Blogs clog Google (say that three times fast!) because Google boosts your site's rankings in searches based, among other things, on how many inbound and outbound links you have. Most bloggers have lots of links -- it's the nature of blogging.
I had a post on my blog about "Powerpoint Nazis" and got some comment spam pushing screen decorations (wallpaper) for cell phones. Looking through my logs, I was amazed at the number of referers I got from Google based on people looking for "Nazi wallpaper."
OK, let's start with the givens most folks will admit to:
Most blogs are crap. At least, if you're comparing them to wide/deep sources of general information.
Blogs do clutter up the results of the major search engines.
Some blogging/CMS tools are elegant, but many -- including many of the leading ones -- are pretty kludgy.
Now, here are the givens that too many Slashdotters won't admit to:
The web isn't here to serve you and you alone. Maybe parts of it are, but on the whole it's a lot more like a community (and like a community resource, if you're talking about the infrastructure and tools such as Google) and a lot less like your l337 hax0r basement clubhouse. We geeks cannot simultaneously bitch that people should become more technically literate while at the same time shooing Aunt Edna away from the web because her MT weblog is boring and plastered with comment spam.
You want to tell me you popped out of your mother's womb and started coding Perl before you could crawl? Please. We have all ascended a tech learning curve -- and the smart ones are continually looking for new ones to climb. Blogging is in its infancy in terms of both form and tools -- it will evolve for the same reasons you're not still coding COBOL -- people, left to themselves, will find increasinly efficient ways to communicate and transmit information.
For millions of people, weblogs have created what many of us found incredibly valuable in our formative years: A cadre of People Who Understand. Most people (usually as adolescents), cast around in search of a group they can feel like they really belong to -- a group that understands and appreciates their viewpoint and contributions to the group. For many of us, it was finding someone who knew Linux, or hanging out with other D&D players, etc.
But you know what? That big issue of finding a community of one's own isn't limited to geeks -- it's indicative of the prevasive loneliness that may be one of the most dominant characteristics of modern, first-world society.
And blogs have had a huge impact on that.
Today, there are thousands (perhaps millions) of interconnected online communities centered around blogs. No, they're not running FUDforum or other bulletin board software, but they still fit the core definitions of a community, whether online or off. Millions of people are learning more about how the internet works and information that was isolated is increasingly communal and (wait for it, RMS...) free.
How can that be a bad thing?
Re:Been involved with this before, on a smaller sc
on
The Super Superhighway
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· Score: 1
The project did reduce congestion -- every car in the Express Lanes was a vehicle that, one has to assume, would have been crawling along on the (non-toll) freeway if the motorist had made a decision not to use the toll lanes.
Additionally, the Express Lanes allowed (and, I think, still allows) free access for carpools of three or more occupants -- an important incentive for carpools and vanpools able to use HOV (i.e., carpool) lanes at either end (on the 91 in Riverside County and on the 55 in Orange County).
There were air-quality advantages as well -- pre-opening models indicated the Express Lanes would be more beneficial to air quality along the route than simply building more general-purpose lanes or traditional carpool lanes. The former, without tolls, would have just gotten congested (stop-and-go traffic = greater air pollution) and the latter would have removed fewer vehicles from the congested freeway.
I'll grant you your first point, though -- the original franchise agreement was naive on the state's part as well as the franchisee's.
My guess is Wall Street demanded the no-compete clause on new construction (and, truth be told, I would have tried to negotiate the same thing), but anyone who follows California politics for more than 10 minutes could tell you that the odds of politicians leaving the agreement alone were slim and none.
Been involved with this before, on a smaller scale
on
The Super Superhighway
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· Score: 4, Informative
I was involved with the 91 Express Lanes, the first toll road in the world that was fully automated (no toll booths) and privately financed.
It was a good project -- neither the state nor the county had funds to improve one of the single most congested segments of freeway in the country, and there were no good alternate routes. There was, however, a median, which a private company leased from the state for a nominal fee. They built toll lanes on their own nickel (well, Wall Street bond buyers' nickels) and opened for business. The deal, as they're proposing in Texas, was for the road to be privately run for 30 years and then turned over to the state, which would be able to continue to charge tolls.
The road's been open for less than a decade and although it's been a big success in terms added traffic capacity, there are some lessons no one expected:
No franchise agreement is so bulletproof that it can survive long-term, organized political pressure. Today, the Express Lanes are owned by the regional transportation authority. Why? Because politicians didn't like the fact that they didn't own the road and couldn't use it as a political football. So, a region that didn't have money to build it in the first place found the money to create a new ownership entity and buy the road back from its private-sector owners. (Who made a nice profit along the way.)
There's huge market potential for "open sourcing" traffic and tolling models. No company is going to pursue a project like the Texas one -- or even the merely $125 million Express Lanes effort -- by simply opening up their own pocketbook. Most of the money comes from bonds sold against future toll revenues, and the buyers of those bonds want rock-solid tolling and revenue estimates. Several companies do this, but even the best ones (like these guys make spectacularly expensive mistakes AND get away with using proprietary, "black-box" methodologies. Wall Street is always going to like expensive consultants; if some academics, geeks and economists could provide an open model that Wall Street could test against, there would be money to be made -- and fewer mistakes.
There are years and years when things can get easily fsck'd up before construction ever starts. Once you get a road like this open, everyone loves it -- even people who swear they'll never use it benefit because the new facility takes traffic off of existing roads. But long before you get to that point, it's not an exaggeraton to say that every neighborhood group, ambitious city council member or lawyer looking for tort income will come after you.
Re:Google will get reactive at some point
on
What's Next For Google?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree with your premise that the business cycle and the realities of public ownership will mean some sort of reactivity at Google. However, I think your analysis of their ad revenue's vulnerability is incorrect.
Google's whole ad model is built around a simple, devastatingly effective concept: Advertisers only pay if there's a clickthrough. In a recession, when people are buying less overall, the clickthrough rates are likely going to go down.
But -- and this is the big deal -- that will automatically reduce ad expenditures and it will do so in a fairly graceful way. This is a big, big contrast to the agency-driven, big-dollar buys a major advertiser would commit to on a network like Yahoo. Those purchases are much more likely to feel the effects of fast, pannicky spending reductions because the risk they represent is higher in terms of both dollars and questionable rate of return.
Does Google get hurt in a recession? Yes. But I'd argue that they get hurt a lot less -- and with more of a predictable, linear response -- than Yahoo or other competitors.
The idea of selling access -- even if it's dirt cheap -- is a good idea and it doesn't make you a blood-sucking capitalist. What it *does* make you is someone who can avoid the "tragedy of the commons," issues that arise when you give away something that people value.
Charging lets you assign value to your service, and assigning value is a key way to keep customers in line while covering your nut.
In terms of the cable modem companies "coming after you," you need only worry about legal competition -- no franchise agreements come to mind that completely lock out all broadband competition. It's worth noting, however, that Verizon has backed legislation in Pennsylvania to prevent municipalities from setting up free broadband services -- a bad step in the direction of market control.
If you *are* going to charge, then you've got some additional costs to consider:
Business licence, if necessary, or registration as a non-profit if you're pursuing it as such. One way or another, you don't want to get caught running a business in all but the tiniest towns without the right license, because city hall likes to extract its pound of flesh as much as the next guy.
Insurance and incorporation -- because it's important, i.e., "Little Jimmy viewed Paris Hilton's tits on the DSL leech you sold me, and now I'm going to sue you for everything you've got!" For you, that probably means your house and your stuff UNLESS you're a.) incorporated (to separate your business assets from your personal ones); and b.) insured. (And yes, I know your TOS would limit your liability -- it doesn't matter. People don't have to win lawsuits to leech every penny you have... they just need to file them and force you to defend them.)
Bulletproof TOS. No matter what you do, give yourself the ability to shut folks down at your sole discretion. Have an attorney who Knows About These Things review your TOS, even if it costs you a few bucks to do so.
Good luck!
ezPublish CMS has WebDAV capabilities
on
WebDAV with a Quota?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Since it's based on PHP and pretty extensible, I would think getting a quota function established (if eZ publish doesn't already have one) would be easy enough.
Now, can someone help me get the damned 3.4.4 version to run on FreeBSD?;)
Agreed -- Dana doesn't get a lot of credit for it, but he may be the most libertarian lawmaker in Congress.
(Note the lowercase "l" -- he's in the GOP rather than the Libertarian Party, but much of the stuff he supports puts a high priority on small govnerment and maximizing individual freedom.)
Except... I can't get the damned thing to install (FreeBSD 4.9). I like to think I know what I'm doing on my own box and regularly install much more complex packages by hand... but ezpublish fails every time. Ugh!
Is there a help list for the beleagured?
You know, call me a softie for the almost-a-compliment on my weblog, but I felt compelled to respond -- not because I utterly disagree, but because you make some very valid points.
I think you're essentially right that HP is going to make money off the deal and that it *does* mean exposure for them in a way they haven't seen before. In that sense, I take your point that there's a method to their madness.
What I don't get is their to-market strategy and price point. If they're going to bundle and discount, you're right -- that's smart. But I still don't think there's a huge market for an iPod clone, at the same price point, from HP as a standalone item. It'll be interesting to see if they think so, too.
One of the most interesting things you brought up is the comparison to Dell -- a company (in)famous for understanding that you don't have to be an innovator to make tons of money. Somewhere in the Big Dell Warehouse of Market Knowledge, they've done their best to figure out all the hardware markets that are near (but not quite at) commoditization; that's the point at which they traditionally jump in.
You can bet iTunes will keep getting better (and Apple will keep being picky about its licensing) because that's a value-added that can keep hardware prices up for a long time.
Now, give me permission to reprint your rebuttal on my webblog, dammit.;)
I covered this on my marketing/communications weblog. The salient points from a marketing perspective:
HP just proved it doesn't understand basic branding: OK, so that's a pretty big smackdown to throw at a multi-billion-dollar tech giant. But consider: People buy the iPod because it's cool, it's functional and (stay with me here) because it's an iPod. If you're going to compete, you need to be different/better/unique, you need to have a dramatically lower price point, you need to have a better channel or you need to have God on your side. HP has demonstrated none of these things.
HP just told us it doesn't listen to its customers. I challenge anyone in HP's marketing organization to produce research indicating existing customers would buy an hPod (my name for it -- HP can send me a royalty check) over the existing Apple product based on exact functionality. My guess is the research doesn't exist.
Finally, HP is broadcasting the message that many of their strongest brand attributes are gone. No, I don't expect Joe Consumer to make a statement like that -- but I do expect him/her to pick up on it subtly. HP used to be about great, long-lasting products that led in their categories (printers, anyone?) both in terms of sales and innovation. They still do some innovation, but increasingly HP is trying to be all things to all people, and it's not working out too well. The clearest branding message from the hPod? That HP is a follower, not a leader.
If you go this route and live in a region with one or more mid-sized daily newspapers (say, suburban dailies of 60,000 daily circulation or less), then contact the paper's city editor or managing editor, and ask them to recommend somone on staff. At a larger paper, you can ask for the photo editor.
I had a leg up on the process, since I was a city editor at the time, but that was only a minor advantage.
When I got married (more than 14 years ago), we had exactly the same concern: We wanted the negatives/slides, and complete reprint control.
How we handled it: We hired a newspaper photographer who was primarily a photojournalist, but who also had a little bit of wedding experience. We told him to "cover" the wedding like an event -- shoot half of it in black-and-white, half in color, absolute minimum of formal shots, etc.
Oh, and we told him to crop everything he printed for the best, most dramatic shots - no need for standard sizes/ratios like 8x10", etc.
Bottom line: We paid $400 (OK, so this was 14 years ago -- still damned cheap at the time), we've long-since digitized all the negs and slides, and our wedding album is the envy of everyone who sees it.
We run a graphic design shop that specializes in editorial design, so we faced a lot of the same issues you're probably looking at. For us, the decision came down to:
Platform: We had designers who were fluent in the Mac world and only slightly less fluent in the PC world. One thing we decided at the outset was that religious wars wouldn't be tolerated in the decisionmaking process -- we paid people to design and to be technically competent enough to pick up a new OS if they needed to, not to evangelize.
We ended up deciding on PCs for a variety of reasons specific to our operation (I won't bore you with those), but the common reason boiled down to simple customer service: We surveyed our clients and vendors (in that order of priority). Most clients were on PCs and were more comfortable with PCs, so that's what we aligned ourselves with.
* Program: For us, the comparative process came down to questions of:
What would allow us to optimize our workflow? Time is money, and so we looked at our workflow (both overall and client-specific) and developed a checklist of what our must-haves were.
What would cost the least overall? Purchase price is *not* the major cost of the software decision -- for us, we factored in what downtime would cost, what the value-over-time of the warranty and tech-support policies were, etc.
Where was the software in its life cycle? Simply put, we wanted to get a product in the "sweet spot" that was past version 1.x and not yet near the end of its life. This question pretty much eliminated Pagemaker for us -- a product that has been repositioned and kluged to death.
Ultimately, we looked at Framemaker (too geared to technical publishing) Quark 5.x, Quark 6.x and Adobe InDesign. We settled on Quark 5.x and stuck with it past the introduction of 6.x because of stability issues. We have one publication running on InDesign, with an anticipated 12-18 month cycle for migrating over. We'll probably always have at least one Quark installation because some clients just refuse to switch.
Google is all about two things from an operational standpoint:
Keep costs down; and
What happens inside the company, stays inside the company.
Figuring out the number of servers they have is why we're noodling over the second point, but the first point is what probably as us all thrown off. Someone in a position to know said recently that he could state as a an absolute fact they have more than 100,000 servers -- and added that merely mentioning it probably violated multiple NDAs he had.
Not a thing, in terms of the number of their servers, or internal data such as line-item hardware purchases.
This is how it should be, since knowing the size of Google's hardware capacity is a very, very strategic bit of information, and the kind of thing that would allow Yahoo/MSN/whoever to get a feel for how much capital would be necessary to duplicate or improve upon it.
If Gates tried what you're suggesting, the market wouldn't reward it -- MS stock would decline, institutional shareholders would balk and the company would suffer, depleting the very resource you want to distribute... cash.
Companies are not in business to do good or to pay people x% of their revenues; a company is solely in business to profit. What Gates wants to do with his personal share of the pie is laudable, but if he tried to make it the company mission, he'd destroy the company in the process.
I currently host MT and Mambo, and have also hosted other weblogs and nuke-type systems. Each has its pros and cons.
If you're comfy with Perl and want to hack extensively, MT is the natural choice. You can make it do damned near anything you want without hacking, of course (via plugins), but sometimes it's fun to mess around under the hood. Oh, and you can avoid the comment-spam problems you mentioned via a number of plugins.
If you prefer PHP, I'd say try Mambo (with a nice polling function built in) or Wordpress (which gets props because it produces valid XHTML/CSS and is clean, clean, clean on the admin interface.
Best advice: go to Open Source CMS and play around. They have default installs of a lot of CMS/blogging systems, and even let you play with the admin interfaces. Very helpful, all in all.
There are a lot of types of RSI, and you should get it checked out in any case.
However, if it hurts while or immediately after working, it may be tendonitis rather than carpal. Carpal is more tingling and numbness than pain in the early stages.
The good news: If it's tendonitis, it can be cured with an anti-inflammatory drug like cortezone (sp?) and some changes in how you use your hands. Very minor, very effective -- and the over-the-counter wrist braces another poster mentioned work wonders.
I love comments like this just because they're so... well, wrong
American journalism is controlled by accountants. By advertisers. By sensitivity to advertisers. By political correctness. By harried people competing against a rapidly evolving medium they don't fully grasp. By sheet mediocrity.
But American media is not controlled by our political figures.
Yes, we give them too much air time/column space with too little substance. And yes, the press should be more of a watch dog and less of a lap dog. But can a media market that gives us both Rush Limbaugh and The Nation really be under the control of political figures?
Or maybe you mean Rush is controlled by the GOP and The Nation is run by progressives and far-left Democrats? OK, fair enough -- I don't think it's true, but let's say it is. That's still one helluva long way from the media being controlled by all the politics.
By chasing a chimera of of objectivity they can't meet -- and one the public would happily tell them matters more inside the newsroom than outside of it -- traditional newspapers have gotten further and further away from writing in a manner that readers can relate to.
This matters a lot because it's at the root of the "gotcha" journalism most local broadcasts engage in, it's one of the big factors behind the decline in newspaper readership and (most importantly), it's pissing away the trust that the U.S. model of press freedom spent 200-odd years building up.
Disclaimer: I was a journalist for a bunch o' years and made these same observations then, too. Not a good way to make friends with the publisher's office.
The point: Most readers will trade off accuracy for someone who's openly in their philosophical or political corner. Another segment will trade off accuracy for immediacy. If you're both passionate and immediate, of course you're going to be a formidable thread to old-school media.
Initial price (i.e., the price the first shares sell at) is set by the underwriting bank in conjunction with the company going public.
The price-setting is a bit of a black art (think: complicated regex work) based on both company valuation and market appeal. It's not unheard of for the initial valuation to be changed the day before the IPO based on huge market anticipation and the feeling that people will pay more.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall a project for making a working X-ray device from old tubes. It was in The Scientific American Book of Projects for the Amateur Scientist (also raved about here).
I had a post on my blog about "Powerpoint Nazis" and got some comment spam pushing screen decorations (wallpaper) for cell phones. Looking through my logs, I was amazed at the number of referers I got from Google based on people looking for "Nazi wallpaper."
Now, here are the givens that too many Slashdotters won't admit to:
You want to tell me you popped out of your mother's womb and started coding Perl before you could crawl? Please. We have all ascended a tech learning curve -- and the smart ones are continually looking for new ones to climb. Blogging is in its infancy in terms of both form and tools -- it will evolve for the same reasons you're not still coding COBOL -- people, left to themselves, will find increasinly efficient ways to communicate and transmit information.
But you know what? That big issue of finding a community of one's own isn't limited to geeks -- it's indicative of the prevasive loneliness that may be one of the most dominant characteristics of modern, first-world society.
And blogs have had a huge impact on that.
Today, there are thousands (perhaps millions) of interconnected online communities centered around blogs. No, they're not running FUDforum or other bulletin board software, but they still fit the core definitions of a community, whether online or off. Millions of people are learning more about how the internet works and information that was isolated is increasingly communal and (wait for it, RMS...) free.How can that be a bad thing?
Additionally, the Express Lanes allowed (and, I think, still allows) free access for carpools of three or more occupants -- an important incentive for carpools and vanpools able to use HOV (i.e., carpool) lanes at either end (on the 91 in Riverside County and on the 55 in Orange County).
There were air-quality advantages as well -- pre-opening models indicated the Express Lanes would be more beneficial to air quality along the route than simply building more general-purpose lanes or traditional carpool lanes. The former, without tolls, would have just gotten congested (stop-and-go traffic = greater air pollution) and the latter would have removed fewer vehicles from the congested freeway.
I'll grant you your first point, though -- the original franchise agreement was naive on the state's part as well as the franchisee's.
My guess is Wall Street demanded the no-compete clause on new construction (and, truth be told, I would have tried to negotiate the same thing), but anyone who follows California politics for more than 10 minutes could tell you that the odds of politicians leaving the agreement alone were slim and none.
It was a good project -- neither the state nor the county had funds to improve one of the single most congested segments of freeway in the country, and there were no good alternate routes. There was, however, a median, which a private company leased from the state for a nominal fee. They built toll lanes on their own nickel (well, Wall Street bond buyers' nickels) and opened for business. The deal, as they're proposing in Texas, was for the road to be privately run for 30 years and then turned over to the state, which would be able to continue to charge tolls.
The road's been open for less than a decade and although it's been a big success in terms added traffic capacity, there are some lessons no one expected:
Google's whole ad model is built around a simple, devastatingly effective concept: Advertisers only pay if there's a clickthrough. In a recession, when people are buying less overall, the clickthrough rates are likely going to go down.
But -- and this is the big deal -- that will automatically reduce ad expenditures and it will do so in a fairly graceful way. This is a big, big contrast to the agency-driven, big-dollar buys a major advertiser would commit to on a network like Yahoo. Those purchases are much more likely to feel the effects of fast, pannicky spending reductions because the risk they represent is higher in terms of both dollars and questionable rate of return.
Does Google get hurt in a recession? Yes. But I'd argue that they get hurt a lot less -- and with more of a predictable, linear response -- than Yahoo or other competitors.
Charging lets you assign value to your service, and assigning value is a key way to keep customers in line while covering your nut.
In terms of the cable modem companies "coming after you," you need only worry about legal competition -- no franchise agreements come to mind that completely lock out all broadband competition. It's worth noting, however, that Verizon has backed legislation in Pennsylvania to prevent municipalities from setting up free broadband services -- a bad step in the direction of market control.
If you *are* going to charge, then you've got some additional costs to consider:
Good luck!
Since it's based on PHP and pretty extensible, I would think getting a quota function established (if eZ publish doesn't already have one) would be easy enough.
Now, can someone help me get the damned 3.4.4 version to run on FreeBSD? ;)
(Note the lowercase "l" -- he's in the GOP rather than the Libertarian Party, but much of the stuff he supports puts a high priority on small govnerment and maximizing individual freedom.)
Except... I can't get the damned thing to install (FreeBSD 4.9). I like to think I know what I'm doing on my own box and regularly install much more complex packages by hand... but ezpublish fails every time. Ugh! Is there a help list for the beleagured?
I think you're essentially right that HP is going to make money off the deal and that it *does* mean exposure for them in a way they haven't seen before. In that sense, I take your point that there's a method to their madness.
What I don't get is their to-market strategy and price point. If they're going to bundle and discount, you're right -- that's smart. But I still don't think there's a huge market for an iPod clone, at the same price point, from HP as a standalone item. It'll be interesting to see if they think so, too.
One of the most interesting things you brought up is the comparison to Dell -- a company (in)famous for understanding that you don't have to be an innovator to make tons of money. Somewhere in the Big Dell Warehouse of Market Knowledge, they've done their best to figure out all the hardware markets that are near (but not quite at) commoditization; that's the point at which they traditionally jump in.
You can bet iTunes will keep getting better (and Apple will keep being picky about its licensing) because that's a value-added that can keep hardware prices up for a long time.
Now, give me permission to reprint your rebuttal on my webblog, dammit. ;)
HP just proved it doesn't understand basic branding: OK, so that's a pretty big smackdown to throw at a multi-billion-dollar tech giant. But consider: People buy the iPod because it's cool, it's functional and (stay with me here) because it's an iPod. If you're going to compete, you need to be different/better/unique, you need to have a dramatically lower price point, you need to have a better channel or you need to have God on your side. HP has demonstrated none of these things.
HP just told us it doesn't listen to its customers. I challenge anyone in HP's marketing organization to produce research indicating existing customers would buy an hPod (my name for it -- HP can send me a royalty check) over the existing Apple product based on exact functionality. My guess is the research doesn't exist.
Finally, HP is broadcasting the message that many of their strongest brand attributes are gone. No, I don't expect Joe Consumer to make a statement like that -- but I do expect him/her to pick up on it subtly. HP used to be about great, long-lasting products that led in their categories (printers, anyone?) both in terms of sales and innovation. They still do some innovation, but increasingly HP is trying to be all things to all people, and it's not working out too well. The clearest branding message from the hPod? That HP is a follower, not a leader.
I had a leg up on the process, since I was a city editor at the time, but that was only a minor advantage.
How we handled it: We hired a newspaper photographer who was primarily a photojournalist, but who also had a little bit of wedding experience. We told him to "cover" the wedding like an event -- shoot half of it in black-and-white, half in color, absolute minimum of formal shots, etc.
Oh, and we told him to crop everything he printed for the best, most dramatic shots - no need for standard sizes/ratios like 8x10", etc.
Bottom line: We paid $400 (OK, so this was 14 years ago -- still damned cheap at the time), we've long-since digitized all the negs and slides, and our wedding album is the envy of everyone who sees it.
I can't recommend this approach highly enough!
Platform: We had designers who were fluent in the Mac world and only slightly less fluent in the PC world. One thing we decided at the outset was that religious wars wouldn't be tolerated in the decisionmaking process -- we paid people to design and to be technically competent enough to pick up a new OS if they needed to, not to evangelize.
We ended up deciding on PCs for a variety of reasons specific to our operation (I won't bore you with those), but the common reason boiled down to simple customer service: We surveyed our clients and vendors (in that order of priority). Most clients were on PCs and were more comfortable with PCs, so that's what we aligned ourselves with.
* Program: For us, the comparative process came down to questions of:
- What would allow us to optimize our workflow? Time is money, and so we looked at our workflow (both overall and client-specific) and developed a checklist of what our must-haves were.
- What would cost the least overall? Purchase price is *not* the major cost of the software decision -- for us, we factored in what downtime would cost, what the value-over-time of the warranty and tech-support policies were, etc.
- Where was the software in its life cycle? Simply put, we wanted to get a product in the "sweet spot" that was past version 1.x and not yet near the end of its life. This question pretty much eliminated Pagemaker for us -- a product that has been repositioned and kluged to death.
Ultimately, we looked at Framemaker (too geared to technical publishing) Quark 5.x, Quark 6.x and Adobe InDesign. We settled on Quark 5.x and stuck with it past the introduction of 6.x because of stability issues. We have one publication running on InDesign, with an anticipated 12-18 month cycle for migrating over. We'll probably always have at least one Quark installation because some clients just refuse to switch.Hope this helps!
- Keep costs down; and
- What happens inside the company, stays inside the company.
Figuring out the number of servers they have is why we're noodling over the second point, but the first point is what probably as us all thrown off. Someone in a position to know said recently that he could state as a an absolute fact they have more than 100,000 servers -- and added that merely mentioning it probably violated multiple NDAs he had.This is how it should be, since knowing the size of Google's hardware capacity is a very, very strategic bit of information, and the kind of thing that would allow Yahoo/MSN/whoever to get a feel for how much capital would be necessary to duplicate or improve upon it.
Companies are not in business to do good or to pay people x% of their revenues; a company is solely in business to profit. What Gates wants to do with his personal share of the pie is laudable, but if he tried to make it the company mission, he'd destroy the company in the process.
If you're comfy with Perl and want to hack extensively, MT is the natural choice. You can make it do damned near anything you want without hacking, of course (via plugins), but sometimes it's fun to mess around under the hood. Oh, and you can avoid the comment-spam problems you mentioned via a number of plugins.
If you prefer PHP, I'd say try Mambo (with a nice polling function built in) or Wordpress (which gets props because it produces valid XHTML/CSS and is clean, clean, clean on the admin interface.
Best advice: go to Open Source CMS and play around. They have default installs of a lot of CMS/blogging systems, and even let you play with the admin interfaces. Very helpful, all in all.
Mandatory plug for my MT-based weblog, here.
However, if it hurts while or immediately after working, it may be tendonitis rather than carpal. Carpal is more tingling and numbness than pain in the early stages.
The good news: If it's tendonitis, it can be cured with an anti-inflammatory drug like cortezone (sp?) and some changes in how you use your hands. Very minor, very effective -- and the over-the-counter wrist braces another poster mentioned work wonders.
American journalism is controlled by accountants. By advertisers. By sensitivity to advertisers. By political correctness. By harried people competing against a rapidly evolving medium they don't fully grasp. By sheet mediocrity.
But American media is not controlled by our political figures.
Yes, we give them too much air time/column space with too little substance. And yes, the press should be more of a watch dog and less of a lap dog. But can a media market that gives us both Rush Limbaugh and The Nation really be under the control of political figures?
Or maybe you mean Rush is controlled by the GOP and The Nation is run by progressives and far-left Democrats? OK, fair enough -- I don't think it's true, but let's say it is. That's still one helluva long way from the media being controlled by all the politics.
By chasing a chimera of of objectivity they can't meet -- and one the public would happily tell them matters more inside the newsroom than outside of it -- traditional newspapers have gotten further and further away from writing in a manner that readers can relate to.
This matters a lot because it's at the root of the "gotcha" journalism most local broadcasts engage in, it's one of the big factors behind the decline in newspaper readership and (most importantly), it's pissing away the trust that the U.S. model of press freedom spent 200-odd years building up.
The funny thing: Newspapers know this, but they're trapped by the by the same bundling mentality that's choking innovation in the telco market.
Disclaimer: I was a journalist for a bunch o' years and made these same observations then, too. Not a good way to make friends with the publisher's office.
The point: Most readers will trade off accuracy for someone who's openly in their philosophical or political corner. Another segment will trade off accuracy for immediacy. If you're both passionate and immediate, of course you're going to be a formidable thread to old-school media.
The price-setting is a bit of a black art (think: complicated regex work) based on both company valuation and market appeal. It's not unheard of for the initial valuation to be changed the day before the IPO based on huge market anticipation and the feeling that people will pay more.
And no, I never did make it all the way through the game without cheats, dammit!
I had *no* idea about some of this functionality -- I haven't tried KDE since before 3.0. Time to set up a test box...