Browsing Tag: internet

    address
    Miscellany

    New Address, New Online Error Messages

    June 4, 2012

    Aside from the occasional brush with unwanted creatures, living in a new house is pretty dang awesome.

    But, as I’ve recently discovered, living at a new address has at least one minor drawback: Nobody recognizes that it’s a real address. Or, at least, nobody that uses whatever international address database is out there.

    Several times in recent weeks, while trying to conduct business online and providing my address, I’ve come upon messages like this:

    address

    That’s happened on United.com, Amazon,co.uk and a couple other sites. Very frustrating. I didn’t even know that addresses were checked against any master database of where people live, but apparently so.

    On the bright side, it’s only a short-term problem. On every site where that message shows up, I just resubmit my order, then resubmit it again and, without fail, the third try gets accepted even if they can’t recognize the address.

    Still, I hope that database is updated soon.

    Miscellany

    How’s This for a Domain-name Fail by Yahoo and MSFT?

    March 30, 2012

    Discovered this while writing my latest Search Engine Land article:

    Back in 2009, when Yahoo and Microsoft announced their big search deal — where Bing results would power Yahoo search — both companies created a special website just for the occasion: www.choicevalueinnovation.com. Both Bing’s blog post and Yahoo’s blog post linked to it. Here’s the link at the end of ex-Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s post:

    bartz-post

    Get this: That domain now belongs to Press Control Services, an electrical manufacturing company in Lewisville, Texas!

    I don’t know how or when they managed to score that domain, but can you imagine how many inbound links it has due to the Yahoo/MSFT history?? Wow. Talk about some good old-fashioned SEO. Well played, folks. Well played.

    pcs-home

    Miscellany

    Is Pinterest THAT Mainstream Already?

    March 26, 2012

    Pinterest_FaviconAn anecdotal story about how mainstream Pinterest is at the moment:

    Four times since 2005, @U2 has conducted a massive survey of U2 fans around the world and we’re planning to do it again next month.

    To get ready, the @U2 staff has been reviewing the 125 +/- questions that we typically ask — about 100 to 110 of them are the same each time, and the rest change depending on what’s going on with U2.

    At some point along the way, we asked a couple questions about social media:

    • Do you use Facebook?
    • Do you use Twitter?
    • Do you use MySpace?

    The gang agreed that we don’t need to ask about MySpace this year — it’s just not relevant at this point.

    The first suggested replacement question?

    Do you use Pinterest?

    That was suggested before “Do you use Google+?”

    I know it’s not at all scientific, but it really struck me when my @U2 crew put Pinterest in with Facebook and Twitter as something we should be asking U2 fans around the world. Is it already that mainstream?

    u2popmart
    Featured, Music

    The Birth of @U2 – 15 Years Ago Today

    February 12, 2012

    By definition, @U2 was born on October 23, 1995. That’s the day we use when celebrating the site’s birthday, and we’ve had a couple pretty good parties over the years (even on different dates).

    October 23, 1995 is the day I put my first website online — “Matt’s Mostly U2 Music Page.” It was a site dedicated to U2 and a couple other bands I liked at the time, but it was about 75% U2 content. The header image looked like this:

    matts

    But in another sense, @U2 was kinda born 15 years ago today: February 12, 1997.

    That’s the day that U2 announced its PopMart Tour from inside a K-Mart store in Manhattan. And it’s the day that the 16-month-old website really became a legitimate and popular online source of U2 news. On that day, I knew that it was going to be something bigger than a normal hobby site.

    Before the Announcement

    In the days and weeks leading up to the tour announcement, there was incredible buzz on Wire — the major U2 listserv of the day — and on other U2 communities like CompuServe and AOL. Fans were looking for any bits of news they could find, which mostly amounted to rumors.

    I recall posting articles and bits of information on the website, and then sending out the link to the various online communities … and the hit counter always went up when I did that. (Yes, I said “hit counter.”) Now, I’d been posting U2 news on the site since the beginning, but with the tour approaching, any little nugget of info became breaking news and drew a lot of traffic.

    So, as the 12th approached — and it had been known in advance that U2 would be announcing the tour on this date — I had to think about how @U2 was going to cover the news.

    1996I was the Sports Director for KEPR-TV at the time — the local CBS affiliate here in Tri-Cities, WA. I did the sports weeknights at 6 pm and 11 pm and was mostly a one-man department. That meant getting sick or taking a day off was a real pain in the arse for the station. They’d have to pull someone else away from their regular tasks to do sports.

    Nonetheless, as the 12th approached, I decided that I was going to play hooky. I didn’t think I had much choice, actually. There were a lot of U2 fans online that would be visiting the website looking for news, and I felt more obligated to report that than to report the day’s local sports.

    To this day, it still amazes me that I decided to call in sick from my job to update a website with U2 news. Did I really do that? Yep.

    The Announcement

    I called in sick that morning, and then turned on my TV and fired up the computer. I think it was an Apple Performa 450 at the time, and I might’ve had a 14.4 or 33.6 modem. Good times.

    My memory is shaky, but I vaguely recall that the announcement would begin at Noon at K-Mart — or 9 am my time. MTV wasn’t airing it live, as I recall, but they’d certainly report it pretty quickly in those twice-an-hour MTV News updates hosted by Kurt Loder (or whomever it was then).

    But there was a huge problem: we didn’t get MTV live in those days. It was delayed; even if MTV News had the story by 12:30 pm ET, I wouldn’t see it until 12:30 pm PT … three hours after the fact!

    So, TV was pretty useless. But there were numerous music news websites at the time — All Star Magazine, Addicted To Noise, JAM Showbiz (which still exists) and others. MTV even had a website then, as did a few major news publications. Google didn’t exist yet, but there was Yahoo and a few other search engines that I’m sure I used … probably Excite, Northern Light and others.

    I kept an eye on all the music news sites I could find, and all the U2 forums/communities/mailing lists. I must’ve hit refresh 200 times that morning. I don’t know where I first found the tour news, but I remember posting a couple shorter bits of info and then …. BAM! …. MTV News had posted the entire list of dates and details online. They also posted some video from the news conference, and I had software on my Performa that made it easy to do screenshots, so I took a few of those. I posted the news, emailed the mailing lists, notified the online communities and the rest is history, as the saying goes.

    You can still, to this day, see the original MTV News story (and my screenshot) on @U2. (Yes, an early form of content scraping! Remind me later to write a post on that topic.)

    The Aftermath

    Even though I’d been posting news for ages, getting the full list of PopMart tour dates online really established @U2 as one of … maybe THE … go-to sites for U2 news online. I recall the hit counter was off the charts that day, and for several days afterward. And it never dropped back down.

    A couple weeks later, Triple J radio in Australia had me on-air to talk about the tour news. And then they did it again in April; they called after the first concert in Las Vegas so that I could give a live report/review to their listeners. (They had me on again in early 1998, right before the tour arrived in Australia.)

    Later in 1997, Ireland’s Hot Press magazine mentioned @U2 in one article and also published a guest article that I sent in to preview the PopMart shows coming to Dublin. (You can read that on @U2, too.)

    And, maybe the most important result of all was that, as more people visited the site and sent in news to share with other fans, I was able to start growing out a staff. For a while, it was just me and one other person posting news. Then it was 4-5 people. Then 8-10. Then a couple dozen. And today, we have about 40 people involved in one way or another. All volunteers, me included. It blows my mind.

    So, yeah. February 12th will probably always have a special place in my heart and mind. It’s not @U2’s formal birthday, but it’s the day that it started to become what it is today. Thanks, PopMart.

    u2popmart

    Featured, Social Media

    Facebook: Annoying? Mysterious? Both?

    December 24, 2011

    facebook-logo-square-311I just finished updating my Facebook profile to the new Timeline. What a nerve-racking experience….because with Facebook, you never know what privacy settings have been changed without your permission, what new options and features are turned on by default, and so forth.

    Facebook doesn’t exactly have a good history of protecting its users, especially when it involves things (i.e., data) that benefits its advertisers. Because, as the saying goes, when a service is free, the users aren’t the customers — they’re the product being sold.

    Anyhoo, when it comes to Facebook and any social networking site, I try to be very protective of my location. I don’t accept Foursquare requests from people I’ve never met, and even from some whom I have met. On Facebook, I’ve only used the check-in feature once, to test it when it first launched. And I don’t let friends check me in to places they visit, either.

    So you can imagine my surprise and frustration when I switched over to Timeline and saw this:

    unacceptable

    Somehow I’ve checked-in or been checked-in 35 times on Facebook. Say what??!! How does that happen? I just don’t get it, and I don’t like it.

    Luckily, I was able to remove that maps thing from my profile. At least I think I did. You never really know with Facebook.

    And then there was this: While I was reviewing my history of liking pages, Facebook decided to list MapQuest in my Likes, even though — as the button suggests — I never really did Like them on Facebook.

    unacceptable-2

    What’s that all about?

    Is Facebook more annoying than mysterious? Or vice versa? I can’t decide.

    Miscellany

    Google’s Scheme Revealed!

    December 21, 2011

    Yesterday afternoon I came upon an invite to Schemer.com, a recommendation engine owned by Google that got a little press within the last few weeks. The idea is that, with help from friends, you can discover things to do — big or small stuff — track what you want to do, what you’ve done, etc.

    I have no intention to review the site at all (okay, in one sentence: It seems kinda pointless.), but this was pretty funny to me:

    As soon as I accepted the invite and signed up for an account, Schemer sent me to its home page and this was the first recommendation I saw.

    schemer

    How perfect is that??!! Google’s scheme is obviously to get everyone to switch to Google+ from Facebook, Twitter and any other social networking site we use.