Wow ! If you saw the last video, you have to see the response, featuring Jimmy Kimmel & Ben Affleck:
almost as impressive, the list of celebs includes: Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Cameron Diaz, Macy Gray, Robin Williams, Don Cheadle, Huey Lewis, Josh and Meatloaf !
I really like Skype. In fact, I think it has the best IM client on top of the killer VoIP calling features. So I guess it’s not surprising that spam is invading IM/VoIP. We see lots of web spam being thrown against blogs, wikis, and social networks — and thankfully services like Akismet are effectively zapping it.
So what about IM/VoIP Spam ? I’ve been getting 3-4 mostly Not Safe For Work (NSFW) Skype IM requests per week, with a few casino offers as well, and it seems to be increasing in frequency. Here is a typical looking one I got only a few minutes ago:
It’s not unmanageable right now – you just click “block” and it closes that current spam request. And in fact, I went ahead and changed all my privacy setting in Skype to only allow communication from authorized contacts — so that should help (update: even with all the privacy settings turned on I got another spam IM 😦 ). But it does add an extra layer and potentially makes it harder for people to reach me.
Jim Higdon over at VoIP News suggested the same approach to combat this spam and predicts more problems in the future:
No End in Sight
Given that Skype spam appears to be a widespread trend, there isn’t much any one person can do to stop it, other than blocking the offending user. But that defense is akin to swatting mosquitoes in a swamp: You’ll run out of swat before the swamp runs out of mosquitoes.
You could try using one of these 10 alternatives to Skype. But, if you’d rather stick it out, you might be forced to batten down your Skype hatches and only allow messages from people you know. Go to Preferences > Privacy and set “allow instant messages from” to “only people whom I have authorized to start.” You won’t get any pleasant Skype surprises anymore, but maybe you won’t get any unpleasant surprises either.
And of course, like its complete lack of real-time customer service, Skype has no “report this user” function. So, you Skypers are on your own.
OK — very quick tip to share that I just assumed everyone knew – but I find that few do.
If you are calling a number like Fedex’s “1.800.GoFedEx”, and you are using a BlackBerry, you can simply type in the letters into the dialing screen and it will automaically convert it to the appropriate numbers. Since the BlackBerry doesn’t have the numeric keys of a regular phone, going through this process in your head can be a bit time consuming 🙂
This works on my 8300 Curve and I believe with older versions as well.
Time lapse of San Francisco shot on February 8th 2008. On this day the fog was flowing from east to west which is very rare.
[ Via laughingsquid.com ]
The amazon AWS services have been extremely popular with lots of startups and has received very positive reviews. AWS is a way to leverage the Amazon infrastructure to provide lots of scalability for image hosting, CPU tasks, DB and more.
So what happens when an outage hits Amazon as we saw today ?
Impact wise, what struck me this morning, were the vast number of broken images across the web ( from sites that rely heavily on Amazon S3 ) and twitters of people agonizing about their businesses effectively being shut down.
A post on the Amazon forums is a good example:
I have to add a major ME TOO here. My business is effectively closed right now because Amazon did something wrong. I’ll have to reconsider using the service now.
For us on WordPress.com, we use S3, but only for a small portion of the image serving, and thanks to our architecture, were able to automatically deal with the outage this morning with no impact to our users. Our systems wrangler Barry has a post about it:
Currently we serve about 1500 image requests per second across WordPress.com. About 80-100 per second are served through S3; the rest being served from our local caches. When the outage occurred, our systems detected the errors and automatically sent the requests normally bound for S3 to local image servers that we use for backup and failover purposes.
The marketing geniuses at Apple have done it again ! 🙂
From the second I saw & heard the MacBook Air commercial I felt that I knew the background song.
Well I finally realized that I did – it was a song from the French-Israeli singer Yael Naim (iTunes Album, official site). I had heard the song a few times on 102fm Tel Aviv.
Been using Dopplr lately. Dopplr is “an online tool for frequent business travellers.”. They’ve been around a few months and have great buzz like this:
“You put in your travel schedule and link to your friends. It allows you to see where everyone is. I love it.” – Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia in The New York Times.
The idea is that it helps show you who will be in town, and who might also be traveling to the events you are attending. I think all of us use a combination of blogging, email, IM status updates, twitter, and facebook to broadcast our various trips. Dopplr looks to make this all simpler and more efficient.
OK, so this all sounds great 🙂 Except what I’ve found is that the people I know who have dopplr accounts, are “following” my trips but not actually sharing their own trip info. Could be a privacy setting issue, or a general lack of usage since they signed-on since you need to login and actively share stuff back, whereas sharing your trip with others requires no action on their part.
For this service to have any real value you really need lots of your friends and colleagues to use it. It’s a classic network effect – the more nodes – the more people use it – the better the service will become. Time will tell how this works out. Looking at my latest stats in Dopplr, about 10% of the people I know who have accounts are actually active.
Always nice to run across these kinds of posts.
This one from Kreblog titled “State Of The Blog”
I’ve done it all:
* I’ve been on Blogger (hosted myself and hosted on blogspot.com).
* I’ve been on MovableType (hosted myself… I think twice).
* I’ve been on Community Server (hosted myself).
* I’ve been on .TEXT (hosted myself).
* I’ve been on dasBlog (hosted myself).
* I’ve been on WordPress (hosted myself and hosted on wordpress.com).
* I have Windows Live Spaces, Yahoo 360, Vox, LiveJournal, MySpace, and Facebook accounts… all are unused because blogging there is either confusing and/or subpar.And my conclusions up to this point:
*WordPress is currently the best blogging server software hands down.
*wordpress.com is the best blogging host.
(emphasis mine)
Saw on paidcontent that Caligari, the makers of TrueSpace, were acquired by Microsoft:
Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) buys…this time a smaller deal. It has bought Caligari, a developer of 3D modeling software, with an eye to use its technology for its Virtual Earth mapping system. No financial details were released. In December, Microsoft bought UK-based Multimap for a reported $50 million.
Calgari, founded in 1986 and based in Mountain View, CA, started by making 3D software for the Amiga.
As someone who did a bit of work around Virtual Reality Modelling/Markup Language (VRML) — a nominee for worst pronounced acronym ever — back in the mid 90s, seeing Caligari in the news instantly brought back memories of WebFX, Paper Software, and the promise of more killer Netscape plugins. Here is a link to what was hot in VRML back in September 1996.
Very cool event coming up, BarCamp New Orleans:
Let’s get a bunch of Gulf Coast geeks together and build something for someone who needs our help.
Maybe it’s time we do a BarCamp here in New Orleans. In addition to connecting digital folks, sharing what we know and what we’re working on, maybe we can pick a team project to do as well.
I’d like to find a struggling small business we could help immediately with a new site or enhanced Web services. Spend a weekend cranking as a team and launch the thing at the end of the weekend. We can get help from our friends everywhere with regard to code, design, ideas. Brains, we have them at the ready.
Date: February 16th and 17th, 2008
Where: Voodoo Ventures offices, 757 St. Charles Avenue, Suite 301
I won’t be able to attend, but the excellent Brian Oberkirch will be there. Also check out the video below for more details:
Raanan Bar-Cohen 
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