This video of how George W. Bush is controlled explains a lot!
via B.L. Ochman
In a comment on my previous mail about how not to complain, SilentBob pointed me to a thread on Boards.ie.
In this thread it says that an English company called SwitchMedia threatened Boards.ie with legal action:
Their first interaction with us was to threaten Boards.ie with legal action. Before we could even respond we got a legal letter demanding not only the removal of the offending content but also the removal of the entire thread.
This appears to have happened after someone posted that SwitchMedia are very expensive (SwitchMedia are an English hosting company who have recently opened an Irish operation). SwitchMedia’s response to that was to issue a legal letter demanding that the thread in question be removed, it seems.
Boards.ie is one of the largest Irish websites and has an enormous community of loyal posters and readers. Threatening Boards.ie with legal action as a first resort is not the wisest course of action if one is trying to grow a brand and build a business in Ireland. I hadn’t heard of SwitchMedia before this and my impression of them now is far from positive.
Furthermore, it is also claimed that SwitchMedia mines the records of the Companies Registration Office for details of new businesses. Seemingly SwitchMedia uses this information to target potential clients using direct marketing techniques. If this is the case then SwitchMedia are engaging in quite dubious business practices.
Would you trust someone who engages in these kinds of business practices to host your site?
[Disclosure - I do a little hosting myself. I host around 11 sites (including three or four of my own) mostly for friends and very few of the sites I host have received any bill for the service!]
UPDATED TO ADD:
Someone sent me a copy of a SwitchMedia invoice (below). €129 plus VAT per annum for an Irish domain name? Seems a tad expensive to me!
Michele Neylon put up a post last night, ostensibly about how not to do PR, but really it was about how some of his competitors are getting legalistic with clients. I think.
The post was one of the more cryptic posts I have read in a long time. Seemingly someone somewhere, who may be a competitor of Michele’s, sent a legal letter to someone for something. You with me so far?
It goes on. Somebody else, who is also a competitor (may or may not be the same competitor) engages in sharp business practices and may have also sent out a legal letter (this is not clear).
Jeez Michele. If you have got something to say, just say it. Don’t hide behind “somebody somewhere did something to somebody”.
Either that or say nothing.
I have been playing a bit doing some research on YouTube. I realise YouTube has been around a while and I have watched many videos on it but I hadn’t looked into uploading video to YouTube until now.
YouTube is a site which allows you to upload video clips (in the same way that Flickr and Zooomr allow you to upload photos) and share them online.
I setup an account and uploaded some quick videos.
Why am I playing with it? Well, my wife is Spanish and her family are always interested to see how our children are doing. I can take a video of the kids using my camera phone, copy to the computer, and upload to YouTube in a few short minutes. Each video gets its own url and I don’t get hit for hosting or bandwidth charges.
The interface is very straightforward and it seems to accept most video formats.
This has great possibilities for anyone interested in online video.
I see Michael Hampton has released the latest version of his Bad Behaviour plug-in for WordPress. Bad Behaviour is a plugin for:
blocking malicious activity, including blog/wiki spam, e-mail address harvesting, automated cracking attempts, and more. It does all of this looking only at the HTTP request headers; for POST data, the content of the spam is not analyzed at all
I have been using Referrer Karma for this previously and it has proven quite useful. I’m going to try Bad Behaviour for a time now and see which of the two I prefer. One point in Bad Behaviour’s favour is that it has an admin page accessible from within WordPress. With Referrer Karma you need to do your administration seperately.
Via James.
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