Dancing Mortgage People Ate My Brain
My weblog entry on protecting yourself from dancing mortgage people attracted the attention of New York Times reporter Brad Stone, who tracked down Jennifer Uhll, the graphic designer who created the ads for LowerMyBills.Com.
Whenever I see one of these ads, I'm reminded of the door-to-door meat salesmen who occasionally show up at my house offering steaks from a beer cooler in their trunk. Every time they do, I want to ask, "Who are the people keeping you in business?" I half expect to find they're also selling human organs for transplant.
I'll buy high-definition 1080i DirecTV from Jessica Simpson, but I'm not buying meat from some mullet-headed stranger's trunk and I won't trust a life-altering banking decision to creepy dancing silhoettes with undulating pelvi. The ads are so successful for the company it spent $74.6 million running the ads and was bought by Experian for $400 million in 2005.
The people have become so pervasive on newspaper sites that the Times had to admit it inflicts them on readers.
Stone did not pass along my warning to web users that the time has come to recognize the threat the dancers pose to humankind. We have to stop the rooftop couple, line-dancing cowboy clones and fist-pumping zombie Gregory Hines now, before LowerMyBills.Com and its minions unleash some new form of Lovecraftian brain-destroying contagion on the world in the name of affordable mortgage refinance.
UDRP Response Filed to Save Wargames.Com
My attorney Wade Duchene has filed our response to the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) complaint made by MGM Studios over Wargames.Com. We're getting closer to the day where a panel of three arbitrators decides whether to give the domain to MGM, which owns a trademark registered in 2003 for the 1983 film WarGames.
UDRP arbitration is an increasingly popular tool for intellectual property lawyers trying to acquire domains for clients, as MGM's firm is attempting here. If they lose, all it costs is a $1,300 or $2,600 filing fee and their time.
The math's not as pretty for a domain name holder: You have to fight like hell to defend your rights against accusations of cybersquatting and anything else an attorney can claim to make you look dodgy, and all you get with a victory is to keep what you owned in the first place.
Actually, that's not entirely true. There's at least one benefit to me: I'm making new friends at the OfficeMax copy center and UPS Store. When I showed up yesterday to make copies of the UDRP response for some reporters, they greeted me like Norm on Cheers.
I'm also getting a great too-late-for-me education on how to reduce your risk of a UDRP grab.
If you own a domain you haven't launched and there's a trademark holder with a mark close to your domain name, you're vulnerable even if you've never offered it for sale. The time to defend your rights is before you've been contacted by a trademark holder. In a UDRP arbitration, the actions you take after that first contact are disregarded as self-serving.
My emphatic advice: Start your business today. Don't wait until everything's perfectly in place and the site's near to launch.
I registered a fictitious name statement in Florida in 2004 when I began work on Wargames.Com, which is my first (and only) retail business. That's probably the first step you should undertake. You can register a fictitious name, also called a DBA or do-business-as, with a service like MyCorporation.Com or do it yourself with your state. I paid around $50.
Registering a fictitious name tells the world you'll be doing business under that name, establishing a verifiable public record of your intent. I'll pester my attorney to explain how that helps.
The Digger Diggs, and Having Dugg Moves On
When Ryan Tomayko's blog was linked recently on Digg, he was so freaked out by the experience he wrote some code to reject all Digg traffic:
The funny thing about Digg is that it changes the way people read. The average Digger seems to assume that people write stuff solely for the purpose of making it to the Digg front page. ...
No one knows you there so you have to write in a way that is completely void of who you are and what you're about. That sucks. I'd rather just opt out of the popularity contest (and I did -- see below).
I've been ground into chuck a few times by high-traffic sites, most recently over my legal fight to save Wargames.Com from being grabbed by MGM.
When an online community's focused on you, it feels like a big deal, but the average Internet user can afford to spend no more than 10 minutes caring about any subject. After that, a new "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" remix, Apple gadget, or high-resolution picture of a celebrity's babymaker has hit the web and everybody moves on. Digg users form six strongly held opinions an hour.
When I offered BenedictXVI.Com to the Vatican, this weblog received 500,000 hits in two days and I got several thousand comments along with six flattering sexual assessments (five straight, one gay). I was just starting to enjoy my newfound celebrity after 36 hours when some Canadian woman fell on the ice singing the National Anthem at a hockey game in Quebec, inhaling all my fame oxygen. I was so upset I couldn't start my day with the Today Show for weeks.
By the time Tomayko finished his Digg blocker, the members of the site had forgotten him entirely.
It's Not the Size of the Blog in the Fight ...
Wired News has declared Dave Winer vs. me as one of the top blogfights of 2006.
Back in early 2005, blogger and RSS guru Dave Winer hired programmer Rogers Cadenhead to port Winer's popular Weblogs.com site to a more robust platform. The project was a success -- Winer sold Weblogs.com to VeriSign for more than $2 million later that year -- and Winer struck a verbal agreement with Cadenhead to perform the same magic on another of Winer's web properties, Share My OPML. Winer paid Cadenhead $5,000 but the project fizzled when they couldn't agree on a formal contract. Then, in March 2006, Winer filed a lawsuit against Cadenhead demanding he delete the Share My OPML code and return the money. Cadenhead took it public, posting a letter he received from Winer's lawyer and calling Dave out. Winer responded with his own blog post slamming Cadenhead's ethics. The case was settled out of court; Cadenhead kept the money but deleted the code.
Winner: Cadenhead, who gets points for his innovative use of blogs to sway the court of public opinion. "I decided the best way to avoid court was to show Winer what it would be like to sue a blogger," he wrote.
I appreciate the victory, but I have a sneaking suspicion this honor is like being crowned king of the dipshits.
One of my New Year's resolutions is to avoid getting on this list again for 2007.
Filing a Mickey Mouse Lawsuit
My seven-year-old son's a huge fan of Mickeyroni & Cheese, boxed Mickey Mouse pasta sold at Disney World that occasionally makes it to the local Disney outlet store. (The combination of rehydrated Vermont cheddar cheese, 1.5 tablespoons of milk and semolina pasta shaped like a rodent's head is pretty good.)
When he heard yesterday that Disney has discontinued the product, my son announced that he was going to sue the company to force them to continue making it.
My wife replied that "you should only sue somebody when you have no other choice."
His response: "Everybody sues dad."
Five Things About My Secret Nude Past
I've been tagged with the five things you don't know about me virus, so here's my list:
1. In 1988 I spent two weeks at a nudist campground in Orlando, though I was tricked into going by my future mother- and father-in-law, who said we were going to DisneyWorld.
2. People play contact sports in nudist camps, including basketball, which was a surprise to me because of the threat of reaching-in fouls.
3. When elderly male nudists play shuffleboard, they still wear knee-high black socks tucked in to their open-toed sandals.
4. There's an unspoken bond among men who are comparably equipped -- a sense of our shared struggle that's conveyed by a friendly head-nod or a crisp wave of the hand. Though my father in-law dubbed this the "Dinky Dinkus Club" when I told this story to other relatives at a large family gathering, that was not my point at all.
5. If you put a restaurant in a nudist camp, do not under any circumstances use vinyl seats.
Five bloggers I'm now obligating to answer this question: April Winchell, Dave Linabury, Katrina vanden Heuvel, All My Children's Cady McClain and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
'Quite a Few Martinis Were Consumed'
Ron Nessen, the press secretary for President Ford, tells the San Francisco Chronicle about the 1975 assassination attempt on Ford by Sara Jane Moore in San Francisco:
Nessen recalls that as the shots rang out, he looked for a car in the waiting motorcade that already had its doors open. He jumped into a car with Donald Rumsfeld, who was then Ford's White House chief of staff.
After racing from downtown, the Ford motorcade drove onto the tarmac at the airport, and the presidential party hurried aboard Air Force One. Before it could leave, however, the plane had to wait for first lady Betty Ford, who had been carrying out her own schedule of events on the Peninsula.
Nessen, who now lives in suburban Maryland, said the first lady had no idea that her husband had been attacked. "She said something like, 'How are you, dear? How did your day go?'"
"I think it was Rumsfeld who finally told her that someone took a shot at the president. ... We took off and what had happened sunk in. I can tell you that quite a few martinis were consumed on the flight back," Nessen added.
A few years later, Betty Ford became the nation's most prominent alcoholic and painkiller addict, admitting her problems, the family's staged intervention and her subsequent trip to rehab. Considering all of the things she discussed openly -- psychiatric treatment, substance abuse and a mastectomy to treat breast cancer -- one of the things that ought to be remembered today about President Ford is his wife's willingness to talk candidly about her travails.
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