Disclosure Required

The FTC is now requiring that bloggers fully disclose their relationships with vendors they promote. In other words, you had better let people know what type of freebies you are getting before you hype up the company. This can include to gifts that enable you to go to conferences as well. I wish I had such perks myself.

Here is what is strange about the FTC guidance. It only applies online. Print media does not have the same restrictions. So let me get this straight. I can put out a print article where I sell my soul to a company, but I don't need to come clean about it? That sounds like the web is getting a stricter rule applied to it.

This is ok. I don't receive any gifts from anyone. So I don't have to disclose anything. I run another blog where I complain most of the time. Therefore there is no room for conflict of interest. Let's see how this FTC guidance plays out in the year to come.

Google Wave

I have been hearing a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Google Wave. Like most Google products, Google Wave is a Beta release. It has e-mail, IM, and document editing.

Now I can't be sure, but I think I gave Google Wave a try for a web programming class I am taking. We sampled a couple offerings for document sharing on the web.

Google's main competitor in this space is Microsoft with their SharePoint. Another elderly competitor is Novell.

Team Members Only

There was a blog I discovered today. And I liked it. The post I read was good. So I decided to post a comment. I proceeded to type in my comment. Then I provided my blogger credentials. The blog came back with an error message stating, "Comments are restricted to team members". WTF?

I tried to locate the e-mail address of the blog author. It could not be found. Weak. Guess what? I am not returning to that blog. I am not sure what this team member business was about. Maybe it is just people who are teaming up to write the blog. I don't know. And I no longer care.

Here is some advice to you bloggers. If you do allow commenting, make sure everyone can do it. Otherwise you will alienate your readers. You have been warned.

Writing Clearly

Today was a slow day at work. It is a government holiday. So none of the networks were available. What is one to do on such a day? Some slackers just stayed home. I studied up some topics. One was how to write better by Michasl Covington. Let me share some insights I learned from a deck put together by Michael.

The ability to write is a power. You probably don't need to learn too much more grammar. But you do need to learn how to organize your info. Get to the point is a rule of thumb. The first sentence of each paragraph needs to be the main point.

Ensure you know the meaning of words before you use them. Be precise with you vocabulary. Remove needless words. Use a Roman font for most text. That's about it.

You Don't Have Mail

Gmail was down hard yesterday for around 2 whole hours. It was a compound problem where some boxes were down for maintenance, and then some problems happened. I guess it was a case of Murphy's law. Luckily I have no mission critical mail that comes to my Gmail accounts. Some other businesses were not that lucky.

I did not pay much attention to what Google had to say about the outage. In my mind, I figured Google would work the issue as fast as humanly possible. Others were happy with how Google handled the situation. They are a big company. They have the damage control team firing on all cylinders. Good work Google PR people. You might be doing some evil, but the people don't hate you yet.

Online Dating Tips

I came across a study of online dating site OkCupid that was quite the find. They looked to see what type of messages got the best returns. I found the analysis on men messaging females was the best.

Here is the conclusion: Send a lot of short messages. Even though a short message may not give you a high probability of scoring for any one potential match, you get a better overall return on investment. That is, you can send more short messages to a lot of people. In the end you will get more responses.

The real killer from this post was the phrases in your message that would give you a better chance at getting a reply. The best phrases to use are awesome, sorry, haha, and pretty. The worst phrases to use are ur, im, hit, wanna, and beautiful. Go figure. Pretty is better than beautiful.

Hapi Spammers

Recently I was going to add a new post to my blog. That's when I found something weird. Somebody left a comment to my last post. This was confusing because I thought I turned comments off on the blog. I double checked and they were turned off. So I investigated.

This took me to the Hapi blog hosted on Blogger. They had a lot of views on the profile. There was a bunch of technical information for blogging. That is when I understood. The schmucks were spamming comments on blogs. They must have found a way to automatically post blog comments on blogs. The script even bypassed the option of comments being turned off.

That was a bit disappointing. Spammers are evil. There is nothing happy about Hapi. I won't even give them a link. Why send my readers to the spam box? Somebody should teach these bums a lesson. Maybe Google (Blogger) can set them straight for their evil deeds.