How sad that today, rather than encouraging people to do the same today for issues that Commoncause supports, they have lost faith in their supporters willingness to support causes from their own initiative. Instead, they have chosen to become a large scale spammer.

THey must consider their supporters untrustable drones. Why else provide form letters for them to send rather than letting the supporters provide their own perspective on issues ? They must not trust their drones to take action either. Why else create an automated spamming system rather than providing emails or snail mail addresses for their supporters to use on their own ?

Which leads to the reason for this post.

Last month i wrote a post saying why I thought there could be value to tiered levels of service on the internet. Some people agreed. Some disagreed. The beauty was in the discussion that resulted.

Discussion, its a beautiful thing. The exchange of ideas. It leads to better ideas.

Well the spammers at commoncause.org decided that they should spam me with the following form letter.

I agree with the principle that just because the technology lets you make it easy for some to "get involved"... that is not necessarily the right thing to do. This form letter shows exactly why; the user got to click a message to show their support. But it has no effect, because the user is not informed.

Perhaps this is useful for congressional issues -- you know that the Congressman is not and will not be reading your letter. If you are going to be summarized into a histogram, you might as well not spend the effort to craft something. I know, because every time I have written to a Congress member, the response back has been a form letter -- and generally not even one based on the opinion I expressed (ie, TOPIC_FORM rather than PRO_TOPIC_FORM / CON_TOPIC_FORM). The form letter responses have no impact.

In this case, as a responsive host but not a civil servant, Cuban is open to a discussion. But the form letter was not particularly well researched. All that it tells him is that there is rabble being roused on a website, and people are willing to be roused to the point of filling in their email address. Woo!

I get a number of petitions from activist-types like my sister. This multiple tiered Internet is pretty high activity (and not particularly well understood). My sister forwarded me a petition from MoveOn.org about it. You can see a sample on snopes.com. The premise is that because companies will have the option to pay to be excluded from spam traps, non-profits will no longer be able to send email. Which isn't true unless you don't understand the reason for the proposal (adding a money trail adds an accountability trail). I won't click an auto-petition, now, because this is an example where the petition is not formulated by the better informed. If I care, I'll become informed and figure out my own response.

Commoncause.org is a spammer - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com _

Last weekend, two prominent technology bloggers, Dave Winer of the venerable Scripting News and Robert Scoble of the Microsoft-sponsored Scobleizer, expressed their frustration with Tech Memeorandum, a popular website that highlights the headlines of technology-related stories appearing in blogs, newspapers and other media. In Winer's view, Memeorandum has turned into a tedious contest "with one blogger trying to top another for the most vacuous post." Scoble, echoing Winer's complaint, announced that he was going to avoid looking at Memeorandum "for at least a week" and instead rely on his self-selected RSS feeds to track technology news. Others have also been critical of Memeorandum, suggesting that its content is overly narrow or that it draws from too small a pool of sources.

Difference between Memestreams and Memeorandum, apparently, is that the small pool for Memeorandum is A-list; Memestreams has lower profile technologists.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The editor and the crowd

The idea behind attention is very simple. I know, because it's my idea. Doc Searls introduced me to Dave Sifry at a party, and Dave and I sat in the corner for two hours and brainstormed how to turn that idea into reality. Later, I came down to Technorati's office and fleshed the idea out, describing what I do (did) with NetNewsWire and how I wanted to do it better. Dave sat there, taking notes, debriefing me in a classic deconstruction of what I did with RSS data, what I found important, and what the inforouter (my name for an aggregator on steroids) could do to improve information transfer.

Soon the outlines of a spec emerged; who, what, and for how long feed data was being consumed. I insisted that OPML be used as the first bootstrap of subscription data. Sifry, in the throes of establishing a business out of Technorati, seemed to sense the value of attention, but had to fit it in with many other priorities in allocating resources. In my role as a member of the Technorati Advisory board, I evangelized what I saw as attention's profound value proposition as RSS adoption accelerated the need to deal with a second order magnitude of information overload. I also surfaced the idea on a series of blogs, first at CRN, then at eWEEK, and lately at ZDNet/CNET.

» Waiting for Attention… or something like it | Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter | ZDNet.com

Information overload has become the typical issue of anyone using the web to access or search for nuggets of information. Both the search and the subscription paradigms lead to countless results, posts, articles that one needs to sift through to extract relevant facts. Using Attention metadata (blog subscriptions, document hyperlinks, URLs and keywords entered by a web user,…) is one of the mechanisms infrastructure providers will use to elevate relevant pieces of information – as demonstrated today by the first generation of meme trackers (like Memeorandum, TailRank,…).

Memestreams should be a part of this discussion.

Our host for the March session of the Search SIG is one of the pioneers of the Attention movement: Steve Gillmor, as the co-founder of the AttentionTrust and co-creator of the original Attention.xml specification with Technorati’s Dave Sifry, has evangelized the growing importance of Attention metadata over the past two years. He is also the host of the famous podcasting series: Gillmor Gang, Gillmor Daily and AttentionTech.

Does Memestreams do anything like Attention.xml? It seems like it should be very feasible.

Jeff Clavier's Software Only: SDForum Search SIG: The Search for Attention - March 16th 6:30pm @ AOL - Featuring FeedBurner, Memeorandum, Root Markets & Technorati

Rule #3: Stocks with attractive IR women are no more likely to appreciate than average, but they are more fun to cover. Stocks are, in the end, a good that is subject to the normal laws of supply and demand.

A CEO who hires an attractive IR woman understands marketing; after all, his target demographic — financial analysts at large investment firms — is almost exclusively male and geeky. Unfortunately, these same CEOs have a propensity to overspend and have questionable judgement (tending to, say, sleep with members of the IR department). Thus, on balance, these stocks are not any more likely to perform better than stocks with unattractive IR women or men but, if you are in the aforementioned demographic, you are more likely to enjoy your time with the company. That’s a net win for you. Half of investing is picking the right asset class.

Long or Short Capital » Mr Juggles Investing Commandments (#3 & #4)

CSS files for larger sites can become pretty large themselves. Gzipping or compressing these files has shown to provide a reduction in the neighboorhood of 70-80% of the original file size, a fairly significant 'weight loss'.

The Definitive Post on Gzipping your CSS

One common view among programmers is that the GPL should say nothing at all about DRM, because DRM is a technical problem, and can be solved by technical means. This was true five years ago -- all DRM was ultimately software, all software is data, and all data is mutable. So, DRM could always be circumvented. In other words, these people are perfectly happy to have DRM so long as it is toothless.

I should note that this view is somewhat elitist. Of course programmers can break software-based DRM. But non-programmers have to wait until a programmer does the work, and then have to figure out whatever tools the programmer wrote. That's not always easy -- DeCSS was written in 1998, but it was not until 2001 that user-friendly DVD ripping software became available.

But even if it were acceptable to have DRM from which programmers could free themselves, that's not the DRM we have in 2006

FSF - Reaction to the DRM clause in GPLv3

After spending a few hours getting comfortable with Yahoo!’s new Event utility that was recently released along with many other sweet tools via YUIBlog, I became convinced that it is the dopest, sweetest, most tight, most sexiest event utility on the planet. With a little crunching and some gZipping I was able to get this puppy down to meezily weezily 2k.

Furthermore, when I say forget addEvent, I mean any and every version of addEvent you can think of. This goes for Scott Andrew’s original addEvent function, every entry from the addEvent recoding contest, even Prototype’s Event observer and its many properties and extensions. I even had a stab at it myself and was pretty impressed with the outcome.

Interesting blog design, too. Nice use of style sheets and navigation hints.

Forget addEvent, use Yahoo!’s Event Utility

There is a perfectly good chance that at the present time, your site is sending pages in an uncompressed form to users. That is perfectly normal - in fact it is pretty much standard - but there is a better way to send your data. Some browsers (not all, but some) can accept "gz-encoded" data, which means the data is compressed.

PHP includes functions for sending pages in a "gz-encoded" form. However, this can be a pain to add to large files. There is a much easier way to add gzip functionality to your site than editing every page on it.

PHP, Gzip and htaccess - PHP - ILoveJackDaniels.com

Over the last several months, a small group of web developers and designers have been hard at work perfecting a method to insert rich typography into web pages without sacrificing accessibility, search engine friendliness, or markup semantics. The method, dubbed sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), is the result of many hundreds of hours of designing, scripting, testing, and debugging by Mike Davidson (umm, that's me) and Mark Wubben. Through this extensive work, we, along with a invaluable stable of beta testers, supporters, and educators like Stephanie Sullivan and Danilo Celic of Community MX, have completely rebuilt a DOM replacement method originally conceived by Shaun Inman into a typography solution for the masses. It is this technology which provides the nice looking custom type headlines you see on sites like this one, Nike, ABCNews, Aston Martin, and others. We've released sIFR to the world as open source, under the CC-GNU LGPL license, so anyone can use it free of charge.

Mike Davidson -- sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses