A Florida company has received an $112,500 fine for violating the state's do-not-call list:

A lawsuit filed in 2003 accused Fort Lauderdale-based Sports Authority Florida, a chain of sporting goods stores, of making 77 calls to state residents on the list and playing a pre-recorded message to many of the consumers who answered the calls. Under Florida law, it is a separate offense for a telemarketer to play a pre-recorded message when a consumer answers his or her phone.

I wasn't aware Florida had its own do-not-call list., which looks to be less useful than the national version.

You have to pay $10 to get one number on Florida's list and $5 for each year thereafter. Newspapers, charities and survey companies are exempt.

Florida · 2006/04/13 · Comment · Link

Google Calendar Makes Date with Atom

Google Calendar can import and export calendars created as Atom feeds but does not support RSS, according to Byrne Reese:

Only a small minority of people will care about this obscure technology fact, but in the syndication community I think this is tremendously significant. To an engineer, adding RSS support is trivial, so the syndication industry must ask themselves, and the RSS folks especially, why did Google only support Atom?

Google also introduced their own proprietary Atom elements or what I could only call the "Google Calendar Atom Extension."

Public calendars -- such as the upcoming U.S. soccer schedule -- are available in Atom 1.0 and iCal formats and can be imported into another calendar.

The Atom feeds have items with published dates in the future that coincide with the scheduled date of the event, which sometimes triggers a warning in the Feed Validator.

Rss · Google · Atom · 2006/04/13 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Newspaper's Cheapness Hurts My Circulation

When I worked at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the early '90s, the place was filled to the rafters with copies of the day's newspaper, free for the taking. I loved reading papers that were fresh off the presses and still had "new news smell," and on Saturday mornings I ransacked the place looking for the bulldog edition.

The bulldog, a Sunday edition published a day early for people who wanted 24 hours head start on everyone else, came out ahead of the day's news. Editors had license to fill the news hole with stories they liked, so a bunch of quirky stuff found its way into print that would be replaced in later editions.

If I was working today for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, a recent policy change would've killed me. They're cutting corners by making employees buy their own papers, even in the office:

Taking more than one newspaper from a rack when you have only inserted enough money for one paper is unacceptable and will not be tolerated. Employees who steal newspapers will put their jobs at risk.

Journalism · 2006/04/11 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Next Outsourced Job: Fast Food Order Taker

McDonald's has begun outsourcing drive-through orders in 40 of its restaurants, using 125 workers at a call center in California and submitting orders back over the Internet.

The process saves "seconds" on each order. Workers make $6.75 an hour, get no health benefits and handle up to 95 orders an hour in a job that sounds like a workplace massacre in the making:

Ms. Vargas seems unfazed by her job, even though it involves being subjected to constant electronic scrutiny. Software tracks her productivity and speed, and every so often a red box pops up on her screen to test whether she is paying attention. She is expected to click on it within 1.75 seconds. In the break room, a computer screen lets employees know just how many minutes have elapsed since they left their workstations.

One of the dire predictions of the Lou Dobbs crowd is that Americans will be pushed into low paying service jobs because all of our white-collar work is being sent overseas. But McDonald's could just as easily take those orders from Bangalore, where by one estimate a college-educated call center employee earns $2.40 an hour.

Our best hope to keep these jobs: sacred cows.

Politics · 2006/04/11 · 21 COMMENTS · Link

Are You Ready for Some Football?

I've begun following FC Dallas, the Major League Soccer team originally known as the Dallas Burn, as part of my embrace of all things soccer in the run up to the World Cup. My friend Wade Duchene has been after me for years to start following international football, which he discovered while stationed overseas during the first Gulf War, and I run a sports community weblog that has attracted a bunch of Premiership fans. Resistance was futile.

Soccer in Great Britain is as huge as any pro sport in the U.S., and it offers something that American sports fans would love if it was adopted here -- promotion/relegation. Teams are organized into a giant league system topped by the Premiership with dozens of leagues below it. The best teams in each league are promoted to a higher league at the end of the season. The worst are relegated to a lower one.

Teams can climb as high or drop as low as the entire system, making possible things like the rise of AFC Wimbledon. When Wimbledon's football club moved away a few years ago, angry fans formed a public company and started their own team, calling it AFC Wimbledon.

The new Wimbledon began in a ninth-level league and have been promoted twice to the seventh level. The old Wimbledon's on the verge of being relegated to the fourth, bringing them closer to the chance that the teams will play in the same league.

If we had promotion and relegation in U.S. pro sports, the Bidwell and Ford families wouldn't be running NFL franchises into the ground for decade after decade, because they'd be subjected to the same competitive pressures as their players. By now, they'd be running Arena2 League franchises into the ground.

Watching Saturday's FC Dallas game on DirectKick, I discovered that former Jacksonville sports talk host Bill Riley has become the Real Salt Lake play-by-play announcer. Another local blogger, Joe Dougherty, was a regular on Riley's morning show on WBWL, which disappeared when the station began running ESPN Radio in its place five years ago.

I looked for Riley on the radio for a while after his show disappeared, figuring he was too good not to be hired by somebody else. He's ended up in Utah calling the games for a woefully bad expansion franchise and hosting an afternoon show.

Florida · Jacksonville · Sports · 2006/04/10 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

I voted today to expand the RSS Advisory Board to 15 members and choose them privately.

After serving on the board when it was private and not exceptionally well-regarded by the RSS community, I think it's extremely important to operate in the open. However, the requirement to publicly evaluate and vote on new members chases off anyone who isn't completely flame-retardant. One prospective member with years of experience in RSS development withdrew his name from consideration when he realized the vote would be conducted publicly.

As for the expansion to 15 members, we could use more members in technically complex areas like the draft spec and profile work.

I had a programming project this weekend that reminded me how complex XML interoperability can be, even on a relatively simple dialect like Really Simple Syndication. We could use a few more XML gurus and longtime RSS developers to complement current members who are more involved in usability and educational efforts.

Programming · Rss · Xml · 2006/04/10 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Watch Out for the Guns

The Jacksonville Barracudas hockey team has been run the last several years by Ron Duguay, the former New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings player. Duguay was a '70s heartthrob who skated without a helmet, relying on big hair to protect his head.

In a story about Duguay stepping down from the team, the Florida Times-Union included a photo of Duguay in his office, where he hung a bare-chested poster of himself showing off Ron Burgundy-like guns and a total eclipse of the hair.

If you'd like Ron in your own office, the poster's up for auction on eBay.

Sports · Jacksonville · Florida · 2006/04/10 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

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