Just a quick note to anyone and everyone… I’m down in SF this week for Boxbe, Web 2.0 expo and Podcast Hotel if you want to meet up. Give me a call or shoot me an email.
cell: 415.297.4215
email: randy@boxbe.com
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Vote for Boxbe on Valleywag!
Boxbe has been included in a poll on Valleywag today to select the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. We might be a little north, but we’d sure love your vote! We’re in with some pretty stiff competition from a lot bigger companies, so tell your friends, neighbors, coworkers, heck, anyone who will listen to go vote for us on Valleywag!
I’m a big fan of alternative means of watching television. Hell, I launched a separate (now sorta kinda abandoned) blog about it. So when ABC announced that they were going to do high(er) definition versions of their show online, I was stoked.
I tried it out on launch day and got this image (which I thought was pretty funny):
Now, maybe it’s just me, but “advertisements not available” sounds like a feature, not a bug. Still, the fact that ABC is upping their video quality and offering a limited number of ads on their online programming is pretty cool.
See… I’m back on the bike. Really, I blog regularly… really.
Tonight in Seattle for one night only, Ignite! If you are a geek in Seattle and haven’t made it out to an Ignite Seattle event, you are truly missing out.
Bre Pettis and Brady Forrest from O’Reilly are brilliant hosts for what has been great fun. If you are a Maker, you’ll want to join in on the Paper Airplane Challenge at 6:30.
If you are in the social media scene, Chris Heuer will be on hand leading a meeting of the Social Media Club. He’s in town tonight to meet up with Seattle’s movers and shakers in the social media scene.
In either case, if you are perpetually late like me, don’t be late for the Ask Me Later presentations, which are guaranteed to be good, well, at least if they’re not, they only last 2 minutes. Being a little ADD addled, 2 minutes for an idea, a pitch, or a cause is a great way to get creativity flowing.
I’m pretty excited about going tonight as the first one was so much fun and I regretfully missed the second one, which was even bigger than the first.
Details from the site:
6:00 – Doors Open
6:30 – Paper Airplane Challenge Begins
8:00 – Break
8:30 – Ask Later Talks: Round 1 begins (full schedule)
9:15 – Break
9:45 – Ask Later Talks: Round 2 begins
10:30 – End of Ignite
Hope to see you there.
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It’s like riding a bike
I seem to keep falling off of my Stewtopia blog. I’ve been spending a lot of my time working on Boxbe’s blog, prettying up the UI and talking about recent improvements such as Gmail integration, I’ve been pretty busy.
I tend to build up a lot of pressure in my head about blogging. “Oooh, I really need to blog about SXSW” or “I need to give a shout out to all the folks I met last weekend,” are thoughts that go through my head, but often I feel like my drafts are never done.
I’m just getting back on the bike today folks. It might not be great, but here I am.
Photo by Flickr member Omar Junior
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Latest spam
First the image spam was coming through, then penny stocks, now we’re back to Nigeria….ugh!
In the last several days, I’ve been getting messages like this one –
My name is Mr Usman Lama, I am a former military intelligence officer, a captain by rank and a Presidential aide under the government of President Charles Taylor of Liberia .I want to invest the fund that i have made during my time in service into a well profitable business and i want to invest this fund outside my country for safety reason because i don’t want the government to question me of getting this large amount of money…
This is so 2002.
image by Flickr user Santos
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I finally get Twitter, then it breaks
Apparently, Twitter has been severely hobbled from the convergence of nerds in Austin for SXSW.
I’m still not sure I’d use the service as much in my day to day (maybe Stuart can change my mind), but man I can see it’s use here at a big conference. At smaller shows, like Northern Voice or Gnomedex, Twitter might be less useful, but sending status and finding your friends here in Texas seems to be really handy.
I’m stewtopia on Twitter if you want to help make my txt messaging bill go through the roof.
Tags: swsx2007, swsx, twitter
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Austin bound – SXSW this weekend
I’m beginning to think conferences are my job… I think SXSW will make my 4th conference this year…oy. Maybe I’m just fulfilling my dream to be a trucker being on the road again.
If you’re in Austin this week(end) give me a shout! Email me at randy@boxbe.com if you want to talk social media, Boxbe, Bay Area vs Seattle, or where to get good BBQ in Austin. Look forward to seeing you there.
Dale Dougherty over on O’Reilly Radar attempts to answer that question and reports on their efforts to combat spam.
In a given week, 94% of the 904,060 all messages sent to O’Reilly servers are rejected because:
- the IP has been blacklisted
- the message had a SpamAssassin score of 10 or higher
- the message contained viruses or malware
- the message failed some other anti-spam technique
(And that doesn’t even account for messages the recipients didn’t actually want.)
Dale interviewed a number of industry luminaries on whether or not “we” are winning the war on spam. Here are a few quotes:
Eric Allman – developer of sendmail, a prominent email protocol
It depends on how you define “win”. I still get junk phone calls, but the phone system is reasonably usable today. I think that spam can get to that level.
Brad Templeton – Chairman of the Board, Electronic Frontier Foundation
I wouldn’t say that. There are a number of fairly decently working filtering systems, though a number of them have concerns about false positives. This doesn’t rely on draconian blacklists, though some people use them.
Danny Goodman – prolific tech writer and programmer
“It’s a lot like the war on terrorism. The hardest part is defining what the war is. The offenders are not clearly defined, the war is not clearly defined.” He said the war seems like “a constant game of whack-a-mole.”
If you are interested in the war on spam, this article is a great overview.
CBC columnist and Mac geek, Tod Maffin ran another great session at Moosecamp around favorite productivity tools. Below are my favorites from the session.
- ImageWell – Swiss Army knife for images (free)
- Paparazzi – takes screenshots of full web pages.
- TextExpander – condenses messages, phrases or code that you might reuse all the time into short keystrokes.
- VoodooPad – wiki for your Mac. BEST NOTEPAD EVER!
- Synergy – software for using one keyboard and mouse with two computers (and screens). Kind of like a KVM…
- Hazel – best maid for cleaning up your Mac.
- BrowserShots.org – test web designs on 31 different browser platforms.
- QuickSilver – I’m hoping I’ll get this one day, but for now, I’ll point it out to all all of you
More tools
Audio of the session
image by Flickr user katiew
Kris Krug, photographer extraordinaire, organized a conference within a unconference within a conference at this year’s Northern Voice. He collected an exceptional panel of other photogs and tech geeks.
High end consumer cameras
Tim Bray did a talk on high end compact cameras. Made me think about using the G3 again. It does shoot in RAW and it has the intervolator. I wonder if the G6 has that? If you are looking for a new camera, Tim posted his talk at the here.
Tim’s talk brought up some points that I’m always thinking about: I love my Canon Rebel, but there are serious costs to bringing it with me all the time. It takes beautiful pictures, but it’s big and bulky. The vast majority of the photos that I take are on my Canon SD450. Maybe I could learn to use it a bit better…
Color Profile Love
A huge THANK YOU to Matt Trent at UBC for teaching me in 10 minutes everything I needed to know about color profiles in Photoshop. I sat through an hour at a Macworld session years ago from someone who worked at Adobe and I didn’t get it. Now, I think I’ve got all I need to know.
The secret – if you work on a Mac and are posting photos online work with Adobe SRGB. Why? Safari reads numerous color profiles, but almost no other browser does. The color profile is smaller than Adobe RGB, but it is the lowest common denominator, thus will look the same on most browsers.
Hopefully, next year I’ll get to see your lab and work in HDR.
Matt Trent’s Moosecamp Presentation
Adobe Lightroom
Roland Tanglao led a session about Adobe Lightroom, which looks a lot like if iPhoto and Adobe Bridge had a kid. Oh, and apparently, in the photo world, black is the new white.
Lots of good features here, but not enough to pull me into another app. One interesting thing, though, it looked like Roland was running an older G4 laptop, but Lightroom really seemed to fly. If you’re looking for something a little more robust than iPhoto, Lightroom might be for you.
Thanks everyone for such an informative session! Look forward to seeing you next year.
Chris Heuer, Social Media Club founder and all-around nice guy, has a great set of pictures up on Flickr from the conference so far.
Check them out here.
All Northern Voice photos on Flickr are here.
Photo by (or at least in his feed) Chris Heuer
So first off, if you haven’t used Google Adwords, I highly recommend it. Besides being a great user experience, you can learn quite a bit about search terms that you might be interested in.
To feed the ego, I now have a sense of how many people are searching for ‘Randy Stewart‘ on Google over the last month. I didn’t realize that Google showed this data, but I guess it makes sense to know what you are paying for.
So, Ziki…. how much are they paying for my name? Well, I’m not an SEM specialist, but given that I have the third position when you do a search on my name and I know how much I pay when someone clicks, I’m imagining that Ziki is paying slightly less than I am.
How much am I paying, let’s just say 6x the copper version of Abraham Lincoln. I’m still interested in what Ziki is doing and I think it’s a really smart marketing campaign. They haven’t reached their 10k goal in signups just yet, so there is still an opportunity to get in on their campaign.
So, given how blog lazy I’ve been lately, I’m a little embarrassed to go to a blogging conference this weekend, but nevertheless, there I’ll be going. Hell, I guess any excuse to get back to the beautiful city of Vancouver is good enough for me.
If you are at Northern Voice this weekend, drop me a line and say hi. I’m the guy that’s going to be catching up on a long list of blog ideas so I don’t feel lame.
Look forward to meeting you all.
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First Boxbe board meeting
candies in quarantine
Photo by by Esthr.
Looks like I missed a Happy V-Day around the Boxbe office. From left to right – Esther Dyson, Steve Jurvetson, Thede Loder, and Corbett Barr.
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Boxbe Blog is live
I’m excited to announce the launch of one of the projects I’ve been working on lately, the Boxbe blog. Boxbe, as you might remember is the market based spam solution I mentioned a few months back. We’re still figuring out all the ins and outs, so the blog is a little slow going right now, but we should be picking up post-wise in the not-to-distant-future.
Boxbe solves a couple of very real pain points for me.
First, as someone who wants to have conversations with readers and potential new clients, obfuscating my email in any way is a bad idea. I want people to be able to email me easily and Boxbe helps me do that.
Second, while the word ‘spam’ is loaded (one man’s spam is another man’s canned meat), certain kinds of emailers (Viagra, Vioxx, penny stocks, etc) will never pay one red cent to reach me, so those kinds of email are dead to me. Forever. Putting a small fee in the way of spammers pretty much removes them from the conversation as their business model is predicated on free email.
Anyhow, the service is a little rough right now, but it’s being improved on a daily basis and I expect to see a lot of updates to functionality and usability real soon now.
If you’d like to reach me, send email to randy@boxbe.com