Intel's New Chip: More Important Than Cancer

Robert Scoble, the former Microsoft blogger who's now a exec at podcasting startup PodTech, recently engaged in the following exchange with one of his readers:

Reader: You think Intel making a smaller chip is more important than cancer?

Scoble: having cancer is important to THAT ONE PERSON. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Scoble, the 86th-most-linked blogger on the planet, is angry that more blogs don't link to him, so he made an example of the tech site Engadget for ignoring two videos he shot about Intel's new chip:

Today Engadget has an article about a cancer patient getting their Xbox ripped off. You telling me THAT has more news value for Engadget's readers than a tour of Intel's factory which also included discussion of Intel's new chips coming out later this year and how Intel got that breakthrough done? Give me a break.

Intel's a PodTech client that has paid the company to produce a gauzy promotional video about its new chip, a relationship PodTech was two days late in disclosing.

Though Scoble claims he wasn't paid to produce 48 minutes of unedited, more-important-than-cancer video about Intel, I can't see any sane reason he should be treated as an objective judge of the company's news value.

Scoble's the vice president of media development for PodTech. Intel's a major client. What would Scoble have said if his visit to its factory revealed an underwhelming new chip that's only as important as Restless Leg Syndrome?

Podcasting · Intel · Podtech · Robert-scoble · 2007/02/05 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Re-Elect Rogers and Rogers Rabbit

I've secured my first endorsement for RSS Advisory Board chair:

it's like running for president of your own imaginary treehouse. with rabbits. "hello, my name is rogers, and this is my rabbit running mate, rogers. we're running for imaginary treehouse president on the rogers-and-rogers-rabbit ticket."

Rss · Politics · Atom · Rabbits · 2007/02/03 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Running for Chair of the RSS Advisory Board

I announced today that I'm interested in continuing for the next two-year term as chair of the RSS Advisory Board, the group that publishes the RSS 2.0 specification and helps foster interop on issues such as RSS autodiscovery and the common feed icon.

The board went public one year ago with eight new members, publishing our charter and conducting all votes on a public mailing list. Previously, we operated in private and were accorded little credibility -- when I joined the board in 2004 at Dave Winer's invitation, Mark Pilgrim linked to the news with this headline:

entire puppet government of RSS resigns in protest; new puppet government quickly installed

Since going public, 1,200 messages have been posted on the board's mailing list RSS-Public, making it one of the best places to get help with RSS 2.0.

Looking forward, I'd like to see the board publish the RSS profile, a set of best-practice recommendations for feed publishers and software developers, and the clean rewrite of the RSS 2.0 specification. I believe that following the RSS roadmap means freezing RSS elements and attributes and all defined behavior but does not require us to treat the language of the current spec as if it were carved in stone.

But as I told the board, I'm pretty conservative in my approach to our mission. I'd rather work through issues patiently and help incrementally where we can than push through controversial changes, which is why we're still puttering away on the spec rewrite one year after its first draft.

Xml · Rss · 2007/02/02 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Domain Owner Keeps Pig.Com in UDRP Dispute

In a UDRP dispute decided Monday, the New Pig Corporation failed to take away the generic domain name pig.com after previously trying to buy it for $21,000. I'm hoping that the National Arbitration Forum decision bodes well for my own generic use of Wargames.Com.

New Pig owns a Pig trademark registered in 1987 for industrial absorbents used to clean oil spills.

The decision sheds some light on the money involved in parked pay-per-click search domains like the one currently at pig.com. Domain investor Adam Dicker bought the domain for $50,000.

To make its case look better, New Pig reportedly bid $2.74 per click so that it would show up in the top position on pig.com, which it then used in the UDRP complaint to claim the domain was trading on its mark.

Attorney John Berryhill, one of the small number of attorneys specializing in UDRP disputes, appears to have slaughtered New Pig in this case:

While the Complainant states that, on average, it spends $4M per year on unspecified promotion of its products, no documentation is provided for this assertion. The swine and pork industries dwarf the Complainant's sale of its specialized product, and it is reasonable to assume that the Panel members themselves were aware of the word "pig" prior to this dispute and, like the Respondent, had never heard of the Complainant or its products.

The Complainant now admits that the Complainant itself is responsible for the appearance of its own advertisement on the Respondent's webpage.

Business · Domains · Udrp · 2007/02/01 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Dell: Master of 4,264 Domain Names

Nathan J. Hole, the Loeb & Loeb attorney representing MGM in the effort to grab Wargames.Com, has won four more UDRP arbitrations the past eight weeks:

• Dell Inc. v. Gail Wright for the domains dellcart.com and dellpccart.com
• The National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Namia Limited for the domain frozenfour.com
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. fslc wf-b for the domain thepinkpanther.com
• Dell Inc. v. Oguz Ozdemir for the domain dellpc.net

In all four cases, domain owners didn't file a response, giving them no real chance of winning. This brings Hole's record to 13-0.

I've been a Dell shareholder since 2001, so Loeb & Loeb was working for me when it acquired the following domains for Dell through the UDRP process: dell4mecom.net, dellcart.com, dellcomputerssuck.com, dellcustomersupport.com, dellscomputer.com, delldvr.com, delldvr.net, delldvrs.com, delldvrs.net, delliran.com, dellpc.net, dellpccart.com, dellpromos.com, dellsite.com, dellsite.net, dellwork.com, dellworks.com, wwwdell4me.net, wwwdellcom.com, wwwdellcom.net, wwwdellcomputer.com and wwwdell4mecom.com.

These 22 domains were acquired in 11 UDRP cases that cost $16,900 in filing fees from the National Arbitration Forum plus whatever it costs to have a young attorney write sentences like "Respondent's vague allegations regarding his contemplated use of the Domain are contradicted by the manifest weight of objectively verifiable facts surrounding his registration and use."

None of the domains directs traffic to Dell today, and in two cases nobody bothered to update the name service after the UDRP ruling, so they continue to point to their former owners' web servers. If you visit dell4mecom.net and wwwdellcomputer.com today, you'll find parked pay-per-click pages on two servers that host 1.4 million and 44,000 domains, respectively.

Dell currently owns 4,264 domains according to DomainTools and appears on pace to add 1,000 a year. To give a sample of its thoroughness, the company owns dell-sucks.com, dellcomputerssuck.com, delldjdittysucks.com, dellhostsucks.com, dellservicesucks.net, dellsucks.org, dellsucksass.com, dellsucksnow.com and dellblows.com.

Dell has bigger problems than an addiction to domain names -- how do you say "please help, my Inspiron laptop incinerated my mantackle" in Hindi? -- but I'm not seeing the logic of a corporation hoarding thousands of useless and valueless domains related to its brands because some random idiot registered them. Dell's trying to corner the market on an infinite resource.

Business · Domains · Gaming · Udrp · 2007/01/30 · 23 COMMENTS · Link

Amapedia: The Conspicuous Consumption Community Wiki

While browsing Amazon.Com this evening I noticed a reference to Amapedia, a collaborative wiki the company describes as a "community for sharing information about the products you like the most."

The site's newly launched, because there's not a single mention yet on Technorati or Google Blog Search and its About page was created five days ago.

Anyone with an Amazon.Com account can edit the site. Amapedia's list of do's and don'ts for "Amapedians" describes what it's hoping to cultivate:

Do:

1. write about your favorite products
2. find out what others' favorite products are
3. quantify why you like or dislike a product as much as possible
4. cite your sources

Do Not:

1. self-promote by referring to yourself, your work, or your Web sites in any article
2. store personal photos
3. create a personal home page (we may support that in the future)
4. talk in the first person in the main body of product articles (that's what the "Anecdotes, Experiences, Opinions, Comments" section is for)
5. express personal opinions about things that are not products (i.e., while we are very interested in your opinion about a book about the Iraq war -- particularly so if you can calmly document specific good and bad points about it -- we are not at all interested in your personal opinions about the Iraq war itself on this site)

The project appears to have been under development since spring 2005. The domain name Amapedia.Com was registered April 25, 2005, using an anonymous proxy service and programmer Jonah Cohen, in an online resume, states that this was his job at Amazon.Com that year:

Software Design Engineer for Amazon.com. Summer 2005

Wrote large portions of production code for Amapedia, Wikipedia-inspired product website, using PHP and MySQL. Designed and implemented synonym-matching system for item types using Java and PostgreSQL.

There's not much to recommend yet in the wiki's user-generated content (cash register ka-ching!). When I created a new article on the Sonicare Elite 9800 Power Toothbrush I became credited as a "Contributing Amapedian" on my user profile.

I bought the $120 toothbrush because I'm overreacting to some expensive dental work I need. While receiving a crown this morning on one of my molars during a difficult 90-minute operation, my new dentist informed me that I have a "remarkably aggressive tongue."

I believe I've found Amapedia early enough that I can install myself as its leader and establish the community norms. Towards this end, I'd like all Amapedians to addressed me as Amazimbo, First Among Equals.

Wikipedia · 2007/01/25 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Wargames.Com UDRP Dispute Goes to Arbitrators

MGM's effort to grab Wargames.Com is now in the hands of a three-member panel of arbitrators for the National Arbitration Forum, who will read the filings of both sides and decide the matter in the next two weeks.

Under the forum's rules, each side got two chances to make its case:

• Dec. 19, 2006: MGM challenged my ownership of the domain in its original complaint, paying a $2,600 fee and requesting a three-member panel of arbitrators.
• Jan. 8, 2007: I made my response, which attorney Wade Duchene filed at the 20-day deadline. Because MGM requested a three-member panel, no fee was required. If MGM had selected a one-member panel for $1,300, I could've paid $1,300 for two more arbitrators.
• Jan. 16, 2007: MGM made an additional complaint, a response to my response that cost the studio $400. MGM only had five days to do this, but the last day can't fall on a weekend or holiday, so it got three additional days.
• Jan. 22, 2007: I offered a response to their response to my response, which was filed by Duchene and Brett E. Lewis, a former attorney for Register.Com who's won more than 20 UDRP disputes. This response also cost $400 and had a five-day deadline.

Lewis, an attorney whose bio claims he can "hypnotize opposing counsel with his brightly polished, gleaming bald head," wrote an article for the domain industry site DNJournal on how to protect your domain names. My favorite tip is that you should not pretend to be a cat.

The timing of this dispute worked out well for MGM, putting most of our work time in the Christmas holidays and giving the studio extra time for its additional complaint.

MGM's intellectual property firm Loeb & Loeb has become one of my weblog's most avid readers. Its second complaint includes screen captures of several weblog posts here on Workbench to pursue its claim that everything I've done on Wargames.Com is an attempt to hide a long-unrealized desire to profit from MGM's 1983 film:

When Respondent "launched" the <wargames.com> website on September 14, 2006, it did not even merit a mention on any of his websites. A printout from Respondent's blog showing entries from the days surrounding September 14, 2006, is attached as Annex E. In fact, during the three (3) months that elapsed between Respondent's first use of the <wargames.com> domain name and MGM's filing of this dispute, Respondent did not publicize, announce, or mention the activation of the <wargames.com> website. Indeed, the first public announcement of new <wargames.com> website was in connection with Respondent's blog post announcing that MGM filed the complaint in this proceeding (see Annex D). Thus, if Respondent is to be believed, after spending more than two (or eight) years and 1,000 hours developing the <wargames.com> website, he did not so much as mention when it finally went active. That Respondent only began to publicize his website after MGM initiated the instant proceeding betrays his claims regarding his efforts to develop an active website using the Domain, and further suggests opportunistic bad faith in attempting to capitalize on the dispute for his own financial benefit.

They overlooked the links to Wargames.Com in the "Working On" sidebar of this blog -- even in their own screen captures -- and wargame ads I've run on other sites I publish. Google has indexed more than 13,000 pages where I've linked to my store, an effort that takes 3-6 months to improve its standing in search results.

Both of MGM's documents are filled with stuff like this, where its attorneys take a thin inference from something I've written -- or in this case not written -- and stretch it into a Perry Mason moment where I break down on the stand and admit I killed kindly Miss McGillicutty for the $13 in her Little Sisters of the Poor donation bucket.

Udrp · Gaming · Domains · 2007/01/24 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

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