Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

There are a group of internet sites that exist for the sole purpose of generating advertisement hits. I see a lot of examples in the spam that gets filtered out of my blog.

While speaking with friends the other day, we came up with a term to describe these sites. They often contain no real content, and just referrals to other sites. Thus the term “Vacuous Destination” (along with its abbreviation “VD”, which has a whole different connotation, but I think appropriate as well) was hatched.

I hesitate to give examples of this stuff, as I don’t want to generate ANY revenue for them. If you have misspelled web addresses before and ended up at some odd search site, you might have seen one flavor of them. Another more obnoxious variety is the type that “hires” writers to provide “articles” so they have “content”. The articles are usually just a bunch of fluff, surrounded by advertisements. The best way to eliminate this sort of content from the internet is to not visit it AT ALL. Don’t certainly don’t click on any of the advertisement links on the sites.

Only you can prevent the spread of internet VD.

One of the aspects of the internet is starting to bear real fruit: community intelligence. Up until recently (from my perspective), the internet has been primarily used in a community sense for discussion boards (newsgroups, mailing lists, chat boards), and self indulgent websites (like this one). I frequent a couple of sites that are aiming slightly higher than the others.

One of them is the CAPS facilities provided by The Motley Fool. For years, The Motley Fool has promoted discussions on their stock boards, which I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to. The CAPS facilities provide a lot more than just simple discussion. They actually allow you to weigh your stock picks against the market, as well as weigh your stock predication abilities against other people. This becomes a community effort because you can post comments along with your picks that other users may end up reading (and commenting on). This has spawned a whole new community around these simple concepts. They have recently partnered with MSN, which has expanded the pool of users a bit. It is interesting to see how things grow and progress in that environment. I’m skeptical that the data gleaned from the site has merit, but that is remained to be seen.

The other site I have been frequenting is a site devoted to community reviewed wine called Cork’d. In addition to wine reviews, they also allow you to keep an online catalog of what wine you have stored, and provide the opportunity to search for online vendors to purchase wine. It is interesting to see how other people react to the wines Lisa and I have tried. Especially the bad ones. There are a few jokesters who rate wines inappropriately (Mad Dog with a 100 rating for example), but a lot of people put significant time and energy into their entries. Check the sites out if they sound interesting — there’s always room for one more!

The REALLY annoying bug that I posted about before has reappeared. Since Yahoo doesn’t seem to respond to any support requests on the subject, I thought I might try to help them debug the issue. Here are the Window’s messages that are processed by the main window every second or so:

<00002> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00003> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00004> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00005> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00006> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00007> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00008> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00009> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00010> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00011> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00012> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00013> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00014>000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00015> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00016> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00017> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00018> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00019> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00020> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00021> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00022> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00023> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00024> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00025> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00026> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00027> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00028> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00029> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00030>000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED lpwp:0012F23C
<00031> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGED
<00032> 000B09E8 S WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING lpwp:0012F23C
<00033> 000B09E8 R WM_WINDOWPOSCHANGING
<00034> 000B09E8 P message:0×0466 [User-defined:WM_USER+102] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203
<00035> 000B09E8 P message:0×052E [User-defined:WM_USER+302] wParam:00000000 lParam:00000203

Another bit of information that I thought was interesting: When this bug is occurring, Yahoo Messenger won’t pop-up in front of Command Prompt windows. Start->Run->cmd. As long as they are in the foreground.

Yahoo has released version 8.1 on the Yahoo Messenger page that seems to fix that annoying bug I posted about earlier.

Given my experience with this issue I think Yahoo! could learn a few things about software distribution:

1. Respond to user queries through your customer service.
2. Tell users when there is a new version of software.
3. Put a release notes document on the messenger page so you can actually figure out what to expect in the new version.

Of course, you get what you pay for, and Messenger is “free” software.

I like the features of the Yahoo! software (Messenger, and Jukebox), but they are both resource pigs. I stopped running the Jukebox regularly because the thing chews up so much RAM.

There are some pretty dramatic views available on the new maps.live.com site of Portland. One of the features of this site, aside from the map, and satellite views that google maps and Yahoo Maps provide, is the “Bird’s Eye View”. I have explored the results of this for a few places in Portland, and in Las Vegas too. They have an amazing amount of detail, and being able to look at the given location from four directions is pretty impressive as well.

Check out these links for some samples:
The Hawthorne Bridge
Pioneer Place
Airplanes at the airport

It would be interesting to know how these images were captured. I assume from the angles that it had to be an airplane.