I’m shamelessly stealing the title of one of Stephen Colbert’s segments. Some consider Colbert the greatest living American. See, I can joke around.
First, a tip of the hat to Robert Scoble. Scoble did a great interview about the paid search side of search marketing with Jeff Figueiredo of Point It. If you spend all your time dabbling in organic/natural search, this is a good reminder that search engine marketing includes both search engine optimization and paid marketing. Scoble’s interview is great, because when Jeff starts to get too technical, Scoble pulls Jeff back into concrete areas: How do I find the keywords to advertise on? How do I know how much to pay? What is the difference between “exact match” and “phrase match” and “broad match”? It’s a good use of your time to watch if you don’t know much about pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.
A tip of the hat to Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). I’ve been using it as my main desktop OS at home, and it’s amazing how usable it is. Are there still tweaks I miss? Sure. It doesn’t handle larger flatpanel LCD resolutions after installation, and the NetworkManager could be installed by default. But the progress even since the Dapper Drake version a year ago is *phenomenal*. I think Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical are making all the right decisions. The user forums are friendly and informative, and it’s clear that Ubuntu is getting serious traction. Heck, pressing the Alt + PrintScreen button even grabs a screenshot. And I don’t need to fire up WinSCP to upload an image to my website. I can mount a remote FTP/SFTP directory from the “Places” menu, then drag and drop the screenshot directly to the remote server. Very nice.
Next, a tip of the hat to gtkpod. All my music is in MP3 format, and I hate even installing iTunes. I like my music players to look like hard drives that just play random tracks, not locked boxes. The gtkpod progam lets Linux users drag and drop MP3s onto Apple devices easily. I just used it to transfer 500 megs of my MP3s from a Nano to a cute little silver Shuffle.
I have to give a wag of the finger to eBay/Paypal. No, not because of the recent kerfluffle. I was trying to donate some money to the gtkpod team tonight, and when I clicked on SourceForge to send them some money via Paypal, I got this error message:

I had to wait for Paypal to come back up to send some moolah. Every website has downtime now and then; it’s just a bother when you want to send some money that second.
Finally, a tip of the hat to Lawrence (Larry?) Lessig. Lessig has spent ten years trying to encourage sound approaches to copyright and intellectual property. His successes include the founding of Creative Commons. But Lessig has decided to embark on a new project. He plans to spend his next ten years working to examine and bring change to his definition of “corruption”:

I don’t mean corruption in the simple sense of bribery. I mean “corruption” in the sense that the system is so queered by the influence of money that it can’t even get an issue as simple and clear as [copyright] term extension right. Politicians are starved for the resources concentrated interests can provide. In the US, listening to money is the only way to secure reelection. And so an economy of influence bends public policy away from sense, always to dollars.

Transparency in government funding and decision-making is a wonderful goal, in my opinion. I’m looking forward to seeing how Lessig tackles this new decade-long task.
Do you have any tips of the hat or wags of the finger you’d like to point out?


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