Tag: Yahoo

I’ve Been Aggregated

From time-to-time I’ll run into another blogger or someone with a small website and the conversation will get around to traffic – how many visitors do you get?

Compared to Yahoo!, or Google, or my company’s website, I’m hardly a blip on the radar. Compared to other personal websites, I do pretty well (though I have taken a terrible traffic hit beginning the week before Christmas. I’m hoping it relates to the season, as opposed to my lack of compelling content).

My secret is twofold. First, there’s always fresh content. Maybe I shouldn’t force myself to write, but sometimes I do. I hope the forced entries don’t come off that way, but some probably do. In a perfect world, I’d have at least one entry per day.

The second is much more important. I try and make sure my site’s URL is always visible somewhere. If I post a comment on Slashdot or some bulletin board, I add my URL. I don’t post just to advertise, but I don’t hide the site either.

This increased visibility was one reason I submitted my blog to ctweblogs. The site is an agreggator of blogs, mostly from Connecticut (though not totally – and I’m not sure why).

I’ve found myself going to their site, looking to make sure my latest entry has been found, and then reading other blogs. To a large extent, these are personal sites I would have never seen.

It’s amazing to me how many people obsess about politics and government. They are nearly always stridently on one side of the political spectrum or the other. There don’t seem to be any hard hitting middle-of-the-road blogs.

A good number of the bloggers are angry. They know their position is right – why doesn’t the world see it their way? Maybe the blogs are a steam valve to keep these folks from bursting under their own internal pressure.

Dude, chill.

I’ve found enough interesting that I keep coming back.

When Bandwidth Is King

Maybe you read my entry about watching the Internet’s gatekeepers? It looks like some of what I suspected was going on is actually happening! Internet providers are interested in favoring their own offerings (or deteriorating those from their competitors).

Currently, on the Internet, all content is created equal. Under the provider’s suggestions that will change… possibly drastically.

This battle will pit SBC, Comcast and their brethren against Google, Yahoo!, EBay and the like. It’s a real 21st century battle of the titans.

This is, as they say, a developing story. Stay tuned.

Bob Wood’s Blogs

My friend Bob has turned into a one man publishing army. He’s got two blogs and another website all up and running. It’s not easy feeding three of these on a daily basis.

Bob used to be my expert on all things audio. I guess he still is. Now, his more eminent expertise is in home theater. There’s a subject I know zip about.

It’s amazing to look at all he’s written at http://greathometheater.com/. Lots of things I’ve wondered about are explained… well, except for that how to pay thing.

Bob and I were talking this afternoon, and somehow the topic moved over to search engines like Google and Yahoo!. Bob said his site isn’t in Google’s index. I just looked – he’s right!

As he explains it, there is a sandbox period when you exist, Google knows you exist, but they won’t add you to their database. Ouch! A huge portion of my daily traffic is driven by web surfers who’ve hit Google or Yahoo! or MSN. Without their help, how would anyone know I’m here?

How does anyone know Bob’s there?

The search engines scour this site all the time. Google’s here as often as the #7 train rolls through Willets Point. I give up hundreds of megabytes in bandwidth a month to keep them happy. It’s a worthwhile trade.

You can see I’ve added links to Bob’s sites in this entry and included the blog’s address in the text. I don’t know if it will help… it can’t hurt. Bob’s sites deserve to be seen.

On My Way To Nashville

My friend Mike runs a television station in Nashville. Another friend, Steve, is the news director. They are in the midst of an interesting experiment. Depending on who you ask, you will be told it’s the future or the demise of local TV news.

On Friday, I’m going there to make up my own mind.

WKRN has decided to eliminate the line between reporters, editors and photographers. At that Nashville station, everyone’s a reporter who shoots and edits. They are called VJs, even though, to me, that name brings up memories of Mark Goodman, Allan Hunter, Nina Blackwood and Martha Quinn.

When I told this to some people at my station, they wondered how you could concentrate on getting the meat of a story while you were also worried about running the equipment? I don’t know. I want to see.

I think the vast majority of the photographers I work with could easily be reporters. They have to think like reporters to shoot well (and most of our guys are phenomenal shooters).

I don’t know about the reporters going the other way. Shooting a video camera is as much an art as anything else I can think of. It doesn’t seem to be something easily learned in a short time.

Reporters like to be seen in their stories. Stations like their reporters to be seen. How do you do that when you’re shooting and reporting? I want to find out.

What this rejiggering of resources does buy is a much larger head count on the street. You can cover many more stories, or assign people a longer time to cover a story, or you can use this technique to spend less money.

It would seem that last one is a very tempting outcome for a station’s owner. I am assured by my friends that’s not what they’re doing.

Moving to this new method of electronic journalism also brings new editing and storage techniques which should make the melding of TV news department and Internet news website easier. It’s all a brave new world, but will it be successful?

Is this how TV news will be done in the future? There are lots of vested interests who say no. In the right to work state of Tennessee it’s easier to give it a try.

I do know the hot breath of the Internet is being felt on the back of TV’s neck. At Yahoo, an ambitious plan is underway to add all sorts of video programming. It will all be on demand and without many of the content or time restrictions of over-the-air television. I’m still trying to decide if it will be a more or less expensive method of distribution?

Anyway, I’m excited about seeing my friends and spending time with them. I’m also excited, and in some ways petrified, that I might be taking a peek at the future of television.

Who Is Andrew Breitbart And Why Is Matt Drudge Throwing Him All Those Links?

I’m a habitue of Drudge. Though Matt Drudge has a political and sometimes social agenda, the site links to news I find interesting and does it on a fast and constant basis. Drudge is mostly a collector of news rather than a reporter. Just about all his headlines point to stories on other sites.

Until recently, most of Drudge’s stories came from traditional sources. If a story was actually from the Associated Press, he’d find a website carrying it and link there. You’d be directed to a newspaper, TV station, magazine or Yahoo, which carries wire service reports.

Now, he’s started linking to lots of stories on breitbart.com. Breitbart.com looks like an automated aggregator of AP and Reuters wire stories.

Quite honestly, I’d never heard of it or of Andrew Breitbart, the person whose telephone number is listed as the contact for the web address.

I’m not in Los Angeles, but I used Google’s mapping facility to look at breitbart.com’s physical address. It looks like a residential area just off the San Diego Freeway and near UCLA.

Then I started checking his name. Here’s a quote from Andrew Breitbart on author Roger Simon’s site.

The New York Times got it right — I am amicably leaving the Drudge Report after a long and close working relationship with Matt Drudge, a man who will rightfully take his place in the history books as an Internet news pioneer. I am also excited to be a partner in an inspired new endeavor, the Huffington Post. The last time I worked with Arianna she got a guy who didn’t deserve to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery disinterred. That was cool. I admit: I like to go where the action is.

And, if you go to the Internet Archives and look at some older breitbart.com pages, they actually show Drudge’s site. Well, they all do except this one. Oops.

So, it looks like Breitbart is now somehow connected with Arianna Huffington – liberal and, once again, Matt Drudge – conservative.

Is Drudge is sending all this traffic Breitbart’s way out of the goodness of his heart?

There’s nothing nefarious here (well nothing I can see). If there’s a financial relationship between Breitbart and Drudge, traditional journalists might question the ethical connotations of linking for profit. There’s nothing I’ve looked at that says that’s what’s happening and far be it from me to judge ethics. I just don’t know.

I’m writing what I found because I saw unusual online behavior and put 2+2 together. It’s all out in the open.

For me, it was interesting to see this new website spring up and get much of Drudge’s business. That’s where my curiosity kicked in. If you can aggregate tens or hundreds of thousands of hits… or more, Google ads (or similar ads, sold by others and placed on your site) alone could make a small, automated website very profitable with little investment or ongoing effort.

Blogger’s note: While looking through more websites, trying to read up on Andrew Breitbart, I stumbled on the fact that his father-in-law is Orson Bean. If the name means nothing to you, don’t worry. If you’re my age, Orson Bean was a very witty New Englander who worked the TV game show circuit in the 60s and 70s. I was a big fan. I wondered where he went.

Sub Base New London Saved

I am stunned. I never wrote about it here, there being so much controversy and it being a seemingly political issue, but when the BRAC commission originally announced the New London submarine base would close, I figured it was a done deal.

From the Hartford Courant:

Connecticut officials reacted with joy.

“Yahoo!” said U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. “Submarine base New London lives, and I think that it will live forever.”

Gov. M. Jodi Rell said she was in tears as she listened to the decision while in her car on the way to New London. The governor said she had someone in her office hold a phone to a television set so she could hear the vote. “We did it! We did it!” Rell said.

It seemed, as a Blue State, Connecticut had little pull in 21st Century Washington. The BRAC commission was supposed to be non-partisan, but…

Well, I could not have been any more wrong!

Forget about security for a moment, because I am not qualified to judge how much more or less secure our nation would be with submarines based elsewhere. My concern was Connecticut and how our state’s well being would be affected.

In terms of economics this would have been a tragic body blow to the state. All those people and jobs, all that money and commerce, all the subcontractors necessary to run the base – gone.

Before the advent of casino gambling, Southeastern Connecticut was an economic black hole. This would have brought us back to where we were before the casinos and then some.

Am I looking at this from a selfish standpoint? Absolutely.

A Former Teacher Finds My Blog

How do you describe a blog to someone who hasn’t read one? It’s like a diary&#185.

Forget all this political mumbo jumbo and the (false) promise of blogs as the new journalism. Blogs are diaries. Some might be political, but many more concentrate on Britney Spears or the emotional traumas associated with high school.

This is my blog. It concentrates on what’s important to me, without the controversial stuff that would prompt my boss to ask me to stop.

Here’s where a blog differs from a diary. Diaries are private or only read by a select few. Blogs, on the other hand, are available to anyone, and once indexed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest, become a contextual part of the Internet.

That indexing is very important. Stupid, insipid things written by me and others… relatively unimportant people, can gain weight when they concern an esoteric subject which isn’t often discussed.

Take Junior High School 218 Queens, aka – Harold G. Campbell Junior High School. On the Internet, I’m considered a source for JHS 218Q. But how many people care, or more importantly search for Campbell Junior High? So it was a surprise to read the email I got this morning

I was at the club this morning (Saw Mill River Club in

Mount Kisco, NY. I prefer the Powerhouse Gym on

Francis Lewis Blvd. but it is 39 miles away), working

away on the elliptical when I thought, “Why not go to

a search engine and type in Harold G. Campbell JHS?”

So I did (when I got home).

Your name and the Kennedy assassination article

appeared. I started reading it when I was shocked to

see my name. I then read that the day after,

Saturday, we went to a show. I have no recollection

of that but if you say it, then I must have gone.

Here’s that Google link. My website is the second citation.

The shocked man is my former 8th grade teacher, Harold Friend. He was Mr. Friend then, he is Dr. Friend now. The academic elevation doesn’t surprise me. He was very smart.

Dr. Friend was mentioned when I wrote about the Kennedy assassination. It was his classroom I was in when we got the word from Dallas.

How cool to get this email. How strange for him to search the Internet and find someone talking about him. The indexing power of search engines is a luxury of our times that never existed, or was even contemplated, as recently as 15 years ago.

After reading the email, Helaine said Dr. Friend must be old now. If he was 30 in 1963, that would put him in his early 70s now. Of course he could have been 25, or 45. To me, in the early 1960s, he was old. I was a kid. But, being in his 70s now doesn’t seem to make him as old as it once would have.

The fact that his story begins in his gym means, however old he is, he’s really younger.

Once again I have to ask myself, who reads this… and why. I can tell from my logs that most of my traffic isn’t to my home page, but people going to inside pages – archived material I had written about earlier which is pointed at by the search engines. It just boggles my mind that anything I write has any impact on anyone.

I’m just a guy who likes to write. Like all bloggers, all I bring are my own experiences and insights. It can be read, but that doesn’t make it special.

&#185 – Be careful on the spelling, because it’s certainly not like a dairy.

Blogger’s addendum – It has been established, in further communication, that he doesn’t remember me.

Google On Sixty Minutes

Tonight on Sixty Minutes I watched Leslie Stahl’s two part piece on Google&#185. I didn’t learn anything new, and was pleased to see many of the good things I had heard being reinforced.

There is one part missing from that story… something I had never seen touched upon.

In order to do what it does, Google must cache the entire Internet. So, if Google says it can search 8,058,044,651 pages (as it does right now), those pages must be stored (possibly more than once) in Google’s server farms.

I would hope they have a sophisticated way of compressing the data for fast indexing and easy storage – still that’s more than a daunting task. And Microsoft, Yahoo and a few others do much the same.

Last year, when my webhost had a server crash and lost a few weeks of data, Google’s cache allowed me to go back and reconstruct nearly everything I had lost. And if they do it with my site, they’re doing it with every site, whether the info is good, bad, useful or useless.

&#185 – The piece was produced by Rome Hartman, who probably doesn’t remember me. Back in the early 70s I worked for his father, also Rome Hartman, at a radio station in West Palm Beach, Florida. On the weekends, we sometimes went out in the station’s boat as he did fishing reports. He’s done well for himself in spite of having known me.

Who Came Here In 2004

Last year, on December 31, I posted a little summary of what happened on this website in the previous year. I just looked back and was amazed how things have changed. The number of people and unattended, researching, web crawling computers, has increased greatly.

The content hasn’t changed. It’s the same drivel I’ve posted here since day one. This blog is nothing but inconsequential, random, musings about what’s important to me. That’s why whenever anyone else buys into reading it, I am both astonished and flattered.

In 2003&#185 approximately 17,000 separate viewers came calling to this site. Collectively you visited 30,000 times, downloading 872,000 files. My page counter now sits just north of 60,000.

That was then, this is now. The page counter has moved from 60,000 to 355,554. This year you visited 256,409 times downloading about 5,000,000 files (each image within the blog, plus other insertions in a single page, counts as a file). My server, located in Chicago and maintained by hostforweb.com has spit out 51.7 gb of data.

Though there was a huge spike after I wrote about Ashlee Simpson’s Saturday Night Live debacle a day before it hit the bigger websites, a smoothed traffic line shows my audience steadily building. I am averaging over 1,000 visits a day.

There are three ways I look at my traffic and all tell slightly different stories. On each web page is a counter which increments once any time someone reads a page. I don’t think it is triggered by web crawlers that sites like Google and Yahoo use, though I can’t be sure. There is also a control panel counter I can see in the web site’s “back office.” Finally there’s the counter from the company that I allow to place ads on the site.

They’re always different. Always.

Speaking of ads, since I added them as an unobtrusive experiment, they have paid for my web hosting. The aggregate total in $198.44, of which I’ve already received about $144. This site makes on average 89&#162 per day. As I write this, I have made 7&#162 today. Some days are better than others.

Before you poo poo that number, multiply it by 365. I was going to publish a blog anyway, why not put these few ads off in a corner?

The number one search term was “John Mayer,” though that’s misleading. Ashlee Simpson probably drew more traffic, but there were multiple search terms (and spellings) used. As with last year, I’m surprised that traffic has come here after searching for things like, “hot water pipe is frozen south korea” or “chuck woolery wives&#178” or the always popular “carrot top shirtless&#179.”

Google also sent a lot of traffic my way because of an entry I had which debunked a popular picture of a tanker sailing into a hurricane. If you search Google for “hurricane photo” my enticing picture is on the bottom right. This one link was clicked 55,599 times by Google’s users.

I have tried to write something every day. Sometimes that meant scraping the bottom of the barrel. My apologies. Other times my life was centered around things I couldn’t or wouldn’t write about publicly. Those days were the most difficult for blog writing.

There are now over 900 individual entries in this blog. There are also thousands of photos in my photo gallery. If you ask Google what they have archived on this site, the response is 11,400 pages!

Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for reading. Thanks for commenting and sending grammatical and spelling corrections. It’s all really appreciated.

My daughter says whenever I put something in a text box, that’s an immediate sign that’s it’s really boring.

Happy New Year Steffie

And Happy New Year to you too.

&#185 – This blog began in early July 2003, so last year’s numbers represent approximately half a year.

&#178 – After Jo Anne Pflug I am lost.

&#179 – This particular term was searched for 399 times. Some people need to get a life.

Drudge’s Graphics

I read Matt Drudge all the time. Actually, that’s an exaggeration because the vast majority of what’s on Drudge’s site is just links to other places.

It looks to be written entirely in html – the simplest of web languages. Its most sophisticated feature is the javascript code in ads, written to try to evade pop-up blockers (and it certainly beats Google’s toolbar).

Drudge doesn’t run much in the way of images. Tonight there are three showing on his page. Amazingly, they are all being hosted on websites other than Drudge’s. Two are in yimg.com, which I think is a Yahoo image server, The other is msn.com.

If he’s not paying for this privilege, since it certainly can be done without permission, it’s the equivalent of powering your house through your neighbor’s electric meter.

My Very Strange Readers

When I look at the logs for this website, I can often see what brought readers here. Sometimes it’s a bookmark or a link from another site (I am always grateful when others link to this site – though, as you see, I don’t have permanent links to other blogs here). Many times, it’s a search engine leading folks here.

Just to give you an idea, so far in June Google has sucked down 26.5 MB of bandwidth as it indexes this site. MSN, whose search engine is just ramping up, has pulled down over 100 MB! Nearly 1,300 visitors in these 11 days of June have come from search engines. At the moment, Google brings in 3 times as many readers as Yahoo, 10 times as many as MSN.

If you come from a search engine, like Google or Yahoo, the actual search query you entered is logged for me and it’s often fascinating info. For the past few months, many strangers have come here because of things I’ve written, or photography I’ve posted, about John Mayer and his road manager Scotty Crowe (Scotty has many fewer web citations, so I come up very high on a search for his name). They have been the 1 & 2 most popular search terms for months.

Now, joining them on the hit parade is “Carrot Top Shirtless.”

I don’t which is scarier – people are looking for Carrot Top – shirtless, or the fact that there’s content in my blog that makes geofffox.com show up in the search… in the second spot on Google!

The Real Meaning of Internet Access

If you’re clever, you can find nearly anyone on the net. Early on, at least 8-9 years ago, Steffie was writing a school report on penguins. She wanted to know more about the sleeping habits of the Emperor penguin. I was lost.

Back then I probably reached for Yahoo and looked around. There were a few citations, and I found a website that was close, but didn’t really have what she wanted.

Actually, by this time we had gone way beyond what she wanted. I was now doing this research for me.

I wrote to the website’s owner, and he wrote back that night. Yes, he knew about the Emperor penguin – in fact he was considered an expert on the Emperor. And then, he proceeded to explain their sleep patterns (very light sleepers).

It didn’t impress Steffie, but it did me, that he was from a university in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. And he was totally available.

Since then I have found a way to contact the head of programming at NBC, when they were considering a reality show which would have put a ‘contestant’ on the Russian MIR space station – which, I argued, was a death trap. More recently I wrote to a Nobel Prize winner at the University of Texas and got a pretty funny reply.

Until her accelerated departure last week, I had been writing to Shelley Ross, executive producer at Good Morning America – a show I used to do weather fill-in for – and would move heaven and Earth to do weather fill-in for again. I wrote her more than she wrote me… but she did reply, and even told me I was funny.

A few years ago I wrote the late Jack Paar, who had a very interesting website, but he never wrote back. I was always worried he had seen me (our station can be viewed in Greenwich, though residents there tend to believe they’re actually in New York and primarily watch New York City TV), not approved, and decided to snub me. I hope I’m wrong.

Tonight I wrote Shelley Berman.

In the 60’s Shelley Berman was as big as a comedian could be. A 1963 documentary was his undoing. He still plays Vegas, travels around the country, and teaches at USC, but he should have had more for the last 40 years.

He is extremely active on his website, and I assume I’ll get a response… or maybe he’s seen me… or Paar tipped him off before he died. Who can tell?

Meanwhile, it’s just cool to know I have this access.

100,000 Pages Served

Sometime on Monday the little counter on the bottom right of this website will spin past 99,999 and move into six digits. It’s my website, and I am impressed. I never thought there would be anywhere near this much traffic.

However, let’s keep this in perspective. Compared to a large commercial site like Google or Yahoo I’m not even a rounding error. This site has so little traffic that it easily shares a computer with dozens of other small sites (and my server is in Chicago).

For a one man operation with no promotion, and no draw other than a look at what I’m thinking on any given day (not much it often seems) 100k since July is livin’ large.

To define terms, each time a full page of this website is viewed the counter goes up one. This page counts as one. If you go back and look at a single archived entry, that’s another one. Looking at a full screen of thumbnails in my gallery is one more. And, if you click on any of them to get that single image in a larger view that is yet one more.

There are other counters at work on the site. Most of them operate behind the scenes on the management pages.

This is the 400th entry in my blog which started on July 4, 2003 (you can see the titles of each with links by clicking here). The combined text and images here take up 285 MB. This website has spit out a little less than 15 GB of data, enough to fill 20 or so CDROMs. There have been 56,000 separate visits to the site. If you count each individual file that’s called on, each image, style sheet, table and text files, you will be just short of 1.5 million hits!

This site is fully indexed on all the search engines, but gets the most traffic, by far, from Google. The largest number of referrals come from people entering the name, “Scotty Crowe,” John Mayer’s road manager who I had written about… and who doesn’t appear on other sites often enough to move me from a prominent showing on Google and Yahoo. In 2003, Scotty was only number 2, just behind “giblet gravy,” a term I had used in a context that probably wasn’t be searched for.

There are other Geoff Fox’s listed on the Internet – many others. But, I am the number one result when you Google my name. I’m also high on the list for ‘dissed’ and, of course, Scotty Crowe.

Each day, between 350-450 of you visit, looking at about 2 pages per visit on average.

There is a certain amount of exaggeration when you see all these numbers. Some do nothing more than reflect the Internet equivalent of a wrong number, as people come here by mistake. Others are reflecting robots and spiders and crawlers from search engines like Google, Yahoo and now Microsoft. Still more, less than 10% but significant, are from me… looking for errors and proofreading my work (I spend a lot of time spellchecking and proofreading my work and mistakes still get through all the time).

Actually, I often stay away from the public pages, lest I run up the counter.

If I told you how much this endeavor has cost, you’d probably be surprised. The main software is Movabletype, which is free. Same goes for Gallery, my photo gallery software and GrADS which produces the meteograms. All the software on this site is freeware.

Renting my little corner of cyberspace is also pretty cheap. I paid $100 for one year of webhosting, which provides the destination when you type https://www.geofffox.com. For that $100 I get 350 MB of space, more bandwidth than I can use, and the ability to control my mailboxes and truly be the master of my own domain! Owning geofffox.com is another $20 (I also own tv-cd.com).

Please accept my thanks for coming here and helping me stay motivated. I have become somewhat anal – posting virtually every day. I am surprised, gratified and a little scared when I think you’ve spent a time reading what I have to say.

Helaine and the Cult People

I kid Helaine, saying she’s in a cult. It sometimes seems that way. This is all because she’s a huge fan of Rick Springfield, and has been for over 30 years.

Rick Springfield had some big hits: Jessie’s Girl, Don’t Talk to Strangers. He’s got enough for a decent ‘hit medley’ in concert. Still, it’s been a long time since he had concentrated airplay.

Over the years, Helaine took me to see his early 80’s movie, “Hard to Hold” and later to see him in concert. After a while he became the ‘house act’ act the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, starring in EFX.

He is talented and charismatic on stage. He’s my age, but in much better shape (damn you Rick Springfield). A few years ago, in Las Vegas, Helaine convinced Steffie to go to see Rick in EFX and now she’s hooked too. After the show she told Helaine, “You never said he was hot.” Since then, Steffie has taken loads of photos at his concerts (here and here) and was even published in his Tour Book and 2004 Calendar.

With the Internet, acts like Springfield have been better able to sustain their careers and maintain a sizable fan base without continuous radio airplay. Helaine subscribes to a Rick Springfield group on Yahoo and receives dozens (sometimes hundreds) of emails daily. Some of these women analyze the nuances of his stage act with the detail of a color commentator going over a touchdown pass on the fifth replay.

Helaine has mostly lurked in the shadows, reading and not writing. She has made some friends through the group and kept current on what Rick’s doing. All that changed a few months ago.

Rick was in the process of finishing a new album and would be promoting it by appearing at concerts, doing interviews and making personal appearances. The fan club members decided they would help. They organized ‘street teams’ in defined geographic areas and set out to spread the word.

Helaine got to be manager for the New York region, though we live about 100 miles from New York City. For the past month or more, I’ve been watching her, amazingly organized, on the laptop, piles of paper at her side, planning strategies. Day-by-day she consulted and cajoled the members of her team.

I was a skeptic. I was wrong.

A few days ago, Rick appeared on WPLJ radio in New York. At street level, unseen by the radio crew, dozens of street team members congregated with signs and pamphlets and a whole lot of genuine spirit. Somehow, word got up to the studio and down came someone with a microphone and recorder.

Today, Rick was on “Fox and Friends” on Fox News Channel (click to watch the interview – high speed access only). Again, the fan club was outside. As I watched the broadcast, it was obvious the hosts were impressed by this show of strength. You could see posters and people through the window behind the interview set. Their presence gave Rick Springfield ‘street cred’ in the present tense.

As it turns out, one of our former technical directors is now a TD at Fox. With a few emails, I was able to get Helaine and Stefanie inside, where they watched the interview and schmoozed a little with Rick, his road manager and personal manager. I’m sure some of the other fans were jealous, but this was my doing – not Helaine’s.

Speaking of jealousy, I would be lying if I didn’t say I was a little jealous of Rick’s fans and their ‘street team’ mentality. How wonderful to have a fan base that is so dedicated that they’ll come and stand outside in the bitter cold or do whatever else is necessary to continue your success. Actually, that in and of itself might be more meaningful success than CD sales figures alone could ever show.

Helaine and Steffie are back on the road tomorrow, seeing Rick in concert in Toms River, NJ. All the other girls in the cult are going too.

Follow The Money

I get more than my fair share of spam every day. And, I read about the various approaches being proposed to stop spam. Microsoft has a method. Yahoo has a method. Most everyone on Slashdot has a method.

All of this deep thinking is predicated on the fact that spammers are hard to find. They can use proxies or zombies or otherwise hide their identity. On a network designed with the assumption of trust, finding angles wasn’t difficult.

I think we’re going after this the wrong way.

Spammers are on the Internet because they want money. Their easiest access to money is by selling things and getting the cash by credit card.

Why not do as “Deep Throat” instructed Woodward and Bernstein; “Follow the money.”

Am I missing something? How difficult would it be to set up some stings – very publicly noted – and bag some violators?

The way to stop spamming isn’t to make email more difficult. You stop spamming by making collecting the money more difficult!

Blogger’s addendum: No sooner had I posted this when I read a similar post on Slashdot. And then, not long after that it was this article at Wired.

Maybe I’m psychic (in addition to psycho)?