Category Archives: Internet

1.5 billion active Gmail users

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In May of 2004 I received an invitation to beta test Google’s new email service, Gmail. Google had acquired Blogger in early 2003 and sent invites to users. We were allowed to invite two friends. As I recall, people were selling such invitations. It was early enough that I was able to get “stevemays@gmail.com”

For reasons unimportant, yesterday I created a second Gmail account, my first ever. I decided to use the name of a character from one of my favorite novels. I searched for more than half an hour, picking the most minor and obscure characters I could think of, and never found one that wasn’t taken. I finally gave up and went for nonsense: poontangmeringue@gmail.com. And decided I didn’t really need a second account after all.

Google says they have 1.5 billion active Gmail users. I’m a little surprised poontangmeringue was still available.

Twenty years of blogging

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Twenty years ago (February 2, 2002) I posted my first entry here at smays.com. 5,981 posts. About 25 posts a month, 299 posts a year. My original tag line was, “I really have to start writing some of this down.” I’d hear or read a memorable quote and wanted a place to put it where I could find it later. A place where I could add some context to a photo or video clip, although video was really hard to do in those days. Took forever to encode and even longer to upload. I made the clips tiny to keep the file size small. The media archive contains 2,982 images; 191 video clips (with lots of links to YouTube); and 86 audio files.

From the beginning I’ve been diligent about categories (30) and tags (228). Metadata. Only found half a dozen I missed, now fixed. A few of my categories: Books (438), Family/Friends (583), Gadgets/apps (492), Internet (796), Media/Entertainment (1,185), Politics/gov (552), Sci/Tech (613), Miscellany (689), Video (571). You can see the full list in the sidebar.

For me tags are the most important part of a blog spanning two decades. Can’t imagine finding anything without them. A few examples: Blogging (346), Consciousness (102), Dogs (152), Google (230), Music (209), Television (157). With almost 6,000 posts, you don’t know what to search for if you don’t know it’s there. Tagging addresses that.

Many people will highlight portions of text or make margin notes while reading a book. But how would you ever find that bit later? Flip thorough all the pages? And that require you remember the quote you’re looking for. When I finish a a book (usually this is with non-fiction) I transcribe anything I underlined, and turn that into a blog post. WordPress does such a good job indexing posts I can search for some obscure word or phrase –even if I don’t remember the title of the book– and I’ve got it.

When I was working with clients (15 years ago?), helping them set up a blog and make their first post, one of two things would happen: There would be a dozen posts within 24 hours (very rare); or they wouldn’t post again for weeks. They wanted to have a blog, just just didn’t want to write blog posts. I believe there is blogging gene. You have it or you don’t.

Another pitfall I’ve mostly avoided is the need to make every post a brilliant essay. They do this because they expect people to read their blog and they want every post to be a work of art. I knew from the beginning it was unlikely anyone would read my blog. Not with any regularity. This was liberating. If I found something interesting (to me) in the New York Times, for example, I could copy a couple of grafs and paste to my blog with a link back to the original NYT story and done.

Social media platforms have pretty much killed off blogs. Nobody expects much effort for those posts. (They even have a name for them: “shitposts“) And in ten minutes every post is washed away in the stream. And those LIKES make you think someone is reading what you posted.

I was hooked on blogging from the beginning and believed it was/would be an important part of the Internet. I was wrong about that but that’s okay. From time to time I think about what will become of smays.com when I’m gone. Is there any way to keep it live, just as an archive of course? Probably not. The WayBack Machine (Internet Archive) has some of it. And that’s good enough.

Live Streaming Star in China

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From the New York Times: “Over the past year, as Covid-19 has severely limited our ability to interact with the world beyond our front door, livestreams have helped transport us to places we couldn’t visit, people we couldn’t see and events we couldn’t attend. In China, live streaming services command an audience of nearly 560 million, with streamers broadcasting to devoted followers who tune in every night. Successful live streamers can earn thousands of dollars each month in direct donations from fans, and those at the very top earn millions from brand sponsorships and major contracts. In the short documentary above, we enter two agencies that scout promising newcomers and mold them into high-earning stars. But what’s it like working for a company that engineers every aspect of your life — and then requires you to livestream it all day?”

Not sure which I found more frightening… the lives of the “stars” or their fans.

Hyperlinks

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In the early days of HTML (“WWW“) I looked for every opportunity to embed an in-line link on the websites I was responsible for. The more links, the better. It was all about the “user experience” back then and links added value.

Seems like I don’t see that many links these days and I only had to wonder for about three seconds. Why would they send me off to another page/site? Maybe we were always just “eyeballs.” I miss those links and the places they took me.

“New App Lets Banner Ads Listen, Remember, Respond”

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In the late 90’s I played a small part in our company’s early efforts to get on “the information highway.” We went all-in on an idea called AdActive. Proving, once again, that nothing ever dies on the Internet, I found the following on ClickZ. (1998)

Straylight in Seattle launched AdActive, a software product that allows existing banner ads to provide advertisers information on end-user brand perceptions, letting marketers target future messages based on individual responses.

Designed to support one-to-one relationships between customers and companies, AdActive works with a Web site’s existing ad delivery system or network to extend the traditional banner ad, the privately held company said.

Users are offered a number of options to tell advertisers what they think of the product or brand being presented without being taken away from the content they are viewing. AdActive then records the response so that it can be aggregated to provide detailed brand/product perception reports and used to more effectively target future ads.

“AdActive allows Web sites to realize new revenue by giving advertisers the ability to interact directly with consumers,” said Allen Hammock, technical director for Straylight’s AdActive Product Group. “Advertisers will also be able to look at what people think about their brand and products while giving Web surfers the ability to actively shape their online ad experience without registering or giving up their online anonymity.”

AdActive features a response bar, a small footprint Java applet, allows an individual to pass along positive or negative responses to an ad, contact an advertiser directly or even cancel an ad from being shown again.

The app gives advertisers the ability to respond to individual consumer brand perceptions with new advertisements or to refocus their efforts on consumers who chose not to respond at all.

AdActive is designed to work with NetGravity’s industry-standard ad delivery system, AdServer. The software is priced in a tiered structure based on a site’s traffic and computing resources.

The Wish Book

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International Business Times: “Sears and Kmart filed for bankruptcy in October 2018 and were able to stave off another bankruptcy filing during the pandemic as sales lagged and foot traffic waned. But now the retailer is facing a new series of financial troubles.”

My mom and her family (farmers) called the Sears “mail order catalog” the “wish book.” Children on the farm or in small towns would begin paging through the toy section in the months leading up to Christmas, circling toys they wanted Santa to bring them. Today, I assume, they have and app — many apps — for that.

Growing up in the ’50s in a small town, the selection of toys was slim. Don’t recall it seeming so at the time but there were a couple of “ten cent stores” or “five-and-dime stores” but they could only stock so much. No, the Sears catalog was the motherlode.

While reminiscing on this today I found myself wondering, how did we order something? Toll-free numbers didn’t come along until 1967! Long distance calls were expensive and the idea of placing an order by phone was laughable.

I think the catalog had a bunch of blank order forms and you filled these out, included a personal check (money order?) and put it in the mail.

Weeks later (months?) the items would be delivered by the “mail man” or UPS, although I don’t recall getting many “parcel post” deliveries in those days.

And we thought nothing about going through this process. It was this or take whatever you cold find on the shelves of local stores (remember them?)

What we have today? Literally unimaginable (for me). The Sears catalog was replaced the internet and websites and the entire chain was doomed long ago. And you something? My toys don’t mean quite as much as they did back then.

Are we ever “offline” now?

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I used to think about what it means to “be online.” I still recall when everything was off-line. Or pre-line.

Before social media and the primacy of the latest post — and the irrelevance of all previous posts — I thought of my websites, especially my blog, like a small town library. You kept everything you thought you (or someone) might want to retrieve and read again. I didn’t care much how infrequently a “book” was checked out, just that it was there on a shelf and in the card catalog.

But now the ever-flowing river of Tweets, Toots, FB posts, etc. makes anything below the scroll worthless. The notion of “rebooting” one’s online presence made me think of moving that small town library to a new building on the other side of town.

When online video was hard

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Everywhere you look people are streaming live video. TV news programs, late night talk shows, online classes, grandmothers Zooming with their grandkids. It has never been easier to “video chat” with someone. But it wasn’t always this way. Here are a few of my memories from the early days. (6 min)

No comments

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I’ve gone back and forth on comments since I started blogging in February 2002. When I remember I disable them but rarely get any comments on posts where I forget. We don’t get a lot of visitors here but that’s always been fine by me. One of my favorite bloggers, Dave Winer, has what I consider the best approach to comments.

Start a blog, I advise, and say what you have to say and link to my post. Of course what they really wanted was to use my flow to (very often) zing me personally in some way. I consider that spam. Or hijacking. It gets so insidious so quickly that I haven’t had comments here for any duration for many years. It starts off collegial, but quickly devolves into abuse as the trolls take over.

I’ve attempted to disable all comments from previous posts but haven’t checked to see if that worked.