In other words, there has to be a "susceptible" population which is likely to want to know the meme you're pitching. Sounds reasonable, and very basic, but it's clearly not well understood at a lot of technology companies.

If you're a marketer, chances are you've been told to create, or have pitched, 'buzz' as a remedy for lackluster sales. So press releases fly, trade show booths are contracted, collateral and Web sites created. But, no real buzz emerges, despite work and dollars spent.

This is especially intriguing in light of the recent finding that the threshhold of contagion on the Web is zero. Any meme, no matter how weak, should be able to persist in the network, at some level.

The reason buzz fails, I think, is that no one really cares about your thing - they are not susceptible to infection by your idea or product. Case in point: a publicist has, for reasons I can't begin to imagine, sent me 3 press releases in the last 2 days touting an accounting software company. These releases are so dry, and boring and devoid of interest to anyone but the company itself, that I, for one, lack the skill to make something interesting out of them. Unless, of couse, you regard this post as interesting.

At first I thought this a case of infectious agent failure - the publicist had failed to write an interesting press release. On second read, however, I changed my mind. The news, even if the publicist had found a clever way to present it, has landed in the inbox of a non-susceptible - and I suspect almost everyone falls into that category. End of contagion, after one hop. Buzz failure means either that you haven't found the susceptibles, or, more likely on a scale-free network like the Web, they don't exist...
Comments [ ] 6:29:30 PM    

"Ooops, professor, sorry we wiped out your lifetime's work - see your name is 'Usher', and our software thought those files on your hard drive belonged to us?" The liability for an 'ooops' could be very large... also, what happens if 'freeze', one of their hunter-killer programs gets loose, say, in a hospital or air-traffic contol center?
Comments [ ] 11:18:54 AM    

BTW, I ripped a CD to iTunes 4 in AAC format yesterday... quality at 128 kbps was at least as good as a 192 kbps mp3 to my ear. Rip, mix, burn and still have some room left on the HD...
Comments [ ] 10:41:08 AM    

Why would that cause the apparent (and welcome) cessation of Cyveillancebot activity? Well, one theory would be that Cyveillance is aware that they are in the business of, technically at least, infringing copyright, and are staying low, now that they know that I know.

One of the things I know, is that that access logs show a different pattern if a page is opened from my server, and if a copy of that page is opened from a file saved to a hard drive. So here's what it looks like when the page is opened from the server:

63.148.99.229 - - [13/May/2003:12:24:28 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"

63.148.99.229 - - [13/May/2003:12:24:28 -0700] "GET /graphics/logo_blu_bg_shado_116.png HTTP/1.0" 304 - "http://www.gulker.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"

[snip - the full log sequence is here - snip]

63.148.99.229 - - [13/May/2003:12:24:29 -0700] "GET /graphics/right_bg.jpg HTTP/1.0" 304 - "http://www.gulker.com/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)"

The first item in the sequence is a request for "/", the short way to request gulker.com's default home page, and all the rest are requests for the graphical bits and pieces that comprise the page. So what happens if someone saves my page to their hard drive, and then opens it in a browser?

What happens is that you get the same sequence in the access log, with one exception: there is no request for "/" - the browser already has it, it only needs the graphics and other 'furniture' to draw the page.

In a recent 2-day period, I noticed that the graphics-only sequence was requested 554 more times than the full sequence. So, more than 250 times a day, a browser somewhere in the world was pulling my page from a local file, rather than from my server.

One reason that this would happen is that the browser has cached my page, but not the graphics files associated with it. I've done some experiments with this (Mozilla, IE, Safari), and the behavior depends on the type of browser and how its cache prefs are set. I'm sure that some of the time, particular browser versions, set in just the right fashion, are causing this behavior, when people come back to my page before it's expired from their cache.

But there is another reason this could happen. If someone were to download my page, store it on their own hard drive or local server, and then open it from that server, you see the same sequence - no "/".

You might see this if, for example, Cyveillance - who have pulled more than a thousand files from my server including essays, articles, research, presos etc. without ever (until the Tuesday human visit) downloading the attendant graphics files - were to post my files to their internal, private network, and was allowing access to them by employees and clients.

If that's what they're doing, I think that is copyright infringement - many of the files they have pulled (and continue to pull down, over and over again) are copyrighted. It seems to me that if Cyveillance were to post something like "This imbecile is spouting anti-DCMA blasphemy at http://www.gulker.com/ " on their private or public servers, that would probably not be a copyright violation - their clients would be reading my opinions from my server. In this case, they are being paid to find inimical opinion on the Web.

But if they place my original work on their server, and then distribute it to the clients who pay them (large) fees, that probably is a copyright violation - they are being paid for distributing my copyrighted material without permission, which, of course, is exactly what they and their clients object to so strenuously. So, next step is a little detective work to figure out who owns the IP addresses that are pulling my stuff in this fashion... 63.148.99.229, BTW, is registered to Cyveillance according to arin.net, and is almost certainly one of their firewall machines...
Comments [ ] 10:13:50 AM    

MS set up a $180 million fund to enable salesmen to offer MS server products and services to governments at steep discounts or free ("Under NO circumstances lose against Linux") according to an email obtained by Fuller.

The story goes on to describe MS employees attending Linuxworld, posing as independent consultants and OEMs. One described Linuxworld as "an even mix of local Union Hall teamster gathering, Christian Scientist revival and Amway sales conference." Steve Ballmer is quoted, calling Linux "a cancer". Good to see they really got the message up in Redmond, especially about predatory pricing... meanwhile Linux has 26% of the server market, according to IDG, against MS' 44%, and is growing...
Comments [ ] 7:52:40 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures