Chausse.org

And now, for something totally different… I’ve lived in Massachusetts for the past 12 years or so, but I was born and raised in northern Rhode Island. People crack jokes about the size of the state when I add the “northern” prefix, but northern Rhode Island has a culture far different than that of our Newport brethren. And one cultural force to be reckoned with is that of Chicken Family-Style - the unofficial favorite meal of northern Rhode Island.

In January 1990, Yankee magazine ran an article about the meal in which writer Bonnie Tandy Leblang noted that “Nine out of ten weddings in northern Rhode Island feature chicken family-style.” She further contended that this dish made up more than half of all orders in area restaurants, and that at one restaurant offering a full menu, it accounted for ninety percent of all orders.

No one outside of the area seems to understand why in the world you would eat french fries and pasta in the same meal but, growing up, nearly every special event I attended featured this same culinary experience.

If you care to experience it for yourself, look no further than Wright’s Farm - the Mecca of Chicken Family-Style. The place seats 1500 people and you can STILL expect an hour wait.

Why am I posting this? No real reason, excpet that I never expected to find such an in-depth article on this subject and wanted to share it…

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One of my duties at Zoom Information is building the next version of our “People Directory”, a ginormous list of, well, people. We are quite interested in how many of our people-pages get indexed by Google. In order to keep tabs on that, we add a code to the bottom of each page, which helps us easily determine our page count. For example, if you perform this Google search which looks for “L000003″ within just www.zoominfo.com, you will see 210,000 results. This means that Google has indexed 210,000 of our “Level 3″ pages.

You may be wondering what this has to do with this article’s title. Well, a blogger named Peter Kaminski has been tracking some unusual blog spam comments that have been popping up lately. They tend to look something like this:

Posted by: Courtney Gidts | Nov 14, 2005 3:12:18 PM. I’ve managed to save up roughly $53602 in my bank account, but I’m not sure if I should buy a house or …

A blogger is left to wonder why a spammer would leave a message like this - no hyperlinks, no obvious agenda, no real point.

Well, the key is in the “$53602″. You see, bloggers are increasingly using various tricks to block “comment spam”. So, blog spammers have a real interest in determining which ones do NOT. How do you do that? Well, you assign a unique “key” to your comments which you can check against later - much like our people directory page ID tags.

Do a Google search for “Gidts $53602” and you’ll learn that the comment was successfully posted to a blog entry on Worthwhilemag.com. Keep a database of these numerical ID’s and their associated blog URL’s, automate Google searches to see which ones come up with results, and - voila - you now have a giant list of vulnerable blogs. Since there are about 100 bazillion blogs online, even if 99% of them were to block spam, this clever entrepreneur will be able to find the 1 bazillion that don’t… and use that information to turn a hefty profit.

Don’t try this at home.

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Today, I turn 30.

That’s not a picture of me. That was just the first result when I searched Google Images for “30″. Feels oddly fitting, though. Happy Birthday to me!

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It’s always weird seeing my fairly uncommon surname in print… But, apparently, there is a “Chausse Drive” in Methuen and, apparently, it is flooded. Chausse means “causeway” in French, so I guess it’s a good name for a road - if not slightly redundant. Thanks, Dave.

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Time to scoop Michael Arrington…

While planning my exit from Microsoft/Groove, one company I interviewed at was a startup calling themsleves Tabblo. Their product, which was still in stealth mode, completely blew me away. There were a few reasons I didn’t continue pursuing a job there, but the coolness factor of the product was definitely not one of them. In fact, it was the coolest web-based tool I had ever seen.

What is it? Well, imagine Flickr on steroids. Flickr’s cool, but it’s lousy at making attractive galleries for printing or sharing with friends. Tabblo uses really advanced AJAX as well as smartly thought-out templates and defaults to turn your pictures into beautiful galleries. It does way more than that, too. It’s quite simply the ultimate do-stuff-with-photos site. I’ve been peeking in at their web site every week or so to see if they’ve launched, and now it appears you can actually sign up and use it (although the home page still says “Coming Soon”). Just visit their homepage, click “Beta users login here…”, and click Sign Up in the upper-left corner. There are some rough edges here and there, but these guys are going to be zillionaires some day.

Filed under Cool Stuff, The Internet Biz, Web 2.0 1 Comment »

OK, this idea is totally half-baked, but the associated domain name that popped into my head for it keeps cracking me up.

I was reading an article discussing problems that crop up when people use email for purposes for which it was not designed. One of these behaviors was “emailing a file to yourself” as a cheap form of document retention. So, I thought - why not have a special email address that would process incoming emails (from yourself only), store the attachments, and provide a nice, organized web UI for later retrieval of said attachments. All you’d have to do is sent the email to you@docplop.com instead of you@whereeverelse.com.

Someone’s probably already cooked up something like this, but I guarantee you they’re not calling it DocPlop.com - and that, right there, is the true secret to its success.

Filed under Steal My Idea™ 4 Comments »

This is an awesome, awesome, awesome, brilliant idea. Cameras are just now starting to add Wi-Fi functionality for instantly putting your photos online and those that do have Wi-Fi built in often require you to use a proprietary service (Boo! Hiss!) that puts your photos on the web site they want you to use, instead of Flickr, or your other photo sharing site of choice.

Solution: build the Wi-Fi into the memory card!. Then ANY camera can be Wi-Fi enabled without any sort of goofy attachments. That’s what the folks at starutp Eye.fi are working on. I’m a bit puzzled as to what sort of user interface you’d get to work with, but I’m sure it’ll all make sense when the time comes. Unfortunately, “Eye-Film”, as it’s called, is vaporware at the moment, but if it works as advertised, this would be a must-purchase in my book.

Filed under Gear and Gadgets No Comments »