Derek Scruggs

Tonight I did a demo of SurveyGizmo at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. I was fortunate to get a few laugh lines, but the credit really goes to Scott for putting together some nice screen shots and helping me work out exactly what to present.

A typical client demo or webinar can go on for up to an hour. Cramming the highlights into five minutes was like explaining the intricacies of quantum mechanics as “basically, a lot of weird unpredictable stuff happens.”

It’s especially gratifying to hear what David Cohen had to say:

Thank The Magic Diety in the Sky for SurveyGizmo, who is doing well and is having an open house at their new digs in downtown Boulder later this week. The room erupted with glee when they showed actual technology that was cool, as well as “a demo of Keynote transitions.” SurveyGizmo has a very deep and well established product for creating, managing, and analyzing surveys. If you’ve experienced Survey Monkey, it’s kinda like that but has a more “enterprise” feel and is targeted slightly upmarket. It has nice-to-have features such as two-way Salesforce integration and stuff like scalability (they currently handle 20-40k responses per minute). Pricing ranges from free to $159/month. Go check it out if you need to find out what people think, and you need it to be real.

Thanks David! See you Friday?

Though I’ve never been hit with a major denial of service attack, I constantly get hit by spammers and other gremlins trying to post their content on my sites. And one time last year an email spammer exploited a weakness in a script to use my server to send out tons of spam.

I HATE THESE PEOPLE!

They are scum and thieves. They not only steal computing resources, they steal my time, because at least once a day I have to spend two minutes or so dealing with their crap. But the worst part is that they use spyware and other tricks to turn computers into “zombies,” which they then use to launch attacks on site owners like me.

Recently these forces of evil turned their sites on an anti-spam company in Israel. And it worked. The company had to shut down the service.

This is outrageous.

So I’m glad to see a non-profit movement emerge with the mission to get more people to secure their computers and perhaps one day prevent these kinds of abuses. Please check out Take Back the Net – Secure Your Computer

In re: my previous post about searching Google for Tianenmen, a couple people pointed out that in China they don’t use the English spelling of the word, and in fact don’t even use Western character sets. The simplified Chinese version of Tianenmen looks like this: 天安门

(Mainland China except Hong Kong uses the simplified character set.)

So FYI here are the results one would expect to get searching Google for 天安门 in the US vs. China:

US: Google.com

Mainland China: Google.cn

Also, I just found a great (and also disturbing) overview of the differences one gets when searching for “falun gong.”

The  blogosphere has been abuzz of late about Google’s apparent caving in to the Chinese government’s request that they censor their search results. I’m of mixed feelings about this. Being radically moderate and having spent time in China, I think it’s silly to have a binary view of how things should be done there. (Though I’ve always thought Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” stance was a bit pompous and destined to fail.)

That said, I had a very visceral reaction when I came across the links below on a Slashdot thread.

Here’s a Google image search of “tianenman” as in Tianenman Square: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Here’s that same search on Google’s Chinese site: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Where did the tanks go?

This is pretty cool. Mail to the Future is a tool that allows you to schedule an email from yourself to yourself to be sent to you up to 30 years from now.

Here’s a great article that crystalizes some ideas I’ve been struggling with. More Evidence of a Maturing Software Industry talks about the slowing of the upgrade cycle for software like Microsoft Office. This is definitely a trend in mass market and some enterprise software, but there is still plenty of room for innovation in emerging niche markets. For example, the very idea of an RSS aggregator didn’t exist a few years ago, and it still hasn’t hit mainstream uptake, so there is plenty of growth ahead for that particular segment.

However, the nature of software development is becoming more of an assembly-line process, much of which can be outsourced to India. The “stripping down” of software development is leading to organizations whose core competency is software architecture and product management, not the actual coding. How long before even those processes are outsourced?

When you think about it, the only home office jobs necessary will be sales and marketing. Sales, because nothing will every replace the face-to-face meeting, and marketing, because a market’s culture is a critical element of marketing.

The reason I personally have been struggling with this is because I write software. I love software. It’s challenging, creative and fun. I’ve written a software platform used by some of our customers to manage their customer data. Until recently I viewed this as the strategic “secret sauce” for Escalan, the proprietary advantage we can leverage into a large company. But last year I had an epiphany: it’s not the software that is our advantage, it’s our expertise in how to use it to help companies make more money on the Internet. And that expertise is rooted in marketing. Thank God. So you won’t see much in the way of features and benefits about the software on our site (aside from the link above). Instead, we take a problem-oriented focus. We seek first to understand exactly how a company needs help with their marketing and only then do we consider whether our product is a fit for the problem at hand.

Boxes And Arrows has a neat little bio about Paul Otlet, who was waaaay ahead of his time in coming up with what could be described as primordial hypertext.

Christopher Clemper: “why not use a simple name or e-Mail for user-tracking?”

The userID can be anything as long as it’s unique – an email address, an ICQ handle etc.

In the marketing world, however, a common design goal is to minimize the amount of data a user has to submit in order to receive your content. (I know, a lot of marketers abuse this, but that’s because they’re clueless. If marketers could reliably sell stuff to you without knowing your name, they’d do it. Hence the attraction of RSS.) Generating a userID from the server side if none is provided is a fallback option. One could easily imagine a form the posts a userID field as part of the feed subscription process. In that case, the server would just need to look up the ID to make sure it’s not already in use.

This is where part two of feed subscribing comes into play – the application/rss+xml MIME type. In the scenario above, the subscriber submits a form. If the form validates, what happens next? As it currently stands, they would be presented with an XML icon that they use to subscribe to the actual feed. Since that method is confusing to many users (e.g. my mom), I prefer that aggregators register with the client operating system/browser as the default handler for application/rss+xml. Then the publisher can just push out the feed with that MIME type (after first redirecting to the new, userID-aware URL) and the aggregator will catch it by default. QED.