Mike-O-Matic

Several weeks ago, I wrote a few articles about the challenges faced by the Digg, Reddit, and the other user-submitted news sites. They disproportionately reward content submitted by influential users regardless of the objective quality of that content, but can’t really fix this without throwing up hurdles that could stunt their popularity.
There are some […]

Once I was on a project implementing a helpdesk application for a non-profit association. The client had long employed customer service people, but didn’t have an computer-based system in place to help them with their job, only endless streams of email and reports from the phone system’s call-center application.
The conversations with this customer were […]

Excellent (and well-timed) post at Mr. Angry’s blog today.  Titled When is Workplace Discretion the Better Part of Valour, it describes some ways of handling prickly situations at work in which you need to stand up against a particular proposal without becoming a corporate casualty.
Although Mr. Angry describes situations where it doesn’t work so well, […]

Starting a new business (or a new anything, really) is really one of the more challenging activities somebody can undertake, particularly when they are doing it for the first time. There comes a point when you realize it is just you and your partners, and you are suddenly responsible for creating something out of nothing.
Depending […]

A few days ago I wrote a post about botnets and spam and have seen several similar posts out there in the blogosphere. Many of them advocate a legal solution to the problem, which I totally agree with.
The only tricky part is defining what spam is.
Legal solutions are necessary in some cases, […]

When I was younger, my family used to move a lot. My father worked for a giant shipping company, and every time he was promoted we had to pick up and move to some other port city. By the time I was in 7th grade, I had lived in about 10 or 11 different houses […]

Interesting article on eWeek the other day about the state of the war on botnets.  To those who are unfamilar, botnets are groups of hacked PCs that can be controlled remotely by malicious groups to do basically anything they want.
In most cases, the bot herders rent the botnets to spammers, but Stewart and others have […]

In response to my post last week called 5 Reasons Why Recent Graduates Should NOT Found Startups, Leon at Solatis Internet asked if I had any advice for his situation. From his comment:
My problem at the moment is that I’m pretty arrogant (in a good way ;-)) .. I cannot seem to find someone […]

Good article over at Mike Taber’s blog, called How to Avoid Losing $40,000. He tells a story of a consulting engagement gone bad and a few of the lessons that he learned from the process.
I had a similar story from a few months back involving a smaller yet not insignificant amount of cash.
I received […]

Big news this week as Google took a major plunge and purchased everyone’s favorite user-submitted video site, YouTube, for $1.6 billion. The reaction around the internet seems to be generally positive, except for the smug video produced by YouTube’s Chad and Steve.
Some people have asked why Google would purchase the service when they had […]