Dylan Hunter

For anyone who’s tried to register a name, (pretty much _any_ name) on the Web in oh… the last several years… You thought it was bad, you thought it was nigh unto hopeless, (i.e. the domain squatters took them all) well, you were right.

That’s it, 7RG8.com for me, Baby, (and see that, you squatter spiders - there’re folks writing about that and EIYK.com - you better get those registered right now, so that when I click on that “why am I seeing this page?” link, you can tell me that you’ll let me have them for the bargain basement price of $50k each).

And you thought it was tough coming up with a name for a razor….

Ok, bizarro, but wanted to put this up here since I couldn’t find anything at all about after firing a whole ton o’ queries @ Google, (it can’t really be that no one else has ever had this problem, can it?!). In any case, here’s the issue:

Have been reading Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design, (been looking for new web designs - hey, when you’re idea rich, but cash poor, you do what you need to do to get the job done! ) and each time I try setting background images using the precise code from the book, I get nothing… zip…. nada…. I normally use Firefox, (1.5.0.1) so tried checking to see if it worked in IE6, nope.

Ok, so after running a whole ton of queries on Google, and otherwise futzing around without success for quite some time, (playing with file paths, single quotes, double quotes, using @import instead of <link />, etc., etc.) decided to download Dan’s sample code, and extracted the files for Chapter 9, (i.e. where he finally does a full-page layout). For transport, Dan decided to put all the styles inside <style> tags within the main index.html file, rather than as an external stylesheet. No biggie, should be no problem to cut it back out, put it into a separate file, insert a link, and go. So, before going any further, I open the file in Firefox, all background images, etc. are there, so great, we’ve got a working prototype.

So, onto step 2. I yank all the style info out of index.html, save as a new .css file, link the two together, and phoosh - the background images are gone again! All the rest of the formatting is intact, so it’s definitely using the external css file, but the background images are just not showing up for some reason, (and the images themselves are still in the exact same directory, as is the index.html file).

So, after cross-checking again about a hundred times, it was back to Google, (again largely without success - which is _really_ surprising - I don’t think I’ve ever had Google fail me as utterly as it did on this one, which is why I’m writing this, so hopefully the next poor sap will have this come up! ). After just about giving up, I remembered how many variants people used to point to their bg images, and one that I saw, in particular, kept bothering me, since it didn’t look like it should work - i.e. url(../img/bg.gif) - which suggests that the browser’s thinking you’re in some other first level child directory, and thus need to back out (../) and then go into img/ to locate bg.gif. So, what the heck, apparently it’s working for somebody, why not give it a try? Sure enough, boom - the bg images are all back in place.

So, not sure, but it looks like if you reference a css file in a subdirectory, all bg image locations are taken from wherever that css file is, (hence why you need the ../ preceding) rather than from your document root. Now, I could have sworn that a whole mess of folks had their css files inside css subdirectories without using the ../, but who knows? The important thing is it works! So, change all url(img/bg.gif)’s to url(../img/bg.gif)’s and you should be fine, (and here’s hoping you found this easily on Google so that you don’t have to waste all the time I did for something as silly! ).

Top executives at U.S. venture-backed companies are receiving about $10,000 more a year in total compensation than they did a year ago, according to a new survey by Dow Jones’ VentureOne. The firm said that the median salary and bonus compensation for CEOs of venture-backed companies is $263,000, up from $252,000 a year ago. In addition, CEOs reportedly are earning larger bonuses — a median $50,000, compared with $40,000 in March 2005. In other positions, vice presidents also are earning a median $10,000 more than last year ($180,000) and director-level positions are earning about $5,000 more ($130,000). More than 700 executives at U.S. venture-backed companies participated in the survey.

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Move over Intel, the days of silicon are numbered, the Borg a mere few decades away. Some excellent fodder for thinking further about the implications of cybernetics, as well as hopefully stimulating further discussions / experimentation as to whether sentience is something purely biological, (in which case, we’ll be creating sentient hybrids - low grade, to be sure, for quite some time, but still) or something else, now that the first combo brain cell / silicon circuit is finally a reality. Much more to come on this path to be sure, but plenty of excitement, (and pitfalls) ahead!

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project as summarized by Senior Research Fellow Deborah Fallows, the internet is increasingly a place where Americans just hang out. Some 30% of internet users go online on any given day for no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time.

Compared to other online pursuits, the act of surfing for fun now stands only behind 52% of internet users sending or receiving email on a typical day, 38% using a search engine, and is in a virtual tie for third with 31% getting news online. About 25 million people went online in 2004 on any given day just to browse for fun. In the Pew Internet Project survey in December, 2005, that number had risen to about 40 million people…

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Just checked out Jobby after reading about on TechCrunch, and darned if Michael wasn’t dead on - the interface, (with a slight glitch on the “user experience” tag for some reason) is definitely awesome, (heck, almost turns looking for a job into a video game! ). Will definitely have to keep in mind going forward.

Would be really cool if, as it grows, live jobs appeared in a right pane or something in order of best match to their tag clouds, as well, (now that _would be_ a video game! ).

And for a viral piece, since recruiters care often care most about what others say about you, how about throwing in a little LinkedIn endorsement kind of thing, on-the-fly weighted by the skill of the endorser for the given tag, (i.e. for “Product Mktg” or “Ruby on Rails,” etc., you would get further gooses for the number of people who endorsed your skill on those tags if they also had high skill / endorsements for theirs, moderate for moderate scores, low for low - yep, peer review / Backrub / Google for jobs! ). Also should help out a bit in differentiating the 4000 people that’ll all come up with Advanced on tags A, B & G, which are most important for a given job.

Now this looks like some fun, (and a _whole_ lot o’ work! :-0 ). Just joined today, and would encourage others to do the same, though one does have to wonder a good bit why they’re effectively starting from scratch in trying to determine the web of human knowledge when a whole ton of these kind of assertions / relationships could be preliminarily posited by crawling extant SE’s, Wikipedia, blogs & the whole host of Web 2.0 tagging-type apps, leaving users the far simpler option of just editing the relationships they’ve posited from analysis of these sources - ah well, s’pose that’s the difference between having all the cash and time in the world, and knowing that you’ve got 6 mths to pull something off, or you won’t be making the mortgage payment!

In any case, the concept’s certainly intriguing, at least, and if the method undertaken turns out to be too unwieldy, certainly a good chance that a startup could do as suggested above - anyone got a $1M burning a whole in their pocket?

Cambridge, Mass. — Japanese Computer manufacturer Toshiba and the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Monday announced a new collaboration, called the “GlobalMind Project,” a program intended “to bring cross-cultural common sense to computer systems.” Toshiba said that it hopes to explore new ways to give computers “human-like” understanding for applications such as Japanese text recognition and processing, car navigation, and robots. On MIT’s end, the program is being led by Professor Emeritus Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and will include other Media Lab researchers.

Another excellent Top X list from Guy Kawasaki - this time from the point of view of the candidate who’s evaluating offers from that guy who’s telling you you’re about to help build The Next Google(tm).

Though I personally got beat on the “How much cash is in the bank?” question while at WebMap, (insist on seeing the actual bank statements! ) and the liquidation preference one, (which, luckily, I’ve yet to run afoul of) now goes into the queue of questions for me to remember, what I found most interesting here was the %’s of the company you should be expecting for joining after they’ve already raised a $1-3M round, and have approx 15 employees, (i.e. so, already have a reasonably solid company up and working). ‘Course, they come with the standard disclaimers, but certainly at least make interesting rough guidelines:

• Senior engineer: .3 - .7%
• Mid-level engineer: .2 - .4%
• Product manager: .2 - .3%
• Architect, i.e., the “main (wo)man,” though an individual contributor: 1 - 1.5%
• Vice presidents: 1.5 - 3%
• CEO, i.e., “adult supervision” brought in to replace the founder: 5 - 10%

Well, not sure how much the assets they’re trying to sell are actually worth without the underlying tech and user profiles, but s’pose any move toward reducing spyware distro from someone this big in that realm should be more than welcomed, (’course, whoever actually buys the assets should be similarly lambasted). Who’s next - 180 Systems, (’course, if they decide to try going nicer, there’ll go probably the best potential company to buy the Claria assets)?

It’s been legal in both advertising and just about everywhere else pretty much for as long as anyone can remember, (so long as you tell the truth) but apparently as a result of Mazda actually being, oh intelligent, and bidding on comparisons between the Pontiac Solstice and its Miata, (i.e. “Pontiac vs. Mazda” or “Solstice vs. Miata” - thereby spending only thousands when Pontiac spent millions on product placements to get on The Apprentice last year to get similar results) as of March 1, Yahoo no longer allows companies to bid on their competitors’ trademarks for comparative purposes, even though such “Comparative advertising in itself is proper and legal…” according to Peter Raymond of the law firm Reed Smith in NY.

But don’t worry, if you’re a reseller of the trademarked item you’re good, or, if you’re a comparison site so long as you “provide substantial information about the trademark owner,” golden, just not if you’re one of the parties actually being compared. Hear that, Mr. Dreamer working on the next Great American Gadget? Hear that Mrs. Nutcase trying to offer that truly better, more personalized service when everyone else is cutting back on theirs? No compare with Big Boys for you - NEXT!!!!

A very cute timeline / explanation of the buzz campaign for the way overhyped MS Origami Project. And while there’s definitely no question that Dustin Hubbard deserves some strong credit for pulling it off, (or, at least gets the credit for serendipity! ) it also shows a bit of the danger of overhyping a product that’s just not that extraordinary.

Had the UMPC been as impressive as folks were hoping from the buzz, MS would have done beautifully in kicking up its reputation a good, strong bit on the innovation front, even if they only sold 2 UMPC units, helping them to cover up some of the Vista black eyes, and, perhaps, if they could get a couple of whiz-bang doo-dads back in the product schedule before Vista, *1* might actually help them a bit on adoption there, as well, (and for that, if it pulls forward adoption curves even .001%, it would have more than paid for itself, Dustin and the entire Origami Team at least a hundred times over! ).

Unfortunately, since after all this hype, what eventually came out was effectively one very large Wet Noodle(tm), unfortunately, it serves the opposite purpose, serving to damage MS as wasting our time with another not fully baked product, (probably sticking to its classic “get it right by v. 3.0″ strategy) that doesn’t do what the Innovators want it to, and is much too expensive to generate any significant Early Adopter purchase.

Buzz is always a double-edged sword, and here, since the level wasn’t well-matched to the thing being hyped, it ended up scoring a net negative. But still, a good learning experience and, as importantly, a fine display of skill that will hopefully only become more impressive with further seasoning, and were it my call, (which it isn’t! ) Dustin and the rest of the Origami Buzz Team have proved themselves well enough to give them a shot at the Big Leagues - I’d definitely toss them on either the Vista or revamped MSN Search launch teams to see what they could do on those, and just ask them to try to do a tighter “buzz match,” (to external potential opinion, rather than oversipping the internal koolaid) on that one.

So, nicely done Dustin & Gang, on the level of buzz generated, and, as importantly, for having the courage to admit the strong role of serendipity in, rather than playing it as planned perfectly from the beginning, (and here, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they would have done anyway, even if the phrase “overhyped” weren’t flying about from the moment the UMPC launched! ). Here’s hoping you keep moving on from here. And for the rest of us, a good thought exercise to keep in mind when planning our buzz campaigns, (knowing that any claim to actually “control buzz” is like handing someone a card with “cat herder” on it - immediately stamps a big, blaring “SMOKING CRACK” across the forehead of the speaker / giver! ).
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*1* Even if only on the version that would ship with UMPC’s, where they could control the hardware configs better for a first shot, and then for more GA on the desktop / laptop front later. In fact, if played right, could let MS use the UMPC for a nice semi-GA tech test bed for a little bit, to let them say that they’ve actually released some of the features that they’ve kept ripping out of Vista, even if they’re only available to the 14 people who would actually shell out the thousand bucks to be the first on their block to own their own Star Trek: Next Generation notepad doo-hickey!

Good things to keep in mind when it’s time to talk to the VC’s, (presuming you were lucky enough to get in in the first place):

What they want: The Venture Capitalist Wishlist

What not to say: The Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs

Hmm… Surprised that the current auto segment is so tiny, (if you exclude eBay @ ~5M uniques, the rest of the top 10 are all hovering around 1M).  Luckily, there’s something we can do about that!

Leaving aside the issue of Yahoo trying to get back at seven folks who obviously have talent and skill, and chose to take that talent & skill somewhere else,*1* is an excellent reminder of making sure to wipe all your personal stuff, (including IM trails that are defaulted “on” in Trillian) before handing that laptop / desktop back over. I actually just modified the settings on my laptop to move the Trillian logs into my normal My Documents folder, so that I will remember to DL and delete when I clean it, rather than leaving them deep beneath the default Trillian Program Files directory, (which I _totally_ wouldn’t remember to pay attention to). Suggest you do the same!
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*1* As is their right if Yahoo wasn’t helping them sufficiently achieve their goals - i.e. Google’s “Everyone should have a chance to make $10M” thing - if you’re a major company making hundreds of millions / billions, and you don’t provide a way for your folks to make life-changing money for company-changing contributions, you’re just asking for your best talent to keep running out the door, and thus for your own company’s competitiveness to continue to fall, eventually to the point where you’ll have to think about bribing your customers to return / continue to use, (and if you don’t think there’s a causal relationship here…).

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BTW - Is anyone else hating that WordPress 2.0 keeps changing href’s to xhref’s, even when you’ve turned that option off in the Options tab? I wouldn’t care if either IE or Firefox actually supported xhref’s, but they don’t, so they end up just underlined or colored, and useless! ).

A quick blurb on the newspaper industry and how to deal with the Internet. A nice stat to put in the queue:
“….”But on-line media produce 20 to 100 times less revenue per reader than newspapers do, he said. To put it another way, for every print reader lost, newspapers have to replace them with between 20 and 100 website readers to gain the same revenue….”

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(BTW - Congrats to MediaPost for finally getting their URL posting straightened out, so that I don’t have to cut and paste the full text anymore - yeah! )