Don's blog

Every recent consumer electronics product from Apple—definitely the iPad, but all iterations of the iPhone including the initial one—has been greeted with rounds of articles crowing about what an arrogant, foolhardy mistake it is and how this will finally, finally, be the moment the emperor is revealed to have no clothes. And ultimately this is what's so infuriating about Apple: that's not what happens. Ever.

I can't think of any Apple product I've been disappointed with.

Dmitry thinks paying a set fee to read all the blogs in a network is a good idea. I'm all for paying good authors for content I find interesting, but this would be much like buying a cable TV package—paying for a bunch of crap stuff that doesn't interest me as well. How about a blog network where the reader chooses a selection of blogs and pays only for those, with a set minimum price.

The ads you allow on your site are part of your brand.

Internet marketers, are you listening to this? What's on your site?™

Thanks to the torrent of spam comments that began today, I've changed the CAPTCHA method for anonymous comments from being simply math-based to a more difficult image code. Sorry for any frustration that causes, but even though anonymous comments are not immediately posted I still have to deal with a large queue. I may switch back once the spam subsides.

By the way, registered members get their comments posted immediately.

I had reason today to use one of those "people search" websites you've probably seen from time to time. I was wanting to find out who the owner of a particular AOL address was, so I Googled the address. Although the address didn't come up in the search listings, two paid ads for search services came up and I took my chances with one of them.

When people talk about signing PDFs, they can mean two things: attaching a digital signature to the file or placing a graphic representation of their signature on the document. Often what people really want to do is the latter.

The demand for the Apple (AAPL) iPad may be like the iPhone and iPod...Apple may have to quickly cut prices the way that it did with the iPhone to keep consumer interest in the iPad high.

Apparently the law of supply and demand is lost on this guy.

Douglas A. McIntyre: Demand For Apple iPad May Be Higher Than Expected

Don't know if it means they're shipping, but I was charged for my iPad 3G today. Apple's site still shows a late April delivery date. It won't be too soon for me!

[Update 3/27/2010: False alarm—they must have just been checking the credit card. The authorization expired.]

[Update 4/29/2010: Now it's coming—I just received a shipping notification!]

You have two snippets of text to work with: your name and your subject line. Personally, I believe the most valuable of the two is your name.

Amidst today's onslaught of email messages promoting the latest "big thing" by a "guru", here's a refreshing article about getting your own email messages opened. It doesn't cost a dime.

Ryan Healy (via Markus Allen): 7 Tips to Get Your Email Opened

It isn't that we shouldn't be doing things we don't want others to see, it's that perhaps we shouldn't be doing them all in one place, with a provider that tracks and correlates absolutely everything we do in our lives.

And some people worry about the cookies that are stored on their computer.

Rich Mogull: Google, Privacy, and You