Everything Else

All's well that ends well for the disagreement between the National Pork Board and the Lactivist. The pork board showed some real class and worked with the breastfeeding blogger in question to achive a win-win resolution. Good for the National Pork Board and good for the blogger Jennifer Laycock for working out a great solution that raises my respect for both parties.

Back Off National Pork Board, that is what breast feeding blogger Jennifer Laycock thinks about the threats from the National Pork Board. It seems that the National Pork Board's slick special attack lawyers:

I received a letter this morning from Jennifer Daniel Collins, an attorney at Faegre & Benson that represents The National Pork Board. It stated, for the most part, that my use of the phrase "the other white milk" violates their trademark on the phrase "the other white meat."

Okay fair enough, IMO the National Pork Board lawyer, Jennifer Daniel Collins, might have had a somewhat reasonable point if she would have just left it at that, but instead she goes on to insinuate:

"In addition, your use of this slogan also tarnishes the good reputation of the National Pork Board's mark in light of your apparent attempt to promote the use of breastmilk beyond merely for infant consumption, ..."

See it's better not to say too much because by such an outrageous insinuation the Pork folks lost any sympathy from or credibility with me. What kind of sick mind does the lawyer from the National Pork Board have? I've looked over the Lactivist site and there is nothing untoward there in the least. This is just a woman trying to raise breast feeding awareness through humor. Did these lawyers actually look at the website?

So what can you do? Here is the contact form for the National Pork Board, do drop them a line and tell them what you think.

Sources: Cre8pc Blog and Search Engine Land

Update:

Happy resolution: Well Done, Pork

We all get comment, forum and mail form spam. On some of my sites I have switched to using freebie remotely hosted scripts and it seems to scare off many spammers. For instance I use Bravenet email forms on one site and it has eliminated robot spam and almost eliminated human spam while legit users still can contact me.

On another site I use a Bravenet forum board to allow visitors to discuss some of my content and make suggestions. Again no robot spam and no human spam.

I use Haloscan for blog comments. I think comment spambots get foiled by the JavaScript linking or discouraged by lack of PR juice.

None of the Bravenet scripts are pretty but they seem to keep my work load lower on my content sites.

I was at a Jewel Food Store today buying groceries. The lines at the regular checkout lanes were a bit backed up and since I only had a few things a helpful clerk suggested I might try the self serve checkout. I politely said, "No no, only if you are going to pay me to do your work for you. I'm not going to pay you and then do all the work too." That was the end of that.

To me, self checkout lanes sends the message that the retailer does not care enough about the customer to even bother assigning a real human being to take his money.

I recently became a Comcast cable TV customer. Comcast has a feature called On Demand, as part of their digital cable offering. To use On Demand, you select a clip, TV show or movie from a menu and it starts playing. If you get interupted in the middle of watching, it will remember were you left off for about 12 to 24 hours. Nice. What is even better is that a lot of the content is available for free. Did you miss the NBC or CBS news? You can watch it when you want on demand, not on the television network's schedule but when it is convenient for you.

There is nothing new about on demand television. People have been using Tivo and other digital recorders to time shift TV programs for some time. But frankly I would not use such a device because there is not enough good programming left on TV to justify the extra expense of a digital recorder. With few exceptions, I no longer actively seek out particular shows for watching - I just sort of channel surf until I find something good, which is sort of a passive approach.

I guess there will always be some demand for scheduled television, but as we all get busier with our lives, I suspect that on demand TV, delivered either by digital recorder, DVD, cable or iPod will become the growth market for video entertainment in the future.

It's amazing how automated comment spammers and their bots work. One of my directories gets mass waves of bots all trying to spam the comments for the listings.

Here are their footprints:

83.240.17.162
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Mac_PowerPC)

203.113.146.250
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0; NetCaptor 6.5.0RC1)

216.93.179.108
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; iRider 2.21.1108; FDM)

69.243.42.205
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

222.118.167.142
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows ME) Opera 5.11 [en]

202.38.52.5
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; KITV4.7 Wanadoo)

200.123.131.181
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Hotbar 3.0)

62.183.50.164
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; N_o_k_i_a)

201.6.226.173
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Maxthon)

211.152.35.23
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0; N_o_k_i_a)

They appear to be randomizing the IP and User Agent. All are hitting only the comments area of the listings in swarms 6 or more times a day. I'll bet half my bandwidth is going to these guys.

Link popularity and PageRank have become such a holy grail commodity that it's all now just zombie hoards of spam bots roaming the web looking for any form field to spam.

So this is what the web has come too?