Obama Loses TechCrunch Endorsement
A lesson to all presidential candidates courting the Web 2.0 vote: Don't get snippy with Michael Arrington.
After Arrington reported that the My Barack Obama social networking site was displaying a racist user-created group in a find-a-group tool, Obama new media director Joe Rospars lamented that he was playing gotcha instead of covering "the real story."
Arrington's response:
This isn't Washington DC politics, and you shouldn't assume I have some racist or other bias against your campaign. We're a tech blog and I pointed out what looks like a rookie mistake on your site that caused some embarrassment. Most of our readers (me included) are going to be inclined to be on your side. But Obama just lost my vote, because of you.
Victory Declared in the Battle for Wargames.Com
The National Arbitration Forum just released its decision in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. World Readable c/o R.L. Cadenhead, the domain-name dispute in which the film studio tried to take Wargames.Com away from me because it owns a trademark related to the 1983 film WarGames and the upcoming sequel WarGames 2: The Dead Code.
A three-member panel of arbitrators denied MGM's claim on the grounds that I established my legitimate interest in selling wargames at the domain:
The picture that emerges from this material is of the Respondent, having seen Complainant's WARGAMES movie as a teenager in or about 1983 and having developed a professional interest in computer programming and wargames, to the extent of writing about them, creating them and publishing material on numerous websites, registered the disputed domain name
in 1998 with the idea of one day using it to sell wargames over the Internet. That idea remained in abeyance for six years until Respondent began to prepare to open his online store. Meantime the domain name resolved to a website which, inter alia, contained advertising links which most likely generated PPC revenue. By the time Complainant complained by letter of September 7, 2006, preparations to open the online store had advanced sufficiently to enable Respondent to advance his plans and to open the store on September 14, 2006. Complainant rightly submits that what Respondent did after receiving the letter of September 7, 2006 cannot be taken into account in determining legitimacy. However, the speed with which Respondent was able to open his online store after having received that letter lends support to Respondent's contention that much work by way of preparation to use the disputed domain name for the purpose of selling wargames over the Internet had already been done by the time that letter was received. The sworn statements mentioned above cannot be dismissed as ex post facto attempts to concoct a defense to this Complaint. Indeed, they explain the acquisition in 2004 of the sales and use tax permit and the subscription to the Drop Ship Source Directory as being related to Respondent's intended online wargames store.
In its complaint, MGM found several things to make me look like a cybersquatter obsessed with the film, including a joke I made in Sams Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours:
The quote "Shall we play a game?" is from the 1983 movie War Games, in which a young computer programmer portrayed by Matthew Broderick saves mankind after almost causing global thermonuclear war and the near-extinction of humankind. You'll learn how to do that in the next book of this series, Sams Teach Yourself to Create International Incidents with Java in 24 Hours.
MGM also cited a Red Herring interview:
That Respondent recalls where he first saw the WARGAMES film demonstrates the degree to which the film imprinted on his mind, and helps to explain his fascination and continuing references to MGM's film.
When first contacted by MGM in September, I was certain that I would win a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) case if my ownership of the domain was challenged. I didn't know much about the UDRP, having never been involved in one of these disputes in a decade of web publishing, but I understood that it existed to stop people from grabbing domains to profit on somebody else's trademark. I got Wargames.Com to sell wargames.
The more I learned about the UDRP, the less confidence I had in winning. Most disputes end in victories for trademark holders and there's a huge number of ways that domain owners have been judged to have acted in bad faith.
Where domain owners are concerned, the UDRP's a strange game where the only winning move is not to play.
This battle has been four months of stress-induced, take the whole gallon of ice cream out the fridge eating -- people are starting to ask my due date. The next book I write will cover how domain name owners can protect themselves from a UDRP grab. I asked my book agent to shop two different proposals depending on the outcome.
The first proposal: How I went to battle with a ginormous corporation and saved my domain.
Thanks to my attorneys Wade Duchene and Brett E. Lewis, I don't have to write the other proposed book: How one of America's most beloved film studios hurt my feelings, kicked my ass and took my domain name, and what you can do to avoid my sad, sad fate.
Searching for Ways to Move Up in Google
A year ago the RSS Advisory Board moved to its own domain, losing all Google juice associated with its old site. Because the search term RSS is enormously popular, we've found it difficult to attract search traffic and build a decent Google pagerank. It took nearly a year to crack the top 100 for that term on Google; we're currently up to the 80s.
I've been using this experience to learn the arcane art of search engine optimization (SEO).
The first SEO technique I undertook to make Google happy was to add my sites to Google Webmaster, a free tool that shows you how Google's discovering and indexing your content. Once you verify your site's ownership by adding a meta tag to the home page's header, you can view search query stats and page rank information, create sitemaps and find out the errors Google encountered while crawling your site. This week, Google added a killer new feature: Link reports that count incoming links for each of your pages and list all of those links.
Next, I developed an XML sitemap for rssboard.org and a user-friendly site index and error page.
Creating these features taught me that I've been making a huge mistake on my weblogs by duplicating content over multiple URLs. My weblog entries can be read at a short URL, long URL, date-based URL, tag-based URL, and archive URLs -- all of which were indexed by Google. Publishing as many as a dozen copies of the same content triggers Google's duplicate-content filter, downgrading most of these pages into the "omitted results" index that Google refers to in messages like this:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 1 already displayed.
I'm correcting the problem by removing most of these URLs from Google's index by adding a noindex, follow robots header to duplicate pages with my publishing software:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />Users can still request these URLs as they navigate a site, but the only ones stored by Google are an entry's official URL and current tag pages. When I use a shortcut URL, I redirect it with an HTTP header that tells Google it's a permanent move:
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved PermanentlyThough it's tough to quantify whether SEO techniques are working, the board's site has risen consistently (but slowly) in the rankings.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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