Quick Hitts

I built my first website in the mid 90′s. It was a single page containing a list of local dial-up BBSs, with mine, Electric Avenue, at the top of the list. (Ponder the awesomeness of that business model – advertising a dial-up BBS on a web page. Ugh.) Before building it I sought out the [...]

You’ll appreciate this post more if you read this first. Publish America is a vanity publisher who takes their scam one step further than most by saddeling authors with outrageous contracts.  The contracts have varied a bit over time, but often contain a clause that requires authors to buy a butt-load of their own books [...]

Despite the problems I’d had with Mozy, I kept using them because I was lazy and never got around to switching to a better service.  They were taking their monthly payment out of Paypal, but when that account got depleted they notified me I needed to give them a different card to continue using their [...]

So now the FCC is in charge of the internet, and Big Brother’s lovers are cheering.  “Big Brother has saved us from a mortal danger that we have been imagining might happen someday!” The generic argument against government regulation should be the default position for anyone even remotely interested in liberty. Laws (and regulations are [...]

Imagine that you had a business with the following business model: The business has been in existence for over 200 years. Your logo and brand name is instantly recognized by approximately 100% of the people in the United States. You have a customer base of over a quarter of a billion people.  Nearly all of [...]

Marketing failures can teach you as much, if not more, as marketing successes. I just received an e-mail from a company I’ve done business with.  The headline was “Free Ground Shipping from <Company Name>.  I opened it and saw a very attractive ad, which I clicked. Instead of  taking me to http://companyname.com/ it loaded http://marketing.companyname.com/ [...]

Pfizer is abandoning the New London, CT site where their greed led to abolishing property rights for every single American. The city of New London sold 24 acres of land to Pfizer for ten bucks, but Pfizer didn’t want to have to look at the older houses that dotted the waterfront.  They claimed they wanted [...]