As reported this week on TechCrunch, The Funded has been sued by EDF Ventures.  EDF is upset because someone anonymously wrote something bad (heaven forbid!) about them.

Fortunately, The Funded shares my views that websites should log nothing, and hasn’t been logging for quite some time.  As such, EDF’s subpoena is worthless.  This will save a lot of people a whole lot of time, grief,  and money in avoiding the courts.  I hope the major online sites follow suit before this gets really out of hand - because that is where it is going.

As for EDF - I hope they learn something from this.  If nothing else, they should get thicker skin!

Here in America, when we have a problem, our politicians really can’t do anything to fix it.  Even if we all agree we need a problem fixed, we go through endless spiral debates that take years.

In Beijing, they have a lot of traffic.  They didn’t want traffic to be a problem during the Olympics - so they simply passed an odd/even driving rule for the month.  If your license plate is odd, don’t drive on even days.  Overnight, traffic dropped by 50%.  No problem!  Try accomplishing that in the United States.

We righteous in America always think we know best.  And in some cases, maybe we do.  But when it comes to just getting stuff done, you’ve got to admit, the Chinese are way ahead of us.

As you know, I’ve been a Vista fan for a while.  I run it at home, and really like it.  It’s much better than XP, despite the awkwardness of UAC.

Despite my praise, I’ve been surprised to hear my colleagues and also the press in general describe Vista as a catastrophic failure.  At first I thought it was Microsoft bashing, but the bashing was so consistent and so prolonged that I believed it.  Although I liked Vista - most people apparently did not.

Microsoft was naturally frustrated by this.  I know they do a lot of usability studies there, and it had done well in studies.  Why did it “fail” in the market and press?

Hence, Microsoft Mojave was born.  This was a user experiment where Microsoft recruited volunteers who had never tried Vista to check out Microsoft’s new OS, “Mojave”.   Only after demoing Mojave and getting rave results from those same users did Microsoft reveal that Mojave was actually just Vista.

Anyway, if Microsoft is to believed on this (and don’t forget Microsoft has been caught lying under oath in the past with forged videos), it confirms my thoughts on Vista.  Vista is actually pretty well liked; just hated by the press.

If you rewind the clock to April, Silicon Alley Insider praised Yang’s handling of the Microsoft negotiations, saying that “Yahoo Playing This Brilliantly“.   Now, Silicon Valley Insider claims that Yahoo Management “blew the deal“.

Alright - just because you did some things well doesn’t mean that you will succeed, and obviously Yahoo didn’t get the deal done (is that success?).  But what is clear is that no matter what Yang did, Silicon Alley Insider intended to roast him for it.

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/barack_obama_spends_2_8_million_on_google

I would never give money to a politician unless it was a good investment.  For individuals, it’s not.  But hey, want to see which of your friends are suckers?  You can even get their addresses and go T-P their houses.

Today Microsoft launched Live Search Cashback!  This service is really a merging of their Jellyfish service (Microsoft bought Jellyfish some time ago) with Live Search.  Microsoft says it’s going to help change the game against Google.

I first used Jellyfish back in October, 2007.  I thought the service was pretty nice.  They have a whole “community shopping” service, which I am not interested in, but from visiting their site, you can clearly see via the live “shopping smackdowns” that there are lots of people that do.  I guess their competition is probably the Home Shopping Channel and such.  Clearly shopping as entertainment is a very valid business.

The reason I signed up at Jellyfish was because we were buying some chairs online, and I found that the seller had an affiliate program through Jellyfish to give us 15% off.  15% off the $450 was over $50, so it was worth it.

Overall, affiliate rebates are just like mail-in rebates.  You never know when or if you’ll get paid.  So be careful.

Here is roughly what happens:

1.  You make a purchase.  You can’t go directly to the merchant’s site; you need to make sure you follow the links from the affiliate you are expecting the rebate from.

2. At that point, you’ll pay full price, and you’ll get the product delivered to you.

3. The seller has an agreement with the affiliate (Microsoft) that it will pay the affiliate every 90-120 days.  They do this to avoid paying rebates on items which could be returned, and also because nobody likes to pay bills promptly.

4. Finally, Microsoft can credit your account; since they’ve automated the process, I expect this is probably pretty quick - within 1-3 business days from Microsoft receiving the money.

5. Of course, Jellyfish/Microsoft know that it’s been 3-4 months since your purchase and there is a decent chance you’ll forget altogether.  So they won’t tell you the money is there.  You need to check your account, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a balance to cash out.

If you haven’t used affiliate cash back programs before, you probably should now that Microsoft is fully in the game.  Most affiliate programs to date have not passed all the money back to you, the consumer.  However, Microsoft’s program does - they are passing 100% of the affiliate check back to you.  How does Microsoft get paid?  Well, technically they don’t - if you claim your money.  However, if you forget to pick up your check, well, they got paid anyway, didn’t they?

Overall, I think Jellyfish/Cashback is pretty cool and I will use it.  Over the long haul, however, I don’t expect affiliate programs will ever offer the best prices.  Management of affiliate programs is expensive, and as more companies make their own online efforts efficient, the cheapest prices will be direct from the manufacturer  (absent subsidies from Microsoft, that is :-).

This is great news!

Since I have no insight into ads or Google’s financial numbers, I can post this.  I post this on my own, and have no idea what my employer thinks…

Last month, Markus Frind reported on his blog that his adsense click-through-rate “declined by 60% in the last 2 months”.  Content providers that make lots of money through pretty liberal placement of fairly useless advertising have been complaining.  It’s no surprise that they are disappointed; who wouldn’t be.

This week, Google’s 10K report says:

“…the main focus of our advertising programs is to provide relevant and useful advertising to our users, reflecting our commitment to constantly improve their overall web experience. As a result, we may continue to take steps to improve the relevance of the ads displayed on our web sites and our Google Network members’ web sites. These steps include removing ads that generate low click-through rates or that send users to irrelevant or otherwise low quality sites and terminating Google Network members whose web sites do not meet our quality requirements. In addition, we may continue to take steps to reduce the number of accidental clicks. These steps could negatively affect our near-term advertising revenues…”

Advertisers seem to be heralding the news (see comments), as you would expect.

When you learn to ride a bike, you start with training wheels.  Over time, you learn to ride without the training wheels, so you take them off. 

If you really want to be a good typist, you ultimately need to get rid of your training wheels - the backspace key.  Sounds absurd, right?  Try it.  You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can become a better typist.  At home I have a special keyboard driver which allows me to change it.  I mapped my backspace to ‘x’.  But I don’t have that ability here at work….  I’ll have to figure it out somehow.

There is a secondary effect as well.  I find that by not having a backspace option, I think more about what I write before I write it.  I can’t tell if I’ll be a better author or code writer without the backspace key, but you’ll know I’m more deliberate.

I know, you think I’m crazy.  Try it!

Late last year, I stopped using Facebook when I witnessed them giving my personal information to advertisers.

The clever advertiser, Josh Koppelman, has exploited that data again to gain insight into potential employee turnover due to the MicroHoo possibility.  The data is not statistically accurate, but it is definitely an interesting indicator.