Notes from a wireframe world

The Daily Mail has never had what you may call a rational outlook of the world be it their Hypocrisy over Eastern European migrants or abortion or Bingo in fact there is very little that they haven’t attacked and slandered and made up stories about over the years.

So what’s new?

Well their resent story and shall we say non-to subtle headline (see above) about a former child safety expert Mark Williams-Thomas, the opening paragraph of his article was shocking enough.

"Even after 15 years in child protection, I was shocked by what I encountered when I spent just five minutes on Facebook posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me."

But the rest when on to describe how a series of men approached him and made sexual suggestions.

But hang on a second, Facebook isn’t the kind of place you spark up random chats with people, but you can’t just chat with them.

Thankfully the old media does have some integrity Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC contacted Mark and Facebook to ask them about this they said.

Facebook says when it contacted Mark Williams-Thomas, he had a rather different story. He had been contacted by the Mail which had provided him with the material about the fake profile, but he had corrected it to make it clear that it involved not Facebook but another social network. By late yesterday, the story on the Mail’s website had been amended; although it still featured a Facebook picture, it included this apology:

And Mark said

He got back to the paper with a number of changes before publication, but although they acknowledged receipt of his alterations, they were not acted on.

In other words they just made it “fit” their world view. So much for old media’s journalistic standards.

Mark is very annoyed by this “because it detracts from the point of the experiment which was worthwhile”.

This whole thing is just another example of why some elements of the old media, ironically throes who are most critical of the new media, should take leaf out of their own book, or they will be forced to close… and may be that wouldn’t be such a bad thing for society after all.

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous

Last night, well till 2am this morning, I finally fixed a highly annoying problem with VB.

As you know if you’re a regular reader (don’t worry if you just found this via Google looking for the same problem as I had, don’t worry we love you too), I’m currently working on a Twitter client called TwitterBrite, part of the application will make a query to my web server, and pull a list of interesting twitter people worth that user following.

This should be fairly simple, all I need to do is point my WebClient at the correct URL and pull the XML out then process it as I need

But no, my server returns a “(406) Not Acceptable” exception every time. Wikipedia tells us that this error is “The requested resource is only capable of generating content not acceptable according to the Accept headers sent in the request.”

OK… this isn’t pushing any content to the server just pulling from it. So the next step is to see what Dr. Google says. Sadly all my initial search returns is that I’m not alone in having this problem. Then I found one or two gems. So it’s to do with the headers I’m sending to my webserver. But wait MSDN says

Oh… So it can’t be that! And let’s face it “text/xml” isn’t exactly an obscure mime type. So I thought, it must be something server side. So I went into the PHP and forced the header but no joy, so I wrote an e-mail to my web host (at about 1:30am).

Just as I was going to go to bed when I thought “you’ve nothing to lose, just try adding the headers” so I added the three lines

And guess what! It pulled the data first and every time!

So either MSDN is wrong or I missed something! If you have any additional information on this I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous

CoTweet, the Twitter CRM tool used by several large brands, including the likes of ford and the airline JetBlue has been sold to the email marketing firm ExactTarget.

So I hear you cry, this is just another web2.0 merger who cares?

Well you should, at least you should if you use a web based twitter client for your business.

CoTweet, like Hootsuite, doesn’t use oAuth, at least it doesn’t when I last tried it.

So all CoTweet’s usernames and passwords have just been sold to a third party, so even if you trust coTweet with your username and password do you trust ExactTarget?

It also exposes another issue sourounding cloud based services. That of the cost. CoTweet started life as a free beta, then late last year they started charging $1,500/mo for their basic plan. In any other business this would be called extorsion, you sign-up for a service for free then when your tied to it they rank up the price.

That said CoTweet has a small but active customer base, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have to charge such a huge price because if they don’t they go under.

And if your customer service relied on their service and they went out of business what happens to your data? What happens to your customer service?

That’s why TwitterBrite is a desktop based application, if I go under all that happens if you don’t get updates and the “Find interesting people to follow” wouldn’t work, but other than that you wouldn’t notice anything.

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous

You may want to check out an article I wrote for EzineArticles (yea they must take anything) called "Cloud Computing – Is it Right For Your Business?" In this article I’ll try and give you a balanced view of the pro’s and con’s of cloud computing so that you may make your own mind up as to if it’s for you and your business.

And while I’m plugging stuff, you may want to check out my Amazon books store and my cafepress store. The book store is a collection of the best (well best in my view) books on social networks, business programming etc.

The Cafepress store, hosting the classic “Real Entrepreneurs do it with their bootstraps” design, inspired by the techcrunch Europe clothing range.

OK I planning to sell zero shirts, I may as well use the old cafepress account I have… but I think the books may do well as they are a good selection of books on subject I think you lot will find useful.

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous

Google Buzz (dubbed by some as the facebook/twitter killer) is Google entrance into the social/real time chat market.

I managed to have a five minute play with it this morning, and it looks and feels a lot more like FriendFeed than twitter or facebook, but that said, what’s the point?

I tend to agree with Microsoft who say.

“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”

I don’t have the time to check yet another social network. I liked friendfeed (before facebook took it over, when it seemed to die a death) there was little in the way of spam and junk, also I got my twitter and RSS fix that way.

Anyway, I I’m wrong and I do end up using it, you can follow what I’ve got to say from my google profile or via google buzz’s RSS feed.

Am I (and Microsoft) wrong? What do you think?

Posted via email from scottherbert’s posterous