Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com Ryan Jones Blogs About Internet Culture, Marketing, SEO, & Social Media

Somebody I was friends with in elementary school just passed away recently. I never spoke to him after elementary school, even though we graduated together.

Anyway, it was a wake up call to me. I’m only 27, I’m way too young to be thinking about death – yet I am.

That’s some scary stuff that most people my age just don’t want to deal with right now, but we probably should. Hell, my dad is around 60 and if he’s got any plans, I sure don’t know about them.

Thinking about death just isn’t fun, so I can see why many of us just don’t think about it.

What about you? Have you made any plans for your death?

Update: Apparently Steve was the 3rd member of my graduating class to pass on. We lost one to a motorcycle accident, one to cancer, and one to drugs. It’s sad – we’re too young to die.

Back when all the hype was new, I pre-ordered a copy of Spore from Amazon. Now that I’ve got it, I noticed it has the Rootkit DRM installed on it. Basically, installing Spore installs what can be described as a virus along with it. This virus runs in the background every time you start up your computer, and it doesn’t get removed if you uninstall the game.

As if that’s not restrictive enough, EA also limited the game to 3 installs – each one phoning home to check if you’re allowed to install it. For people like me who still play games that are well over 10 years old (for nostalgic value) that means I eventually won’t be able to play Spore. Who’s to say that in 4 years EA will keep up the verification server? That will render my copy of the game useless.

I’m not buying Spore, like I thought I did. I’m only renting it.

I honestly don’t know if I should install this or not, as the only way to remove the rootkit is to re-format your computer.

What would you do?

By the way, I’m not alone. There’s over 1500 negative reviews on Amazon.

I’m in a very cynical and nasty mood today – perhaps related to the DDOS attack that’s happening against one of my websites right now. I think I’ve got it handled though (if you target me at the domain level, i’m just going to re-route all that traffic back to you :))

anyway… I’ve been looking at the TechCruch50 and it seems that most of the companies fail from the same thing most startups fail from: they don’t solve a problem and they have no path to revenue.

let’s take a few examples:

blah girls sounds like nothing more than a comic or a cartoon. How is this new? This is nothing special.

Tweegee is aimed at “tweens” which tells me 2 things: actual tweens will want nothing to do with it, and they won’t get more than $0.25 CPM for any ads on it. Tweens don’t have money, and as MySpace has proven, they don’t click ads or buy stuff from them. They also don’t want to be tweens, they want to do what the older kids are doing. All this will do is drive more people toward MySpace and Facebook.

Banking for kids? You’re kidding me right? Kids don’t have jobs or money. My middle school tried this once, and it failed miserably – despite them even giving us $5 and a free pencil for opening an account.

hangout should go hang out with Tweegee (and maybe even Shyrk too) so they can all fail miserably together. Of course I haven’t seen it yet, but it looks like a SecondLife ripoff. They’re claiming without privacy fears and what not, but come on can you really tie into social sites and eliminate privacy concerns? That’s a bigger oxymoron than “Microsoft Works” or “Airline Food.”

I’m not really sure what LiveHit does, but they use cool words like “velocity-based tracking and dynamic-predictive modeling.” It’d be nice if they told us what they actually do, but I know how some VCs have a tendency to favor fancy words and powerpoint presentations over actual business models – so hey, take your money now while you can.

Quant the News is another one of those companies that “was formed to develop and deploy advanced textual sentiment analysis applications that leverage its unique, AI-based natural language processing and data mining technology.” Again, some great fancy words that don’t tell me a damn thing about what you do.

Seriously, every time Techcrunch50 and Demo roll around I feel like starting a bunch of companies based around a nonsensical domain name and a few social APIs and seeing how much money I can get. Somebody else’s API + Adsense is NOT a business model. When are we going to see something that actually does something useful.

Here’s the questions I’d like to see them all answer:

1.) What unique unsolved problem are you solving?
2.) What’s your path to revenue (and you can’t say adsense.)

If you’re thinking of investing in some of these companies I have a better offer for you. Give me the money, and in 12 months I’ll give you back 1/2 of what you gave me. I guarantee you’ll get more ROI with my plan.

If you’re like me, you pay most bills right away when they come in the mail. You’ve probably seen all those “renew your subscription to” letters come, and just paid them. It’s pretty standard. Have you ever looked at the little coupon though and compared it to the expiration date on your magazine?

For those who don’t know, your subscription expiration date is listed on the mailing address label of your magazine. If it’s not, then they’re violating US laws.

Anyway, the publishers must be wanting money lately, because last week I received renewal forms for MacLife, MacWorld, InformationWeek, and Sports Illustrated.

The only problem? My MacLife expires in 2010, MacWorld in october 09, information week in Febuary, and SI in 2011.

So why are they sending me renewal notices now? Simple: Most people will pay them. It’s technically not a scam, as they just increase my subscription length – but I’d rather hold on to the money myself instead of giving it to the publisher. Wouldn’t you?

I keep laughing at stupid news articles advising not to download Google Chrome because it’s just Google’s way of gathering more information about you.

If you’re a journalist working on such a post, please pay attention:

Chrome is open source – look at the code, you’ll see that it doesn’t send any such data to Google.

Despite this fact, I’ve still seen at least 15 articles from places like Wired, Guardian, computerworld, national business review, etc all claiming otherwise.

Do journalists not do research anymore? I know it’s fun to just run with whatever story sounds good, but next time you might want to make sure what you’re claiming is actually happening.

If you’re curious about what data Chrome actually sends, you can look at this post.

One of my friends just asked me where I read some of these crazy things I talk about from, well mostly RSS feeds that constantly flash across my browser while I’m working. Here’s what I’m reading (all links are to the RSS feeds)

Ted Dziuba – He’s a general asshole who used to work at Google and now runs pressflip. He’s good and telling you why certain web2.0 startups suck.

TheDailyWTF – Great stories about programming mishaps.

Techdirt – Mike usually has a great take on all things technical. Mostly patents, copyright, lawsuits, etc.

My Demoxi Pipe is a Yahoo pipe of all the privacy, security, and identity theft blogs that I monitor closely for work. I just realized that it may be interesting, so check it out. It’s also got some voting blogs there too.

Freaknomics blog. Hey, I loved the book and the blog is just as good. It’s just a shame that the NYT won’t let them publish a full feed. I hate going to the site to read it.

Matt Cutts is head of Google’s webspam team, but he also blogs about gadgets and other web culture stuff.

Fark pre-dates Digg in user submitted content, and is still vastly superior in humor.

Of course I read Slashdot and Wired too.

So that’s what I’m reading. What are you reading?