Bit Revolver

Chris Pirillo had his password stolen through iTunes, after which the thief broke into his PayPal account and put through $450 in charges for iTunes gift certificates. PayPal’s investigation concluded that there was no unauthorized access, and they refused restore the funds. Lesson: think twice before dealing with PayPal.

Something tells me that PayPal will eventually realize they botched an investigation involving one of the most popular tech bloggers on the Internet, and they will take another look at it soon.

The much anticipated version 3 of the Firefox web browser is due for release — but instead of just putting up the application for download, the Mozilla Foundation is orchestrating Firefox Download Day 2008. Download Firefox on the date they release, and you can be a part of world record-breaking history.

Quite an ingenious way to chase a larger slice of the web browser marketshare. And hey, I am all for it. Firefox is a quality open source application whose weight and influence in the browser market helps spur innovation and keep all the other software vendors on their toes. I’ve been using Firefox for years, so sure, I’ll show my support and help chase the Guinness World Record for most software downloads in 24 hours.

Consumerist reader Peter, who pays for top-tier Internet service from Comcast, recently found that Comcast’s definition of unlimited doesn’t really mean unlimited. Comcast is infamous for cutting off subscribers who download too much, and Peter received a notice warning him of such.

The infuriating part begins when Peter is told that an unlimited account is not entitled to download an unlimited amount of data, it is just entitled to download a limited a mount of data faster. What’s worse, Comcast cuts off customers who download too much while and at the same time refusing to inform them of what their bandwidth cap is or how much of it they have consumed. When was the last time your mobile carrier fined you for going over your minutes, but refused to tell you how many minutes were included in your plan?

Link via Ross McKillop.

After my teammates and I ripped up the opposing players in a particularly one-sided Halo 3 match, we all congratulated each other in the post-game lobby. A member of the losing team chimed in:

Good game? That game was awful!

One of the winning players quickly corrects him:

That’s because you lost!

To which he reasons:

Well, I guess if I lose at this game, at least I win at life, right?

In “An Open Letter to Comcast and Every cable/Telco on P2P” billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who was an early investor in P2P content distributor Redswoosh, financial supporter of P2P company Grokster’s legal battle, and once called P2P technology the “most bandwidth effective distribution solution” for various applications of digital content, complains that P2P users are the bane of broadband Internet. In his rant, Cuban advises all Internet Service Providers to ban their customers from using peer-to-peer applications.

Predictably, Cuban’s words have drawn harsh criticism. The comments on his blog entry are ripe with opposition, and the blogosphere is afire with rebuttals such as this one from Janko Roettgers’ P2P Blog. In a weak follow-up, Cuban clarifies his position: he is fearful of P2P slowing down his own broadband connection, and since he is not personally interested in any of P2P’s various applications, it is irrelevant and should be banned. I will give it to Mark — he is clever to make his point by portraying himself as an everyman with whom we can all relate. Unfortunately for Mark, just as being a billionaire does not make you an expert on technology, being clever does not make you correct.

If your broadband connection is unreasonably slow because neighbors are sucking up bandwidth on P2P networks, your issue is with your service provider, not your neighbors. You and your P2P-giddy neighbors purchase a certain amount of bandwidth from your Internet Service Provider. You are entitled to use whatever amount of bandwidth has been guaranteed to you in exchange for your money. If your ISP cannot provide that bandwidth, they have oversold their resources and are at fault for not having the capacity to fulfill the terms of your contract.

If the bartender can only half-fill your pint because the the bottomless pit sitting on the next stool over polished off the keg, would you not ask for a refund? Complain to customer service, not your neighbors, Mark.

ZDNet blog Between the Lines talks about the evolution of the web over the next 25 years. Web 3.0 will be the semantic web, and Web 4.0 will be the “Web OS”.

Can I take a stab at Web 5.0? I don’t think I’ve come across anyone discussing that iteration yet.

Actually, better yet, what will Web X appear as, and will it have minor incremental upgrades named after various cats?

“Everthing in its place(ment)” does not discuss Radiohead, but rather a new feature in the Google AdSense program that allows you to attract more advertisers and increase competition for space on your site. The new feature allows you to target custom channels as they relate to your ad placement, and make that information available to advertisers as they’re searching for publishers. Do you have a banner strategically placed above the fold, in a high-profile spot? Shouldn’t publishers looking to purchase space on your site know that?

To create a targetable custom channel, log into AdSense, click over to Adsense Setup > Channels, and create a new custom channel. Give the channel a name, and then check off the box labeled “Show this channel to advertisers as ad placement”. A slew of new options will appear, allowing you to input various pieces of information that give advertisers an idea about the placement of any ad unit tracked with this channel. Here’s a screenshot:

Be as descriptive as you can, using details that let anyone reading about your custom channel to understand exactly where this ad unit will appear on your page, and how that benefits them as an advertiser.

Leon Ho of lifehack.org reflects on the site’s growth from zero to 12,000 RSS subscribers. Looking at his graph of subscribers over time, I wondered about the relationship between the growth of lifehack.org’s subscriber base versus its metrics with regards to traditional web traffic. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of lifehack.org’s subscriber growth versus traffic growth:

As it turns out, lifehack.org’s subscriber growth is right in line with it’s traffic growth (traffic according to Alexa, that is). If you smooth out the traffic spikes from the Alexa traffic graph, the two fit together almost perfectly. I was a little surprised by this, partly because I have never really looked into the general relationship between subscriber growth and traffic growth in websites. I expected the relationship between the two graphs to be much more logarithmic (in favor of web traffic), instead of so linear.

At first I reasoned that the relationship between these two graphs was due to the sophisticated nature of the readership that lifehack.org carries. Lifehack.org is a site that attracts a much more technologically savvy crowd than other non-tech related sites. To investigate this theory I produced the same side-by-side comparison between the subscriber growth and traffic growth for my own Of Zen and Computing. While OZaC is also a technology-related site, its target audience is not the tech-elite, but rather the tech-curious (even though I’m flattered to have had a handful of “tech savvy” subscribers pick up my feed, such as the LifeHacker editors). Once again, I expected a logarithmic relationship between the two graphs, with web traffic growth out-performing subscriber growth by far.

Surprise - virtually the same result as lifehack.org. I’m almost certain that subscription spike in late October was due to one of the major aggregation services suddenly beginning to report how many of its users subscribed to my feed. Because of that, I’m imagining that a more accurate graph would have a much smoother transition between September ‘06 and November ‘06.

Once again I am intrigued, although my lack of an explanation may be all together due to my lack of seasoned chops when it comes to Internet marketing. This is also a completely terrible and unscientific “study”, because I am using three completely different analytics services to measure two different samples of data.

It appears that someone recently registered and then sold the e-mail address “iPhone_wholesaler@yahoo.com” on eBay. The auction attracted over 35 bids, and the winner paid $355 for the e-mail address.

We’ve all heard of companies that buy domain names containing common surnames and then selling e-mail addresses on those domains, but individual e-mail addresses? Commenters on John Chow’s website, where I found this story, note that eBay’s “similar items” feature reveals many more similar iphone e-mail addresses for sale.

The race to unify all of your media and devices is obviously well underway, as seen by the recent release of products like the Apple TV. In “YouTube coming to your TV (in several ways)“, Ars Technica explores several of the ideas floating around for bringing YouTube content to your living room. Ars covers the two core options: creating a YouTube television channel that highlights the most interesting flicks, and creating an on-demand television interface to the library of YouTube videos.

A YouTube channel may be interesting, but this concept is not exactly new. First of all, various celebrities like Jim Breuer already count down the “funniest” and “most viral” videos on VH1’s Web Junk 20. I don’t know many people who watch Web Junk 20. Secondly, America’s Funniest Home Videos did this model in ‘89 (albeit via VHS and snail mail). As ABC’s third-longest-running primetime series [source], AFV has been extremely successful. The problem is that the “AFV model” doesn’t jive with the inherent on-demand nature of YouTube and the Internet in general. Massive numbers of people flock to YouTube because the site offers something different for each of them.

YouTube is not a one-way road either. Another reason the site is successful because it has bred a massive community of devoted followers who interact with each other and the YouTube service daily. On America’s Funniest Home Video’s, Bob Sagat does funny voices over videos of people getting hit in the crotch. On YouTube, community members post replies, blog entries and response videos in reaction to clips of people getting hit in the crotch.

The floundering Recording Industry and Motion Picture Association have certainly taught us plenty about the difficulties of an arranged marriage between traditional distribution methods and the next generation of media consumption. Not even Bob Sagat, given his own dedicated cable channel, could count down enough top videos to pique the interest of that many people in the same way that an on-demand service can. Perhaps a YouTube channel will make its way into our homes, and perhaps it will be successful. It’s not a bad idea. I just don’t think it will be as successful as a service that brings YouTube, in all of its on-demand, web 2.0 social networking glory to our big screens.