BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Couple of months ago I did a little “research” - I asked people around to find out if they know anything about RSS. Turns out - none of my business-oriented colleagues knows that term. Even more - they have no idea what news aggregator/reader is and actually read news from all the web sites they are interested in by actually visiting those web sites.

Here is your chance to shine. Offer your clients/dealers/affiliates an RSS stream of company news, price updates, discounts. Make sure they know what it is. Make sure they know how to use it. Stress that RSS, unlike e-mail, will not be a stream of spam, so they can read your content free of spam and annoying ads. Customize RSS feeds so that it will supply different information to different groups - customers, dealers and affiliates.

Next thing you know - RSS may have a chance to replace e-mail in your company altogether. It’s cheaper, faster and more reliable. Too bad no one notices.

Popularity: 40%

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There is a post on Mashable that outlines how to game Twitter into becoming a natural environment to spread malware. There is little to none incentive to create pure spam feeds, as they will, undoubtedly, be closed and all future links will be marked with “nofollow” attribute. Malware, however, is whole another story. In this case the attacker doesn’t have to have clean direct links. In fact, as it is mentioned in original article, attacker, actually, have to mask destination with some sort of shortener (worse yet, if the link looks like “legit” affiliate link). By gathering large enough audience, an attacker can get to them in a single strike. And if the destination look innocent enough, he might get away with it just long enough. After all -it all is still same old social engineering.

Educated guess says that Jaiku might be vulnerable the same way. Just look what happened to the Blogger.com (aka Blogspot) - it became free doorway hosting service right at the beginning…

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While preparing a replacement laptop I do install a lot of (somewhat) useful software. Most of it is freeware like Skype, which I am going to talk about.

As always I went to Skype’s web site and downloaded the latest version of program. If you still on that arctic expedition and haven’t noticed - Skype has bundled a Firefox plug-in with it’s software. And it’s mandatory. That’s right - you are notified about the plug-in installation only AFTER the install is complete. Pretty neat, eh?

Next surprise - if you launch Firefox after installing Skype, instead of your regular home screen (in my case - the ever-tempting about:blank page) you will see an uninvited Skype page devoted to Firefox plug-in (located here: http://www.skype.com/help/guides/ff_extension/) that still has (as of August 26, 2007) the following passage:

Calling phones within the US and Canada is free until the end of 2006. You need to buy Skype Credit to make international calls.

Gee, do you think we still got time for free calls? Or another version: Earth to Skype - it’s already 2007 halfway gone, damn it.

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