vampirical

Thanks for the additional context, definitely helps paint a better picture of the situation.

The money quote for me was this: Maeda has been President of the University since 2008, when he took over the position from Roger Mandle — the longest-serving president in the school's history — who stepped down after receiving a vote of no confidence from RISD department heads in 2007. Mandle, like Maeda, came under fire by faculty members after proposing significant changes to the structure of the traditional RISD curriculum and accompanying financial decisions.

Hmm interesting, I tried to play as I would against a human and got some interesting results.

Over 20 games I end up tied in wins/loses with the untrained version plus greater than half straight ties. It seemed I should be able to add one more layer of "predict" to my crazy rock-paper-scissors reasoning and win solidly but it didn't seem to change the results at all. I wonder if it just progressed evenly with me.

On the other hand, I firmly beat the trained version with 80-90% win and mostly ties making up the remainder.

I'd be interested to see the algorithm behind it as I get the feeling the untrained version was making good choices for all the wrong reasons and with a slightly more complex game it would show.

They actually did exactly that. They didn't do a hard de-list for JCPenny as in the bmw.de case, only a tweak to the link weighting to remove the type of bogus link JCPenny was benefiting from. So they've dropped down 30-50+ positions in a lot of cases, as have other who were benefiting from similar links, but they are still being fairly listed.

Wrong link? I'm getting a Not Found.

http://mytype.com/blog/2011/02/233/ seems to work.

Let me consult my list of companies which make money from being MPEG LA licensors: Apple Cisco Daewoo Dolby Fuijitsu HP Hitachi Philips LG Microsoft Mitsubishi NTT Panasonic Samsung Sharp Siemens Sony Ericsson Toshiba Reference: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx

I am SHOCKED to hear that Microsoft would like to continue receiving royalties from all those H.264 license fees and doesn't give a toss about open standards.

Mirror: http://const.it/mirror/135e1a2a/george.hedfors.com/content/w...

My old bookmarklets still work and the old site still seems to work fine (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/). It would be pretty foolish of them to break everyone's existing endpoints like that.

Thanks for clarifying :)

I don't know that I agree with the refund strategy as the way to handle the issue but it's good to hear you guys come down in a good place ethically/morally on the issue (as you say, the most important thing with this sort of site is trust).

This the ft.com article you're referencing? http://const.it/dewall/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2437643c-29... (link bypasses the paywall)

I personally prefer the economist article. I read it back in 06 and I've read a few more on the Ikea tax setup since then. It seems to still accurately represent the situation, some numbers might be out of date but the gist is the same. That ft.com article is a bit sparse, seemingly written as an update for people already aware of the issue, and as you say paywalled.

Thanks for the additional and up to date info though.

You say "100% of claimed Tips". How much initiative do you take to inform publishers that they've received a tip and should sign-up and claim their money? What do you do if a publisher who has received tips declines participating?

The idea that I could donate money which the publisher hasn't agreed to receive and you could end up keeping it if the publisher doesn't decide they want to be a part of your service rubs me the wrong way.

Hmm interesting to see Arc90 making a bigger move in the space, especially partnered up with Instapaper. I've been curious why they hadn't done much more since the simple readability bookmarklet was so well received.

I wonder if they'll run in to any copyright issues now that they're actually re-serving full article content from their servers and not just reformatting in the user's browser. I've been playing with a service with some server side readability functionality built in and the issue came us as a concern in my planning. Even with full attribution and considerate seo practices, it seems possible some publishers may take exception to full reproduction. There are existing services like viewtext.org that would be infringing by the same standards, but I assume it'll take fairly major notoriety or traffic to attract the ire of the papers. Or is this clear cut fair use?

Possible alternative articles on the matter since the wsj seems pretty serious about their paywall:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-01-02/expedia-drops-am... http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2011/01/01/expedia-drops-...

I'm always a bit surprised this doesn't some up more often in these discussions. I used to use little serial GSM/GPRS modems anytime I needed to handle SMS, and that was while working for a voip company with lots of infrastructure in place for that kind of thing (the modems always won based on simplicity, speed, and consistency).

At the small scale spending $100 or so to have an unlimited test system seems comparable, and for large scale I'd much rather be buying a few unlimited SMS plans than paying per message. If the wireless provider supports SMS over GPRS you can do something like 30/min so you may never need more than one modem and sim. I wonder if it is just the barrier to entry, since you have to know that such a thing is possible and hunt down hardware/software to fit your needs rather than just buying in to one of these companies' pitches.

Stay strong and keep fighting the good fight. thumbs up

Their OAuth for IMAP/SMTP should be all you need: http://code.google.com/apis/gmail/oauth/

Yep, you can do just that. Browsers that support rgba for text color make it quite easy and in older browsers you can do onselect tricks and the like to make it work.

Speaking as a donor who isn't considering "subscribing", others probably felt as I did, that we were donating to help out the reddit team rather than Conde Nast.

I have no interest in paying for reddit on a regular basis and cannot imagine any feature or service they could add that would make me change my mind. A donation to give the reddit team an opportunity to get their heads above water and start making positive progress was what I signed up for.

The last 6 months to a year, reddit has had regular scaling/feature/etc. problems and the communication from the admins and devs has always had the same tone of overwhelm. I'd love to see a site I use so often and enjoy so much get out of that hole and though I don't see this as being the way I wish them the best of luck.

(A bit off-topic but EC2 sticks out as the big money sink they need to fix, the last number I remember them quoting was $200,000 a year for their EC2/S3 usage. I would have loved to hear the money was going to outfitting a few racks and moving things back out of the cloud.)

CTR: 1.5% including content network (2.5% search only) I'm being a bit cheap recently and staying around 3rd or 4th position (avg CPC $0.30-$0.60).

With adwords I focus on ad quality and click through rate over all else, the better you perform the more you are rewarded. Make sure you have enough impressions with well targeted keywords first and then over time adjust ads and phase out keywords based on performance.

Avoid tossing in the kitchen sink of keywords, do your research and make your list of keywords, focus a bit on the top and bit on the long tail (oh so much cheaper).