Child of the Machine

See Gillard backs internet filter

Thanks for wasting our money Gillard and Conroy… 705,000 results for a search “hack internet filter”… Why spend billions waving the Child Pornography flag when any police officer will tell you they’re not traded through websites but through technologies the Conroy’s filter can’t filter… Not to mention it’s easy to circumvent, and completely legal too according to Conroy from articles I’ve read.

Would you wast money on building a barbed-wire fence on 1 side of your property? Is it for looks? Is it suppose to gain votes? Maybe it would if you didn’t advertise you couldn’t fully fence the yard so people can walk around it. Or perhaps Conroy and Gillard take us for idiots? “Oh my children are safe now we have a filter, praise the lord, amen…”, “Luckily kids theses days aren’t smart enough to get around that…” (sarcasm)

Surely everyone else has noticed Conroy is looking after too conflicting projects too.. maybe he hasn’t yet? I mean the National Broadband Network (faster internet) and the Internet Filter (slower internet).. maybe after spending billions on both projects we might just come out the same as we started? Just a little be less money in the wallet to spend on more important things.

The Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) have created a visual record of the popularity of internet sites to Australians from 2001-2009.

Openning the site you’ll find the flash application with play through the past 9 years in a matter a seconds in which you can watch the rise of fall of sites over time, and also see their popularity all at once…

History of the Australian Web

They’ve also prepared a report of the top 100 sites with their statistics for each of these years as a PDF you can download.

So the day arrives Firefox 3 has finally been released… I can’t say it was in my diary but it must have been in some others, apparently their FTP servers were down in the hours leading up to the release… Suspect some geeks (and I use the word affectionately) were trying to get an early copy!

With this release Mozilla has taken an interesting marketing approach – trying to break (or set?) a guniess world record with the most downloads. Anyway ‘spread the word’ as they say.. check out Firefox 3.0 to play your small part in a world record.

3 Million and counting on its first day isn’t bad!

Like I assume millions of other people, I’ve been unable to make a payment with PayPal for over 8 hours now. The following error message appear on the PayPal website when trying to make a payment with a credit card…

The PayPal site is currently experiencing technical difficulties with our credit card processor. We are working to solve this problem as quickly as possible. If you would like to use your credit card, please return to the PayPal website later to complete your transaction. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Quite a concern considering eBay is now making it mandatory for all auctions to include PayPal as a means of payment. And as of July this goes one step further with PayPal being the only option to pay an eBay seller.

Are you selling electronic products online? Such as software, videos, music… People are use to buying physical products even still in this electronic age. Even when more and more people are turning to purchasing and downloading music and videos in electronic formats.

We get use to the way the world works, and once something set its stuck! A classic example of this (and the purpose to this post) is 3D Boxes of software purchased online… You know the ones! They were on the website you bought that last application from, you just didn’t realise at the time that you would never see the actually box in real life because you downloaded the software…

One such free product worth downloading, and designed for producing these is 3D Box Shot Maker.

Is it just me or does the phrase “box shot” sound funny? Particularly when taking this quote from their website out of context:

An impressive box shot will make your software outstanding, and easily defeat your competitors at the start.

There are a few of options with how you can use email addresses as a prominent contact method on your website.  These are:

1. You use one account for a service/business area to check and manage.
2. You use multiple accounts for, one for each specific service/function.
3. You can use personal email accounts.

Personal email accounts can easily be ruled out as being unsuitable for majority of situations. When an individual leaves a business unit or is on leave someone else needs receive their emails for specific functions/services. In situations like this it can be quite difficult to update material containing references to old email addresses, and advise people who they need to contact in the future.

The benefits of using generic email addresses are that you should never need to advise your clients of staffing changes and consequently new contact information. Additionally multiple people can usually access the same email generic email account to share the work load. And as new people come on board, and old ones leave, you can easily update who can access these accounts.

The benefits of generic addresses for each individual service are:

• the address can usually be clearly labeled with its purpose eg. Sales could become sales@yourcompany.com
• the address exists independently of the business area responsible for it. Because of this, organisational changes can be easily managed.  Transferring ownership is as simple as granting and revoking access to people checking the email account.

The benefits of using an email address for each a business area:

• staff only need to log in and check the one email account on a daily basis, rather than several (for each service).
• managing access to these emails only needs to be done on the one account, not several.

However there are draw backs to both of these solutions which need to be assessed before deciding which path to follow.

Ultimately a well thought out combination of these two options would be recommended. In majority of situations, larger services would be best suited to having their own account. They are more likely to be widely advertised and used, and because they are not tied to a specific business area, organisational changes can be easily handled. Smaller services however would be more suited to sharing a generic business area email address. This is more efficient by avoiding checking say 10 accounts daily only to find 1 email.

Generic accounts receiving only small amounts of emails are also more likely to be forgotten about! Particularly with the turn over of staff… And repeatedly unanswered emails won’t look good for you! So cautiously plan the use of generic emails limiting the number required whenever appropriate!