.

...our search traffic has increased by over 40% month on month for each of the last 4 months...

...Recently a number of people have had some pretty public complaints about some of Technorati's services. Thanks for the terrific feedback and comments. I feel your pain.

We sat down, listened hard to what you were saying, and then got to work. And tonight, we rolled out a raft of bug fixes and performance enhancements that should help most, if not all of the Cosmos (URL) searches you do on Technorati. It will also help with the speed of all searches across the site...


What we should learn from this.
The blogosphere is wild and wooly and can't be told what to do. But if you...

1. Listen to what is being said [in the blogosphere or elsewhere].
2. Analyze whether or not there is truth in the buzz.
3. If there is a grain of truth then ferrett it out and fix the problem.
4. Report back to the buzz makers with a post showing you've already done what you can in response to the buzz and be genuine. Show you care about your customers / users and that you'll stop at nothing to keep them happy and earn back their trust.
5. Keep working on the issues and ask for more feedback from the buzz makers in an effort to be the best and to connect with your users on a more personal level.

Again, great job Dave and the Technorati team. I think many a company can learn a great lesson about damage control and customer service in these crazy times. I'll keep following with me eyes open wide.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 08:06 AM
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Eyebeam Looking For Talent

If I weren't married, weren't a father, weren't deeply involved in my community and wasn't extremely happy where I am geographically, professionally and mentally then I'd be there in a flash. Eyebeam is one of those organizations you don't really know about because you have to know their work before you know who they are. In order to know their work you have to be a bit "in the know" to begin with... or at least actively involved in the inner-circle of the online world. I've been following Eyebeam's work for about 2 years now and although I've never met Jonah Peretti, I've admired his [and the eyebeam team's] work from afar. I've been linking to Eyebeam's reblog for as long as this blog's been up as well so don't even say I'm jumping on the bandwagon or you'll get pounded.

So if you're up to the challenge and are a tech enthusiast then you need to apply, NOW!

Eyebeam R&D seeks inaugural fellows to work on creative technology projects in the Eyebeam Open Lab. The fellowship is a unique opportunity to participate in a new kind of research environment and contribute to the public domain.

The Open Lab is dedicated to public domain R&D. We are seeking artists, hackers, designers and engineers to come to Eyebeam for a year to develop pioneering work. The ideal fellow has experience creating innovative creative technology projects, a love of collaborative development, and a desire to distribute his or her work as widely as possible.

Participation in the R&D Fellows program includes:

* One year fellowship
* 4 days/week commitment
* $30,000 annual stipend + health benefits

Facilities
The new Open Lab facilities are directly adjacent to a public gallery. Tools include a laser cutter, 3D printer, fully equipped electronics workbenches, multiple co-located servers, and general supplies. We also have a budget to requisition equipment to realize specific projects.


Submit your resumes here.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 12:33 AM
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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

7-11 Branding And Innovation


7-11 Is A Market Maker / Innovator
This is a great piece from Brand Autopsy about how my favorite convenience store chain has evolved over the years to accomodate it's customers.

The convenience store that invented convenience stores, 7-Eleven got it's name because it was open during the unheard of hours of 7:00 am until 11:00 pm...

...At that time that was remarkable. That was unheard of.


From The 7-11 Corporate Site
The company's first convenience outlets were known as Tote'm stores since customers "toted" away their purchases, and some even sported genuine Alaskan totem poles in front. In 1946, Tote'm became 7-Eleven to reflect the stores' new, extended hours - 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., seven days a week. The company's corporate name was changed from The Southland Corporation to 7-Eleven, Inc. in 1999.


They have a major distribution hub in Orlando and I can, to this day, remember driving by it every night on our way home from the family business. I remember thinking to myself, man, there sure is a lot of delicious food in those trucks!

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 11:12 PM
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Om Malik On Yahoo's Lack Of Innovation

A few days ago I put my 2 cents in about how Yahoo made an incredibly stupid move by turning HotJobs into a meta search engine. I think it's a terrible move from a branding standpoint and I clearly stated that in my original post but now that Om Malik and SiliconBeat are saying the same thing, I wonder if others will sit up and take notice. The others being Yahoo in particular.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 12:40 PM
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Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Doc Searls Defends Technorati


Doc Searls comes to Technorati's defense regarding several posts based on the original Tom Foremski piece on SVW about the alleged blatant selling of Technorati to corporate America on a recent panel.

Doc has some good points about data based on other data and repurposing content. In it he talks about how all of us, me included, based our posts on the original content in the SVW piece as if it were fact. Doc pointed to my original post, which Jeremy Wright then picked up and the list goes on. I understand where Doc is coming from and why he's coming to David Sifry's defense but my points are still valid... whether or not Technorati actually, not only allegedly, pitched it's service to the listeners of a recent panel. Jeremy's points are valid as well.

I personally know Tom Foremski and would not have based my piece on his story if I didn't know him as an actual journalist. Tom would not put up data if it weren't true, no matter how exciting it might be. Regardless, Technorati has issues it needs to deal with or it's going to face continued scrutiny on it's performance issues and lack of completeness. David Sifry and team have made a ton of progress in recent months regarding the user interface and features and have squashed a ton of bugs on the way... but if the performance doesn't get fixed then it's going to be a major issue.

Secondly, I know Doc Searls understands the wolfpack mentality and how the bad part of bloggers is that we can be like a wolfpack and tear apart anything in our path if we're all attacking it at the same time. However, this wolfpack mentality must be dealt with in a much lower form than applying standards to bloggers and coming up with an ubersolution. Marketing must learn how to use the wolfpack to cut a trail through the snow on cold winter days if they're campaigns are to survive in this day and age. Additionally, wolves only go in the direction of the food source, and if the wolves smell weakness they'll circle until it's time to move in for the kill. I'm not saying this is good or bad but it's something that can't be ignored.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 12:59 PM
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Monday, July 11, 2005

Yawn, Podcasting With Windows Media Player

Now if I endorsed anyone using the Windows Media player for podcasting I'd certainly be hung in the gallows. After all, the conspiracy theorists have been fairly active on my previous post about the subject of Windows Media Player spying. Yet Robert Scoble can talk all day about it, after all that's what he gets paid to do. Hmmm, one day I'll have to get one of those technology evangelist gigs. I hear the pay's right and you get to surf the web and play with new gadgets and such. That's my kind of setup.

I point out Robert's post because of how unsexy it sounds. Say it out loud with me here.

Podcasting with Windows Media Player


It doesn't get much more boring than that. No offense Robert, you're a popular guy and I know you expect folks to take a shot every now and then and that's not my intention. I'm just thinking about the fact that Windows and Podcasting are in the same sentence. Podcasting is a derivative of the iPod phenom which is a product of Apple and Mac don't play well with Microserfs since they have a long checkered history. Anyway, I saw some inherent irony in the post and had to throw that out there. I did throw you some nofollow free link love since I used your post for blog fodder. So sorry and thanks.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 11:52 PM
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Google Squanders AdWords Campaign

Google AdWords campaign not optimized.
I'm doing some research on t-shirts and always liked the blogger tees I got from Shellen. So I went to google and searched for Blogger tees. The first sponsored result above the natural results was for blogger but I was more interested in finding them at the Google Store. Well the first sponsored result on the right hand side was for the Google Store. So I figured that would take me directly to the blogger tees in there so I can get some good images of them for my due diligence.

Well I click on the ad and then BAM, I get an error page! The message states...


Oops!

Sorry but it looks like we do not have any products to display.
Please check back soon.


Then I started laughing at the irony. Google, the largest ppc ad network in the world can't optimize their own ppc campaigns. Sure, I know, they probably don't pay anything to themselves but I'm sure they have to account for the costs. Chances are they have budgets for each division [product] and they need to know how well their own ads are converting in order to increase their conversion ratios, right?

Hmm, this has got me really thinking now. You'd think Google has automated their internal ppc campaigns to determine when 404 error pages are encountered. Or at least when there is no actual content on the pages they've served up on their own networks... yeah right. First off, after looking at the response headers from the error page in the Google Store, it's plain to see they're not even returning a 404 error code. That's seo 101 but really not that big of a deal. Here are the response headers...

Response Headers - http://www.googlestore.com/category.asp?catid=0

Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 18:32:26 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Content-Length: 14031
Content-Type: text/html
Cache-Control: private

200 OK


But the funny part about the response headers is the fact they're running the Google Store on IIS 6.0 and Microsoft's Active Server Page. Wow, that's interesting. I can't believe I never picked up on that before.

I guess we can count on Google to optimize your AdWords ads for conversion ratios and making sure you're serving up decent content but not their own. File this under eating your own dog food.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 02:48 PM
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Technorati Goes All Corporate On Us?

SVW did a piece on Technorati's contribution to the blogosphere and it's efforts to monetize the data on the millions of blogs it monitors. Here are some excerpts from the SVW piece.

Last Friday I was on a panel with Sam Whitmore, of the popular Media Survey, and Peter Hirshberg, a very high powered marketing guy (see his bio) representing Technorati, a well known web site that is very highly regarded by the blogging community because of its early focus on the blogging phenomena...

...Technorati has done an enormous amount of work in supporting the early blogging communities, and it has been a strong evangelist for bloggers everywhere through its promotion of blogs and bloggers. And through its close watch on blogs, it has helped the blogging community understand itself, and how it is evolving...

...What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati's expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals.


That's kind of surprising to me as well. The fact that he's using the panel to pitch Technorati and the fact that he's trying to get these companies to use it's RSS feeds to monitor their services. I think it's something that should definitely be done but I'm surprised he tried to pitch it [if that is actually the case]. Because if/when the merits of RSS are fully discovered from a corporate PR perspective, the corporations will come running. No need to lead them by the hand to the dinner table. Right now it's still a bit of a high school party and innocent and fun, but when the big guns come they're gonna bust up the party and turn fun Bobby into sober Bobby... nobody likes sober Bobby.

Tom goes on to talk about how he was delighted to see exactly how the corporate world is going to be sold on the blogosphere. Personally, I could care less about selling the corporate world on the blogosphere. As long as large corporations are well, large, they'll be slow to adopt until the latest technology wave peaks and they can utilize their size to gain an advantage in the market. This is how things have always been done and how things will continue to be done in high technology.

Large corporations benefit from the research & development of smaller companies who have become established players in their area of expertise. If they can't replicate the technology fast enough they'll make an attempt to buy out the little guy. If that fails then they'll try to force the little guy to sell or they'll build their own version of the technology. Either way, the large corps are going to enter a market when there is money to be made and there's nothing that can be done to stop them.

I come from the small expert side of things. I'd rather invest my time and energy in a new / evolving market than have to tweak every aspect of marketing, R&D, product mgmt., etc... in order to become a player long after the 7th inning. I like being on the front side of technology curves because that's where the fun is. That's where you'll meet the kooky experts that always end up speaking at the conferences and make you ask yourself, why on earth is that person on the panel. Then you realize they founded xml or started a search engine or build voip. Long before the technology becomes a business, it was a hobby. When it's a hobby it's much easier for it to become a passion, that passion is what's at the heart of some of our great technology brands... like Apple and Google and eBay and Skype. Companies formed after that fun period in a new area of technology don't have the same spark. Just look at Gateway [computers] and Miva [formerly FindWhat] and Overstock and Vonage. The imitators just aren't the same, they came in after it was cool and only have a market advantage as their reason for existence. Now don't get me wrong, I know Google came about a good bit after search had been introduced but they made it really hot and that's something that makes a great brand.

So let's hold off on selling Technorati to the corporate types for a while. Plus, once that happens we're going to experience even slower search times.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 12:07 PM
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Pay Per Call Heats Up



Pay Per Bling aka Pay Per Call

My boy Greg Sterling says the ppc [pay per call] space is heating up and cites Miva's move into the UK and several insider conversations he's had recently. Most people don't know that the Kelsey Group use to have a voice division but has since left that market. However, since pay per call has been an offshoot of the search industry, they're covering this aspect of voice.

Here's a snippet from Greg's post.
On the heels of the U.K. launch of PPCall by MIVA (using Ingenio’s system), Netimperative reports that there are two other companies offering or about to offer PPCall in the U.K.

The Kelsey Group also knows of a major U.S. Internet Yellow Pages publisher that is about to offer PPCall to its online advertisers. These developments (plus other conversations I’ve had) suggest that the market for Internet driven calls will develop more rapidly than the several years it took for pay-per-click to build momentum.


The Kelsey Group has recently released a report on Pay Per Call and it's a must read for anyone needing to know what they should do to capitalize on this hot trend in search.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 10:20 AM
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Sunday, July 10, 2005

Smart Parking Meters - City Life Worsens

Smart parking meters are bad karma
I was reading a piece from CNet reporter Michelle Meyers on smart parking meters that monitor your parking space and when you leave they reset the counter to zero. So no more free lunches using someone else's leftover time, if these new meters take over, there will be no more leftover time.
It's one of life's little pleasures--a reward for all of the time and energy you've put into finding a parking spot in the first place. You go to put your only silver coin in the meter and--yippee--it's still got 25 minutes left.

Well, savor those moments, because it looks like technology is making them a thing of the past. A story on smart parking meters in the Wall Street Journal last month referred to meters in Pacific Grove, Calif., that know when a car pulls out of the spot and quickly reset to zero.

It's rare that stories on new technology make me sad.


She picked up on the original story from WSJ and notes the uproar on Fark when they commented on the story as well.

Here's What I Think
With parking meters and every other major nuissance in cities, the city managers need to keep the main thing the main thing. That is, they need to ensure a safe city that's enjoyable and fun to be in while taking care of their budgets at the same time. I personally have two outstanding parking tickets from parking in a space and forgetting to put more money in the meter after my time had ran out. Now, I understand getting a ticket, no matter how annoying it is. I think tickets have become a way of life in cities and most of us are accustomed to them by now. However, resetting a meter is taking the whole parking meter thing a bit too far.

First off, we all know we have to pay the meter in order to park and that's fine. But we also look forward to those serendipitous moments when someone has left us 15 or 30 or even 45 minutes on a parking meter and we know that's plenty of time for us to park and do what we need to do. Those moments of pure joy and excitement are made possible by for two reasons.

1. Someone paid more than they needed to and felt a little bit of pain leaving a meter they knew had extra time on it. Their pain was offset by the fact they knew someone else would benefit from that little bit of time so it all made sense in the end.

2. Parking meters are dumb. You put money in them and a egg timer starts. When the egg timer dings the cop comes and writes you a ticket if you don't feed the meter again. i.e. the metering technology is old.

Now I'm no city manager or mayor but I know there's going to be a lot of good karma leaving our great cities if these smart parking meters are installed. Good patrons needing a bit of good luck won't find it in the usual places. Good Samaritans paying extra will become jaded knowing the city is profiting off of every minute a car occupies a metered spot and their small investment in good karma will go unnoticed. I'd had to be the city manager in one of these new smart meter cities, it's not going to be pretty.

Of course you know I'm joking about this whole thing but there's a bit of truth in all jokes. I think these new smart meters stink and hurt more than they help but that's just my opinion. Here in Merritt Island you won't find a parking meter. But in Cocoa Beach they installed them at every numbered beach access street and it definitely hurt a little bit.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 05:14 PM
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« July 2005 Week 1 July 2005 Week 3 »

  • Week 1 (3 entries) July 1-9
  • Week 2 (11 entries) July 10-16
  • Week 3 (12 entries) July 17-23
  • Week 4 (0 entries) July 24-30
  • Week 5 (0 entries) July 31-31

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