Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

"But when they created flesh-searing heat from simple chemicals, I became very interested in Chemistry,” said 8th grader Haley Meyer.

The best sentence I've read in a long time. Closely seconded by:

"You can never be too careful," said O'Hara. "I'd rather blow up a hundred innocent people if I can prevent another 9/11."

But that's two sentences. And the humor, of course, lies in the fact that the hundred innocent people blowing up doesn't actually prevent another 9/11. It's just that the Boston police really love blowing stuff up.

I ran across this quote on the homepage of a photographer's business site:

Spalding Media Services specializes in all forms of photography.

From a marketing standpoint, there's a problem with that. If I'm looking to hire a freelance photographer for a certain project, I want someone who specializes in that particular thing. I don't want a commercial product photographer shooting my wedding day. On the other hand, I don't want a child photographer taking the photo I'll be blowing up to put on a billboard along the freeway.

A general approach -- "I specialize in everything" -- is what you want if you're looking for a job with a company that might reasonably have a broad range of needs. The general approach emphasizes versatility and flexibility, not strength in a particular area. That statement only means "I don't specialize in whatever you're looking for."

If you're looking to sell yourself to clients for specific projects, you need to match those specific projects as well as possible. "But how?" you ask.

The Internet makes it possible. (That should be read in a dramatic, commercial voice-over tone.)

Pick the areas that you really do specialize in. Develop them as subdomains -- weddings.photographername.com. Each subdomain should be a tightly focused site with your strongest examples of that type of work and clear calls to action -- a "contact me" form, or a link to your contact and pricing page. That pricing page should be specific to the subdomain. So somebody who's looking for wedding photos shouldn't see a page that lists your prices for studio shots.

Your main site can carry the general pitch, but only if you're also looking for a job. Otherwise, you should pick your profitable niche and focus most of the main site on that. The main site is also where you could throw in a relevant blog or other content.

If you feel you must cross market -- because maybe the people who are getting married also restore and custom detail Harley Davidsons -- keep it subtle. If they really want to see your other stuff, they'll find it through a link in the main site navigation.

If you're reasonably creative, you can see how these principles would apply to many other situations. If you're not that creative, and you have bags of money, you can hire me to come apply them (and countless other marketing and technology ideas!) to your particular situation. :o)

"Theoretically, a hacker could set up a proxy server, and then use it to capture information about the Web sites you visit. And if you type in user names and passwords, he could steal those as well."
-- ComputerWorld

Theoretically? Why else would somebody set up a proxy server?

1. Somebody could set one up out of the goodness of their heart. That seems a stretch, but it's the core belief of the CW article and lots of other 'helpful hints' about how to browse safely.

2. Somebody who wants to anonymize his own traffic would need to wash it in with a bunch of other traffic.

3. Or maybe they want to run some click fraud through Google or another PPC network.

4. Or maybe it's the government setting up honeypots and sting operations to watch for terrorist or other serious illegal activity

5. How about for marketing research? It provides deep insight into a weird audience.

6. Maybe even just for legitimate marketing? Running a proxy allows you to insert ads wherever you like on the pages you serve.

7. Or less legitimate marketing -- overwriting ads from competitors with your own. Insert your own affiliate ID in place of others.

Hmmmmmm... I think I should deploy my own anonymizing proxy server. What an interesting experiment.

The only true cons of this type of device is the fact that there is a bolt sticking out of the patient’s neck and the fact that it must be surgically installed.

Yeah. We're talking about headphones, here. Kind of a big drawback for this design.

But I want to build my own bone-conductive speaker to play with. Designs, anyone? Please?

Why have a "save" button?

So people can forget to save?

So things can crash before people get to hit save?

Every single program should automatically save, all the time. Save to a temporary file that is automatically restored next time the program runs. When the user hits the "save" button, apply it to the permanent file. But don't NOT save just because they didn't hit the button.

Please!

Okay. Lots of big companies use Omniture's SiteCatalyst to track their websites. Omniture charges the companies a certain price for page views, companies rely on accurate reporting of page views to understand what's happening on their sites. And right now, Omniture's tracking system is quite unsecure. If you were the wrong sort of person, you might want to exploit this to totally mess with Omniture and their customers.

This tracking works by Javascript code that's plugged into every page they want to track. So every time that code is run, Omniture records a page view for the client identified in the code. But there's nothing to really validate where that code is being run from. (And even if there were, it would be by HTTP referrer codes, which are easily altered.)

So let's say I wanted to make Ford think that two hundred million people clicked on one of their recent campaign pages. I would copy the code off one of Ford's pages, stick it on my own site, and run it like mad.

Now, people have been actually doing this with Google's PPC program. But there was lots of money involved, so Google got active (or vocal, at least) about fighting click fraud.

With SiteCatalyst, it's not nearly so visible. Clients would end up paying Omniture a little more. Not much -- tracking individual clicks is vastly cheaper than Google's PPC. So a handful of people actively playing this game could get away with a great deal of manipulation without ever being noticed.

And the resulting skew in data could send competitors off in really weird tangents, or undermine their faith in their entire reporting system. What if Ford started seeing large surges of traffic to all of its Vietnamese pages? If it were handled subtly enough, I bet somebody could trick Ford into launching all kinds of Vietnamese advertising content. Even more significant would be the impact this type of activity could have on media companies -- CBS, CNN, Times...

In fact, this could lead to a whole new type of PPC manipulation. Playing with the PPC market from the backend -- manipulating advertisers directly, rather than just messing with clicks and all the Google controls that are already in place. Wow.

A force so powerful, it can only be used for good or evil.

But I'd a lot rather just edit my highscores in Flash games. Breaking actual laws has never held much appeal to me.

(Except as intellectual exercise, of which I suppose I get rather too much.)

Yeah-hoooooo!

The actual implementation of Firedoodle stinks. The idea, though, rocks my world. You can draw on any web page. When you come back later, your drawing is still there. I deleted it moments after installing it because the drawing tools are lousy and slow and bleah.

Then there's MyStickies. Same deal, but with text-based sticky notes instead of drawing. Lower technical requirements result in better implementation. The verdict: MyStickies is good enough for now, I've installed it and I'm keeping it.

The future: a hybrid of both that actually works. With easy sharing. And a social ranking system for other people's notes and comments. And customization of the social ranking so I can say "always show me comments by the following people." Organized into layers, maybe. Like Google Earth. Let me see public commentary. Let me see my friend's comments. Let me see editorial comments. Whatever.

And why only have comments on pages where the comments are enabled by the administrator? That also means that the admin can modify and delete comments at will. A third-party comment manager will be more fair and ubiquitous. Why should I only see Amazon reviews that Amazon allowed to remain on the site? Why not have a comment thread on every single web page in the world?

Whee! I dunno. This is one of those things that just totally fires my cool engines.

And then the future future: marked up reality.

We can't markup reality, yet. Physical reality. But the web is a great playground for technology that might migrate to physical reality someday. That will be soooo cool when it does.

Cell phones with GPS -- one big step in that direction. Man, I want a phone with real GPS access. Not like Sprint's lousy restricted system. I want to have GPS-triggered alerts, with a web-based backend for management.

What is wrong with people?

Donna Charlton-Perrin, creative director on the Suave account at the Ogilvy unit of WPP Group, said Ogilvy was looking for ways to “interrupt moms when they are not thinking about themselves’’— say, by putting Suave stickers on food shelves in supermarkets, or running pop-up ads on Internet sites that sell children’s clothes.

“There seems to be this feeling in the culture that moms must be martyrs, that their lives have to be all about their kids,’’ Ms. Charlton-Perrin said. “But the beautiful woman inside that mom is still dying to get out. So we’re saying, ‘A pretty mommy is a better mommy.’ ’’

It makes my brain bleed. Dove can just barely get away with saying "every woman should be beautiful" because beauty carries other meanings that we hope they're trying to imply. But Ms. Charlton-Perrin (clearly in-touch with American moms who have all adopted hyphenated last names and pursued careers as creative directors for Ogilvy) has just placed physical attractiveness above moral worth.

Maybe she was grossly misquoted? And the coloring books Suave published featuring that theme were actually all misprinted? Maybe she's not trying to suggest that $2 Suave shampoo somehow makes people prettier?

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but an unstoppable slide toward consumerism and superficiality.

Thanks for taking the next step, Donna Charlton-Perrin and the sound, creative minds of Ogilvy.

What is religious freedom?

Triggered by the best news quote of the day, and comprising my long response to it:

The school remains adamant that their decision to suspend Killian for a day has nothing to do with his religion, and quite a lot to do with his repeated refusal to heed warnings against wearing pirate outfits.

I'm a firm believer in the importance of religious freedom. But that doesn't mean "freedom to do anything in the name of religion." The important question that has not been answered is this: what activities are covered under the protection afforded religious beliefs?

Even the most draconian enforcement of anti-religious laws couldn't actually stop people from believing whatever they wanted. When Pharaoh threatened to burn to death anyone caught praying to the Hebrew god, people could still believe in the Hebrew god and pray to him in their hearts. The point of having a law protecting religion must be to protect certain, observable religious behaviors.

Does that law protect the ritual killing of children? How about assembling on private property each Sunday and singing hymns? There's a rather clear difference between the two, huh?

I think the important thing to answer is what specifically religious activities are allowed that would not be allowed under other laws? We have other laws that allow us the right to assemble. We don't need religious protection for that. If you follow that line of reasoning, you'll find that there are no activities that should be protected by 'religious freedom' that would not otherwise be legal.

So why does the Constitution have a religious freedom clause at all?

Because history has shown us many examples of activities that became illegal simply because they were religious. Praying is legal under free speech laws. The point of the religious freedom clause is to ensure that the federal government never enacts laws specifically restricting otherwise legal behavior simply because it is motivated by religion.

That's what I think. Tom Dalton, Constitutional Scholar. Oh yeah. :o)