The folks at AOL have announced the relaunch of My.Netscape, a site that apparently offered a customized home page ala myYahoo that will now offer the same thing…with a liberal dose of Ajax.

Who cares? At least when Jason Calacanis was running the show it was a little bit interesting to watch, after all Calacanis is one of the few people in this world with a more wicked tongue than yours truly, but now? Netscape is a footnote in the history of the web, a dinosaur which AOL continues to disrespect like a 40 year old whore past her prime who is forced out onto the streets because the pimp tells her it must be done. AOL: do the world a favor: retire Netscape so that we can remember her as the 18 year old virgin she once was, not the sleazy, worn out, wrinkled hooker she has now become, having done so much in the past, she deserves the respect.

Tags: AOL, Netscape

Originally posted on March 6, 2007 @ 4:30 am

Law blog Concurring Opinions has jumped on the lets bash SEO’s bandwagon with a bizarre post blaming the process of old domains being reregistered and used for other purposes on “Slimy SEO’s”.

They cite in their evidence the case of Crescat Sententia, who moved from a .org name to a .net name and later found the .org name registered by someone else who is now using the site to flog something called “Proactive Solution”.

Hysterically, Will Baude of Crescat Sententia writes:

In September, without my knowledge or consent, our old domain was purchased by a Search Engine Optimization firm that intends to make money by either reselling the domain for a pretty penny to somebody greedy for its pagerank, or by using that pagerank to sell links to sites eager to trick Google. The webpage up there now is not this blog (it’s an old cache that he will have to take down soon), and this blog is the current and future home of crescat.

OMG the sky is falling! But lets think about this for a minute. The name wasn’t stolen or hijacked. Baude didn’t renew the name, plain and simple, and it would appear that he purposely did not to renew it, so we aren’t talking about an accidental oversight. Having decided not to keep the name, someone else legally came along and registered it. There’s no need to gain Baude’s “knowledge or consent” because in choosing to NOT renew the domain he legally gave up all rights to it. And how exactly does he know that a SEO firm bought the name? He doesn’t, he’s just presuming. I’m personally not a SEO firm and yet I’ve previously bought expired domain names…indeed, perhaps famously social news site Newsvine came about as a direct result of a expired domain (Newsvine.com being previously registered to someone else). SEO doesn’t equal buyer by any stretch of the imagination.

Concurring Opinions gives other examples of sites moving domain and finding their old domains picked up by others, calling it hijacking. Every single example they give is identical: site owners gave up their domains when moving to other sites. I’d note: gave up. If someone doesn’t renew a domain (particularly intentionally) and someone else comes along and registers it, they only have themselves to blame. Whipping up some jihad against SEO’s doesn’t change the facts of the matter. And here’s another thing: cost of renewing a domain name: $7-$10 (shop around, you can get cheaper again). So for a very, very small amount these people could have kept their domain names, put a proper redirect on the old name and we’d all live happily ever after, but then again, we’ve got about as much chance of curing stupidity as we’ve got of solving poverty.

The case for the defense rests. The site owner is to blame.

Originally posted on March 4, 2007 @ 9:10 pm

Seen a YouTube video embedded on a another site lately? Of course one of the more popular features of YouTube from the beginning has been the ability to embed videos on your own site, it’s a great feature that allows many of us to present videos without needing to host them ourselves.

But have you encountered embedded YouTube videos lately that either wont play or take for ever to start? I have, on numerous occasions on many, many different sites. Naturally my first thoughts were that the site hadn’t added the include script properly, but as I saw it on more and more sites it got me thinking.

You see, if you’re like me and you’re trying to watch a video on a website and it’s not working, and you really want to watch it, what do you do? Easy, you click on the video frame itself which takes you directly to the page at youtube.com that hosts the video, and 100% of the time the video works promptly at youtube.com itself. I’ve found myself doing this more and more lately. Here’s one example from Gizmodo. I’d note that I hit play on this video 5 minutes ago, nothing is playing:

A quick click on the YouTube logo at the bottom right of screen: bingo! I get a working video.

The question then becomes: is YouTube intentionally stifling/ handicapping embedded videos to force users to visit youtube.com? Perhaps not all of the time, and with all videos, but perhaps through some random or not so random algorithm? Is there any other explanation for the regular failure of embedded YouTube videos not working as they should? Food for thought.

Originally posted on February 28, 2007 @ 9:29 pm