A Golf Blog

Darwin Award Nomination

Goes to Myron Tereshchuk ….he issued the seventeen million dollar extortion demand, and instructed the company to "make the check payable to Myron Tereshchuk."

Link to the full story.

Vote No On Moore

Dave Winer’s Michael Moore Post.
About the Michael Moore movie, Farenheit 9/11. I haven't seen it and I don't plan to. I'm an American before I'm a member of any political party, and I have more invested in the intelligence of our decision-making process than in any one decision. I'd rather re-elect Bush than elect a president based on Moore's politics.
Yesterday on NPR they played an excerpt where he confronts members of Congress and asks if they would send their children to fight in Iraq. What a ridiculous question. No parent will say yes to that question. You could have asked that question on the Capitol steps during World War II and they still wouldn't say yes. See how this cheapens the question of whether we should be in Iraq? In a smart world, we wouldn't be there, but it isn't because Congress people won't say yes when confronted by a camera crew.
Moore is the worst of American politics, an opportunist, an anti-intellectual.
Vote no on Moore.

Data Privacy

About a week ago, I did a post on Sabre getting Slashdotted. Sabre gave data conditionally to the TSA and when contractual items could not be resolved, the TSA returned the data, unused and unopened.

This set in motion story after story about the sanctity of personal information and how companies in the travel industry handle it.

Then, two days ago, The Customer Respect Group published a survey about the customer online experience with the 100 largest U.S. companies. Congratulations to Robert Scoble, the Microsoft uber blogger – Microsoft was rated #1.

What I found interesting was 93% of the companies have privacy policies – does anyone really read privacy policies? Perhaps we should.

Of that 93%, a whopping 58 percent of them share the data with affiliates, business partners or subsidiaries. Cookies used to gather personal information is found on 93 percent of the Web sites, but only 11 percent of them explain how to disable the feature.

Read the full article here.

Executive Blogging

Heard from Tim Bray at Ongoing that Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is online.

This is great for the corporate blogger – can’t wait to circulate this through Sabre.

User Registration Required

Two weeks ago there was a post on techdirt titled More Newspapers Sending Readers Elsewhere Via Registrations. The article noted that barriers (Registration) push potential readers to other sources for news and even if they do register, oftentimes it’s done with dirty data. It also referenced an article from The Detroit News which had an informal survey about requiring registration. The survey said, 1.5% would give them the information they wanted, 7.5% said it depended on how much information they wanted, and 91% said they would go elsewhere.

Then, late week there was a second post on techdirt titled There Are Alternatives To User Registration. Pretty much the same premise and there was also a link to a very good piece written by Steve Outing for the Editor and Publisher.

So, if 91% would go elsewhere, I wonder how my newspaper’s web site, Star-Telegram.com would respond to the mounting evidence that maybe registration wasn’t such a good idea. They require registration after viewing one article. I sent an email to their “Customer Advocate” who in turn sent it along to Craig Diebel the General Manager, Online. His response was predictably disappointing.

“It is very unlikely we will change our current policy to require registration…. There are pros and cons to registration as Steve Outing points out in the link you sent, but for us it is simple. In order to remain a free advertising supported website we have to do it. …advertisers buy from sites that know who their users are."

By the way, I registered. I figured since I was a print subscriber they already knew about me so it really didn’t matter.

Sabre Gets Slashdotted

Slashdot ran a piece from Wired about how the TSA obtained sensitive passenger information, including home phone numbers, credit card numbers and health data, without disclosing the transfers to travelers or asking their permission from 5 airlines and 2 global distribution systems. Health data?

Sent an email yesterday to our media relations team and this morning, on the Sabre Holdings web site is Sabre’s response.

Inventor of ASCII Dead at 84

The inventor of ASCII, Bob Bemer, died Tuesday evening at his home on Possum Kingdom Lake in north Texas.

Reported by the Associated Press in the Star Telegram. Subscription required.l

Airline Absurdities

There is a great post over at Dave Fox’s Outbursts web log. I doubt there’s many among us that don’t have a story or two to tell about airline experiences.

Yesterday, I got my regular but unscheduled email from Travelocity.com with some tips on fare deals to cities I might be interested in – Dallas / Fort Worth (DFW) to Phoenix, $300; DFW to Las Vegas, $207; DFW to Jacksonville FL., $243; and DFW to Tampa, $237.

Then I thought wait a minute, Las Vegas is at least a couple of hundred miles farther from DFW than is Phoenix so perhaps computing fares at cents per mile might give a better look into value. It’s 872 miles between DFW and Phoenix – that’s a whopping 34.4 cents per mile. It’s 1059 miles between DFW and Las Vegas – that’s 19.5 cents per mile.

This just in, the fare from DFW to Las Vegas just went to $153 – that translates to 14.4 cents per mile.

By the way, DFW to Tampa is 25.7 cents per mile and it’s 26.5 cents per mile to Jacksonville.

No wonder consumers are confused – I know it’s about competition but the rate between DFW and Phoenix seems a bit of a gouge.

Overheard

Every now and then someone comes up with a quotable beauty. Credit for these goes to a co-worker who was paying attention to the meeting conversation.

“We’re mostly done except for the working part of it.”

Or how about “we want to prove we can take the data across and do nothing with it”.

No names and no need to explain why. I’ll be on the lookout for more.

Blog Demographics

A recent survey indicates there will be 10 million hosted blogs by the end of 2004.

10 million blogs by year-end. OK, so not all are maintained and kept current but some are – I was surprised at how low the number was – approached a bit more than 1%. Sounds low but as blogging gains popularity, blogs will evolve into widely read sites about all sorts of subjects. And as that happens, blogs will become much more influential. I can’t wait to see how blogging will influence behaviors at the upcoming democratic and republican national conventions. Of course, that's assuming both parties can get their acts together.

And bloggings popularity and growth will be fueled by the growing population of “power blogs and bloggers”. They will be the roll models for the growing community and, like it or not, I see them as the catalyst for more acceptance into the differing corporate verticals.

I’ll bet the 1% that represents today’s active blogs becomes significantly higher as acceptance grows.