Yes, the Web 2.0 carry-on is starting to get people all excited about making squillions of dollars again. Just three weeks ago someone paid US$115,000 for the domain name — yes, just for the name — refresh.com, which looks like it’s trying to clone MySpace‘s success. A shame they didn’t spend a quarter of that on design — though MySpace does just fine while looking pig-ugly.
Polling booth maps clever, but whose map?
The NSW Electoral Commission has great interactive maps so you can find your local polling booth for 24 March. But they’re based on Google Maps. So as Richard Chirgwin points out, the mapping data is licensed in a very roundabout way.
The NSW Government street data is licensed to PSMA (the public sector mapping agency), which is then licensed to MapData Sciences, which is then licensed to Google Maps which is then licensed back to… the NSW Electoral Commission.
“We are surrounded by cretins,” Richard says. I tend to agree.
Though the defence is obviously that Google Maps provides a nice, convenient interface for programmers to use.
Speech recognition has a long way to go
Just see what happens when a programmer tries to use Windows Vista’s speech recognition to write a simple script in the Perl programming language.
Now imagine: “Computer, intercept the photon torpedo.”
Seek must be a rip-off
OK, this isn’t exactly cutting-edge business analysis, but stay with me. Employment website Seek makes a net profit after tax of $23.9M off revenue of $70M. That’s a markup above costs of nearly 52%.
So I figure they could drop their prices by a good 20% and still be making plenty more profit that the average quite-successful business, yeah? Hell, a computer shop only makes 6% to 8% when they sell you a laptop.
No wonder their share price is at a record high.
Spammer’s Ode #1
While clearing out the spammers’ attempts to post comments to this website today, I was struck by the rather attractive rhythm they formed — if “attractive” is the right word. Here, then, is the first poetry I’ve written in more than 20 years, entitled…
“Discount anal videos”
That was the content of the very first email I received in 2007. Sure, it was spam, so the subject matter was kinda predictable. But there are some sentences that should never contain the word “discount”, and that’s one of them.