if i only knew...

Shopping is everything, or is it?

Quote from the Internet Advertising Bureau daily newsletter i got today:
"Advertising Age gave its Magazine of the Year prize to "Lucky," the shopping publication that essentially invented a genre. Ad Age applauds the way the magazine cuts to the chase, offering its target demographic access to the products it wants without distracting with articles unrelated to shopping."

I find this remark (underlined) very very disturbing. It suggests that the target demographic, which i suspect is 16-30 females with lots of disposable income, does not and SHOULD NOT care about anything else than shopping. I know, the alternative for Lucky is to distract its users with make-up, what to wear to a leopard-print thong, and stuff like that, but still, surely these people don't have VISA logos in the place of their eyeballs?!

OK, i should rephrase: I find the remark not just disturbing but insulting, on behalf of Lucky's target demographics. Of course, knowing the current and foreseeable domination of consumerism in society i am probably just applying my own mindset over things that are in an entirely other realm, where shopping IS the alpha and the omega of existence.

Further quotes from the AdAge article that just make things worse and worse:

{A magazine, as one senior-level editor at another title puts it, that sees the world as "a series of products to be consumed."} Now, that's a mission statement.

A quote from the founding editor in chief: {"I can see why people would think that it means the magazine world is going to hell when this really hot magazine is a magazine without paragraphs," she says. "I get that. At the same time, all I ever tried to do was to fulfill a need, and by doing that I wasn't trying to squash anything meaningful in our culture."}

{Nevertheless, even Ms. France, (...), sounds slightly scared at what her Lucky has wrought.
"Does my jaw drop in focus groups where women look at the 'Ask the Editors' column" -- a relatively straightforward question-and-answer feature -- "and say, 'I don't want to read that page because there's too much text there'? Yes. That freaks me the hell out."} Well, then, what about looking up the word "responsibility" in the dictionary Ms France and giving it some thought? You are a decision maker and you have the power to influence this.

And a last quote from her regarding people expressing thei concerns on the magazine: {"I don't care so much. I know I've got the readers, and that community respects me."}

Well, if that's the standard you decide to live by, enjoy.

Best sites by Google

Interesting experiment: try searching for "www." on Google and it will give you the list of the sites Google thinks are the best.
A couple of things to note:
- It apparently thinks Yahoo is a better site than Google.
- Hotmail.com's result is titled "Sign-in Access Error".
- The only listing in the top 3 pages of results that is not to the root of a website is the link to download Acrobat Reader. (The reason for that being those zillions of download Acrobat Reader links and buttons all over the web where there are PDF files to read.)
- The results also confirm that the internet and e-business is running totally independently from any dot-com boom or stock market trend or whatever. It's about building a company that people find good enough to use/buy from. Why am I saying this? Look at the top 30 and you won't find *any* company other than Google that wasn't around since about 1995-96.

Here's the top 50 list in the same order as on Google as of today (it will be interesting to check regularly to see if there are any changes...):
Yahoo, Google, Excite, Microsoft, Amazon, Altavista, Adobe, CNN, Lycos, Mapquest, Infoseek, W3C, Real Networks, Netscape, New York Times, Acrobat Reader Download, Hotmail, IBM, Netscape (again, different root server), Webcrawler, HP, Macromedia, USA Today, Apple, Winzip, Washington Post, Tucows, IMDB, Metacrawler, Barnes and Noble, Northern Light, Symantec, Sun, Dogpile, ZDNet, Google Press Centre, Apache, Monster, eBay, Intel, GNU, Shareware.com, Weather.com, Cancer.org, Britannica, Winamp, World Bank, American Red Cross, MP3.com, Alltheweb

{ idea from a link by Tommi on linkpool }

Stipe shares my taste of music

What kind of music does Michael Stipe like? Grant Lee Phillips, Bjork, PJ Harvey, Hole, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, U2, Q-Tip, Madonna's Ray of Light, T.A.T.U., Radiohead, Patti Smith, Television, the Velvet Underground, very, very much, Iggy and the Stooges... {source of information}

Interesting list to say the least, some of them are obvious to anyone who ever listened to an REM song or heard Michael sing, but T.A.T.U.? That's quite a surprising choice to mention within a list of these bands and artists. And as a sidenote - i am happy to read Michael shares my view that Madonna's Ray of Light is one of the most brilliant records, especially if put into the context of her other music. It's just way better and smarter that any of her other music before or after, and I say that even though I love a lot of her other songs.

Comment spamming here and everywhere

It looks like my blog broke through some kind of a popularity or at least visibility threshold in the blogosphere: spammers now think it's a good enough website to advertise their junk on.

Last weekend i got about 20 spam comments on this blog, and while deleting them one by one, i realized that some earlier comments that i didn't check the URLs for were also spam. When reading about blog spam i always thought of people putting usual email spam "content" in the comments so that they are very easy to recognize and delete. I never imagined that spammers are actually making sort of relevant comments on the entries and use the URL field only for their spam URL to get better search engine ranking. Amazing how far these suckers go... Out of the 20 spam comments only one was very obviously p o r n related spam, all the others were spam URLs disguised as regular friendly comments.

Anyway, i was looking for a solution to the problem, here are two links i found useful:
Movable Type gurus' post about comment spam and possible solution on Six Log
mt-blacklist is a new MT plugin that uses a blacklist of frequent spam URLs to filter comments before they are posted. I will install it today.

Update 10/20:
I installed MT-blacklist, hopefully it will help. I also found a very very VERY helpful thread in the MT support forums with lots of good ideas to prevent blog and guestbook spamming.
Also take a look at Junkeater.com, nice spam prevention service for free. I will be implementing this as well on my sites soon.