James Senior's Blog

I love this map from Gizmodo which aims to plot the battlegrounds that are raging between Apple, Microsoft and Google.  The thing that fascinates me is the different business models through which the different companies sell their products.  From the Microsoft perspective there is a definite shift between partner model (which is my original background in Microsoft) to direct – think about the Microsoft Store, Zune, Xbox 360, Azure etc.

From an accuracy perspective on the diagram, one disagreement I have is the war for “web software” which is described as Quicktime vs. Silverlight.  This should instead be HTML5 vs. Silverlight – I’m sorry Quicktime is not a valid medium for web software – no chance.

There’s also no “social” battleground which right now would be Google vs. Microsoft: Buzz vs Windows Live.  Which one is going to be stronger there? Eyes look towards the launch of Windows Live Wave 4…  Of course, if you add this vector then Facebook would look strangely absent from the page.

What’s your take on it?

I’ve been under a bit of a spam deluge recently here on my blog.  I have to hand it to those spammers, their comments are getting more human-like everyday, with their text relating directly to the post in question.

Before today I’ve tried some options in BlogEngine.net to get rid of spam like enabling the AkismetFilter settings.  Much to my disappointment it didn’t seem to have any effect on the amount of spam I was getting – it just kept piling up! 

I drew to the conclusion that I was just going to have to put up with it, deleting comments manually.  Then this weekend after I upgraded to the shiny new BlogEngine.NET 1.6 I was playing around with the comment admin panel and strolled into the Configuration tab.

At first glance nothing special in there but then the “Moderate Comments” checkbox caught my eye.  I never normally moderate comments before they are posted but with today’s spam count reaching fever pitch I thought I would succumb to an anti-free speech approach to keeping my comments clean and relevant. 

I clicked the checkbox and much to my surprise I found a whole host of functionality I would never have associated with “Moderation”.  I had always associated moderation with something manual that I must do – I had never checked this box before.  My friends, I must tell you that this was like discovering the buried treasure on Treasure Island – it was a pure moment of enlightenment.  There, below were rules for capturing spam and filtering it out automatically.

Now, I don’t have any evidence that this was the flaw in my anti-spam campaign, but time will tell – i will be sure to keep you updated if it makes a difference. 

What did I learn from this discovery?  There’s a lesson in there for everyone about user experience and the subtleness of convention based approaches.  The convention in this case would for BlogEngine.NET not to put the spam settings under “moderation” (hiding them by default doesn’t help either) but under “Comment Spam”.

Also, it pays to click everything and also read the instruction manual :-)  Anyway, for those of you that come across this post and find it to provide the same kind of enlightenment that it did for me, happy (spam free) blogging!

Steve’s absolutely right, this is the best use of 20 minutes of your time this year.  I wanted to share it with you, watch it and reflect.

Jon Udell’s Innovators show this featured Hugh McGuire who is launching a new project, BookOven, designed to aid collaboration between authors and readers during a book’s creation.

His post got me thinking about how since being in the US I have spun up two subscriptions to magazines where prior to my move I had consumed all my content online.  The two magazines are Wired and GQ and the thing that drew me to their subscription was the price - $10 for a year long subscription.  This to me, was astonishingly cheap and given that I’ve been an avid reader online I felt it was my duty to give back in this small way.

Living and working in Seattle amongst so many technophiles and geeks is always fascinating no more so than on the public bus - the 545, that ferries us all from Seattle to Redmond.  Once onboard one can’t help but study the habits of individuals.  There are laptops and devices being used in most seats, grabbing the free wifi, whilst there are a few of us who are living the renaissance and reading – shock horror - books and magazines. 

There’s something romantic and soothing being offline, amongst pages you can feel and turn, that don’t make your eyes tired.  There’s no temptation to check your email with the gold Outlook logo staring you down – it’s nice. 

I consider it the perfect start to my day and it’s all thanks to a $10 a year subscription to a medium that is supposedly doomed.  It’s hard to believe that given the small amount there’s not a bigger draw to magazine subscriptions.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little thought bubble, reading it online on your screen, for free.  Happy Sunday.

(Photo thanks to www.busdude.com and his final collection of bus photos from the Seattle area.)