Happy anniversary to me

Today marks my 11th year working for AOL, and this Saturday, August 23rd, will be my 36th birthday. This means I've spent roughly 30% of my entire life working for one company. Since I've been working a full time job since I was 20, this translates to almost 69% of my full time work experience has come from here.

The last 5 years (since the summer of 2003) I've been a full-time remote employee, working from my home in south-eastern Virginia, which means I have a home office filled with computers, books, and more junk then most people should have in an office. It also means I don't have a custodial service like most office buildings have, so I get to play custodian from time to time, and clean up the mess I make. Today is one of those days.

While cleaning, I noticed a plaque I have hanging on my wall that I received way back in 1999 for my work on the Internet Operations team for helping scale out our web infrastructure for our members. This plaque is dated Aug 29th, 1999 23:44:30 EDT (yes, it has a timestamp) and marks the first time our web complex served up 3,000,000,000 (yes, that is correct, 3 billion) urls in a single DAY!

One thing I didn't realize when I came to AOL, and something a lot of people take for granted, is the level of scale we have to deal with on a day to day basis. To put those above numbers in perspective, according to comScore Americans conducted 11.5 billion searches for the MONTH of June 2008. Last time I checked, June had 30 days, so that works out to approximately 384M searches per day, or roughly 1/8th of the number of web requests we handled 9 YEARS AGO. Now granted, handling a web request isn't the same as doing a web search, but it (at least in my opinion) is a pretty good comparison of real world large numbers.

Granted, I'm sure those numbers aren't quite as impressive now. Since we've switched to an ad supported revenue stream, and our dialup membership numbers have declined, but I'm still in awe to look back and think of what we accomplished.

And for you my good man, a shiney nickel

I was looking over my bank statement online, and noticed something I thought was quite peculiar. My wife had taken out $100 from an ATM not run by our bank, and I noticed the amount of the withdraw was $102.05. This, in and of itself, wasn't too strange, since most ATMs charge a fee for withdraws of non-customers, but what was strange was the $0.05.

This got me to thinking. Why the extra nickel? Did someone mean to put in $2.50 and fat-fingered it as $2.05, and no one ever noticed? Maybe as the US economy goes down the toilet, someone figured charging an extra nickel would make a difference to their bottom line. No, I had to think it more nefarious then either of those.

My brain decided (since Im a programmer by trade) that whoever wrote the software for this ATM must have done it. Imagine you get the software contract for a major ATM vendor. When each withdraw happens where a convenience fee is collected, you add $0.05 to it. You could display the normal fee, but charge the slightly increased one. Most customers would probably just ignore the fact that they were charged an extra nickel (I know I did, my wife couldn't even remember what the fee was). You create some account offshore, depositing the extra nickel into, while the real fee goes back to the bank for the ATM. If you process 10K transactions per day, across all the ATMs running this software, you'll net $500.00 per day, or  just over $180K per year. Not bad change for doing nothing, and I'd bet that the number of transactions would be closer to 100K per day (if not even higher).

No one would probably ever catch on, since who's going to take the time to chase down some lost nickel? I know I wouldn't (blogging about it is a different story).

And a shiny new laptop, FTW!

Since I telecommute full time, I've always kept a laptop for my trips up to the office, and also because its nice to have something to curl up with on the couch (besides my wife) during TV time so I can both veg out and try and be productive/creative at the same time. My current aging laptop is an eMachines (don't laugh) M6805. It's original specs aren't too shabby:

• AMD 64 3000+ Processor
  
• 512 Mb Ram
• 60 Gb HD (4200 RPM)
  
• ATI Radeon 9600 /64Mb

But it's a far cry from a decent laptop by today's standards. Since purchased, I've bumped the ram to 768M and the HD has been replaced with a 120G 5400 RPM drive when the old HD bit the dust. The biggest drawback is that it's screen is a paltry 1280x800. It's just TOO SMALL and while I've lived with it all this time, it's always been a thorn in my side.

Today, no more. I've made the plunge to replace my laptop with something to (hopefully) last me for the next few years. I've made the plunge to replace my old eMachines windows XP clunker, with a nice new, shiny, fast MacBook Pro. I still own an old G3 iBook, but its long past its prime, and it used to be my means of testing webpages on OS X until work upgraded my older linux box to a Mac Pro. I've spec'd out the following:

• 17" MacBookPro
• 2.5Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB 667Mhz DDR2
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT / 512MB
• 250 GB 5400 RPM HD
• And the best of all, an upgrade to the 1920x1200 Hi-res display.

My current desktop (with the 19" clunker CRT it still has) runs at 1600 x 1200, so this will beat out even that for screen real estate.

If you can't tell, I'm a bit impatient and trying to stave it off. Maybe Ill even blog more once I have it since it wont feel like such a chore on this laptop.

Ads, ads, everywhere and not a one to click

It seems every time I turn around, I keep seeing another article about some company that depends on online ad revenue to "adjust" (thats corp-speak for lower) its outlook, or advertisers complaining that ads on the web just don't cut it and have little value for what they cost.

As a web consumer, I'm not a big fan of ads (as the big red ABP stop sign in Firefox so diligently reminds me). I've gotten used to ignoring them for the most part, just like most everyone else on the web. For me, I've mainly blocked them for one reason: When I go to a site, its for the site's content. When I'm sitting there waiting and glance down at the status bar and see "Waiting for ads.someslowadnetwork.com", and the page doesn't load because of it... I'll either move on or block the ad. I recall an old adage that the "fastest bits are the ones that never make it to the wire" and I enact that.

So, what do we do about this? Ads aren't going to go away, but its obvious with things in a decline on both sides, that something isn't working. Here is my thought:

• A user visits "somecoolsite.com" and gets a page with no ads. They require you to login, but instead of you having to register, you submit your OpenID, and you are in. As a new user you get to browse the site, and it might have ads on it, or it might not. It might have some features disabled, or some other limiting factor, but you get in.
• The site talks about some "cooladnetwork.com" site, and how you can "subscribe" to their site and view their ads and in turn, earn "credits" to "somecoolsite.com" to unlock features, or get no ads.
• The "cooladnetwork.com" site also takes your OpenID, and lets you build a profile. You can tell them as much or as little about yourself as you want. Your age, sex, income bracket, likes, dislikes, all the nice shiny things that advertisers want to know about you to better target you with ads.
• Now here's the trick, the more you tell them, the more valuable you are, and the fewer ads you need to see to earn credits to "somecoolsite.com". The other thing is that since you can tell them what you want, you are more likely to get ads that you might be interested in, and that is a win-win for both consumers and advertisers.
• When you run out of credits, its a quick jump to "cooladnetwork.com" to view your account, do a nice transfer of funds to "somecoolsite.com" and your back in business.
• How many credits to charge and what "value" (money wise), is all up to the site and ad network.

The nice thing is, I get to view ads on my schedule, they don't interrupt my content (either by making it slow, or by bloating the layout), and both the site and advertisers get more value for the ads.

Now there is one big caveat to all this... Privacy. Now obviously advertisers already do tricks with cookies and other things to try and know as much about you as they can. At least this way, its up front, and YOU control how much info is known. When the advertiser wants to pony up an ad, they specify the demographic: males, 18 - 25, 25K+ who like cars. When you see this ad, they don't know that YOU saw it, just that someone in their demographic saw it. There could even be a weighted formula for just how good a fit that I am in based on how far outside the curve I am for their statistics if they want to have people that are "close" to the demographic, but just outside.

The site could even show the ad along side a captcha to make sure the ads are being seen. Imagine something like: Who is the advertiser in the above ad? or some other question that has to be answered, and could easily be done so by looking at the ad.

Maybe one day this will be a reality instead of only words on a web page. Or maybe someone will stumble across this entry and say... "Wow, thats a great idea, here's some mega-bucks, now go build it." Or maybe they'll say, "What a novel approach, maybe you should patent it."

Or maybe they already have.

EDIT: Bah, don't forget the title.

The music revolution has begun

The music industry has long lost me as a consumer. I haven't bought a cd in quite a while (although my wife has bought several over the years, so I guess they get my consumer dollars by proxy), but with the release of Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails, I might start looking again.

As an ex-consumer, I want DRM-free music. I don't want crippled CD's. I don't want lossy formats (well, maybe I do, but if so, I'll make them lossy). I don't want to pay for a CD full of crap just to get one or two good songs. I've purchased a few songs from iTunes, but even then, you get shoe-strung into having to deal with DRM'd music, and having to do the BURN-RIP dance to get some other format, and again you lose quality (albeit my bad ears can't detect it), just to use the music you paid for.

As an ex-consumer, I put the music industry on notice. I've paid NIN $5, not so much for their music, but for their support in standing up for themselves and their consumers. If I can get a chance to actually download what I paid for, I'll probably have a change in heart as to why I shelled out $5. For now, I'm just happy to support the revolution.

As times and technologies change, so must the industries. As the horse and buggy was replaced with the automobile, so were the industries that supported it. Its time the music industry (and you too, movie industry, your time is coming, too!) started to do more to embrace this change. Give people an affordable product that is WORTH PURCHASING and you will have happy consumers for life. It's time to move past the cd era of music, and embrace digital online distribution. I don't believe that moving to digital online distribution will kill the music industry. Quite frankly, I belive the opposite. The longer they wait, the more artists will realize that jumping ship will net them better gains and cut out the middleman. Also, I don't believe that offering DRM-free music will fuel the P2P crowds. I am a firm believer that a good majority of the P2P users fit into 2 categories:

1. They won't pay for music regardless of the price, and as such, no matter how much you charge will not affect them one bit. They will always get it for free no matter what, as long as its available.
2. The other group can't find what they deem as being affordable music (and affordable doesn't just mean price, but getting good value out of what they are paying for as well. 99c for a song from iTunes may be "affordable", but having DRM restricting usage quickly erodes that value).
   

So what does this mean for the music industry? Their attempts to litigate P2P users out of existence, just isn't going to happen. The more they do so, the more people will just hate them for it, and the more customers they will alienate. What they need to do, is move to a business that convinces P2P users to leave voluntarily. They won't be able to convince them all to leave, but it's my belief that a good majority of those in the #2 category will, and without a large enough member base, the P2P users are less likely to find what they want, making the networks less useful for finding music.

For those of you out there that want to join the revolution, help show the music industry that change is inevitable, and that change is now.

Kick things off

First off, Im not really what you'd call a writer or a blogger. I'm a geek, and sometimes geeks have to write. For me, I mostly write code. You pick the language, I've probably written in it.

So what will you find here, and why would you want to come back? Who knows. I have no clue where this will go. I'm very much into the web, technology, computers, gaming, so I'm sure those topics will come up from time to time. I also have an autistic son, so there will probably be a post or two about him as well, although typically my wife blogs more about the family stuff, so Ill probably stay technical when I have the time.

I know I'm late to the blogging scene, but I guess "better late than never." I guess I've never really taken the time, so let's see how this plays out, and whether I'll find the time (and energy) to keep this thing going.