Contesting Cybersquatters

An article in this week's NJBiz reminds us to keep domain names short and sweet. Obviously, the fewer characters in your domain name, the less opportunity you give your visitors to misspell it.

The ideal domain name is your brief and easy-to-spell company name, without any information about its legal structure, with a .com extension. For example, I was once involved with a software company called Adox Incorporated. For us, the perfect URL would have been Adox.com--short, and phonetic. Unfortunately, that name was already in use, by Adox Fotowerke, founded in 1860. Both the software company and the photo chemical company could claim the right to use the name. My company took the URL adoxinc.com, which was less than perfect. (Although I now see that Adox.com is not being used--Andrew, what a fabulous bidding opportunity for you.)

But what if instead of two Adoxes, we had Larry's Surly Bakery squatting on JoesFriendlyBakery.com as I posited last week? A loyal reader has pointed out that all is not lost. There is a way to contest cybersquatters. ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will hear cases like this--but only if Joe's Friendly Bakery has already trademarked or service marked his name.

My point is still that it is much easier to register your domain before you need it and before someone else grabs it.

The NJBiz article also suggests registering common misspellings of your URL. One day soon I will buy the rights to katherinehadow.com, katherinehaddow.com, and so on. It's a low-priority task at the moment, because I'm not worried that someone else will try to capitalize on my good name. Yet.

Not Suitable For Children

My neighbors asked their neighbors whether they should allow their young daughter to visit the WorldVision Experience AIDS exhibit. The neighbors' neighbors happen to belong to the church sponsoring the exhibit. They said that the exhibit was Not Suitable For Children.

Parents of small children, note that on the first evening of the installation, they did offer a program for young ones. If you would like to take an elementary school student or younger, please ask in advance if they will offer a modified program in your city.

Real AK-47

Considering the time and money the Presbyterian Church at New Providence has spent publicizing the World Vision Experience: AIDS exhibit, I was disappointed by how few people attended last night. I hope that when I go back the front-page article in the TwoDays section of this morning's Star-Ledger will galvanize the public.

The only way WorldVision could have made the experience more authentic would have been to hand me a ticket to sub-Saharan Africa. Or at least a bowl of groundnut stew. I knew I had arrived when I heard the drummers playing and singing by the side of the road. Once I got to the tent, a volunteer handed me an iPod.

Each iPod is loaded with a story about a child living in a country battling AIDS. Depending on which narrative you receive, you walk through different chambers with artifacts representing that child's life. Mine included an AK-47 for a Ugandan child kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army. I was encouraged to sit or lie down on his cheap foam bedding, but it was too small for me. The place smelled of sisal. The sound effects included rheumy coughs. Considering that this exhibit must be portable enough to travel to 15 cities before the end of October, it is a marvel of interactivity.

I invited my neighbors to go back with me. They worried that it might be too graphic for their daughter, a tween. Yes, when I thought about it, the narrative did mention girls as young as eight turned into sex slaves. But, and this is a question I cannot answer for them, how vigorously and how long can they defend her innocence? Aren't the suffering African girls children, too?

When I go back I will ask if there is a narrative more appropriate to young children. If they say yes, I will post it here.

World Vision Experience: AIDS
Presbyterian Church at New Providence
1307 Springfield Avenue, New Providence, NJ
7/26 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.
7/27 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.

There are many ways to help. My own church has actively supported the Good Shepherd Home in Bamenda, Cameroon, for years. Before we can help, though, we have to understand the problem. WorldVision has done a superior job in promoting understanding through all the senses.

I Don't Need a Website

Not everybody can hop in the car and cruise down the highway to the big-box store. I am lucky to live in a community where children, senior citizens and disabled people can walk to local merchants. Even if patronizing local businesses were not so convenient, this would be a good reason to support them.

Small business owners are busy keeping afloat. Some of my favorites tell me they do not want to worry about websites, which they probably believe are time-consuming and expensive.

If they do nothing else, I urge them to register a domain. What a shame it would be if Jim's Friendly Bakery finally decided that it wanted to build a site called JimsFriendlyBakery.com, but someone else had already taken the name. Even worse, what if Larrys Surly Bakery next door took the name, and used it to redirect visitors to its own website? More about registering domains on my website.

It's Alive--eHow.com

I waited until my articles went live to announce that I now write freelance articles for eHow.com. My "how-to" articles range from How to Write a One-Page Brochure to How to Learn to Fly a Plane in New Jersey. I got a special chuckle when I told a business editor that I had written an article called How to Catch Worms for Fishing. "Did you write that from your own experience?" he shuddered.

How else?

Evangelism II

Returning to what I wrote about evangelism on July 1, it occurs to me that perhaps gurus and pundits also feel annoyed when we use their titles out of context.

Popups and popunders

Here's a direct mail challenge: send mail to boys at summer camp every day for a week. Mailing pieces must be brief, if recipients not avid readers, unsentimental, preferably humorous. If you don't feel like going to the post office for a weigh in every day, must fit in #10 envelope and weigh less than 2 ounces. No candy allowed. Ah, and did I mention that you must begin mailing four days before the camper even boards the bus?

One year I thought I distinguished myself with a series of cartoon postcards depicting what said camper was doing every day at camp. Said camper informs me that he did not in fact appreciate these miniature works of art.

This year I took a shortcut and looked on the internet for camping jokes. Usually I search for things like "material handling systems" or "apply for DUNS number." These webmasters know that I am not there for fun. I need the information they provide. Their sites make no desperate bids for my attention (if they make any at all).

This search was a new experience for me. Try this yourself: go to Google and enter "camp jokes" in the window. The quantity of popups on the sites I found flabbergasted me.

Pity the poor maligned engineer who invented popups, probably in answer to a real problem. Some popups are blessings. I am grateful for a popup telling me "System going down in five minutes; please save your work".

It all changed, though, the day the first salesperson saw a popup and said, "Wow! I can use this device to put my message right under the user's nose! It won't go away until the user clicks on the little x! Hey, we can get the programmers to put lots of these on our website!"

"But-" the programmer sputtered. "Popups are for emergencies!"

"Yeah, and it'll be an emergency for you if we outsource your job to Bangalore."

And popunders do not even pretend to carry important messages. You just look down at your screen and realize that you suddenly have eleven open windows. No wonder your screen refreshes so slowly.

I am pleased to say that Google agrees with me about pop-ups. Apparently they find them as intrusive as I do. Which is why you will never find pop-ups on this site, other than the fact that Google hosts Blogspot, and I do not know how to program pop-ups. Yet.

CraigsList Foundation Boot Camp

Does anyone want to join me at the CraigsList Foundation Non-Profit Boot Camp on August 16 in New York? I want to learn more about social entrepreneurship and big ideas for non-profits.

Wetpaint Has Winner

The Wetpaint.com Millionth Site contest that I announced on June 24 has a winner. Even though you are no longer eligible for the carbon offset prize, I still recommend going there if you want to learn to set up a site.

Just Say No to Flash

I remember when CPU time was so precious that researchers at Stanford and Berkeley had to eke it out on shared servers. Now I marvel that I can carry a gig around in my pocket. A terabyte if I wear cargo pants.

Still I’m shocked when a site tells me that it has to install Flash or ActiveX. Usually I navigate away. I have a modest computer. I try not to store much on it. If I allow you to install QuickTime or Flash or ActiveX, I might have to give something up, either speed or memory.

I don’t want to sacrifice space on my computer so that some kid fresh out of college can show off what she learned in programming class. Don’t ask me to slow down my computer so that your site performs better.

But, hey, I’m the woman who refuses to carry a drugstore discount card. I refuse to make my wallet fatter so the store can track my purchases. (Sometimes I give them my ex-husband’s phone number if I’m buying lipstick and hygiene products, just to confuse Big Brother.)

If you’re marketing to me, don’t ask me to inconvenience myself on your behalf.

AdWatch--yikes!

Yesterday I installed AdAware. Twice. Lavasoft no longer supports my free copy of AdAware SE, so they urged me to update. When I got to the update screen, they offered me either (1) a free copy of AdAware SE or (2) a free copy of AdAware Plus if I took a free trial product from TrialPay.

It took me a long time, because I didn’t really want any of the free products. I really did want the AdAware Plus because for reasons we do not need to go into here, I no longer had a working copy of VirusScan.

So I downloaded my free copy of AdAware Plus, and I clicked on AdWatch, which was billed as a real time security program, sitting quietly in the background, making note of potential problems.

After running AdAware I started my browser, and AdWatch started nagging. “Iexplore.exe is trying to make changes to” (inscrutable file name here). “Allow or block?”

“Holy cow!” I said! “I must have a terrible virus problem if AdWatch is bringing it to my attention right away!” But then I concluded that iexplore.exe was probably Internet Explorer, the very application I was trying to run, and I allowed it to continue. There were three questions like that, to which I trepidatiously responded, “Allow.”

AdWatch continued its menacing litany. “Qtask.exe is trying to make changes to” (inscrutable file name). My eyes narrowed. I hadn’t started any application that began with a “Q.”
“Block,” I commanded.
“Qtask.exe is trying to make changes,” it insisted. I wish the CIA had been so dogged in the summer of 2001.
“Block,” I repeated sternly.
“Qtask is—“ it warned.
“Block.”
“Qtask—“
“Block.”
“Q—“
“Block.”

I didn’t get the second lowest score in my Pascal class for nothing. Eventually I figured that I was embroiled in an infinite recursion.
“Allow,” I said wearily.

Was AdWatch worth it? I looked up the reviews, praising its silent sentry duty. Maybe other users enjoy the security of knowing that AdWatch will slay intruders in their tracks. Maybe others don’t mind micromanaging their computers. I did, and I resented it.

But what was qtask? I looked that up, too. It was a program called QuickTime. Aha! It had something to do with iTunes. Why was it coming up at startup and refusing to be swatted down?

Once I logged on to the sites I needed to visit, AdWatch did not obtrude. But when I started logging off again and closing tabs, AdWatch went wild. At one point I had 29 notifications stacked one above another. AdWatch, I resolved, had to go.

I was a woman on a mission. I went to “add or remove programs,” determined to root out AdWatch forever. But AdWatch and AdAware were so tightly bound together that I could not cleave one from the other. I would have to remove the whole thing and reinstall it, which I eventually did.

I took my speedy revenge on QuickTime, though, and I haven’t missed it yet.

Evangelism

I remember the polite, quizzical looks on my audience's face when the Summit Old Guard welcomed me as a guest speaker in 2004. My introductory speech presented me as the "evangelist" for my church, and they weren't quite sure what that meant.

I felt more comfortable saying that I was an "evangelist" in that context than that I "marketed" my church. "Marketing" has an air of manipulation. Who wants to be manipulated into a house of worship?

Now, with social networking, "evangelists" are a dime a dozen. I just hope they don't give the original evangelism an unsavory name.