Today, the other key part of the equation has just gone live in the App Store, the PAYware Mobile app. This free application, when paired with the hardware, allows you to use your iPhone to easily accept credit card payments, just as Square does. Still, as Dorsey noted in the original video we took with him (second video below), Square is being aimed at a broader market of people who may not have merchant accounts but still wish to be able to accept payments. Also, while VeriFone's hardware is clearly better designed for use with the actual iPhone, Square's method of using the headphone jack is so that it will be able to be used with other mobile devices eventually (Square is currently working on an Android app, for example). VeriFone promises support for other platforms as well, but this particular hardware unit will only work with an iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS.

VeriFone also clearly believes its solution is the safer bet for merchants thanks to its secure payment gateway. Truth be told, running transactions on this device does feel a bit safer than Square's, but there are also a range of confusing options. And setting the thing up is kind of a pain. You're also paying for this extra security. VeriFone's solution has a $49 activation fee, along with a monthly fee of $15 on top of the 17 cents you're paying on each transaction. Square gives its hardware and accounts away for free, but plans to take a small percentage of each transaction. This will be an interesting battle to watch.

Watch a quick demo of VeriFone PAYware Mobile in the video below. You can order the hardware here. And you can find the app in the App Store here.

Given that neither Amazon nor any of the other e-book/e-reader retailers has managed to provide a compelling electronic textbook, I should have known that Apple might be the one. ... McGraw-Hill just happens to be the number 3 textbook publisher in the world. That spells a lot of potential content.

Reading glasses are for old folks and big type is for kids that don't know how to read. Well, that used to be true.

For those that believe that the web is now looking like itself and no longer doing a mimetic dance with it's first cousin, print, you should be down with this: Bigger font sizes, better kerning, wider line height and plenty of negative space make for a better user experience. Especially when reading thousands of words online everyday.

What got me going down this path was a link that someone shared today through their Google Reader shared feed to an article in Rolling Stone by Matt Taibbi. The link, as you can see, is a link to a printable version of the piece. I was rate this as great for print and poor for readability.

The post content font size is super for saving printer paper and thus trees, but it is a killer on the eyes. Reading the post at that size even in the the early paragraphs was causing me strain and fatigue. I was tired of reading the dense blocks of text without even forming half and opinion about writing. I was more concerned with the design and the inability to read it quickly because the type was packed so tight letters like sardines.

To read this article and make it not about the squished fonts and tiny words I had to throw the Readability plugin at it. Once activated it gave me plenty of white space, larger font and the ability to scan the words with ease. It performed the duty of making the web look like itself.

This got me thinking about what the best size for type readability on screens is. Turns out that after reading a couple of studies that say that is someplace between a 12pt or 14pt sans-serif typeface with a setting of 120% height in CSS. Readers also typically prefer serifed fonts for legibility but sans-serifed for actually reading blocks of text.

The major irony of course is that this blog and both of the posts that I linked to don't follow any of these guidelines for creating and optimal reading experience! Tech Startups will be heading there in the not so distant future but I fear that the those two poasts are going to be stuck in the internet dark ages.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices (smashingmagazine.com)
• Talking RSS Reader Does Just What it Sounds Like [Downloads] (lifehacker.com)
• Social media has made me boring (mdzlog.alcor.net)

No Shame In Readability is a post from: TechStartups.com

Yes, really. Rupert Murdoch's crusade to blame Google for the failing newspaper business model continues today, as it emerges that News Corp has conducted talks with Microsoft about de-indexing the company's sites from Google and (presumably) being paid to include them in Bing instead.

The concept makes sense only if you buy Murdoch's claims that Google is stealing content rather than simply helping people find it.

The revelation comes from the Financial Times, which has a strong track record for accurate reportage this is unlikely to be a fluffy rumor. The piece reads, in part:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company's being paid to de-index its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google's search engine.

News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment.

I say go for it. So, I'm sure, do all the other web publishers who see that removing many of the major news sites from Google will provide even more traffic for the upstarts. News Corp is merrily making itself irrelevant to web consumers, while continuing to use Google as its punch bag rather than addressing the radical transition of media into the online world.

In 2006 I proudly started my first blog, DigMo! It was technology, it was creativity, it was music and it was education. Despite it being a bit of blog soup I was pleased at how quick the site grew but within a few years it reached a critical point beyond which I really couldn't get the traffic to grow. The site was frankly far too general to appeal to a specific community.

The site had a massive 80% bounce rate and taking advice from reading the great advice on this site I decided to take stock and critically re-evaluate the future of DigMo!

As a result I decided to split the site and create two separate niche blogs, DigMo! To focus on educational technology and I launched a new site, TotalApps, to focus on Mac and iPhone App reviews. The thought of starting from zero scared me and I looked at ways to get the site up and running quickly.

I decided the best way to draw attention to the blog was to offer regular site competitions. Finding companies willing to sponsor prizes was actually much easier than I initially expected. I tend to target companies whose product I have reviewed and especially if the review has been popular with readers.

With blog authors being urged to declare any products they are able to keep once a review is published what better way to retain your creditability but by passing the review samples on to your readers as a competition prize ? It seems to me like a logical benefit that will add value to your site and grow the community.

The Mistakes

I think it is best to share my mistakes with the Problogger readers and the initial competitions I ran simply required visitors to leave a comment on a post. This didn't grow the site and managed to result in a massive 70% bounce rate i.e. the users came, entered, and left knowing we would email them if they had won.

The Successes

I decided if I was going to make competitions really work they needed to be of benefit not only to the visitor but also the site and thus I needed to limit entry to RSS subscribers (both email and reader)

The solution was simple and surprisingly successful and will basically work for anyone running a Wordpress blog even with a custom theme.

Setting the competition up takes a tiny bit of code adjusting but nothing too difficult.

The Concept

The competition works by placing a code at the bottom of blog posts that will only appear when the entry is read in an RSS reader, i.e. it does not appear on site.

To do this I used a known solution that was pointed out to me by fellow blogger Thaya Kareeson.

There are a few versions of this idea around but this solution works brilliantly on TotalApps. As I haven't come across any plug-ins that can run competitions this bit of code fiddling is the ideal solution for now.

Getting Started

Open the functions.php file in your current theme folder (I would back this up before adding the code just to be on the safe side).

Paste the following code into the text :

function contest_post_filter($content) {
if ( is_feed() )
return $content.'TotalApps Competition Code (Please note it is case sensitive) : a12221s';
else
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','contest_post_filter');
function contest_comment_filter($comment_text) {
return str_replace('a12221s', '[code hidden]', $comment_text);
}
add_filter('get_comment_text','contest_comment_filter');

There are two lines you need to change - 1. the line that says TotalApps Competition Code and 5 lines down the code is repeated (a1221s).

I recently ran a competition where visitors could win a copy of Screenflow 2.0. The following screenshot shows the bottom of the post as it appeared in the browser.

. and this is how it looked in the RSS reader. You should note your RSS Feed must be the full article view (i.e. not just the abstract) for the code to appear.

When the competition closes as I generally ask the sponsor to select a number between 1 and the number of comments and then contact the lucky winners using the email address in the comment.

When a competition closes you can either comment out the code in functions.php by adding /* before the code and */ after or alternatively is simply change the text to "No competition at present"

Offering a reason to sign up to the RSS feed resulted in the number of TotalApps RSS subscribers growing in one month to double the number of readers DigMo! had after 3 years.

Tips :

• Know what your readers want and try and target prizes appropriately.
• Make sure you link to your RSS and RSS by Email Feeds in the post to make it as easy for visitors to subscribe as possible.
• Make sure you make the rules clear and post the winner's name publicly on site.
• Where possible have the competition sponsors look after the postage. This not only saves you time and hassle but it is also assures the sponsor the competition is above board.
• Don't run competitions for more than a week as most of the comments tend to happen in the first week after that it dries up quickly.

I have to say I am certainly no expert in coding or blogging but am really excited to find a solution that really works for managing the competitions and I am equally as excited to see the number of subscribers grow.

There may even be better solutions out there and if you know of any I would be keen to hear them.

David Cleland is a teacher based in Ireland who runs three successful blogs (TotalApps, FlixelPix and Digmo.co.uk)

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Run Subscriber-Only Competitions on Your Blog

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Late last night, news broke that Facebook was working on a Lite version and had (perhaps accidentally) invited a number of people to try it out. In its own words, Facebook Lite is a faster, simpler version of Facebook.

While it's still unclear exactly what the intended purpose of Facebook Lite might be an even more direct competitor to Twitter or simply a Facebook that works better on slow connections one thing is clear: Facebook needed a diet and Lite appears to be exactly that.

Facebook Has Become Complex

Once lauded for its simplicity, Facebook has evolved into an incredibly complex site. Many users still don't understand the difference between Pages and Profiles (a difference that's going to become increasingly blurred), or between Pages and Groups.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of different privacy options which Facebook is now trying to streamline. And what was once a network just for college students now includes networks for high schools, companies, and, regional networks, though those are about to get killed off.

But Not Necessarily for the Better

And despite all of this feature bloat, many users still actually miss things that have been taken away or moved to the Highlights area of the homepage, like birthdays and events. In fact, another rumor we recently reported on suggests that Facebook is set to soon undo its Twitter-like homepage.

Could the social network be setting up to try and cater to two worlds: one that wants a focus on public facing status updates, and one that wants the information you used to get in the news feed, like new friends of friends and changes in relationship status? Perhaps that's what Facebook Lite is all about.

One Size Doesn't Fit All?

The biggest thing Facebook has going for it right now is that everyone is on it. Although admittedly I now spend more time on Twitter, I still often check Facebook because so many of my friends use it. But that's the exact same boat MySpace was in a couple years ago: the social network you checked because a big part of your social network was still on there.

However, at the moment, there are no signs that Facebook is slowing down, and overall, it's currently the Web's biggest time sink for users. All of this tinkering certainly makes it seems like they aren't resting on their laurels, but where exactly it's leading to is incredibly unclear at the moment.

But Facebook Lite whatever it is seems like an important part of keeping at least a certain segment of users happy. With a site whose population would make it one of the biggest countries in the world, offering more than one way to experience it might not be such a bad idea.

Tags: facebook, Facebook Lite

We just broke the news earlier tonight that Facebook is launching a newer, simplified version of the Facebook platform, called Facebook Lite. This news comes only a day after Facebook made its blockbuster acquisition of FriendFeed and rolled out its Realtime Facebook Search. You may be asking yourself what the heck is Facebook Lite? or maybe why would Facebook launch a stripped-down version of its website? We're here to answer those questions, and we have screenshots of the new Facebook Lite to help us out.

1. What is Facebook Lite?
A: It is a completely stripped-down version of the Facebook platform. From what we can tell, it is almost like a Twitter stream: you can see your most recent status updates and the updates of your friends. There is a left-hand navigation with four main categories: Wall, Info, Friends, and Photos & Videos. It does little more than that.

2. What does Facebook Lite look like?
A: Here is what we believe to be a screenshot of Facebook Lite, courtesy of Hacker News:

Very stripped down, very basic, very reminiscient of Twitter and FriendFeed.

3. Is this Facebook integrating with FriendFeed?
A: Most likely not. The deal is still new to integrate their technologies in this way, and we're hearing reports that these tests have been ongoing for the last 2-3 days. That would put its development well before the FriendFeed acquisition

4. What's the point of Facebook Lite?
A: Speculation says it's a direct assault on Twitter. Facebook continues to find ways to make itself competitive with Twitter. This is why Facebook has been launching features such as public profiles, profile fans, public status updates, and realtime search. Twitter is simple, so Facebook's fighting back with the same.

However, we don't know for sure. They may just be making a speedier version for slow connections. We'll find out more from the Facebook team soon.

5. How can I access it?
A: It's a limited test for only a subset of users. The fact that thousands, if not millions of users got the test notice was a bug. Most likely Facebook will open up the test to more users very soon, especially since everybody now knows about it.

We've contacted Facebook and are awaiting a response on this development. In the meantime, we want to hear your thoughts. Do you think it's a good idea? What do you think is the social network's goal is with Facebook Lite? And will people use it?

Tags: facebook

Inspired by the look of the personal web page of interface designer Tim Van Damme, the team over at Harkness Labs set out to build a service where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. Having lots of experience with quickly setting up and launching light-weight Web services (check out the CrunchBase profile for the company's founder Daniel Blake for a list of other projects), it didn't take them too long to come up with a good enough concept.

After a month or so of coding, Card.ly is now live. I love it (here's mine), and I'm going to send the link to a bunch of my friends. It's a bit more limited in scope than Chi.mp (our coverage) and a different approach from Unhub (our coverage), but I doubt there's an easier way to create custom social hubs that look so damn good than Card.ly.

Once you add personal details and your various online profiles (nearly 50 are currently supported, from LinkedIn to Yelp and our own CrunchBase), you can pick a custom theme out of nearly 30 proposed designs - most of which are free, others are only available with premium accounts - and automatically have your online business card published. It's hCard compliant and people can download a vCard from your personal Card.ly profile by clicking the recognizable icon under the title.

You can also embed widgets for your profile, which I have done at the top of this post. Finally, some themes support a Stream' tab, which basically doubles as a lifestreaming web application by pulling together all the activity from the profiles you added to your Card.ly account.

Card.ly is free when you're content with a limited choice of skins and RSS feeds, as well as couple of other restrictions, but there's a premium version that will set you back $24.99 a year. The paid account comes with more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, and more goodies like advertisement-free cards. Not as cheap as I'd like it to be, but I paid for it just for the fact that I can link to my Google Analytics account and get advanced statistics on my personal card.

Your opinion?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Fever and the Future of Feed Readers

Time was, every self-respecting geek lived and died by his feed reader (or aggregator, if you prefer). Just several years ago, the number of subscriptions in your RSS-chomping tool of choice made for bragging rights. 200? Oh, I can get through 500 feeds a day. More subscriptions meant you were more in the know. Really good lists of subscriptions were traded amongst friends, but cautiously, just as one might hold back a recommendation to a superb but little-known restaurant.

At the time, the only real debate was around the best way to present all this information. Some preferred a river of news, others preferred their content categorized and neatly filed, like sections in a newspaper. But everyone was in agreement: having all this fresh content collected for you in one place was a boon. It was a change in mindset, and it seeded the demand for what is now being called the Real-Time Web. (Incidentally, the Real-Time Web is next year's Web 2.0. If you'd like to appear cool and aloof, start disdaining the expression now).

Today, at least in the web-tech echo chamber, feed reading is quickly falling out of fashion. Too many sites producing too many feeds of dubious quality means information overload, and a creeping sense of obligation to keep up with a torrent of questionably relevant content. Some have gone back to checking a handful of bookmarked sites, as we did in the early days of the web. Others rely on social aggregation sites like Reddit, Digg, and Hacker News to show them what's worth reading. Both strategies are highly manual and, to me, distressingly unoptimized.

Abdicating Aggregation

Another camp all but eschews the idea of trying to keep up with feeds. Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of the superb social coding site GitHub, is one of the more visible advocates of this approach, saying in a tech conference keynote last year:

Stop using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever the kids are using these days. It's not worth your time. [L]et other people do the filtering for you. Use your time for other things.

This statement initially rings true. We're in the age of social networking, after all. I've told social sites about my friends, and my friends are always talking about things, so just show me what my friends are talking about and I'll always be in the loop, right? Then I can focus on my own interests and projects. Sounds great.

The problem with abdicating your content consumption to other people, though, is other people. Perhaps it's overestimating my ability to find interesting things to read, but I don't trust my friends and the Internet at large to educate and entertain me. In the venn diagram of my interests and my friends', there may be 80% overlap, but most of the content that I'm going to find deeply engaging is probably in the leftover 20% at the margins.

There's also a sort of collective danger to the strategy of exclusively consuming information through social osmosis: if everyone does it, who's going to find the interesting stuff? Who takes the reigns as the editors, the arbiters of taste? Going back to a post I wrote in 2003, who will be our cool shit aggregators?

If everyone took Wanstrath's advice, nobody would do any filtering and nobody would consume anything. Realistically, we're in no danger of that, but we're also not seeing a radical improvement in the way we consume information on the web. Surely someone's investigating another strategy?

Blending Subscriptions with Social Data

Google Reader is, as evidence of the slowly dying field of feed reading, pretty much the only regularly-updated, widely-used aggregator left on the web. Bloglines has been gasping for air for over a year, and NewsGator is positioning itself towards the enterprise, presumably trying to scrape some money out of the generally unprofitable business of aggregation.

Reader has been something of a playground for Google, and one of the products for which the behemoth has been most responsive to public feedback. When Reader launched, its interface was nigh-unusable. It was updated, improved, and gradually became the only feed reader worth using and not just on the web, something it pains me to say as the owner of licenses for multiple desktop aggregators that eventually had their price driven down to free, and have since seen little attention from their developers.

Today, Google seems hellbent on cramming its otherwise clean and speedy products with cumbersome, poorly conceived social features. Presumably they see social networks as a threat to their valuable side business of, uh, completely free products, and this is their ham-fisted response. In Reader's case, the user response has been one of confusion and derision.

Seeing content filtered through my social lens seems like the marriage of traditional feed reading to Wanstrath's more osmotic approach. Reader's implementation doesn't prove this to be a happy union. The tool is now cluttered with smilie faces indicating content that my friends liked, only Google has fairly incomplete view of who my friends are because they've yet to create a social experience that encourages me to share that information. Reader's myriad competing ways to share, vote on, annotate, and remember items further detract from its former appeal.

I've given up on Reader, but I'm not ready to give up on feed reading just yet. I wanted to try one more experiment.

Enter Fever

Fever is a feed reader designed and built by Shaun Inman, the developer behind the popular Mint web traffic analytics product. Like Mint, Fever is $30 (USD) and runs on your server a ballsy proposition in an age of free software running in the proverbial cloud. It is unapologetically for power users.

Fever's proposition is straightforward: supply it with the feeds you always want to read, and supplement those with feeds that you only want to read the juicy bits of. Fever will then show you a sort of personal Techmeme or Google News, pulling together stories that reference common URLs. Fever's precise formula for this isn't discussed on the product's relatively curt homepage. Take it or leave it.

I forked over my money, spun up a virtual server, and have been using Fever for several days now. Installation was as straightforward and slick as you could hope for given that Fever is a self-hosted web application. Special features aside, it handles the basics well imagine Google Reader before all the social bloat and with a far more attractive design. Fever's design is not perfect, but it's easy on the eyes and pleasant to use. Put another way, Fever doesn't make it harder to read feeds much as you always have.

The $30 question, though: does Fever really float the best, most relevant content to the top in a personalized way? Can it dig through all the noise on the web and show you what you need/want to know at a glance? The free answer: sort of.

For starters, it's easy to pollute your corpus of signal feeds, which Fever calls sparks. Fever needs sparks that contain a lot of links. If you put top feeds from Digg, Reddit, and the like into Fever, you'll basically just end up with your own dim, mostly irrelevant slice of the web. Fever really needs folks like Waxy, Laughing Squid, and Trivium to keep churning out link blogs full of references to good content. Without those sort of quality, URL-rich feeds, your Fever's view of what's hot is going to be lukewarm.

For this reason, Fever is just fine for floating good techie content to the top, but poor for most any other subject. I'd love it if Fever could find me good posts from the set of minimal techno or cocktail blogs I subscribe to, but link blogs and, indeed, linking outside one's own site just aren't as prevalent in those communities. Fever did similarly poorly given a number of sparks for top world news; a paucity of URLs means Fever can't replace Google News for figuring out what's on the front pages of the world's newspapers.

It's disappointing that I can't depend on Fever to be a one-stop shop for my daily information intake. With my current heavily-curated collection of subscriptions, I can rely on Fever to be a sort of no-bullshit Techmeme, but little more. For the topics of world news, music, art, culture, humor, food, and drink, I still need to read a number of feeds entry-by-entry.

Given Fever's initial cost, plus the ongoing cost of hosting a server on which to run it, I can't imagine that it's a tool that will last long in my tool belt. I already regret the time I spent setting it up and tuning my feeds, and I can't really justify keeping it around for the sole purpose of being a less-encumbered Google Reader.

The Future of Feed Readers

I'm not sure what the solution is here. Feed readers as we've known them are dying, but it's as yet unclear what will take their place. Filtering feeds for relevance algorithmically seems all but fruitless; filtering through the social graph is only a slight improvement, but misses the rare content that may only strike a chord with a small audience.

If there's one thing I'm convinced of at the end of this exploration, it's that there's more work to be done, and more businesses to emerge in this field. Social networks alone aren't focused enough tools to bubble up and share quality content. My hope is that a surplus open data of the sort we're trying hard to share at Twitter will help spawn a new generation of tools to manage the flood of content. I don't think it's a problem that Twitter, or any other pipeline for information, can solve on its own.

With all that said, perhaps the right approach really is to abdicate one's consumption of content to whatever you're passively exposed to, and to occupy your mind with other things. The act of creation is almost always self-affirming, and the act of consumption so rarely is.

Too Much And Not Enough: Eric Norlin (Defrag) has a nice short piece on a phrase I'm hearing a lot these days.

CrunchUp Live: Real Time Search Panel: More of too much and not enough. Kimbal Musk's (OneRiot) has the money quote of the panel: Drinking from the firehose is a ticking timebomb.

Has enterprise software has always been terrible? Gnip's Eric Marcoullier says yes: Always one for a pithy quote, Eric Marcouiller (Gnip) got one in during his 30 minute panel (with 7 panelist eek just about enough time for one question for each panelist) at TechCrunch's Real-Time CrunchUp. The real idea is that Consumer Internet is now setting the expectation for how enterprise software should work (e.g. the UI / UX is so much better).

Ok enough of that real time shit, time for some other stuff.

Technology Going Downhill: Great story about a mountain bike crash, some dislocated fingers, an iPhone, and presence of mind.

Welcoming Andreessen Horowitz: The gang at True Ventures has a great essay on early stage entrepreneurship that ends with If you are an entrepreneur today, this is an historic time to chase your dreams. With over $1 billion in fresh seed capital in the very early stage market, what are you waiting for?

The Fine Line Between Informing and Spamming Your Followers: Fred Wilson talks about how he inadvertently spammed his 27,162 followers on Twitter, why that sucks, and how he tries to deal with it.

Playful New Ways to Waste Your Time: It's fun to see how the mainstream media perceives the dynamic of social gaming. I assure you that my endless time spent in front of FarmVille and Mafia Wars is research, since I'm an investor in Zynga.

Ok time for that run.

FP&A is part of HP's expanding IT Financial Management (ITFM) portfolio designed to help chief information officers (CIOs) and IT managers create comprehensive financial transparency, optimize costs deeply but prudently, and newly demonstrate the business value of IT services.

In a related announcement here at the HP Software Universe conference this week, HP unveiled enhancements to its project and portfolio management (PPM) solution for planning and organizing IT investments.

HP also opened its related Tech Forum conference here this week. For the second year in a row, BriefingsDirect will cover the HP Software Universe 2009 conference through a series of podcasts, blogs, transcripts and Twitter entries. [Disclosure: HP is sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Follow the HP Software Universe 2009 conference on Twitter by searching on #HPSU09.

HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Center 8.0 arrives as a key component in ITFM, providing integrated capabilities for IT portfolio investment management, global resource efficiencies and IT financial transparency.

PPM popularity is on the rise as organizations align planned business investments with IT project portfolios, said Daniel Stang, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a release.

Analysts in addition to myself are hearing consistently from IT executives that cost-optimization, cost-containment, and cost-reduction initiatives are the top priorities being driven from the business side onto IT.

The business leaders are demanding a clear understanding of all IT costs and benefits as the global recession lingers, if no longer still steeply deepening. HP's enhanced IT planning and analysis solutions are designed to help IT executives reduce costs without jeopardizing IT's ability to support future growth when it's called for.

The recession therefore accelerates the need to reduce total IT cost through identification and elimination of wasteful operations and practices. But at the same time, IT departments need to better define and implement streamlined processes for operations and to show the near and far business value of any new projects.

As part of the opening keynote address here today, Andy Isherwood, Vice President and General Manager of HP Software and Solutions, said the recession compels better management of IT. CIOs need to reduce costs, yes, but they should do so without jeopardizing future growth.

Consolidating IT cut costs and saves energy by focusing on the operational inefficiencies up front. It's about getting down and dirty, not pie in the sky solutions, said Isherwood.

Along with consolidation, IT leaders can increasingly automate and virtualize infrastructure and data centers. Combined with greater financial management, IT performance analytics, and IT resources optimization, enterprises can cut their IT operations bills while setting the stage for the new phases of advancement.

And those new benefits, said Isherwood, include using flexible sourcing, from on-house premises data centers to outsourcers like HP's EDS, as well as clouds, both on or via off premises partners like Amazon Web Services. As Ann Livermore of HP said yesterday: Everything as a service.

HP is already preparing to better manage and govern the cloud transitions with its Cloud Assure, which joins IT financial management, IT performance analytics, resource management as next major focuses for the HP Software and Solutions group.

To sum up, Isherwood said that HP's major solutions drives are around IT Management Software, Information Management Software, BI Solutions, and Communications and Media Solutions.

HP expects that after a 12-month period of operational optimization initiatives that CIOs will also seek more transformative IT functional delivery improvements, including such next-generation data center bulwarks as consolidation, automation, and virtualization.

Today's pressing IT management and architecture decisions, then, need to gain from better financial management tools, proffer IT performance analytics, and exploit IT resources optimization techniques for both near- and long-term benefits.

These financial performance indicator insights and disciplines for IT will also place CIOs in a better position to look at and pursue future flexible and cost-reducing sourcing options. Those are sure to include modernizing in-house legacy deployments, outsourcing to providers such as HP's EDS, and exploring a variety of burgeoning third-party cloud offerings (on premises, off premises, or managed hybrids).

Knowing the true costs and benefits of complex and often sprawling IT portfolios quickly helps improve the financial performance, while setting up the ability to meaningfully compare and contrast current with future IT deployment scenarios. Who knows if cloud computing will save money if we don't know the true costs of all-on-premises approaches?

Gaining real-time visibility into dynamic IT cost structures provides a powerful tool for reducing cost, while also maintaining and improving overall performance. Holistic visibility across an entire IT portfolio also develops the visual analytics that can help better probe for cost improvements and uncover waste.

This is where the HP planning, analysis and financial management solution comes to the rescue in terms of value, optimization priorities, and future planning comparisons.

The HP Financial Planning and Analysis product announced here today is designed to help organizations understand costs from a service-based perspective. It provides a common extract transform load (ETL) capability that can pull information from data sources, including HP PPM and asset management products as well as non-HP data sources.

Cost Explorer, a key component of FP&A, provides business intelligence (BI) capability for visualizing data that is applied to IT costs. Users are able to see data displays color-coded to help identify different dimensions and variants in costs.

HP FP&A can be run as a stand-alone or in conjunction with other HP software products such as HP Project Portfolio Management Center, HP Asset Manager and HP Configuration Management System as well as the newly enhanced version of HP Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Center 8.0.

Along with the software products, HP is also offering consulting services based on best practices, including:

• Strategy and Advisory Services to help synthesize organizational requirements, data, process and technical gaps for developing detailed implementation roadmaps.

• Implementation Services to provide BI services for strategic decision making including forecasting budgetary needs, quantifying the value of IT services delivered to the business, improving cost efficiency, and aligning IT resources with business needs.

• Process Consulting and Solution Implementation Services based on the HP Service Management Reference Model help in deploying HP ITFM and HP PPM to get improved business results.

• Best practices for Configuration Management Systems help accelerate deployment and provide a use model for customers to identify IT assets and relate them to the costs of the services delivered to the business.

Key enhancements to HP PPM Center 8.0 include:

• IT portfolio investment management for improved alignment between IT and business with cash flow analysis that supports business reviews with actionable, real-time information.

• HP PPM Center Mobility Access for governing IT expenditures through secure and automated checkpoints from mobile devices, which send email notifications and workflow actions to cell phones and PDAs.

• Global resource efficiencies for managing human resources with reports and notifications in the recipient's language.

• Additional IT financial transparency and controls for decision support with a comprehensive financial summary that aggregates IT investment data and related analyses.

• HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) integration with HP PPM Center 8.0 provides advanced search capabilities for business and technical users.

• HP Service Manager integration offers a single IT services access point, so users can access services by creating an HP PPM Center proposal from an HP Service Manager catalog item via Web services.

What's more, HP PPM is now available in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-delivered solution that offers accelerated deployment. Expect a lot more from me on this subject, via podcasts and interviews with the key leaders.

HP is also offering new Software Professional Services for HP PPM 8.0, including:

• Solution Consulting Services for PPM 8.0 providing design and implementation consulting to help customers reduce IT costs by automating enterprise-wide portfolio management via services.

• Fast Track Deployment and Upgrades to help speed deployment of the new software.

• Process Consulting Services to help customer make use of best practices guides for industry standards. HP delivers standardized processes based on HP and industry best practices such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3, COBIT and ISO

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

Bessemer Venture Partners is incubating the startup and put in most of the original $900,000 in seed money. The company has raised a total of $1.4 million to date and works out of the Bessemer offices.

We first wrote about MashLogic in October 2008 when it went into private beta:

MashLogic is a more direct approach. Users must download a Firefox plugin to use it, but there's no toolbar. Instead, you simply change the settings to tell it what kind of information you'd like to have included on web pages. Links to Wikipedia is an easy one. But it also has company links to LinkedIn to show you people there you might know. And a currency converter. Etc. It's like a frickin Swiss Army Knife for hyperlinks.

One setting I like - the ability to remove all links on a page, and then only MashLogic links appear. For a lot of sites, the user experience is vastly superior. You can also create blacklists of domains that won't show up in links on the page, even if the original publisher put them there.

Once you've got the tool configured, smart links will start popping up all over the place. Professional Athletes get their playing stats, Politicians get a real time poll of their progress towards the White House. Currencies are *zap* converted. You can even see a map for any street address.

Their goal is to save you from having to go back to the search engine to find the next thing you're intersted in but isn't linked on the site.

The site has evolved since October. It's now available for Internet Explorer in addition to Firefox. Also, any topic trending up on Twitter is highlighted and linked (at the user option), with additional information on who's tweeting about that topic. And if a Twitter username appears in the text of a web page (as they do in our comments), clicking on it brings up a box with that Twitter users information. Users can also post to their Twitter accounts. Here's how it looks:

MashLogic works with publishers to create slightly customized versions of the product that pull information from that publisher first. Users can customize away from those changes, but most don't. We've been distributing a version of MashLogic since last October and it drives a fair amount of traffic to us from people seeing TechCrunch and CrunchBase content linked from around the web.

It's one of the few products I've tried that I've stuck with over these last months. It definitely makes browsing and research easier. Try it, I think you'll like it.

Here's an interview I did today with founder/VP Ranjit Padmanabhan. After I butcher his name we see how it all works:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor, a judge in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, to the replace the retiring Justice David Souter. The former private IP lawyer's cyberlaw decisions ranged from copyrights in a digitized world to warrantless computer searches, so-called click-wrap agreements and the Patriot Act .

In 2002, Sotomayor wrote a decision (.pdf) nullifying Netscape's online click-wrap agreement, which demanded binding arbitration of disputes between Netscape and its customers. The free download button for Netscape's browser software was high on the web page, with the user-agreement well below.

We conclude that in circumstances such as these, where consumers are urged to download free software at the immediate click of a button, a reference to the existence of license terms on a submerged screen is not sufficient to place consumers on inquiry or constructive notice of those terms, Sotomayor wrote.

Consumers sued Netscape claiming browser cookies amounted to illegal eavesdropping. Netscape claimed the click-wrap agreement demanded out-of-court arbitration. As we all know, it turned out that cookies are lawful and mostly harmless.

In a December case, Sotomayor joined in a unanimous appellate decision on the 2001 Patriot Act. The ruling limited the application of the automatic gag orders that bind ISPs that receive an FBI national security letter a type of self-issued subpoena demanding information on a customer.

If confirmed, she will be the first justice who has written cyberlaw-related opinions before joining the court, the TechLaw blog wrote.

As a New York District Court judge in 2007, the nominee ruled that The New York Times could digitize and sell freelancers' work, despite the writers' claims of copyright infringement. The Supreme Court reversed her decision. The court is current set to hear that case again, and Sotomayor would likely have to recuse herself from the rehearing.

In 2001, as an appellate judge, she upheld (.pdf) the warrantless search of a New York Department of Transportation computer. The accountant was suspected of neglecting his duties and the government searched his computer without a warrant, leading to his job loss. The authorities found unauthorized accounting software on Gary Leventhal's computer, which was believed to be used for his private accounting practice.

The searches, Sotomayor wrote, were reasonable in light of the DOT's need to investigate the allegations of Levanthal's misconduct as balanced against the modest intrusion caused by the searches.

See Also:

• Free-Lancers Have Just Begun to Fight
• Court Narrows National Security Secrecy, Limits Oversight

Get Started

Our Sandbox environment is available now, for you to build and test your application. Find out more about the opportunity and how to get started at http://developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications/

You can also see the full program guidelines on the developer site, located at the URL below:
http://www.developer.ebay.com/products/selling-manager-applications/program/

Launch with us this Summer!

The public release of Selling Manager Applications to the eBay seller community will be in August 2009. We are continuing to accept applications for our summer release. If you are interested in launching with us this summer, please contact us to initiate your Business Review. We will be locking in our launch partners by mid-June.

Upcoming Changes

• The eBay Managed Billing Platform will be released in late June. Developers should expect disruption to production access in late June and disruption to sandbox access in early July. All developers will need to integrate with the managed billing platform after the release is complete. The key changes include:
• • Setting up billing plans for applications
  • Updates to the OEPI Interface
• In June, documentation will be provided to assist developers with these changes.
• The public release of Selling Manager Applications to the eBay seller community will be in August 2009.

For more information and latest status on the Selling Manager Applications platform, please see the Selling Manager Applications User Guide at:
http://developer.ebay.com/DevZone/selling-manager-applications/Concepts/SellingManagerApps_APIGuide.html

If there were, then there would be more companies avoiding the LLC structure and setting things up as Delaware S corporations that eventually drop their S elections and become C corps. If you are serious about raising money, my advice is usually not to set up an LLC. Set up a Delaware S or C corp.

Of course anything can be fixed, so it's far from fatal if you do set up an LLC. You can set up a C corp and have it buy the assets of the LLC. It just costs money and time. You end up with less money and the lawyers end up with more.

Occasionally, angels will invest in LLCs, but it's basically unheard of for VCs. TechStars is an interesting case - we greatly prefer to invest in S or C corporations, but we'll also invest in LLCs only because it's not practical to pay to dump the LLC and incorporate the company at a very early stage. But man, can it be a headache. Those LLCs all have to provide K-1s to their investors. This ends up happening at the last minute and delaying personal tax returns for those investors. This sounds like a small problem, but investors who play with LLCs end up spending a bunch of extra time running around at tax time. I'm particularly sensitive to it right now because it's that time of year. There are other reasons investors don't like LLCs too. One big example is that they may end up creating tax bills before generating any liquidity.

Bottom line: Assuming you're not ready for a C corp, create your decision tree based on whether or not you feel that raising professional investment is desired/likely. If so, consider a Delaware S corp for now. This is very easy to change to a C corp. If you don't plan to raise money, you can get away with an LLC and it may have very real tax advantages for you to do so. As always, consult your (ideally, venture experienced) accountant and/or legal counsel before taking any specific advice, especially from me.

As for why I'm suggesting Delaware, that's for another post.

UPDATE: I posted More on LLCs two days later as a follow up.

As a venture capitalist, I've seen the advantages of outsourcing. One of our largest success stories, Stratify, controlled costs and provided 24/7 support through a well-managed outsourcing strategy. Most professions are outsourcing at least part of their work, why not lawyers?

I can see two potential ways outsourcing can work in the legal setting .

The first way is simply outsourcing outside of metropolitan areas that are expensive to live in. Why make all of your lawyers commute to New York City or the Silicon Valley to work in an office where they never see their clients? In fact, many of these lawyers would prefer to live outside the city centers to avoid the higher costs of living. I would posit that after some type of apprenticeship program at the law firm, well-trained associates could move anywhere in the country and work effectively. I know for a fact that most law firms have some lawyers working from home in locations where offices aren't located and no one knows the difference. Maybe now it's time to do that wide scale. Law offices could start to look like consulting offices in that most of their now smaller and cheaper office space is for visiting professionals. Salaries could be adjusted on cost of living analysis. The law firm could increase margins and pass some of the savings onto their clients. As an example of one firm thinking outside the box, Orrick has outsourced its entire back office to West Virginia. Why not some of the lawyers? Wouldn't many Silicon Valley lawyer prefer to practice from home in San Francisco or Marin? Who says all the good lawyer want to live in expensive places to live? Who says that good lawyers don't exists in secondary or tertiary markets today?

The second way would be to actually outsource work to other countries. This clearly works better for some practice areas than others, but if it works for processes as complicated as software development, it will work for the legal process. I think patent drafting, licensing / contract drafting, diligence and some other non-client facing tasks can easily be outsourced. I'm sure most lawyers reading this will brush it off saying it's too hard, but nearly every other industry has figured out outsourcing. One reader of this blog suggested the following:

Although the model did not work well in the airline industry, I think that smart law firms should develop budget line practices for routine work. These could be staffed with Indian attorneys, part-time stay at home attorneys and maybe attorneys in smaller markets with lower costs of living in all cases, non partnership track attorneys. They would be supervised by the higher paid, partnership track attorneys with a roughly 10%/90% split of time between the supervising attorney and these lower cost attorneys. These groups would not handle things like general client counseling, high stakes litigations or large scale M&A. The managing attorney would manage the allocation of work between the value line and the main line of the firm. Given the lower cost of labor and the increased possibility of leverage, assuming a reasonable mark-up, this proposal still might maintain per-partner profits

I actually think he's got a good point.

Something to consider. As always, fire away

We are a small, early stage startup from Russia that is getting ready to get out of the concept phase into development. Coming from an investment banking background of 18 hour dayssometimes I start to question if we are doing enough, if we have to be working on weekends, etc And although after starting to keep track of my time actually working I realized that 10-11 hour days are just as effective if done right, it still would be extremely helpful to know if successful company like yours works on weekends and on average, how many hours a day. I really hope I can get an answer from you on that, as it would solve the last big puzzle that I have before starting execution.

37signallers can set their own schedules but I'd say, on average, we work a typical workday (8 hours) and we don't work weekends. (Unless we're really feeling a project and don't want to stop. Then we'll take that inspiration and run with it.) But normally, it's a typical workweek.

Investment bankers may work 18 hour daysbut look at the state of the investment banking business. It's not the quantity of hours you work, it's how you spend the hours you do work and what you're working on that matter.

Too many people think they have to work 80-100 hour weeks. They think, No amount of work is too much work. They pull all-nighters or sleep at the office.

But you don't have to work superhuman hours. A normal workweek should be plenty. Even less is ok. In fact, being short on time is a good thing. It forces you to focus on the essentials. There's no time for things that don't matter. There's only time for the basics. And if you want to build something great, you have to nail the basics first.

Basecamp, our flagship product, was created on the side while we were still doing client work. With just 10 hours a week of programming time and 10 hours a week of design time, we made a product that took off.

We didn't have time to focus on anything other than the basics. It did a few things and did those few things really well. There were no distractions. It did what people really needed and nothing more. It was only after it took off that we decided to devote more time to it.

Also, keep in mind you're setting up habits that you'll continue to follow. If you work endless hours now, you'll probably never stop. Once you start running the hamster wheel, it's tough to get off.

Worry about the quality of your hours, not the quantity. That's what really matters.

Redirects being abused by spammers

• Scripts that redirect users to a file on the serversuch as a PDF documentcan sometimes be vulnerable. If you use a content management system (CMS) that allows you to upload files, you might want to make sure the links go straight to the file, rather than going through a redirect. This includes any redirects you might have in the downloads section of your site. Watch out for links like this:
  

example.com/go.php?url=
example.com/ie/ie40/download/?

• Internal site search result pages sometimes have automatic redirect options that could be vulnerable. Look for patterns like this, where users are automatically sent to any page after the "url=" parameter:
  

example.com/search?q=user+search+keywords&url=

• Systems to track clicks for affiliate programs, ad programs, or site statistics might be open as well. Some example URLs include:
  

example.com/coupon.jsp?code=ABCDEF&url=
example.com/cs.html?url=

• Proxy sites, though not always technically redirects, are designed to send users through to other sites and therefore can be vulnerable to this abuse. This includes those used by schools and libraries. For example:
  

proxy.example.com/?url=

• In some cases, login pages will redirect users back to the page they were trying to access. Look out for URL parameters like this:
  

example.com/login?url=

• Scripts that put up an interstitial page when users leave a site can be abused. Lots of educational, government, and large corporate web sites do this to let users know that information found on outgoing links isn't under their control. Look for URLs following patterns like this:

example.com/redirect/
example.com/out?
example.com/cgi-bin/redirect.cgi?

Is my site being abused?

• Check if abused URLs are showing up in Google. Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google's results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn't supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.
  

• You can also watch out for strange queries showing up in the Top search queries section of Webmaster Tools. If you have a site dedicated to the genealogy of the landed gentry, a large number of queries for porn, pills, or casinos might be a red flag. On the other hand, if you have a drug info site, you might not expect to see celebrities in your top queries. Keep an eye on the Message Center in Webmaster Tools for any messages from Google.
  

• Check your server logs or web analytics package for unfamiliar URL parameters (like "=http:" or "=//") or spikes in traffic to redirect URLs on your site. You can also check the pages with external links in Webmaster Tools.
  

• Watch out for user complaints about content or malware that you know for sure can not be found on your site. Your users may have seen your domain in the URL before being redirected and assumed they were still on your site.
  

What you can do

• Change the redirect code to check the referer, since in most cases everyone coming to your redirect script legitimately should come from your site, not a search engine or elsewhere. You may need to be permissive, since some users' browsers may not report a referer, but if you know a user is coming from an external site you can stop or warn them.
  

• If your script should only ever send users to an internal page or file (for example, on a page with file downloads), you should specifically disallow off-site redirects.
  

• Consider using a whitelist of safe destinations. In this case your code would keep a record of all outgoing links, and then check to make sure the redirect is a legitimate destination before forwarding the user on.
  

• Consider signing your redirects. If your website does have a genuine need to provide URL redirects, you can properly hash the destination URL and then include that cryptographic signature as another parameter when doing the redirect. That allows your own site to do URL redirection without opening your URL redirector to the general public.
  

• If your site is really not using it, just disable or remove the redirect. We have noticed a large number of sites where the only use of the redirect is by spammersit's probably just a feature left turned on by default.
  

• Use robots.txt to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your site. This won't solve the problem completely, as attackers could still use your domain in email spam. Your site will be less attractive to attackers, though, and users won't get tricked via web search results. If your redirect scripts reside in a subfolder with other scripts that don't need to appear in search results, excluding the entire subfolder may even make it harder for spammers to find redirect scripts in the first place.
  

• You can also use Webmaster Tools to remove URLs. Chances are that the spammers have also hacked and abused other sites to generate links to the spammed section of your site. If you see suspicious sites or spammed forums linking in, feel free to report those to us, preferably with the verified spam report form in Webmaster Tools.
  

Harvey Anderson, Mozilla General Counsel, wrote that after research efforts were conducted that Mozilla came, to the conclusion that our Russian users really wanted direct access to the Yandex search services in official Firefox RU builds. As a result, we're planning on setting Yandex as the default search provider for the Firefox 3.1 Russian locale builds (these changes should go into the current beta for testing). This means that, upon download and launch, the Firefox Start Page for RU locale builds will use Yandex for search queries, and the search bar will default to Yandex.

The Google-Mozilla relationship in essential to both parties: it gives Google massive distribution, and provides Mozilla with most of its revenue. And yet the Yandex move, plus Google's debut of Firefox competitor Chrome, must surely cause a little friction in this mutually beneficial relationship.

[via CNET]

More Resources From Mashable

-23 Best Social Networking Toolbars and Plugins for Firefox
-The 10 Best Google Maps Extensions for Firefox 3
-8 Google Reader Extensions for Firefox 3

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Report: Russian Search Leader Yandex Set for Massive IPO
Russian Search Leader Yandex is Hungry for International Renown
Firefox 2 Security Fixes Released
400 Million Firefox Downloads
YouTube Mobile, Yandex, Orkut Polls, Amazon PPA, FunMobility, Motorola, MobilePlay, The Onion, Jott, Congoo
Mozilla Officially Ends Support for Firefox 2
Mozilla: Would You Like a Virus With That Add-on?

Update: The Progress and Freedom Foundation is funded by the record labels, including EMI, Sony and a host of content providers.

A conservative think tank lashed out at U.S. District Judge Michael Davis on Monday, calling his mistrial decision (.pdf) in the Jammie Thomas music sharing lawsuit "unreasoned," "unreasonable" and "injudicious."

The new position paper (.pdf) from the Progress and Freedom Foundation says the judge's September ruling is riddled with "profound flaws" that "must be exposed before they mislead other jurists."

Davis' decision overturned a $222,000 Minnesota jury verdict against Thomas, setting the stage for a new trial.

The Washington-based PFF's staff and board are filled with former Reagan administration and other government officials. Monday's publication, "Thomas on the Making-Available Right: An Unreasoned and Unreasonable Decision," comes as the Recording Industry Association of America is demanding Judge Davis allow the record labels to appeal the decision to a higher court before a retrial commences. The trial is currently set for March.

Davis, a President Clinton appointee, tossed the jury's October 2007 verdict after concluding his jury instructions made it too easy for panelists to find Thomas liable for infringing 24 music tracks on the Kazaa file sharing program. Davis had instructed jurors Thomas was liable for infringement solely for having music in an open share folder on a peer-to-peer network, even without evidence that anyone had downloaded the music illegally.

It was an important decision, resting at the heart of what proof is required to ding a file sharer for copyright infringement, with fines totaling up to $150,000 per music track.

The RIAA has issued about 30,000 lawsuits. Most have settled out of court. Rulings on the so-called "making available" argument have been all over the map. The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled in a file sharing case.

Only one federal judge has sided with Davis. But the RIAA eventually won a $40,000 judgment from the judge, before trial, after the court said the defendant had tampered with evidence. But a Texas judge last month sided with the RIAA in a case against a teenager accused of "making available" music on a file sharing network.

In declaring a mistrial in the Thomas case, Davis wrote that "actual" distribution of music files was required. The RIAA countered that infringement was implied (.pdf), and that it was next to impossible to demonstrate somebody else downloaded files that Thomas publicly made available.

Still, the decision, even if ultimately accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court, does not kill RIAA lawsuits. In every case, the RIAA downloads music files from the open share folder. Judge Davis said the 24 downloads allegedly made from Thomas' share folder could be used as evidence of infringement. (A looming issue, however, is that the RIAA's investigators are not licensed, which could become an evidentiary issue but so far has not.)

Thomas Sydnor II, a Progress and Freedom Foundation senior fellow, blasted Davis for failing to follow case law that found pedophiles were guilty of distributing child pornography for solely having kid smut in an open Kazaa share folder. Snydor wrote that Davis "found these on-point analyses of the ordinary meaning of 'distribute' irrelevant."

Sydnor, a former copyright adviser to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the Thomas decision misread or disobeyed precedents, federal treaties, scholarly reviews and the three branches of government.

In his mistrial decision, Davis concluded the RIAA's position "is simply not reasonable."

Sydnor seized on that language.

"And with that, Thomas collapsed its rickety tower of clashing results, unreasoned decisions, and distinguished precedents," Snydor wrote. "This extreme claim was itself unreasonable, and it triggered cascading absurdities."

Illustration: Modernhumorist

See Also:

• Thomas Demands Retrial in RIAA $222000 Verdict
• RIAA Decries Attorney-Blogger as 'Vexatious' Litigator
• Beckerman: RIAA's 'Vexatious' Charge Reeks With 'Falsehood and ...
• Retrial Date Set in RIAA v. Thomas
• RIAA Decries Texas Woman as 'Vexatious' for Demanding File Sharing ...
• Judge Declares Mistrial in RIAA-Jammie Thomas Trial
• MPAA Waffling on Piracy Costs; RIAA Says Illicit CDs Worth $13.74 Each
• File Sharer Settles with RIAA for a Whopping $756 a Song

But please no flashing text (i.e. blinking text).

WordPress themes normally apply the same style to all of the widget titles within your sidebars.

With some additional entries to your theme's style sheet, you can give each widget title its own unique appearance, transforming the (boring) version above to:

How do you add entries to your theme's style sheet?

It's as easy as 1, 2, 3 & 4.

When adding entries to your theme's style sheet, it is best to add them after the existing content.

The style sheet entries used to achieve the above are:

.widget_recent_entries .widgettitle
{
color: blue !important;
font-size: 1.7em !important;
}

.widget_categories .widgettitle
{
color: white !important;
background-color: blue !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
padding: 10px !important;
}

.widget_pages .widgettitle
{
border-bottom: 2px solid black !important;
}

.widget_calendar .widgettitle
{
font-variant: small-caps !important;
}

So how does this work.

When a widget is rendered to HTML, it is done so using the following format:

<li id="widget-id" class="widget widget-specific-style">
<h2 class="widgettitle">Widget Title Text</h2>
...
</li>

Each widget has its own unique ID and class specific style, as well as the generic widget' class.

If we look at the recent posts widget, we see:

<li id="recent-posts" class="widget widget_recent_entries">
<h2 class="widgettitle">Recent Posts</h2>
...
</li>

So we can style any widgettitle' classed item which follows a widget_recent_entries' classed item as is our want.

So to achieve our pimped version, we added the following:

.widget_recent_entries .widgettitle
{
color: blue !important;
font-size: 1.7em !important;
}

The period character (.) before the names .widget_recent_entries' and widgettitle' is critical since this is used to denote a class name.

You will note the use of !important which forces that specific setting to be used. If this was not used, then the entry may be overridden due to the rules used to determine the precedence of style sheet entries.

Now consider the categories widget, we see:

<li id="categories-227973261" class="widget widget_categories">
<h2 class="widgettitle">Categories</h2>
...
</li>

So to pimp the categories title we add the following:

.widget_categories .widgettitle
{
color: white !important;
background-color: blue !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
padding: 10px !important;
}

Now the categories HTML is slightly different to the recent posts widget in that the ID is qualified by a number, 227973261 in this case. The recent posts widget can only be used the once in your sidebars, whereas the categories can be used multiple times, and the ID, which is automatically generated by WordPress, uniquely identifies that instance of the widget.

Using the class name within the style sheet will cause all widgets with the same class to be affected. So if we added another Categories widget to the sidebar, its title will be styled the same.

How can you pimp the category titles differently? I'm glad you asked.

If we look at the page source we will see that the categories widgets are rendered as:

<li id="categories-227973261" class="widget widget_categories">
<h2 class="widgettitle">Categories</h2>
...
</li>

<li id="categories-234397751" class="widget widget_categories">
<h2 class="widgettitle">Another Categories</h2>
...
</li>

We target individual category widget instances by using the widget ID instead of its class, so the style sheet entries become:

#categories-227973261 .widgettitle
{
color: white !important;
background-color: blue !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
padding: 10px !important;
}

#categories-234397751 .widgettitle
{
color: white !important;
background-color: red !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
padding: 10px !important;
}

The hash character (#) is used to denote an ID of an item within the page. So, we are styling any item which has a class of widgettitle' which follows any item with an ID of categories-227973261 or categories-234397751.

So now our sidebar looks like this:

Whilst the widget appears within your sidebar, the ID will not change. However, if the widget is deleted and then recreated, the ID will change. So any existing ID based style sheet entries will no longer have any affect.

I would save the original theme's style sheet and also record any changes you make to this file. This will allow you to easily identify what changes you have made and why, so if your theme is updated, which will replace the contents of the style sheet within the theme, you can easily remake your required changes.

Have fun pimping your widget titles!

This post was inspired by a comment posted on our Simple Image Link Plugin page. The original comment is here and my response here.

The Cartoon Network LP v. CSC Holdings, Inc., No. 07-1480-cv(L) & 07-1511-cv(CON) (2d Cir. Aug. 4, 2008)

The Second Circuit has issued an interesting and potentially important ruling that Cablevision's DVR as a service does not infringe copyright law. This ruling reverses the district court's summary judgment for the plaintiff and opens the way for Cablevision to roll out its DVR service offering in the Second Circuit.

The good news is that the opinion eliminates the odd regulatory distinctions between DVRs as a device and DVR as a service. The bad news is that to reach this conclusion, the Second Circuit has to override a lot of adverse precedent, and I'm not sure that other circuits will find this panel's arguments entirely convincing. As a result, it will be interesting to see if Cablevision interprets this opinion as a greenlight for a national rollout.

Thus, while the opinion is good news for DVR service offerings, the opinion leaves open a lot of questions that will have to be answered in the future. I think it's safe to say that this opinion is hardly the last stop in our journey.

Buffering Isn't Infringement

Cablevision's DVR service splits a broadcast feed into two streams, including a "buffer" copy that goes to a router where it is stored for no more than 1.2 seconds as the router looks to see if any consumers have asked for the program to be recorded for them. If yes, the data goes into their private storage areas; if no, the stream is discarded. The court holds that this buffer copy isn't fixed because it's not embodied "for more than a transitory duration."

To reach this conclusion, the court has to fight against a lot of precedent, especially the MAI v. Peak holding that a copy into RAM is fixed, even though that copy may be embodied for even less time than the buffer copy at issue here. The court says that MAI v. Peak stands for the proposition that these short-duration RAM copies can be fixed but are not automatically fixed. The court says that in MAI (without citing any actual facts from the MAI case), the software surely was resident in RAM for "at least several minutes" while in this case the copies exist for only 1.2 seconds, and this factual difference explains the different conclusion regarding fixations.

There is a major slippery slope problem with this conclusion. Is 3 seconds fixed? 10 seconds? I could keep going, and the court deftly side-steps this problem. Nevertheless, this holding offers some promise for certain types of web activity. First, this ruling might excuse copies made by scrapers/robots who download copyrighted pages to extract unprotectable information on the page. This case suggests that the copies made to download the page and perhaps to process it are not fixed, at least so long as they are flushed really quickly (1.2 seconds or less would be good). Second, this case seems to provide another defense to the otherwise problematic argument that web browsing is infringement; so long as the user hits the back button (and kills any local cache) really fast, no fixation of the web page. The opinion deliberately limits itself to Cablevision's system of overwriting the data, so that may limits its overall applicability, but this case creates a new category of copies that are embodied in a medium but are not fixed, and this offers some hope for defendants.

Users, Not Cablevision, Make the Other Copies

Even if the buffer copies aren't fixed (and therefore cannot support an infringement claim), Cablevision still stores a copy of the broadcasted works in its storage area, where users can download the programs. There's no fixation problem with these, so plaintiffs challenge these copies as both impermissible copies and public performances. The court rejects these arguments, concluding that Cablevision is a sufficiently passive entity that the users and not Cablevision are doing the legally significant activity. Thus, Cablevision is at most exposed to contributory liability for these user activities. Because the plaintiffs had waived allegations of contributory infringement, Cablevision gets summary judgment.

To reach this conclusion, the court ignores Cablevision's active role in setting up its systems and providing ongoing services, including selecting which broadcast channels are DVRable in its system. Instead, the court sees this fact pattern as identical to DVR as a device, where the DVR manufacturer isn't directly liable for how the DVR is used. This is consistent with the uncited Field v. Google case, but it conflicts with numerous copyright cases where the service provider's hosting of files gives the provider more legal responsibility over the system usage than a device maker would have. Similarly, the court distinguishes the coursepack cases on the basis that a human employee of the copyshop presses the "copy" button, because here the system works automatically without manual intervention from Cablevision.

Note, of course, that the court didn't discuss contributory liability, which also raises the ugly and risky question of whether Cablevision users are directly infringing by using the DVR as a service. I think there is helpful language in the Sony Betamax case about DVRing as a fair use, but I doubt anyone wants to see that battle relitigated.

Similarly, with respect to the argument that the distribution of the files from Cablevision's storage area is a public performance, the court says that Cablevision isn't "transmitting" as required by the statute because the user is making the legally significant action.

Further, Cablevision's delivery of the file isn't "to the public" as required by the statute. This latter conclusion is totally fine with me as a matter of common sense interpretation of those words, but it runs contrary to numerous messy and analytically questionable precedents regarding the central serving of copyrighted works to private spaces, such as Redd Horne and On Command. The court deftly tries to evade those, but after 2 readings I still can't figure out what the court said. Maybe the third time will be the charm. I think it has something do with the fact that Cablevision encoded each file delivery to its consumers so that each file delivery could be consumed only by a single playback machine. Let me know if you can figure out what the court was saying here and how it might apply to anyone else. Because the ruling seems to let Cablevision freely broadcast third party content to potentially all of its subscribers without constituting a public performance, I think there may be some exploitable holes here.

One more open question: this opinion makes me wonder if the MP3.com opinion from SDNY is still good law. I'd need to go back through that opinion, but as I recall, a lot turned on the fact that MP3.com tried to act as a proxy for its users. Here, the court treats such proxy activities as passive, and perhaps that analysis would fit the MP3.com facts as well.

Conclusion

I'm excited about this opinion because it eliminates some of the legal anomalies between DVR as a device and DVR as a service. In many situations, DVR as a service will be a better consumer experience, and it is unquestionably better for the environment, so I'm happy that this opinion tries to get copyright law out of the way to enable this result. At the same time, the appellate court set up enough conflicts with other precedent, and sufficiently caveated its opinions to address the narrow facts in Cablevision, that I expect this case resolved nothing definitively. That will have to wait the many cases in our future.

Even so, I remain amused (in a cynical way, not a funny way) that the broadcasters are still fighting against giving consumers what they really want, which is to consume their content at the time and place of the consumer's own choosing. Eventually, broadcasters are going to have to bite the bullet and post their content onto the Internet for viewers to enjoy at their convenience. There always will be consumers who want to consume the content upon first release, but after that, content that's unavailable to consumers is just wasting away instead of continuing to make money for the broadcasters.

In dim light, your brain tells the muscles to open your pupils up wide, and you can see better in the dark (although it takes the rest of your optical system a few minutes to adjust its sensitivity to compensate, and human night vision is pretty lousy compared to that of many other animals). When you get your eyes checked, the ophthalmologist's annoying eyedrops trick your eye muscles into opening the pupils all the way, so that the coloured part of your irises almost vanish around the edges. You might notice then that even with glasses on, you can't focus properly, or read a book or computer screen.

Building lenses to work like the human eye

Camera lens designers take many cues from eyes, and one of the main ones is having an iris (the lens diaphragm) inside the lens that can open or close to let more or less light through. Instead of using muscles and tissues, camera lens diaphragms have a set of thin, overlapping pieces of metal known as aperture blades, and instead of the pupil, the opening in the middle is the aperture:

There are seven metal diaphragm blades in this lens, which open and close the central aperture. Other lenses may have more or (rarely) fewer blades, and in some designs the edges of the blades might be curved so the aperture is more like a circle than a straight-edged polygon.

As in the human eye, the aperture lets the photographer (or the camera's exposure computer) increase or reduce the amount of the light that gets through to the film or sensor at the back of the camera body. But why would you want to do that? Why not let in as much light as possible all the time?

Depth of field, speed, and sensitivity

There are three main reasons to vary the lens aperture:

• To control the depth of field (also known as the depth of focus) of the image.
• To permit shooting at either a faster or slower shutter speed.
• To use greater or lesser sensitivity (often called "ISO") for your film or digital sensor.

Depth of field refers to how much of a photograph is in focus, like this:

On the bottom left, an image with little (shallow) depth of field, using a wide aperture (see the lens on top left). On the bottom right, the same shot with greater (deep) depth of field, using a small aperture (see the lens on top right).

In both photographs, the laptop closest to the camera is in focus. With little depth of field (on the left), everything in the background is blurry. With more depth of field (on the right), not only can you see the laptop in focus, you can also see my sock, a book on the bed, and the bedroom dressers in the background, also largely in focus. If you closely, you can even see that the reflections in the screen of the laptop are blurry on the left, but sharper on the right.

The physics of light rays, and the way they refract and diffract inside lenses and apertures, means that when the aperture is really small, the resulting image has greater depth of fieldjust like your eyes on a sunny day. (A pinhole camera, which has an extremely tiny aperture, offers such great depth of field that it doesn't need a lens at all.)

And when the aperture is really large, the depth of field is shallower, just like when you get eyedrops at the ophthalmologist's officeand can't even read a newspaper because it's so blurry. So depending on how much of your image you want in focus, you're going to set the aperture differently. For a portrait with a nice soft background, you'll choose a large aperture. For an image where both nearby and distant objects need to be in focus, you'll choose a small aperture:

Left, large aperture, shallow focus. Right, small aperture, deep focus.

Of course there's a tradeoff. The smaller the aperture of the lens, the less light gets through, and so either:

• You'll have to expose the film or sensor longer to get the same amount of light on it, or...
• You'll have to increase the sensor sensitivity (or use faster film) to collect the light more efficiently.

But that can work to your advantage too, even ignoring depth of field:

• If you're photographing fast-moving things (sports, cars, kids, aircraft, birds in flight) or otherwise want to freeze the action, use a large aperture so you can use a fast shutter speed, since you're letting in more light.
• If you want to minimize film grain or sensor noise, use a large aperture with lower sensor sensitivity or slower, more fine-grained film.
• If you want a long exposure (to make the water in a waterfall look soft, or to blur motion so it looks like motion, or to get streaks of light from cars driving at night), use a small aperture to let in less light so you can use a slower shutter speed.
• If it's really, really bright out (a sunny day on a snowy ski hill or sandy beach), use a small aperture to avoid overloading the sensor or film.

Small and large apertures now make sense, because they give you a lot of creative control over your images, and let you adjust your picture-taking to your subject, the light, and your photographic conditions. But why are the numbers that photographers use for them, like f/1.8 and f/5.6 and f/22, so strange? What do those numbers mean, and why do the larger numbers represent smaller apertures?

What is an f-stop?

The specific setting of a lens aperture at any time is called its f-stop. (We'll see why below.) On almost all modern cameras, including big single-lens reflex (SLR) models, you adjust the f-stop with buttons or control dials, but for most of the 20th century, photographers did so by adjusting the aperture ring on the body of the lens. Many lenses still include an aperture ring for compatibility with older cameras:

The aperture ring on my 50 mm lens here is set to f/8 (the "8" below the white dot), about midway through its range.

The f-stops available range from small numbers (like 1.8 or 2.8 or 3.5) to large (like 16 or 22 or 32). Counterintuitively, the small numbers represent large apertures (on this lens, f/1.8 is wide open and lets in the most light, for instance), while the large numbers are small apertures (f/22 is the smallest aperture, letting in the least light).

To show why, we'll do some really simple math. First, here's a diagram of where the aperture might be in a typical camera lens with multiple glass elements in it:

A lens looked at two ways: On the left, looking straight into the front, with the aperture open to a width of 25 mm. On the right, a cross-section of the side (with its multiple glass lens elements), with the lens attached to the camera, again with the aperture open to 25 mm, and showing this lens's focal length of 50 mm.

The f-stop setting of a lens is the ratio between the diameter of the aperture and the focal length of the lens:

Another way to write that is aperture diameter : focal length. In this example, we have 25 mm aperture : 50 mm focal length, which is 1 : 2. Another way to say it is that the aperture is (in this case) half the focal length, or f/2. A photographer would pronounce that "eff-two." Since the widest aperture of a lens is important to know, lenses are usually specified that way, so you could buy a lens labelled as a 50 mm f/2 or 50 mm 1:2 lens.

Yet another way to think of it is that it would take two apertures of that width to equal the focal length of the lens.

Let's look at a bunch of other f-stops for my lens:

My 50 mm lens set to apertures of (from left to right) f/1.8, f/4, f/8, and f/16.

At f/1.8, the aperture is about 27.8 mm across, and it would take 1.8 of them to equal the focal length of the lens. At f/4, you'd need four of the 12¹/₂ mm apertures to equal the focal length. At f/8, you'd need eight 6¹/₄ mm apertures to equal the focal length. At f/16, you'd need 16, since the aperture is only 3¹/₈ mm across.

But why isn't the lens aperture ring simply marked with those diameters? Why doesn't it read 27.78, 17.86, 12.5, 8.93, 6.25, 4.55, 3.125, 2.27 instead of 1.8, 2.8, 4, 8, 11, 16, 22? There's a good reason, and it's the clever part.

F-numbers work for any lens, however you measure it

The cool thing is when you start to use different lenses, or different cameras. For a given amount of light entering a lens, a particular f-stop always lets the same amount of light through to the sensor or filmand it doesn't matter what focal length the lens is or what kind of camera you're using!

Here's why that's important. We already know that when a 50 mm lens is set at f/2, the aperture is open 25 mm (see my diagram above). But what about a 200 mm telephoto lens (four times the focal length)? To be open to f/2, that lens's aperture would have to be open half that lens's focal length, an opening 100 mm in diameter (four times as wide). And a 24 mm wide-angle lens? At f/2, its aperture is open only 12 mm, or half its focal length.

So if the apertures of every lens were labeled with their actual widths, every lens would be different. The aperture ring on a 200 mm lens might read:

100.00, 71.42, 50.00, 35.71, 25.00, 18.18...

But a 24 mm lens would be:

12.00, 8.57, 6.00, 4.29, 3.00, 2.18...

Even worse, to take a photo of the same scene under the same lighting conditions, you'd set the 200 mm lens to aperture 35.71, but set the 24 mm lens to aperture 4.29both to get exactly the same amount of light to your film or sensor. If you think f-stops are confusing now, imagine how confusing that would get.

Instead, I know that a 200 mm lens set to f/5.6 lets through the same amount of light as a 24 mm lens set to f/5.6, and the same as a 50 mm lens set to f/5.6. I even know that if I could get myself an 8 mm fisheye lens, or a 600 mm super-telephoto, those lenses would also let through the same amount of light at f/5.6. For a given brightness of a scene, any lens set to the same f-stop can use the same shutter speed and sensitivity to get a proper exposure.

That's why f-stops are a good way to measure aperture, and why we put up with having big numbers mean small openings. But there's one last thing.

Why those particular aperture and shutter stops?

Okay, so if we're going to use f-numbers, why aren't they a more sensible sequence, like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... or at least 2, 4, 8, 16, 32...? Why those weird ones in the middle, like 2.8 and 5.6 and 11?

That's because each stop on the aperture ring doubles the amount of light hitting the focal plane, if you're opening it wider, or cuts it in half, if you're closing it down. (Most of the time, anywaysometimes the widest aperture doesn't exactly double the light from the next-widest, just because the lens isn't designed to open any wider. So my lens opens to f/1.8 instead of f/1.4.)

Imagine your lens is set to f/5.6 and the light meter says a proper exposure is 1/250th of a second. You can open the lens up one stop, to f/4, and twice as much light gets through. So you can make the shutter speed twice as fast, 1/500th of a second, and still get the right exposure.

This explains why the shutter settings are the way they are too, as shown on the shutter speed dials of older cameras. Click your lens aperture ring one stop wider (f/5.6 to f/4), and you can click the shutter speed ring one stop too, to the next faster speed (from 1/250th of a second to 1/500th).

Click the shutter speed four stops slower (say, from 1/1000th of a second to 1/60th of a second), and you need to close the aperture of the lens four stops narrower (from f/4 to f/16) to get the same exposure.

There's a little bit of convention and standardization in all those numbers. Each f-stop, letting in twice the light, represents an increase in diameter of a factor of the square root of 2 (written as ), which is about 1.4142. Multiply 1.4142 by itself and you get 2. Multiply that by 1.4142 again and you get 2.8284. Multiply that by 1.4142 and you get 4. Multiply that by 1.4142 and you get 5.6568. Round that series out and you get:

1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22...

Look familiar?

The same for shutter speed numbers, but there it's even simpler. Take a one second exposure. To get half the light, make it 1/2 second. Half that is 1/4, then 1/8th of a second, then 1/16 (conventionally abbreviated to 1/15), then 1/32 (or 1/30, which is close enough for photographic tolerances), 1/64 (or 1/60), 1/128 (close to 1/125th), and so on. So your shutter speed dial reads:

1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60, 125, 250, 500, 1000...

My guess is, if history were skewed and photography had been invented after digital computers, things would be different. We've all gotten used to powers of two (like 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc.), so we'd have those kinds of numbers on the shutter speed dial and on our digital camera LCD screens instead of the rounder numbers we see now.

Read more

Some useful resources:

• Wikipedia: The Science of Photography
• Wikipedia: F-number
• Understanding Camera Lenses
• Controlling Light

After years of squinting in the dark to tell if the seat was clean, stretching one arm way out in front to keep the stall door closed and sitting side-saddle because the toilet paper dispenser was in my lap, I have a few ideas about how bathrooms should be kept.

This is my public restroom manifesto.

1. All stalls shall have proper lighting.

Do all the mood lighting you want in the sink area. Candle light, funky chandeliers, or brutal gym lights. Really, I could care less about the sink lighting. But the stalls. I want a bright light and no shadows. See, I'm not a squatter and I'm not a toilet seat cover user or a toilet paper ad-hoc coverer, but I am a cleaner. I will take some toilet paper and clean a toilet seat that has some water from the previous flush on it.

I want to see the water that needs to be cleaned up. I don't want a cursory look in the dim light to be turned into cursing in the dim light because I'm now wet where I shouldn't be wet. Ahem. Lighting.

2. All stalls shall have room for the door to open and an adult to step in.

Call me crazy, but I do not want to have to straddle a toilet in order to get into the stall enough to close the door. No straddling, no squeezing, no square dancing moves. I want to step in, close the stall door behind me and not have to brush up against anything. And if this is an airport bathroom, which might need a manifesto all it's own, I must be able to get my luggage into the stall with me and still not crawl all over the toilet.

3. All locks shall lock and unlock.

I am done with the days of stretching an arm or leg out to keep a stall door closed. I am done with days of creatively hanging my purse and somehow jamming the stall door shut. And after a late night in Jerusalem, I am also done with "take your cell phone with you in case you get locked in" warnings.

A lock that closes the stall door and then easily opens, but only under my power, is all I'm asking for here. The best bet here seems to be the big sliding locks, not dinky things that need to perfectly line up. I'm also done with lifting a door with my foot to properly align the lock with the lock-hole. (that's technical jargon.)

4. No body parts shall be touched by the toilet paper dispenser.

I have an aversion to anything other than the toilet seat touching my body when I'm on the toilet. I don't want the cabinet to touch me, I don't want the toilet paper dispenser to touch me and I sure as hell don't want the feminine hygiene trash can to touch me. Here is a little hint to the men that attach toilet paper dispenser to stall walls.

SIT DOWN ON THE TOILET AND THEN POSITION THE TOILET PAPER DISPENSER.

I refuse to believe that if you were sitting on the toilet when you drilled those holes that you would put it where you leg naturally goes. Or so close to the ground that I have to lean over. Or so close to the door that I can barely reach it. (Which is the opposite of point four, but I'm talking LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION here.)

5. All stalls shall have ample hooks for purses and bags.

It's a bathroom. You know that right? You know what goes on in a stall on a normal day, right? Yeah. I don't want to put my purse on that floor and then take it home, where forgetting your bathroom earlier in the day, I drop my germy purse onto my kitchen counter. No. NO NO NO NO.

Give me some sturdy hooks, maybe two or three, to properly hang my belongings. Especially in a city where there is a thing called winter and sometimes I have a purse, a winter coat and a messenger bag to juggle. Give me peace of mind and let me hang my stuff up.

6. All stalls shall have toilet paper and bathrooms shall have an emergency supply available.

I'd like to say this is a no-brainer. I'd like to say these are all no-brainers, but if they were, there would be no need for this manifesto. I have to give props to two bathrooms for the availability of emergency toilet paper. The first are the bathrooms at HUC in Jerusalem. Each had a 48 pack under the sink. The second is the Northwestern School of Law bathroom. They had a special shelf FULL of toilet paper. Learn from these universities, restrooms of the world. Ample toilet paper and back-up supplies available make for happy customers.

7. All toilets shall flush.

I'm a homeowner and before that I worked in college housing. I am not shy about taking a toilet apart to make it flush, but I don't want to do that in a public restroom. However, I also will do everything in my power to leave the next user an empty toilet, so I will take lids off toilets, push buttons and pull strings.

Or you, owner of a public restroom, could just keep the toilet in working order. Water in, water and waste out.

8. All floors shall be dry.

Remember what I said about setting my purse on the floor? I also don't want the hem of my pants or skirt to get wet in unidentified "God, please let this be water" on the floor. I don't want to walk in wearing my cute summer sandles or ugly crocs and get my fresh pedicure wet in what I hope is water. I also don't like walking out and leaving wet footprints behind me, leaving a trail of people wondering what I stepped in and if I realize that I'm tracking "Oh god, please let it just be water" across the restaurant.

9. All bathrooms shall have at least one toilet that doesn't feel like it belongs in a kindergarten bathroom.

I'm tall, but I accept that short people exist. I love some very nice short people. Everyone doesn't need a toilet that comes up to my knee, some people need toilets that come up to my shin. I don't. I want the option of a toilet that is at chair height. I don't want to need a bar above my head to pull myself up and off the toilet, rather a toilet at the appropriate height would serve me fine.

10. Toilets shall not have those plastic slipcovers on them.

The automatic plastic slip-covers at O'Hare creep me out. CREEP ME OUT. Do I know if you waved your hand and made the thingy move? Do you know if I did? Do I know that the plastic things aren't recycled?

No, no, no, and no. (Actually, I'm pretty trusting that the industry really is one use only... but still.) I can clean off a toilet seat that is reused time and again, I can only wave my hand and hope a clean plastic sheet rolls out for me.

11. Automatically flushing toilets shall only flush when really appropriate.

Some toilets flush with such gusto that they cover the toilet seat with water. Thus the need for proper lighting to clean it off with. But what happens then the auto-toilet flushes, you clean it and before you can sit on the toilet it flushes again, covering the toilet seat with water, which you clean.... Finally, you get the timing right and sit before it flushes.

But then the automatically flushing toilet flushing while you are mid-business and you get the distinct feeling that some business just got flushed with gusto up onto you.

Ugh... I hate that feeling. So, automatically flushing toilets of the world, don't flush when I'm sitting on you or just after I've gotten the toilet seat clean enough to sit. How about you get tied to the stall door somehow, eh?

*This manifesto is written by an American for primarily a Western audience. If I am somewhere that toilets don't flush or toilet paper isn't used, I'll make do.

**This was inspired by the new LA Bathroom Blog.

***What did I miss? What is on your bathroom manifesto?

P.S. If I need to tip someone in the bathroom, warn me, cause I feel like an asshole when I go to a bathroom and can't tip the woman giving me toilet paper or eyeshadow.

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The TV appearance started off badly.

The crew sat me and my dummy in a chair in front of the camera, and soon afterwards the cameraman made some sort of hand motion at me. I had no idea what the hand motion meant, so I just sat there, assuming it was nothing I needed to be concerned about.

Then he did it again, and this time it was clear that I was supposed to do something. But I didn't know what to do, so I simply looked at the camera and said, what? He did it one more time, this time more forcefully, and again I said, what?

The cameraman, obviously displeased that I didn't grok his secret language, leaned forward and said, YOU'RE ON!

Oops. I'd just screwed up on live TV.

I nervously launched into my routine, which started off with a joke that mentioned something about having three pieces of candy. I was supposed to hold up three fingers when I mentioned the candy, but I was so distressed with how things started that I forgot to hold up two of them.

The one finger I held up was the middle one.

In slow motion, my eyes moved to the upheld digit, and a look of sheer terror crossed my face when I realized that I'd flipped off everyone watching. Doing that as an adult would've been bad enough, but it's infinitely worse doing it as a kid. The middle finger held a mystical quality back then, and raising it - even accidentally - was a very bad thing. I was pretty sure that raising it on live TV would mean a lump of coal come Christmas morning, and possibly even eternal torment in the place with the guy with the horns.

I have no idea how the show went after that I'm assuming I went into autopilot and finished the act, then quickly got the hell out of there.

To my surprise, nobody mentioned my one-fingered salute after the show, and I never got in trouble for it. But somewhere deep down, in the same place I store my guilt over setting off those stink bombs in third grade, I just know I'll eventually pay for flipping off my home town.

This is the last video in my Getting Started in Video series that I've been doing at Etsy.

The easiest way to edit video is to shoot it in one take. Here on the Etsy Video Awesomeness Team, we call those videos "One-Take-Wonders."

But you can't always get it in one take, or maybe your take is too long. That's when you need to learn how to edit.

MP4 | Blip.tv | Youtube | Subscribe in iTunes

In this video you'll learn five things.

1. Cut Get rid of that awkward moment when you spaced out on camera.
2. Titles Add text to your videos.
3. Music Add Creative Commons music to your video.
4. Exporting The setting you should use before uploading to the internet.

I'm showing you how to edit in iMovie. It's an editing platform that I love. They changed iMovie a lot in version 8 and they made it a lot less awesome. Luckily, if you've got iMovie8, you can actually download iMovie7 for free. I recommend doing this if you're on a Mac.

If you're on a PC, Windows Media Maker is already on your computer and it's a completely functional platform. Combine that with Quicktime Pro for compressing the avi formatted videos that it outputs and you've got a decent system for editing videos. All the stuff I show in iMovie will work in a similar fashion in Windows Media Maker too.

When adding music to your videos, don't use music without permission. It's copyrighted, and having copyrighted music in your video means that you won't be able to screen it at a film festival (and in a worst case scenario, the music industry could sue you).

A strategy for adding music to your videos is to have musician friends hook you up. We use music from our friends Barry London, Jukeboxer, Alice Cohen, and Lineland with their permission and we also have Matt and Eric, as in-house musicians. No matter what music you use, make sure to credit it in your video credits and link to them in your blog posts.

Another way to get music for your videos is make it yourself. I've made a lot of music with Garageband and it's fun! I put out my own album of music that you are welcome to use in your videos. I released it under a Creative Commons license so all you have to do is credit me in your video and you're good to go.

You can also add music to your videos with Creative Commons music. I've used music from this album that Wired put out, and if you search for Creative Commons music, there is a lot out there. Even if it's Creative Commons, it's always a good idea to ask permission for music, if for no other reason than to let your favorite musicians know how awesome they are.

I've also had good luck with the internet archive's open source audio collection. I particularly like old 78 recordings.

Once your video is all done, you're going to want to compress it so that the file is small enough to upload to video sharing sites. Here are the settings I use in Quicktime Pro for export.

I'm always experimenting and trying new settings, so if you've got a different way of doing this, take a screenshot of your settings and post them to the handmade video flickr pool.

If you're making videos and you make things, join the handmade video google group (which we wrote about here) where creative media-makers chit chat about how we do things. You can always shoot me an email with a question, but the handmade video google group is a great place to tap into a community of video folks to ask questions if you get stuck or need help.

Looking for more video tips? Check out the rest of the Getting Started in Video series! And let us know if you're making videos!

Thursday, July 10, 2008
6:30-10:00pm
Mullen's Bar & Grill
3080 Warrenville Rd., Lisle, IL 60532

An opportunity to connect in an informal setting with like-minded people in technology; Silicon Prairie Social is specifically for upwardly mobile tech professionals, tech executives, tech entrepreneurs, technology service providers, Internet professionals, Web 2.0 and startup companies, and the mobile industry. (Note: No professional recruiters, staffing agencies, or active job seekers permitted).

The event is free to attend, free drinks and food will be provided. RSVP is required at http://silicon-prairie-social-3.eventbrite.com .

For more information see www.siliconprairiesocial.com or contact Tim Courtney via social [at] xnet [dot] com

I would wager that most of the people who know they need an SSH tunnel also know the Terminal commands to make it happen. But if those people happen to be Mac users, it's quite likely they wouldn't be averse to having menu bar access, Growl integration, Bonjour capability and a nice GUI to handle their tunnels. And to those who just know they want secure browsing, email and other network activities but aren't SSH ninjas, such things might be even more attractive.

Code Sorcery Workshop's Meerkat is a handy application that provides all of the above tools and offers setup wizards to provide the right settings for the particular tunnel you need. It turns setting up a quick SOCKS proxy for web browsing into a 2 minute task. Setting up a tunnel for Mail is just as simple. Whether you're already using tunnels or looking to get some protection while browsing at the coffeehouse, Meerkat may be able to help out.

You can try Meerkat out for free with a time-limited demo. If it should become something you can't (or don't want to) live without, you can register it for $19.95.

Thanks, Mark!

• Blogging - keep a company blog updated with latest news and status updates
• Get Satisfaction - a place for your customers to express their opinion and help you identify bugs. A Suggestion Box 2.0
• Easy access to contact information - let customers know that they can always call, email or mail in their issues, never hide your number
• Respond to complains quickly - never go silent.
• Never deny the obvious - its much better PR to admit your mistakes than to actively deny they exist.
  

Read on as I touch on some of the points above.

Blogging - The Ultimate Tool to Connect With Your Users

A blog serves a million functions for your company from keeping the customers updated with the latest and greatest happenings to custom feeds for journalists, to engaging the conversation with your users. First thing to remember is to always keep posting, because a "dead" blog is sometimes indicative of the company losing interest in updating the users. If you suffer from planned or unplanned outages of your service - never host your blog on the same server farm as your current website. A lot of times if the site is down, the blog is the first place people look for an update and if you host your blog on the same server as your site which happens to be down, your blog will be down as well.

To start a blog you can take a look at one of our tutorials in the Video Tutorials section. There are two types of blogging platforms out there: a hosted solution such as WordPress.com, Typepad or Blogger and host-it-yourself packages. If you would rather have complete control over your content and not rely on anyone else for that service, you should check out WordPress.org, Movable Type or even our own blogging platform, Post Zinger (which, by the way, is a clear winner in blogging/podcasting space). Some hosting providers such as BlueHost (disclosure: it's our affiliate link) allow you to very quickly install these platforms.

In case you are still not sold on having a blog, keep in mind that they all come with some type of RSS Feed which helps high traffic blog authors to keep tabs on you, and when they see a new interesting feature or a sour customer turned happy they will cover, it bringing the ever important positive coverage of your service. Your blog also allows you to keep the conversation on the site, where you can control it, and while deleting comments and doing weird things will quickly get you very bad rep, you at least have a chance to respond quickly to issues.

If you think you need to be a technical person, that's not true, there are a ton of tutorials out there and it's generally a very low barrier of entry to get started. Pretty much anyone can get their own blog in a matter of minutes and have it customized with your website's look and feel in a matter of days, if not hours. There are always people that can set it for you, adding the benefit of their knowledge in the area.

Got Satisfaction?

Get Satisfaction is an up and coming social media feedback site. A lot of start ups use it as a de facto destination for getting positive and negative feedback about their services. It can be used as a tool to report bugs, suggest new features or complain about your product's usability. It is extremely useful as a feedback tool because the people who write are usually very passionate about your products. I have seen people write great suggestions, awesome bug reports and generally very articulate reviews. It can backfire however - if the company isn't responsive or has terrible customer service through general channels, it will have issues appealing to the social crowd. Case in point: Comcast. They try, they really do, and in 4 years of having the service I personally had no issues, no problems with customer service, always responsive, always helpful. Their corporate image, however, has suffered, from the lies about filtering, to terrible overcharging and deceitful pricing models, they leave a foul taste in customers' mouths. Also, someone over there really needs to fix their dot com site, probably eliminate it all together.

Setting up Satisfaction is pretty straight forward, first you create a company if it does not yet exist, then you claim it through ether email or phone confirmation. It takes a few days but once you are up and running, it is very simple to manage your company and products, add additional reps and moderate the conversations.

Denial is Not An Answer - Do Not Try to Fool Customers

If you have a problem with your service - be it an unfairly treated customer, a site that is constantly down, or shipping delays on a product launch - acknowledge them, do not let complaining customers escalate it and attract negative attention. People enjoy ganging up businesses to stand up for the little guy, be it vocal (through Internet or otherwise) or action driven protest (by unsubscribing, switching services, bad mouthing, etc). Blogs like The Consumerist enjoy writing about these incidents and sometimes whole communities dedicated to complaining spring up in protest. Timing is also everything, and in 9 out of 10 times you will have to make a public response to a lot of these complains, so it's better to be proactive and responsive before you generate enough bad press to fill a wall. Responding quickly and honestly is the key. This is where Brand Monitoring comes into play, where you are able to notice these incidents quickly, before they manifest themselves into PR disasters. From Twitter to Google Blog Search, companies that pay attention are the ones that end up benefiting from "Happy Customer" stories and positive word of mouth marketing.

Finally, have an easy way to contact you company, a number on every page or at least a clear link to the contact page, responsive service centers and acknowledging emails will go a long way. Zappos has their customer number on every page, they respond to emails extremely quickly and show care and compassion - clearly the reason for being so successful in online shoe selling business.

Try some of these out or, if you already use these methods successfully, let us know in the comments how they are working out for you!

PC World has a good article out on 12 Downloads to Make Your Wi-Fi Life Easier, including a video on setting up a Wi-Fi network. It's a good collection of downloads, most of them free. A few of their picks are applications I've used for a while, and then I have a couple of personal favorites that aren't on their list. In this post, I'll point out what you can get out of a few of these free apps.

One free tool that PC World doesn't have on its list is QCheck, from Ixia, which I have found to be the very best free way to guage my home Wi-Fi network's performance. It tests throughput, streaming, response times, and more.

Hotspot Shield is one of PC World's choices for users of public Wi-Fi hotspots. I hadn't tried this before, but it's basically a free and very easy way to get the same encrypted protection you get from more advanced Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications, such as OpenVPN.

Xirrus Wi-Fi Monitor is one of PC World's picks that I have used, and highly recommend. While QCheck is a more robust tool for really thorough performance checks for your Wi-Fi network, Wi-Fi Monitor is great for on-the-fly checkups. It appears as a gadget for Windows Vista users, and displays your signal strength, your IP address, and more.

JiWire makes PC World's list and I've written about it before here. This is just a very easy way to sniff out available Wi-Fi networks wherever you are and display information about the networks.

While it's not on PC World's list, I'm a big fan of Devicescape. You can select a number of different kinds of devices at this site, ranging from Nokia Internet Tablets to Mac OS X systems, and get useful utilities for establishing a Wi-Fi connection very quickly.

In addition to these, I recommend checking out PC World's other (mostly) free Wi-Fi enhancement utilities.

Do you have any favorite Wi-Fi applications?

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Jon Dahl of Slantwise Design presented at Minnebar on "Consulting for fun and profit"

Dahl provided a Jeopardy style list of topics to choose from. The thoughts below come from a combination of Dahl and audience participation.

Hiring

Pitfalls to avoid with hiring employees. Should you fire friends? The audience differed on the value of this. Don't hurt your business by hiring someone just because they're a friend, but do hire those who are truly valuable.

90% of working with people is chemistry. But it's hard to know whether someone will have the right chemistry based on interviews. Try to find people with complimentary skills. Don't mistake the effectiveness of your personal relationship for a relationship that would work in a business setting.

You may like the people you work with but not hang out with them. That's fine.

We have found all of our developers through Craigslist and the community (events like Minnebar).

Finding Customers

Look for small projects first. Easier to complete some projects and build a portfolio.

Consider partnering with other small firms to build relationships.

Have a blog. Prove that you're well-spoken, smart, and thing about interesting things.

Have your principles do sales. Customers want to talk to the people who are ultimately responsible for the success of the project on your end.

Placement agencies can help to find projects.

Rates & Prices

"Everyone does work hourly, but it doesn't make sense to me." explained an audience member. Reusable work seems to make more sense to sell on a project basis.

User-interactivity: Better off billing hourly since people generally don't know what they want when they're starting.

If you're "a person on the team" consulting, hourly works well.

Fixed bids seem to work better with government and large companies who are used to bidding. But be sure to contractually lock down the deliverables.

Fixed bid requires a closer eye on the scope / more project management.

Hybrid: Do an hourly project to determine requirements. Then put together an estimate for a fixed-bid project.

Scope Creep

What to do? Get new customers if you're doing fixed-bid work. For hourly, keep billing them.

Determine the customer's budget when determining an appropriate scope/bid.

Don't change features during each iteration. Write down and hold features until the next round.

Fire them.

Raise prices until they fire you.

Do a bad job until they fire you?

You can fire customers, and you can find new work. However, even difficult customers can be dealt with if you work with them.

Tools and Work Environment

Coffee

Good Accountant

Good Lawyer - Dahl uses NewCouncil.com

IRC or Campfire - Especially great when working contractors.

Basecamp for Development - Audience member: "Where programming project go to die."

Bug Tracker

Location: Spare bedroom? Basement? Office? Whatever works for you and your team. Some developers can't stand an office setting. Others work much better face to face.

"If you really need to know something from a client, pick up a phone."

Consulting vs Products

"I find myself wanting to work on my own projects, but need to focus on paying the bills [through consulting]." Audience member.

Product development is really alluring. Tough to balance with consulting.

Find some efficiencies through reuse of code (almost a product) with similar clients.

Cash Flow

"Consulting makes me bipolar." Audience member.

Checks don't come in on a steady basis.

Figure out your baseline expense and cover that. Then aim for a huge padding above that.

Selection is important. Find clients who pay and pay on time.

Get some money up front. Discounts for early payment is mixed.

Winning Contracts

Clients are most concerned about whether they can trust you.

Improving Customers

Bill appropriate prices for your value.

Building a Reputation

Do good work.

Have a blog.

Be known in the developer community.

Establish a niche. (Ex. Ruby on Rails)

Size

How big do you want to be?

Each person makes the team different and dynamics more difficult.

Quality vs Profits

Important question. You can't compromise.

To be an excellent firm, you have to do excellent work.