Marcelo Calbucci

    This is a funny coincidence (since I'm not a visionary), but it goes like this...

 

    Last week, I was having lunch with Dottie Hall, a Sr. Marketing executive with many years on the software space. At one point she asked me which software companies would I consider to be successful. No doubt in my mind: Adobe.

 

    Adobe has been a consistent software company, and that alone puts it ahead of the pack. Can you call Microsoft, Oracle or SAP consistent? Hardly. Software development has inconsistent cycles, inconsistent quality levels, inconsistent user experience, but not Adobe. It delivers all its line of products on a regular basis, each one building on the previous experience and extending it, at the same time  maintaining a reasonable quality level.

 

    Then, Dottie asked me what could Adobe do to jeopardize its position.

 

    I reasoned: When software companies collapse, fail or become irrelevant is usually because of misguided directions from management. Usually big shifts in direction, either because of research risk (too complex) or execution risk (too different).

 

    So, for me, the obvious answer to how could Adobe jeopardize their position was to become a service company, as in "software as a service" or "hosted services". 

 

    Bingo. Look at their announcement today of creating an online version of Adobe Photoshop.

 

    Do I think they will be dead in 5 years? Not really, but they are moving into uncharted territory for them. Even if they are the smartest people on the planet the risks are tremendous, from cannibalization of their product line to bottomless bugdet pits to make the service work.

 

    Let's talk again in 2010 to see how that went.

 

 

 

 

   

 

    Here is a partnership opportunity that just opened at Sampa....

 

    Do you want to be a key developer behind an up and coming Seattle-based Web 2.0 startup that has a unique angle on the latest Internet fire hose of user generated content? Join Sampa as a Sr. Engineer. The ideal person will be an energetic, risk seeking, experienced developer that has a proven track record of building great software experience. You will be responsible for designing, implementing, testing and releasing key elements of the Sampa architecture, including high performance/scalability/availability server side .NET systems, cross-browser AJAX and UI components and more, using a broad range of technologies. You should have deep experience with .NET, C# and networking. Knowledge of DHTML, JavaScript and SQL is a plus. You'll be a member of an energetic and passionate team trying to change the way everyday people express themselves on the web. We are looking for a team player who is driven to make a difference and willing to take the risk to earn the rewards that come with it. Send your resume to jobs@sampa.com and see if *you* can make a *real* difference to millions of users.

 

 

 

    Hillel wrote on his blog today:

"...an unusual number of people engaged in the business of making software...[would] really like to make a movie..."

 

    Oh, oh! You've got me.

 

    The explanation he gives is something that I realized on my first year in college. Very few people got that, but software is an art form. Yes, I've been told during parties in college that I was too drunk and I should go home.

 

    I had a meeting with Hillel last Friday, and I don't recall telling him that, but I have videos that I produced that go back to 1986. Me and my friend Suzana Canuto (which is also a software engineer and left MSFT last year) wrote a feature screenplay. I also wrote two shorts, produced a couple of 1 minute videos, and, to this day, I continue to do quite a bit of editing, mostly to compile DVDs of my son's growth.

 

    I've met a few engineers that were into art, from music to painting to movie making and quite a few writers (novel/romance).

 

    One thing that I love about the software business is the instant reward. If you build a neat device, how long does it take to get to your customers hands? If you paint a beautiful landscape, how many copies can you produce and how many people will be able to see it*? Software is different. Since the early days, you could distribute your software through BBS, and then the Internet.

 

    Not only that, but software, IMHO, is one of the best art forms there is because it is interactive. It changes, it expands, it evolves.

 

 

   

*PS: ImageKind has made the process of distributing art 100 times more efficient.

 

 

    I just thought it would be interesting to list what I've been using on my browser. I'm very careful with not installing too much stuff because it can slow down the perf, but these are the tools that I can't live without:

 

On Internet Explorer:

 

• Alexa Toolbar: I just love to know the rank of sites that I visit.
• Compete Toolbar: Just like Alexa, but they give me a 1-click to my own sites information and they have this "Trust" level for sites (a bit of anti-phishing help)
• Fiddler: A neat HTTP tracer. This is for developers only.
• DevToolbar: An easy way to check and manipulate your page's HTML. (for web developers only)

 

On Firefox I use:

 

• Compete Toolbar: Same as IE's compete (I wish there was Alexa for FF)
• MeasureIt: An extension that let's me measure the distance between two pixels.
• Web Developer: This is a must have tool for any... well... web developer! Like the DevToolbar for IE, it let's you see and do a lot of interesting things with your HTML.
• Console 2: A great extension to filter JavaScript errors.

 

    Any other tool/extension that I should be using?

 

 

 

    There are a lot of sites on the Internet running Google Adsense, you know, the Google Ads that appear on sites that are not from Google.

 

    Google always has a message on those ads saying "Ads by Google".  If you go to my previous blog post (When a user misspell his email address) on the top Google Ad you'll see "Ads by Gooooooogle".

 

    Today I went to LinkedIn and I was looking for somebody when I saw an ad for Google's GMail. The first thing I noticed was the ad was a video. Never seen that before. Then I realized it was an Ad for GMail (it was not clear).

 

     This is a screenshot of a regular Text Ad on LinkedIn:

 

 

    Notice that it clear starts with "Ads by Google".

 

    Here is another Ad from Google, but this time an Image:

 

 

    Not as clear as before, but the "Ads by Google" disclaimer is there at the bottom (it would be better to be consistent at the top of the ad)

 

    Finally, here is a Google video ad for GMail:

 

 

 

    Nope, it doesn't say it is an Ad.

 

    When I worked on MSN Search, there was an FCC probe into search engines and their paid-links (a.k.a. sponsored links) practices in the sense of not misleading users into clicking on ads without them knowing it was ads.

 

    Afraid of some FCC regulation, the big search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL) decided to clearly label the Ads links. Most of them already did that, but reinforcing it helped the FCC leave us alone.

 

    Now, Google sometimes does things that either are evil or stupid. Since they claim to "do no evil", this is an obvious case of a stupid decision on not disclaiming on their on Google Adsense program that this video is an ad.

 

    What you think?

 

 

 

 

 

    All notifications emails coming out of a Sampa registration process use the "sampa" alias. So if somebody uses a bad email address like "DontExist @yahoo.com" and it bounces, it goes directly into my inbox.

 

    We always had our share of bad emails. Usually 5-10% of people that signup for Sampa use a bad email address. But on the last 4 weeks or so, the number had grown to 10-15% per day of bad email addresses.

 

    I always keep an close eye on it because we had problems with AOL and Rediff blocking all our emails (they thought we were a spam server).

 

    So I went to do a close analysis of one week of bad emails.

 

    Some surprises, some not. We had 4 categories of mistakes:

1. People using fake email address, like "fake @fake.com" or "test @test.com"
2. People misspelling the domain, like "joe @ yhoo.com"
3. People misspelling their alias, like "jeo @ yahoo.com" (intended joe @yahoo.com)
4. People using a Sampa address, like "joe @sampa.com" or "joe @sampasite.com".

     For #1, there is not much we can do except clarify that the email must exist. So we changed our language on the website. Before it said you must enter a "valid email address", now it says "an existing email address".

 

    For #2, we do a DNS lookup now for every email address. If the guy types xyz@yhoo.com we will flag it, unless, of course, the domain was registered by somebody (at that happens a lot for misspellings of Yahoo, Hotmail, GMail, AOL, etc.)

 

    For #3, there is not much we can do. Yahoo never tells if an email exists during an SMTP session. Nor does AOL. Hotmail does tell you that. Don't know about GMail. Doing that test is hard because I need to find out the MX record for that domain, then do a "special" SMTP conversation to figure it out. It is quite a bit of code and I don't have the time now.

 

    For #4, we just flat out prohibit the use of our own domains, like "@sampa.com", "@sampasite.com", "@brainuse.com", "@inthesphere.com", etc. That is a problem because we cannot use our own work emails to sign up for Sampa (but we have an easy workaround).

 

     What have the results been? We don't know yet because I only have two days of data. I want to compare a full week to see the number of people that registered end up confirming their addresses or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

   The video of my presentation at Ignite Seattle just went up. You can see it here:

http://ignitenight.blip.tv/file/154421/

    It is interesting to compare what you think happened and what actually happened on the presentation. In other words, the video doesn't feel as good as I thought the presentation had been. Maybe is my voice that sounds so different when I'm talking versus when I'm watching myself talk.

 

    One of the biggest problems of consolidating reports from multiple sources in synchronizing the timestamps. When you talk about a Web-based business that is quite relevant.

    If each report is on a different timezone, it will be pretty hard to define what is "Saturday", or "Tuesday", or 5 other terms.

    Very early on Sampa, I decided that everything that we log or store would be in Universal Time Coordinates (UTC), sometimes also known as GMT*. We knew that our users would be world-wide, and we didn't want to have to deal with timezone and daylight saving time when dealing with logs and reports.


    Now, not everything that we do at Sampa is managed by us. Like many other web businesses we use Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliates, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, etc. All Google Services (and Amazon as well) use GMT-8 (Pacific Standard Time) and that is a pain.

    We can't really aligned what Google tell us about clicks, impressions and revenue with our other data.

    Now, don't get me wrong, Sampa is too small of a company to cause Google to change is timestamp to UTC, however, I'm sure that are hundreds of thousands of companies world-wide that would very much appreciate that change. Just go to the Google Groups talking about Adsense, Adwords and Analytics to how many people are asking to be able to change timezones.

 

    Today when I was driving back from lunch I saw the weekly BlueDot email telling me my friends have added new dots. It made me realize that my friends never get these emails with my name on it because I never add anything to my BlueDot account. Nor I add anything to my del.icio.us account... But wait, I also don't add anything to my own browser's bookmark.

 

    I have a set of bookmarks on my browser that I've been carrying them for ages. There is the first group, which I call "News" and it contains 6 links (Bloglines, a brazilian newspaper, MSNBC, News.com and Technorati). Then I have a group called "My" which are links to all the sites that I've built to family and for myself; and finally a group called "Banking" where I have a link to AmEx, Bank of America and Citibank.

 

    That is it. Those are the bookmarks that I have at work and at home.

 

    The reality is that I've been using bookmarks as shortcuts to things that I use a lot. It is way faster for me to click once to get to my bank's website than to type the URL. I don't use them to remember interesting things that I've seen in the past.

 

    I read a lot of stuff out of the Internet. Most of the time, I digest things right there and then. If I don't have the time, I'll either email myself with the link or keep a tab open on my browser waiting to be read.

 

    I wonder how many people go back to their bookmark to visit things they've added years ago. This is like your email inbox. If it wasn't important enough to be dealt in a few weeks you're unlikely to go back to it.

 

    Sure, you can keep an email or save a bookmark for future reference, but I have the browser History, and, more importantly, search engines. If something is of enough interest to me, I just remember the key terms and I'll be able to find that content for on the Internet.

 

    The other reason to use BlueDot or del.icio.us is to share bookmarks with others. But I've been using the ol' email so long that it is hard to change a habit. I also don't want my friends to have to subscribe to my bookmarks and have to do all the filtering. I'm the filter, so when I see an interesting video on YouTube that might interest Joe, but not Jane, I will send it to Joe only and Jane gets the benefit of having less uninteresting stuff to deal with.

 

    The final aspect of social bookmarking is discoverability of new stuff. That is useful and from time to time I do use that.

 

    Now, I can see why so many people are different than me, hence the success of del.icio.us.

 

 

    The event had 21 presenters, ranging from super geeky (MapReduce from Barry Brumitt) to life style (How to eat out by Hillel Cooperman). The quality of the slides and the presentations varied widely as well.

 

    It made me realize one important thing: Never, ever, over-rehearse!!!

 

    I'm not talking about myself because I don't have time to over-rehearse. I'm talking about some of the presenters that clearly did that.

 

    That quality of a great presentation, IMHO, is flow of information. It means two things: people get the key point on each slide, and slides move from one to another in a progressive cohesive way.

 

    When you over-rehearse, you usually add too much information and says phrases that look beautiful on paper but look 'posh-y' when you are standing up and giving the talk. Nobody talks like that. It also causes a lot of "ah" and "um" coming from your mouth, because you are using that to go to the back back of your mind and remember what is the next thing you have to say. If you have to do that, the flow is not right.

 

    Another one... Reading from a piece of paper... Ummm.... It's bad. The only person that I see pull that of was Jon Roberts from Ignition Partners when he was talking about how you scale a Startup. But he wasn't reading from a paper. He just had it as a reference to remember the order of the ten things. And he had no slides.

 

    Finally, on "screenwriting-world" they say the phrase "show not tell". It means that instead of you writing a character saying "I'm tired", you write a paragraph that once becomes movie will show him tired. Same thing for presentations. Can you do a PPT that doesn't have a single word in it? Maybe that is extreme, but if you are reading bullet points why don't you just sit on the side and let me read it by myself.

 

    I didn't stay for all the talks because I was tired and not feeling well. But here are some points:

 

 

• Matthew Maclaurin (MS Research) on Programming for Fun/Children/...
  This was a very interesting topic. Logo was the first language that I learned when I was 11. I think it is super cool what he is doing. The talk was good as well.
  
• Elisabeth Freeman (Author of Head First Series) on How To Write a Technical Book That Doesn't Put Your Readers to Sleep
  I love this book series. It is very good. She is very smart.
  
• Avi Geiger on Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs
  Brady was right. This talk did open my mind to a lot of things. Avi makes lots of good points about how much power computers are consuming in the US and how improvements in perf could save energy. Microsoft should take a look at this.
  
• Ryan Steward (ZDNet's Universal Desktop, Threecast) on The Rich Internet Application Space.
  It was a good summary of the different types of technology that exist and are coming out. Slides had too much text. I wish he would had given a screenshot of each technology being used on the real-world.
  
• Nancy White on What the Bleep is a Community Technology Steward.
  I phased out. Didn't get what she was trying to say and by the 2nd minute (remember it is just 5 minutes) I stopped paying attention.

 

On the second set of talks, we had:

 

• Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures) on Elevator Pitches.
  I know Hans and we bump on each other every Entrepreneur or Geek event in Seattle. He had to change his talk last minute because he was going to talk about some real world examples. Turns out that some of the companies are in stealth mode and he couldn't use that so he had to change things. The information on his talk was great, the delivery could have been better.
  
• Sarah Davies (Freedom for IP) on Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom.
  To summarize her talk she says that copyright prevents freedom of culture. Sorry, I don't buy it. I'm all in favor of GPL, Create Commons et al (even use on some of my stuff), but I didn't buy half the arguments she was making.
  
• Lars Liden (Techtown) on Web Technology to Help Children with Autism and Kurk Brockett (Identity Mine) on A Look at Windows Presentation
  I missed this two talks because I was the the corner of the stage waiting for my turn to get up.

    Then it came my turn, but I can't comment on my performance until I see the video.

 

    After that I left.

 

 

 

 

 

   The place was crowded. The crowd was awesome. Some of the talks were outstanding (some not so much), and I didn't make a fool of myself when I talked. By any definition, the Ignite Seattle 2 was a success.

 

   Met a few old friends, like Brady Forrest (one of the organizers of Ignite), Josh Petersen (43 Things), Hans Omli (Shoestring Venture), John Cook (Seattle P-I), Krishnan Iyer ("stealth" startup).

 

    I also had the opportunity of meeting Hillel Cooperman (Jackson Fish Market) face to face, which gave a fun talk about where to eat when you are not on your town and how to order great food (he writes a blog about food). Hillel left Microsoft recently and we've been talking to him about cooperation with Sampa.

 

    I've met a few other people, like the OATV guys, Bryce Roberts and Mark Jacobsen. I had the opportunity to talk pitch them on Sampa. And when they tell you they "see the problem and know there is a need for the solution" it really means a lot. It means the concept passed the sniff test for "not dumb idea", but then, we have to prove that we are the team that can execute and conquer that market.

 

Some extra feedback on the event:

 

• Brady Forrest was extraordinary! The guy 'owned' the event, in a good way. He was calm, focused, relaxed and having fun. I've organized events before. So stressful that sometimes you don't enjoy it the party.
  
• The accoustics was good. Not great, but not bad either. I've done talks like this before to hundreds of people in a bar setting that only the ten people in front of you can really hear you. This one, I'm pretty sure people could hear all over the room.
  
• The place was too packed. When I arrived at around 8pm there was no way to find people because you couldn't move. By 9:30pm things were a bit better. This is a networking event (dare I say a 'social networking' event?) It is important to have space to walk around, meet people without the need to push people to get through or have to yell your name when having a conversation.
  
• I wish I had met more entrepreneurs. I don't like name tags, I think they are horrible (note: this event didn't have that, thank you!), but there should be a wall with posters of all the startups in Seattle. I want to know about them. Or some other way for you to know who is there.
  
• More girls than I would expect. Which is a good thing. It is my view that software doesn't have enough women touch on it.

 

    Will I be there next time? Absolutely!

 

    Maybe I'm not the first one to notice this... wait... I'm not the first one to notice this for sure, but it is very interesting and relevant nonetheless.

    I use a feed reader (Bloglines) to read more than 180 blogs every single day. Lots of noise, some good stuff here and there. But on the last few days I need to find more information about company X, or VC Y, and, as expected, I found several blog entries on those companies and VCs. But the blog posts were not that insightful.

    For example, on TechCrunch, most of the posts are neutral, some positive, some negative. The interesting stuff is happening on the comments... OMG! How did I miss that before. There are disgruntled employees, premium customers, former partners, current employees, happy customers, sad customers, everybody talking about the company and the dirty little secrets that are way more interesting.

    Another blog that has lots of good anonymous, thus juicy, comments is John Cook's Venture blog.



   

 

    For the 3 people that read this blog, I reminder that I'll be giving a 5 minute (!) talk at Ignite Seattle tonight. The event seems to be very cool and a lof of interesting people will be there.

 

Location: CHAC (Capitol Hill Arts), Corner of 12th Ave and E. Pine St.

 

The speaker list is below. I'm the on the second set (9:30 PM).

 

------

 

 

First Set of Talks (8:30 PM)

1. Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Radar, Ignite!) - Greetings & Salutations
2. Matthew Maclaurin - (Microsoft Research) - Programming for Fun/Children/Hobbyists/Hackers
3. Elisabeth Freeman (Author in the Head First Series, Works at Disney Internet Group) -The Science Behind the Head First Books: or how to write a technical book that doesn’t put your readers to sleep
4. Scott Kveton (JanRain) - OpenID
5. Avi Geiger - “Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs” (Brady’s note - trust me this is going to be an eye-opening talk)
6. Ryan Stewart (ZDNet’s Universal Desktop; Threecast) - The Rich Internet Application Space: Everything from where AJAX fits to Apollo to WPF to the Flash Platform
7. Nancy White (Full Circle Associates) - What the Bleep is a Community Technology Steward?

Second Set of Talks (9:30 PM)

1. Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures)- Elevator Pitches and Parallel Entrepreneurship
2. Sarah Davies (Freedom For IP) - Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom
3. Lars Liden (Teachtown) - Utilizing Web Technology to Help Children with Autism
4. Kurt Brockett (Identity Mine) - A Look at Windows Presentation Foundation
5. Marcelo Calbucci (Sampa) - Dr. Watson for AJAX
6. Lee Lefever (The World Is Not Flat) - Adventures from a Year of Multimedia Travel Blogging: A few inspiring stories from a year of travel blogging across 29 countries that produced 500+ blog posts, 24 original videos and 14,000 photos.

7. Barry Brumitt (Google) - MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

Third Set of Talks (10:30 PM)

1. Ellie Lum (R.E.Load Bags) - “How R.E.Load Makes Their Bags”
2. Leo Dirac (Rhapsody) - Transhuman technology trends and their implications for a theory of morality

3. Deepak Singh (business|bytes|genes|molecules) - An Open Scientific Future
4. Mike Acuri (Ontela) - Escaping the Empire: how to leave a big company
5. Heater Ralph - Art or science? A multi-person pogo stick
6. Jordan Mitchell (CEO, OthersOnline) - Distributed Social Networking and a New Metaphor for Search
7. Corprew Reed (American Society for Information Science & Technology) - What the heck is the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASIS&T?

 

 

    Flixster is just another social network, except that they are not.

 

    Most social networks focus on you, while Flixster revolves around movies. A lot of people love movies. Just check how many people go to RottenTomatoes and IMDB.

 

    I have no idea how they did it, but in less than 1 year they have millions of users. Their growth is closer to YouTube growth more than any other company I seen before.

 

    But...

 

    This is a niche/vertical play. They can even add blog, and photo albums and other things to compete more with MySpace and Facebook, but they are branding themselves as a social network for movie buffs, and that has a lower ceiling.

 

    I won't matter much because they will be bought soon by some studio or major media outlet.

 

    By the way, their content is a bit addictive for the first 30 minutes. Can't talk about more than that because I wouldn't sign up for such a service.

 

 

    I've been giving a very short talk (5 minutes) at Ignite Seattle on February 13th. My talk, so far, will be about tracking errors on AJAX-based sites. Very geek!

 

 

 

 

 

    I've been contacted by O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). They are coming to Seattle to look for a few good Startups to invest. Check out their website for what kind of investment they usually make.

 

    If you are interest, feel free to contact them directly or shoot me an email and I'll forward to them.

 

 

 

    This week has been completely out of the ordinary for me. First, this is my son's transition week into a daycare. He is 1 year old, and 4 out of 5 mornings I had to take him there and stay anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours there. A few days I had to pick him up as well, early. Which left me working less than 6 hours per day.

 

    Then, on Tuesday morning I came across a customer complaint about a layout issue. Heck, I've made a major fix for a bug last week, what it could be? The fix broke his layout. Turns out that I was a deadlock with the current layout design. There were two scenarios that could not co-exist. Either one worked, or the other. This is a clear sign of poor design, since there was no way to fix in the implementation.

 

    So I decided to bite the bullet. I had been planning on re-designing that feature anyway, and took a deep breadth and coded non stop for six hours. Finished the feature and started testing it. The problem with changes on layout features is that you cannot automate the test because it requires you to look at a page to see if it is ok. With more than 30 variations on Columns Layout, it took me more 6 hours just to do basic testing. I end up working until 10PM.

 

    Then, the rest of the week I was working on a feature to make it easier for users to invite others to see their site, or the new content on their site, in a semi-automated way. The problem with that is Norton Anti-Virus is a pain in the ass. This application hooks into the SMTP port and does some stupid things, and I can't send emails from my computer. I tried to disable that feature with no luck.

 

    Now, I decided I had enough distractions trying to get my Dev machine to send email so I'm un-installing Norton Anti-Virus (Protection Center) and installing some other product, I'm leaning towards CA's eTrust.

 

 

    No, you have not gone crazy. They did appear on the blog.

    I tried to use Sampa's "Post by Email" feature to forward a funny email I've received to my blog. Turn out there was two bugs that preventing it from happening.

    First, it was not necessarily a bug, but the content of the email was not properly formatted HTML, so the system rejected it. More on this later.

    Second bug was that the email came with a bunch of pictures. When you send an email to Sampa with a bunch of pictures, the pictures are saved automatically to an album (that you choose), and then the blog post is created. So, the pictures were saved, but once the system tried to save the blog post it failed because of the invalid content. The bug here is that we should validate the content before we save the pictures.

    About that first bug, it happens because Outlook/Word generate an amazingly junk HTML. Sampa doesn't like that because it would litter the users website. I create a "WordCleanup" method to take care of that, but apparently it is not working well. I'll investigate more and put a fix soon.

    There you have it. I'm not a Barbie collector.

 

    I just received this email on our "press" alias. Take a look and tell me what you think...

---

From: Jennifer [xxxx@ecyberscreen.com]

To: press@sampa.com

Subject: articles about how to create a web page for sampa.com

 

I'm assuming that sampa.com (Create a Website for Free) is your site.

 

I'm doing research for a company that will be writing an article about how to create a web page. This company is considering featuring your site in this article. If your company is selected, they would place the article on their popular, online publication.

 

I would need to hear from you soon if you're interested in being featured. You can either reply to this email or call 877-838-9862. Leave a message and I'll forward it to them so they can return you call.

 

Thanks,

Jennifer

 

ECyberScreen

6245 Bristol Parkway, Suite #101

Culver City, CA 90230-6983

877-838-9862

---

    I looks like spam. They extracted key phrases from the page (or a search engine, maybe del.icio.us?), to make it look very appealing and send an email to press@[domain]. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure they will charge a PR fee, or publication fee or some other scam like that.

 

    Over the past two years I received dozens of press emails and they never look like that. Usually a reporter says that he is going to do a story about X and he is interested in knowing if what we are doing fits into that. They always, always say who they are (I can find them on the web) and which publication they work for.

 

    Spam Status: Confirmed!