derek hatchard

It's a few years old so I'm late to this party, but this is cool: http://andrius.esu.lt/10/go2.htm.

If I click on your ad, show me the good stuff you promised. Don't make me hunt and sure as heck don't fill the landing page with extraneous clutter.

I just saw a Flash ad for a company selling "people_ready" software (you know who I mean, right?). It looked interesting enough to turn the sound on. It was a short clip that ended with "Watch the short film now." I thought to myself, "Cool. Maybe this is something creative like the IBM server attack ads." But alas, when I clicked, I got a very boring corporate page full of info and links to PDF documents and case studies. No short film to be seen. That is just stinky bad. That video should have been front-and-center. It probably should have started playing automatically.

Being the persistent fool that I am, I kept hunting and found the video on another page. If you want to see it, it's here. It's actually pretty good for a "commercial."

Do you have any experience with people@work from ADP? If so, I know someone looking for some feedback on it. Leave a comment or send me a private note (derek@ardentdev.com). Thanks!

This Week in Tech show #60 (http://twit.tv/60) has some good discussion about net neutrality. The US Senate recently rejected a net neutrality amendment to a telecommunications bill. The need for legislation about net neutrality might be a bit premature but the future of the Internet as we know it is grim without rules against traffic shaping and preferential treatment. It's worth a listen. Here's what I got from it:

Net neutrality naysayers claim that companies like Google and eBay are getting a free ride because they push out so much data into the Internet. But that's hogwash. Google, eBay, and all major content providers are already paying huge sums of money for access to the Internet. I've heard folks speculate that YouTube, for example, is paying more than a $1 million per month just for bandwidth. That's an expensive "free ride."

Why don't the backbone operators simply raise the price of access to their backbones? Because the issue is not the cost, the issue is that the operators want to be able to prioritize traffic. They want to say to Google, "Hey, do you want your stuff to move faster than MSN? Throw some extra change in our pocket and we'll prioritize your traffic." I don't like that idea. It's like an express lane on the highway for rich people.

More precarious is the backbone operator as content provider. If that happens, every content provider that is not a telecom could end up as a second class citizen in terms of delivery. If content from Google, Yahoo, or MSN becomes dramatically slower than content from AT&T or Verizon, what will consumers do? What would you do?

Trying to Cancel an AOL Account

This is all over the web but in case you missed it, Vincent Ferrari is now famous for recording an unbelievable exchange with AOL while trying to cancel his account: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIVZ9b0RgmY.

And Then There's the Sleeping Comcast Technician

It's hard to blame the guy for falling asleep after being left on hold for an hour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvVp7b5gzqU

Death and Resurrection of CouchSurfing

A web-based service called CouchSurfing helped / helps people find places to sleep (i.e., couches to crash on) while traveling. In an remarkably bizarre set of circumstances, CouchSurfing died (http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes-itself-shuts-down/) because a database was dropped without working backups in place. And now in an equally remarkable community effort, it looks like CouchSurfing might be revived. My favorite part is that some volunteers recovered 2GB of data by crawling cached pages from search engines.