LookIt

Sharing Keller

Patrik Fältström showed off how well his digital camera does macro on this warning from the Keller & the Keels Grass CD that I just got through lala.com from someone called Skippy. Keller Williams has bolstered his audience by allowing taping and sharing, so it is no surprise that he explicitly allows ripping to your iPod. The penalty part of the warning is just a bit of his weird and endearing sense of humor.

Picking domain names by search results

There is a definite advantage to knowing what users look for when typing in domain names that they think should work. This article from Government Computer News shows an excellent example in .gov. "600,000 visitors a year to FirstGov try to find the federal government’s Web site by typing USA.gov into their browser", so they switched from firstgov.gov to usa.gov. It wasn't mentioned in the article, but firstgov.gov redirects automatically; this is more intelligence than I normally expect from US government web sites.

Novel form of copy-protection

This article describes how some acupuncture students have made illegal digital copies of major textbooks and are using those instead of buying the textbooks. Acupuncture textbooks are heavy, fat, expensive books with a fairly limited audience. To prevent the use of the illegal copies, some schools have come up with a novel copy-protection scheme: "Various options for schools have been suggested, from amnesty for students who turn in their copy of the disk, to requiring all students to bring their books to class in order to be counted as in attendance." This is a novel method of copy-protecting non-digital media against digitization.