Daggle: Danny Sullivan's Blog

In Which I Finally Experience A Car Boot Sale

Mon, 12 May 2008 20:16:39 +0000

The moving plans continue. Later this week, a company comes to take away half our stuff. Later this month, the other half goes. So there's a lot of cleaning and deciding of what really needs to go. And in Britain when you do a clear out, you don't have a garage sale. Instead, you go to a car boot sale. That's where a bunch of people gather to sell things out of the back of their cars -- out of the trunks, or as the Brits say, the boot. Until now, I'd only experienced the joys of buying at car boots. This Sunday, a whole new world -- being the guy flogging his stuff.

For my British readers, Americans don't do car boots. We have garage sales, where at an individual home, someone puts out all their stuff they want to sell. On Saturdays, people know to drive or bike or even rollerblade around neighborhoods looking for sales. There are often signs on street corners telling you when one is happening.

I don't know why Brits don't do garage sales and instead gather to do car boots (and here's a good introduction to them). Perhaps some houses lack front yards, which may have helped the tradition start. Wikipedia's no great help, telling me only that car boots started in the 1980s, which I kind of doubt.

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Live Twittering A Conference? Try Live Twitting!

Fri, 09 May 2008 18:45:54 +0000

I recently had a go at live twittering a conference and what a pain! First, I was flooding my followers with constant updates. Second, trying to recreate what I live twittered into a blog post was a nightmare, with me literally having to cut-and-paste newer twits above the older ones to reconstruct the proper chronology. There had to be a better way, and now there's one you can try: Live Twitting.

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Twitter Spam: Myth Or Reality?

Wed, 07 May 2008 21:21:28 +0000

I was intrigued to read on TechCrunch that Twitter has started blacklisting spammers. Really, Twitter spam? I mean, how do you get spammed by people you voluntarily choose to follow. It's like bitching that your Facebook "friends" are spamming you. Why did you make them friends, then.

OK, there are people who will try to market themselves on Twitter, just as there are people who will try to do that on any broadcast-style medium. In fact, we praise many people who market themselves -- pointing at those who have built up a large Twitter following (see Tracking Your Twitter Growth With Twitterholic, TwitDir, Tweeterboard & Others) or a company that uses it as a communication channel.

Marketing is not spam. For me, spam is unwanted marketing -- marketing that comes into your life almost against your will and adds no value to it. In the real world, it's like junk mail or telemarketer calls. On the web, it's email from people who got your address somehow, a search listing that's been shoved in front of you but has no real relevance or other crud that people are so familiar with.

So Twitter spam? How is an unwanted message getting in front of you on Twitter, to the degree we have this new Twitter Blacklist. By the way, these are not "known" spammers on Twitter as defined by Twitter itself. They are people who, as far as I can tell, the Twitter Blacklist has decided are spammers (in particular, this post leads to this discussion where Twitter says it has no public blacklist but does suspend accounts it feels are abusive or violating its terms).

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Oh My God! My Village Is Being Invaded!

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:52:55 +0000

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I've long wanted to do a post about the "German village" that's about a mile from our home in Wiltshire. The British Army uses this as an urban training ground (and a few years ago, an "Iraqi village" sprung up next to it. Living in the middle of the Salisbury Plain training grounds, you get used to things like giant airplanes flying just above the house or tanks firing loudly only a mile away. But imagine my surprise to read on Techmeme that we're about to be invaded by robotic scouts! Well, the German village that is. News.com and New Scientist have more about the competition that's being held. And doesn't it figure -- we'll be gone by the time in August when it happens! Well, I'll get out to the village as I've been meaning to for ages to shoot some photos before it happens. Above, a close-up of the village (very out of date, not showing the Iraqi village). Below, our house in relation to the village.

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Dell Support Or Lack Thereof: My Dell Hell Experience

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:17:32 +0000

I know. A story about problems with Dell and customer support aren't new. I know about Jeff Jarvis, his experience and the "been there, done that" feel of another blogger writing about Dell issues. But coming back from a trip and finding my recently repaired Dell desktop failing to boot as has been the case on several other occasions -- I've had it. Like Jeff writing his open letter to Dell in 2005 on his newly purchased Powerbook, I compose this letter on my fairly newly purchased MacBook Pro. My plea is simple. Empower your customer service people to simply replace things that don't work rather than making them jump through whatever procedures you have in place that clearly don't work. Want the longer story? Then read on.

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Newportus Interruptus

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:26:52 +0000

Twelve years after leaving Newport Beach, I'm almost back to living here again. The past three weeks we've been on vacation in Newport, getting the boys used to coming back and making various arrangements. And as part of that return, I've had the strangest sense of a needle dropping back down on a record after being lifted or a long movie starting again after an intermission.

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Newport Beach Scenes: Sophie Monk Filming "Hard Breakers," World's Most Expensive Baskeball Court & Black Cats

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 01:31:04 +0000

Only one more day left in Newport Beach before heading back to the UK, at least until the permanent move this summer. Below, a few random photos from beachside: the filming of Hard Breakers, the world's most expensive basketball court, a freaky weird cat and the deal with that picture above.

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Twitter Poll Results: How Much Did You Pay For School Lunch?

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:31:36 +0000

We visited the school our children will be going to when we move to California later this year. How much was lunch, I asked? $2.95 per day. Wow. I'm old. It was like 55 cents when I was a kid. And I can remember skipping lunches often in high school (I think I got $1 per day then) to scrape together some spending money.

I twittered my surprise at the rise in lunch cost and was impressed by the reaction. Everyone wanted to remark! OK, not everyone, but it was a strong response. So I asked people on Twitter to tell me what they paid when they were in school and when that was. Below, just a fun round-up of what came back.

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Club Penguin Loses Color, Clothing Options

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:08:45 +0000

Consider this a semi-guest post from my oldest son, who is outraged that the Club Penguin server upgrade that was completed this week has caused him and his brother to lose all their penguin colors and all the items they'd purchased for their penguins.

I did some searching, and there's no mass outcry, so maybe this is just hitting our boys. If they hit Edit Player, the Color, Pin & Background tab shows nothing. That's bad, because his penguin color was changed, and now he can't change it back. And the Clothing and Award tab shows nothing. And these tabs mean like nothing to me, by the way.

My oldest has emailed the Club Penguin newspaper to see what they say. Funny to see him trying to work the problem and not knowing to turn to blog search or community forums. The Club Penguin blog has a bit about bug reports coming in. At lease one person comments about the color loss. We'll see how it goes.

The Kindness Of Skateboarders

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:51:47 +0000

I hit the Vans skatepark in Orange last night with my youngest son, and I couldn't help again but think of how nice skateboarders are. You come into this park where people are whizzing all around, and you could assume that it's everyone on their own. But in reality, everyone is keeping a watch on each other.

People take turns with a bit of silent communication, just watching the way traffic will move when a traffic signal goes out. And everyone's generally friendly. People will just offer you tips or encourage you on.

Yesterday, as we waited to take turns on a ramp, we watched another skateboarder keep trying to grind down a rail (if I'm even saying that right). Eventually he nailed it, and I think I exclaimed something like "cool," that he heard. It was an almost involuntary cheering him on, a happiness to see him finally get down the trick he'd been trying so hard to do. And he immediately flashed a real smile and appreciation that someone noticed, someone was cheering him on.

But that's the park -- everyone cheering everyone one, encouraging each other, helping each other, watching out for each other. It's a nice place to be.

Being Social Online & Protecting Your Kids

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 21:08:32 +0000

I've read plenty of articles by now that cover how much people might be exposing themselves to identity theft through social networking and social sharing sites. But I've had a different worry over the past year or so. Is all my twittering, Flickr posting, Facebooking and so on putting my kids in danger?

Think about it. I'm not just exposing myself online as I share things with my now 2,000 followers on Twitter or my 1,500 "friends" on Facebook or anyone who sees a photo I leave public on Flickr. I'm giving away details of my life to strangers that could let a crazy person make themselves seem familiar to one of my kids.

Chills. I got chills after writing the sentence above. And I've thought about it for some time, pondering whether I should even do a post about it, for fear that just talking about the potential danger might make it more real. But I think it's an important issue that few are really considering and one without an easy answer. Below, some of what I've been thinking about and doing to reduce the danger.

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Tracking Your Twitter Growth With Twitterholic, TwitDir, Tweeterboard & Others

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:02:09 +0000

I blame Jason Calacanis for making me think about the number of Twitter followers I have. He wants to be the number one Twitterer in terms of followers, as measured by Twitterholic. Currently, he's number two. I saw him in New York last month, and he talked much about he wanted to raise his "Jason Nation" numbers.

Hmm. How was my Twitter account I doing? And could I make this leaderboard? Because maybe that would be kind of cool....

So I spent some time at Twitterholic. It's neat. It will show you the top 100 people based on followers. You can also resort to see those with the most friends or those who have updated the most.

At the moment, the person (Zadi) in spot 100 has 2,616 followers. I just turned over 1,800, so maybe I'll make it some day. But unfortunately, I can't tell all the other people behind him. You can't see past the top 100.

On the upside, you can see the trend for anyone on Twitter. Apparently this isn't commonly known, so I thought I'd do a post.

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The Great Gmail Import & My Short Life With Web-Based Mail

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 08:47:51 +0000

About two weeks ago, I dived in to merge two years worth of mail from one Gmail account to my existing Google Apps mail account. I wanted to cover how it went and how it caused me inadvertently to abandon my cherished desktop client, Outlook, for two weeks. No, it didn't make me a web-based email convert. But perhaps it might down the line.

Merging Gmail & Google Apps Mail Accounts is my previous post covering some of the discoveries I made when combining the two accounts. I had no idea it would ultimately take 12 days to complete. During that time, I had to shift to using only web mail because any attempt to download only "new" mail caused hundreds -- thousands! -- of imported messages to be seen as new by Outlook.

Coincidentally, the Gmail blog just posted Tips for importing old email to Gmail noting, "It might take a while for Gmail to fetch everything from your old account...." Indeed, 12 days? I know, I had over two years worth of mail. But both accounts are hosted by Google. There should be a much easier, efficient way to combine two accounts without having to go through POP downloads.

I covered some of the glitches already, but here are some additional ones:

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Short Story Time

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:26:37 +0000

I used to love short stories. A collection of Asimov or Clarke or Bradbury short stories? I was a happy camper, as a kid. But something happened along the way. Suddenly, I just had no desire to read short stories at all. I don't know why. Maybe it was that I wanted a longer commitment with the book I was reading, something that was going to keep with me past 30 or so pages. Or if I were going to invest my emotions as a reader with characters, I wanted them to stay with me for hundreds of pages.

Perhaps that's one reason I loved the Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton. Published in three books in the UK (nine in the US), each of the books (The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist & The Naked God) is more than 1,000 pages long. Now that's a commitment! Of course, I'm a pretty fast reader, so that's another reason a 1,000 page plus book goes over well with me. It's going to last a bit longer.

Hamilton's trilogy is rich with characters and really is a page turner. And unlike Kevin J. Anderson's Saga Of Seven Suns series (seven novels, I've done the first five), you don't feel like it's stuffed with filler. I do like Anderson's writing, but each novel seems to barely progress things.

But suddenly, I'm back in the groove with short stories. I've had this copy of Counting Up, Counting Down -- alternative reality short stories by Harry Turtledove -- on the "to read" bookshelf for ages. For whatever reason, I finally dusted it off this week and started in. I knocked off the first story and found I really enjoyed it, that didn't mind that it was going to come to an end so quickly. It may have been brief, but I enjoyed it -- as the other ones I'm reading. It's nice to rediscover the joys of short stories.

Teddy Bear Parachute Jump @ Salisbury Cathedral

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:17:54 +0000

If you happened to be near Salisbury Cathedral on Saturday, there was something more inspiring than the towering spire. It was raining teddy bears from the skies. Along with a lot of actual rain. It was part of a charity campaign, and my youngest son (who loves teddy bears) had his make two jumps (because we missed the first one). Plus, there was the unexpected rescue of teddy bears that got stuck in trees. Pics below.

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