A litmus test for e-commerce sites

In my Observer column today, I propose a test for determining whether a company aspiring to do business online understands the Web: Can you find out what a product or service costs in three clicks or less? The astonishing thing is not that many sites fall at this elementary hurdle, but that so many are reluctant to cite prices at all. Instead they invite you to dispatch an email query to sales@braindead.co.uk.

What this implies is that they are afraid that potential consumers will be able to compare them with their competitors. Such a strategy may wash in the real world but it bombs in cyberspace, where customers are accustomed to performing effortless price comparisons. It’s a mistake Jeff Bezos never made – which is why he’s taking over the world.

The Web is only good for searching and selling according to the New York Times. Oh yeah?

The Times publishes one of those pieces which makes you wonder if the author (Steve Lohr in this case) inhabits the same planet as the rest of us. The gist is that the Net has failed to live up to its promise of creating ‘new media’, and instead has degenerated into an arena where only shopping and searching are viable. Quote:

“The shift to bits promised more than just faster and cheaper distribution of the same old information and entertainment. The digital age held out the potential for a genuinely “new media.” Pundits and media executives spoke about the prospect of everything from interactive television and shopping — click the zapper to suggest a new story line or buy the sweater Jennifer Aniston was wearing on that “Friends” episode ?– to donning goggles and suits to enter virtual worlds offering simulated sports, travel and sex.

But it hasn’t happened. The companies that spent hugely on the “digital convergence” of media and Internet-era computing, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal, which bought Mr. Diller’s media properties, are in turmoil. And their visionary architects, Stephen M. Case at AOL Time Warner and Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi Universal, have been ousted.”

Note the argument: because some brain-dead Big Media companies couldn’t create ‘New Media’ on the Web, therefore the Web has failed. But who said that new media would be Old Media plus broadband? If Mr Lohr had chosen to look at — for example — the Blogging phenomenon, he would have seen seriously ‘new’ media in action. And then he might then have been obliged to contemplate how radical this phenomenon is — how it involves what Clay Shirky calls “the mass amateurization of publishing”. But print journalists are so locked into their paradigm that they apparently cannot see what’s in front of their noses.

Paul Graham’s “A Plan for Spam”

Fascinating essay outlining a probabilistic approach based on analysing the content of spam messages, rather than concentrating on the headers.

Especially on Thursday: more stats on the staggering scale of spam

BBC Online story.

“A survey by the counter-spam firm Brightmail detected more than four million pieces of junk mail on just this day sent to UK internet users.

The volume of unsolicited mail has shot up in the last year, making up nearly half of all net traffic, according to some estimates.

An insight into the staggering scale of the spam problem was provided by Microsoft, which said this week that it now blocks 2.4 billion junk messages to its MSN and Hotmail subscribers every day.

‘Astonishing’ figure

Brightmail monitored mails sent for a week in March over the UK net provider, BT Openworld.

It found that nearly 11 million out of 25 million messages were scanned were spam – a weekly average of 41%.

A large chunk of the junk mail, more than four million, was sent on the Thursday.

“The problem with spam is well documented, but to get close to the 50% mark is astonishing and that figure can only increase,” said Duncan Ingram, Managing Director at BT Openworld.

The deluge of spam is prompting online services like BT Openworld to take action to stem the flow of unwanted offers for miracle cures, get-rich-quick schemes and adult products.

The company offers an e-mail protection service to its customers for £1 a month.

Legal steps

In the US, internet giants AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have all been touting their anti-spam features.

AOL recently said it blocked about two billion junk messages in a single day, while last week Microsoft revealed its anti-spam measures now net about 2.4 billion spam e-mails sent to its Hotmail and MSN customers.

Some firms are taking to the courts to stop the spammers.

Earlier this week, US net provider Earthlink won $16.4m (£10.3m) damages and a permanent injunction against someone who sent 850 million unsolicited e-mails via its service.

Law suits brought by Microsoft and AOL against suspected spammers are still making their way through the courts. ”

Monkey business

Wired story:

“Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

“They pressed a lot of S’s,” researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. “Obviously, English isn’t their first language.”

A group of faculty and students in the university’s media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, “the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

“Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard,” added Phillips, who runs the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.”

Record companies diversify — into illegal hacking
NYT story.

“Some of the world’s biggest record companies, facing rampant online piracy, are quietly financing the development and testing of software programs that would sabotage the computers and Internet connections of people who download pirated music, according to industry executives.

The record companies are exploring options on new countermeasures, which some experts say have varying degrees of legality, to deter online theft: from attacking personal Internet connections so as to slow or halt downloads of pirated music to overwhelming the distribution networks with potentially malicious programs that masquerade as music files.”

Dubya, draft-dodging and the so-called ‘liberal’ media

Picture: BushForDummies.com

The fearless Prez dodged the Vietnam draft using a wheeze which got him into the Texas Air National Guard. From this he then went AWOL for a year. So much for his patriotism. This story was originally broken by the Chicago Tribune and generated a few good spoof websites, but has been largely ignored by the supposedly ‘liberal’ US media ever since.

This week, Dubya staged a major photo-opportunity by landing in a fighter-jet on a US aircraft carrier. The irony of a draft-dodger using an audience of ‘real’ military people was not lost on Tribune columnist Eric Zorn who writes:

“The ‘Bush AWOL?’ story appeared in this newspaper and was based on good reporting and still-unanswered questions. It faded away–a scant 14 mentions in the database for all of 2001 and 2002 due to the age of the allegations, the lack of any new developments and the urgency of current events.

Last week, though, the president all but wore a ‘Kick Me!’ sticker on the back of his flight suit when he decided to land on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in the co-pilot’s seat of an S-3B Viking jet.

Imagine the derisive merriment in the columns and on the chat shows if former President Bill Clinton revived the skirt-chasing issue by touring a sorority house or if Gore delivered a lecture to the engineers at Netscape Communications Corp. Think of the snickering and the sardonic rehash of history.

But for Bush in flyboy attire, a discreet silence. The only voices I encountered raising this issue were David Corn in the Nation; Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, who asked, ‘Tell me if you ever heard of anybody with as powerful a resistance to shame as Bush’; and talk station WLS-AM’s token progressives Nancy Skinner and Ski Anderson, who spent a full hour Sunday afternoon savoring the irony of it all.

There was no relentless examination of the damning timeline on cable news outlets, no interviewing the commanders who swear Bush didn’t show up where he was supposed to, no sit-downs with the veterans who have offered still-unclaimed cash rewards to anyone who can prove that Bush did anything at all in the Guard during his last months before discharge.

So much for the cynical distortion that has become conventional wisdom in many circles. So much for the myth of the ‘liberal media’.”

Christopher Caldwell on the spam problem

Financial Times article. Interesting piece. He doesn’t think much of Larry Lessig’s ‘bounty hunter’ idea, but focusses on the key issue — which is how to stop spamming being a cost-free activity.

Aside: given that the FT has moved away from keeping its archive of web-pieces free, I’m not sure how long the link will continue to work.

Spam stats

I spent a week on holiday recently away from broadband access and with only one or two opportunities to dial up every day. That’s when I really began to be alarmed by the amount of spam I was receiving — one doesn’t notice it so much on broadband because it’s relatively quick to dispose of. But with a slow and irregular connection it really begins to bite. So it’s interesting to see how other people perceive it. Here is an interesting finding from Jonathan Peterson who started seriously analysing his spam count recently. Of the 1,595 emails he received in the first logged month, 1,047 were spam. Yikes!

OpenOffice 1.0 is one today. Happy Birthday!

A year ago today, 2002-05-01, OpenOffice.org 1.0 was released. Since then, around 10 million people have downloaded the application from the volunteer mirror network.