Google REALLY wants you to install their toolbar

I've got the Google Toolbar installed on most of the computers I use. While using a computer that doesn't have it installed, I was surprised to see this:

Google, which famously doesn't clutter its home page with extraneous links or ads, shoves a huge pitch for the toolbar right in your face. An in-your-face change to the interface, you might say.

New Wi-Fi record: JFK Airport hot spot serves East Lansing

Recently while in an East Lansing establishment, the Peanut Barrel, I found an unexpected Wi-Fi access point:



Given that Wi-Fi signals normally reach only a few hundred feet, it seemed a little odd that an access point in New York City could serve East Lansing. I mean, I know my Thinkpad has a superior antenna embedded in its little screen, but c'mon!

Of course this was some nearby jokester setting the SSID to a fictional label. I think this is a great idea. Instead of naming your access point locally -- 123 Albert Street or 1234 Smith Tower -- name it after the Albert Hall or the Eiffel Tower.

Especially do this with your portable access point; really get those hotel guests guessing.

Three Days of the Condor DVD Offers Very Strange Title Menu

My wife asked Netflix to send her a movie called "Three Days of the Condor", a film that scared the bejeezus out of me when it came out in the 70s. I remembered it well, with Robert Redford in the lead, and Max von Sydow a chilling bad guy, and Faye Dunaway an, er, unlikely accomplice and lover.

So we put the DVD into the player, and up popped this graphical menu that seemed to be more about a Hispanic or American Indian movie. I assumed that Netflix had sent us some obscure B movie, totally unrelated to the Redford flick from the 70s.

I went to IMDB and tried to find this false match, and couldn't find it. So I clicked on PLAY and sure enough it really was the movie that Sydney Pollack made in the 70s.

So my question is: what the heck is this graphic? Was someone at the studio assigned to make a DVD menu about this movie, and they Googled "condor" and found a graphic without any regard to the Redford flick? Do all of the Condor DVDs have this goofy graphic?

Should we return this DVD to Netflix, or is this a one-of-a-kind collector's item?

Internet lyrics sources susceptible to misheard rock lyrics

Over the years many have laughed at how they misheard lyrics to pop songs. For some reason while thinking about Christmas gifts I was thinking of coal and its other form, diamonds. That reminded me of a Jimmy Buffet song I like about diamonds. The top Google link for lyrics let me to this site:

I had to laugh when I saw this as the refrain:

(Diamond. Diamond. Diamond. Diamond. Diamond)
Coal under pressure (Diamond)
Sparkle of treasure (Diamond)
Crystaline measure (Diamond)
On a mental pleasure (Diamond)
In the corner of your eye (Diamond)
Make a grown man cry (Diamond)
All the seeds you've sown (Diamond)

Um, er, sorry -- I'm pretty sure Jimmy wrote "ornamental pleasure" ...

Ahhh yes, the wisdom of the masses.... Wonder why Jimmy (who understands the Internet) doesn't put all his liner notes on the Web?

http://sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Diamond-as-Big-as-the-Ritz-lyrics-Jimmy-Buffett/D04F324B9F017D0C482569A1000FA274

Would Richard Wiggins like to rent a condo from Richard Wiggins?

In a time when spam has doubled in three months and phishing is out of control, you're a little suspicious when you get a commercial solicitation involving your own name. A couple weeks ago I started receiving e-mail from Rentalo.com asking if I'd like to rent my condo in Naples, Florida. It was addressed to Richard Wiggins. Since I don't own a condo there (or anywhere) this seemed odd to me. I marked it as spam.

Good Afternoon,We just received a booking inquiry from John Doe who is interested in staying at a Vacation Rental similar to yours in Naples for 2 adults to stay 20 nights (Ref. 2377758).

When a few days later I got another inquiry from them, I Googled my name and Naples, and found a hit that appeared to be someone named Richard Wiggins wanting to rent his condo there.

So I hit the reply button, explained that somehow Rentalo had looked up my e-mail address and started using it, and the other Richard Wiggins might want to fix that.

No reply. On Friday, I got another rental inquiry. This time I called the phone number listed for Richard Wiggins and we had a nice chat. Turns out he lives in Massachusetts and he and his wife do own a condo in Naples. He said that he'd thought my e-mail was a joke from a realtor. I told him my wife thought that their place looked kind of nice, and maybe we might want to rent it someday. Richard said he'd have his brokers update their address records for him.

Then I received this note from Richard Wiggins:

Richard

I appreciate the call and I will take care of this with rentalo. As my wife said "Tell him you are the real Richard Wiggins" Any way thanks again and if you and your wife have any interest just drop me a line and we can work something out.

Best

The real Richard Wiggins

It will be kind of strange making a check out to Richard Wiggins if we ever end up renting this place. But before then, Richard, have your wife Google our name... :-)

Probably the most prominent Richard Wiggins I'm aware of invented digital speech synthesis products for Texas Instruments. Remember the Speak and Spell toy from 1978?

AOL screws up their link to sign up for free account

Click to see full-size screen shot

America Online famously makes it hard to convince a customer support rep to cancel your account. Just now I ran across an AOL ad for their new free service, and tried to convert the $5 a month account I've had for years. The link to convert to the free service is broken:



A conspiracy theorist would assume this is deliberate. Anyone who's ever worked with AOL would recall that old saying "never ascribe to conspiracy what can be explained by incompetence."

60 Minutes advertises Yahoo search as finding aid

For a while now, Pontiac has told people in its TV ads that people should go to Google to search for information on their vehicles. Huh? Not to Pontiac.com? Or GM.com? Tonight, I noticed CBS' "60 Minutes' doing the same sort of thing.

The ad said that you could go to Yahoo and search for "60 Minutes" to find out more about tonight's stories.

That's right: they didn't say go to 60minutes.com, or cbs.com, or cbsnews.com.

They sent you to Yahoo to find CBS' own content.

It's not news that CBS and all other old media are constantly seeking content partnerships. There may be a new battle brewing for building search partnerships.

AOL pioneered this with AOL Keywords. Google has sold its Adwords to the highest bidder, with great success. Without using the term, I think we're seeing Yahoo Keywords, Google Keywords, and MSN Keywords -- registered keywords that are uniquely owned by the advertiser or content partner.

The abysmal architecture of michigan.gov and election results

Ever since then-Governor Engler outsourced michigan.gov to an IBM datacenter running Vignette in Colorado, I've thought that our great state's Web presence was pressed into a misshapen cookie cutter.

Last Tuesday I tried to find out when the polls closed in Michigan. Fox News offered a vote tracking tool that claimed that the latest poll closing in Michigan was 9 pm. As a long time Michigan citizen, I was sure it was 8 pm.

So I went to michigan.gov to learn the scoop. There I found oodles of links including a nice way to look up myself (or anyone else for that matter) to see where I was registered to vote.

What I couldn't find was a simple answer to a very basic question: when do the polls close?

I challenged some friends on Ed Vielmetti's "Vacuum" list to tell me where the Michigan Secretary of State site reveals when the polls close. One old Michigan friend, Jeff Stuit, cheated a bit based on past experience and revealed that the answer was to be found in a PDF guide for poll workers. Ed, who thinks about such things a lot -- e.g. how late is the library open -- remarked that the most basic thing a storefront must tell its customers is its working hours.

This demonstrates yet again the hubris of the Webmaster. She or he publishes what the boss wants to say, and doesn't think about what customers need. She or he doesn't ask a sample of customers what they seek; let's just assume what we need to publish. Surely out of the millions of people seeking to vote last Tuesday, many thousands had a simple question to ask of state government: How late can I vote? Not many would-be voters would think to click on a link for poll workers -- especially not an Acrobat file.

Lou Rosenfeld and I are writing a book on search log analysis. Our mantra is that every Web site should include a search function, and every competent Webmaster (or searchmeister) should analyze search logs to determine what customers seek the most.

Having found it ridiculously hard to even find the phone book for state workers, my guess is that no one at the Secretary of State in particular, nor the Michigan state government in general, is doing search log analysis.

By the way, I concluded that the western part of Michigan's Upper Peninsula -- we call it the UP -- is in the Central time zone, and that their polls follow state law and close at 8:00 pm -- thus 9 pm Eastern. And Fox News, for once, was right.

Also by the way: Saturday, days after the cataclysmic 2006 election, michigan.gov offers a helpful link to election results. The only problem? It's the results from the 2004 election.

Eminent domain, the 2006 election, and me in a statewide commercial

On the hottest day of 2006, a July day with the heat index well above 100, I participated in a film shoot. This was a political commercial produced by a good friend, one of the leading makers of commercials in Michigan, Doug Monson. For over a year I'd asked Doug to let me tag along on a video shoot. I've dabbled in video production for years and wanted to see a pro do it.



Doug upped the ante: he cast me, and other friends, in the commercial. The pitch was in favor of Michigan Prop 4, which amends the Michigan constitution to place severe limits on the ability of government to take property from one private party (e.g. a homeowner) and transfer it to another private party (e.g. a strip mall developer) in the name of "economic development." I play the reluctant bad guy, who has to tell the aging homeowners that the state is taking their homestead away from them to build a strip mall.

It was an amazing eye-opener for me to see how much work goes into a quality 30 second spot. Doug worked with Such Video, a Lansing area video production company. They had 10 or 12 production workers on site. It was the making of a small movie -- very specialized, the sound guy, the lighting guy, the cinematographer, the production coordinator --and Doug directing.

We did take after take after take, all in 100 degree heat. No one needed a pee break despite consuming hundreds of bottles of water.

Doug shoots on film, even though the editing is digital. He insists the quality of film remains superior, even though he has to have it developed in the one lab in Michigan that still processes film.

You can download and view the finished commercial.

You can also see still photos depicting the making of a 30 second campaign ad.

How will I vote on Prop 4? Frankly, I'm not sure. Most newspaper editorials in Michigan say we don't need to amend the state constitution, as the most recent state Supreme Court decision makes it hard for government to abuse eminent domain. I guess I lead towards voting for the proposal, knowing how governments across the country have abused the notion of "blight" to take perfectly fine, albeit older, homes and neighborhoods to serve the tax base.

In particular, I believe that the city of East Lansing has never admitted that John Hannah brought over 40,000 students to town. The city and its homeowner tax base (and voter base) remain in a 40 year state of denial. Starting circa 1967, East Lansing should have encouraged smallish, mixed-use student apartment/retail complexes around town, instead of creating the ghetto of delapidated 40s homes and new duplexes, with a nod and a wink to illegal rentals.

The Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator

Now comes one Christopher Soghoian who wants to raise awareness of a major flaw in airport security: TSA visually inspects your boarding pass, but does not use a scanner to verify online that the document is valid.

So Chris now offers the Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator, which creates a valid-looking boarding pass that you can print at home. For instance, here's a first class seat I've generated for Ronald McDonald:



Observations:

1. Long before 9/11, I wondered about allowing people to print boarding passes at home or office. Since Christopher has demonstrated how easy it is to spoof a boarding pass, expect to see TSA adding scanners at the security checkpoint.
2. After the recent liquid explosives scare, the TSA has relaxed rules a bit to allow you to purchase a bottled water inside the secure area. Now that this raises the question of whether the secure area is secure, Christopher's demonstration may cause a lot of dehydrated passengers.
3. The ads Google is serving up on Christopher's site are for X-ray scanners.
4. It's good that Soghoian is an uncommon name; fortunately, few people will be inconvenienced when TSA adds Christopher to their watch list.
   

Understanding related searches: a colorful approach

Recently when trying to better understand patterns of searches at Michigan State University I color-coded related search terms and analyzed 13 months of data. Not too surprisingly more people seek football tickets in the fall, bookstores at the beginning of the school year, and information on academic probation after grades are posted.



This is a pretty basic approach, one that wouldn't work well for folks with color blindness. I'd love to have a tool that learns related terms and clusters them for you.

Lou Rosenfeld and I are working on a book explaining the value of search analytics; you can find more information about seasonal clustering and a link to my color-coded spreadsheet.

One of those crisp Fall days

Friday was one of those crisp Fall days that football announcers proclaim "And it's a beautiful day for football!" Sadly the prospects for a happy football feeling in East Lansing on Satuday are not propitious, so here's some Fall color to cheer folks up a bit:



More photos of the Red Cedar stroll are at: http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2101059166\

There are some photos of the Spartan Marching Band practicing as well.