Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Today I’m a public speaker at two conferences. The first is Fusion, a conference about marketing by Adformatie. There will be 600 people listening which is a good crowd. But there is no need to be nervous because I’m sharing the stage with 4 other people and we will be interviewed and asked for our opinion.

The second ’show’ will be at the end of the day for 60 students. That will be more dificult because I will be alone and talking for 45 minutes.

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As if you are interested in knowing more about spam…

But I am since it is turning into a nightmare for me. Here are my SPAM stats:

Filtered Mail
149 Good Messages
2.707 Spam Messages (95%)
1.346 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
10 False Positives
5 False Negatives (33%)
99.5% Correct

Showing Statistics Since
27-11-06 15:37

Yes, this is just for 2 days! 1346 spam messages and only 149 real ones. How about that?

The main reason why I get all this SPAM is because I also check the postmaster- and info@fleck.com accounts. This domain has been collecting SPAM for years so when we bought that domain SPAM just started pouring in from day one.

Two days ago I bought a serious spam filter for Mac OS X Mail which I hope will save me. It does seem to work well but I’m still training it and 5 false negatives is way to much to be practical.

I hope it will do better in a few days…

A few years ago I was asked to work with a political party and advise them a bit about their internet strategy. The first thing I did was type their name + .NL into my browser to check their website. They had a pretty big campaign advertising their website, all with just ‘domain.nl’ on everything. You can guess what happened. No website, just a ‘Document not found’ page…

If someone tells me to visit ’somedomain.com’ I open my browser and type in ’somedomain.com’ and hit enter. Sounds logical?

Not to some people. They ALWAYS enter ‘www.somedomain.com’.

And some some server administrators think that everybody ads the ‘www’ before their domains and they don’t bother to set up their server to work with and without the ‘www’ before their domains.

I hate that.

In a lot of cases ignoring the ‘www’ get you not to the website you want to go but to a general Apache error page, or even worse, someone elses website such as the hosting providers homepage or a different client on that particular server.

I mentioned this to the person I was working with and told him it would be a 5 second fix and would dramatically improve their website and lead to more visitors. At least it wouldn’t frustrate any visitors trying to get to their website. I was quite pleased with myself with being able to help them with his.

After two weeks the issue still wasn’t fixed. I called my contact and asked him what was going on. He replied ‘well, we have talked about it during our technical meeting and the server administrator was busy with other stuff and decided it wasn’t a priority and that most people know that you should just add “www” to our domainname’. For a moment I was speechless and then I told him that it would be very difficult for me to do any work for them if I couldn’t even get this one thing done.

And that was the end of my advisory work for them.

It is time for a new Alexa-like service: AJAXed, more Digg-like and updated to Web2.0.

I use Alexa a lot. It serves as a quick check to see what a site is ‘worth’. If it claims to be really popular and I don’t trust that I just check them at Alexa. If someone writes that service X is history and service Y the new hot things Alexa will tell me if that is true.

But Alexa is soooo 1999. The design and features and the black and white stats. It doesn’t use the collective mind at all. It also seems to only work on Explorer. Yech. Maybe they should buy StumbleUpOn and integrate Alexa into that.

It also seems that Alexa stopped working altogether on november 22. Check any website on it. The last blog post is from november 22 and there is no updated information of any kind since that day.

Weird…

Photo by Tonie.

Just found these photos from Tonie. Check another annotated version here.

The key to my office is inside the office. So this morning I arrived early at the office and couldn’t get in. I decided to wait in Elf for Patrick or Arjen or Robert to show up but they all have appointments until 10 or 11.

I feel evicted.

Elf is officialy closed until eleven but the bartender knows me and made me a cappucino, on the house.

I told him about how I feel a bit homeless because I can’t get into the office. He said “Now you know how it feels”. I asked him what he meant and then he told me that the “Partij voor de Vrijheid” got about 600.000 votes in yesterdays election. That means we have about 600.000 racists in The Netherlands.

Imagine how people who weren’t born in the Netherlands but who do live here feel today.