MarketWatch has an article that really makes me hate the internet. In the “old” days (pre-advertising networks) of the internet, so-called “review” sites could be reasonably expected to perform as advertised – review goods. The websites pretty much ran like magazines: they had to court advertisers and woo them with promises of compelling content that could draw viewership to view the ads. If you couldn’t sell any ads, you ended up shutting down.

Google AdSense, Amazon, and other advertising and affiliate networks have removed the legwork requirement of selling advertising; the business model has been reduced to:

• Buy a domain.
• Create a website.
• Link to a bunch of photos of products. Cut-and-paste a bunch of product descriptions.
• Wrap it all up in some nice CSS and Javascript eye-candy.
• Get written about (by other content-free websites like MarketWatch) and encourage more people to contribute their own content-free “content”.

Voilà: an instant, completely content-free, “review” site. This is certainly not much different from print magazines that are mostly advertising anyway, but the absence of the barrier of courting advertisers (all taken care of by the advertising and affiliate networks) enables these “review” websites to easily and completely subvert the consumer’s ability to actually find real product reviews with original content.

(The culprit is not Google, Amazon, et al; someone else would have come up with the ad-network idea anyway. The culprits are the bozos who actually use these websites and make them profitable, just like the bozos who make spamming profitable.)

Today during an especially strong gust of wind, my Brookstone umbrella turned inside-out. However, it was a very simple task to un-flip it back to its normal self, and I cheerfully walked by the trashcans with broken umbrellas stuffed into them. My umbrella is like a blade of grass that gracefully bends to the wind …

And with more rain and more inane blog postings comes more allergy-free days.

I’ve been using the Sage Firefox extension to read all of my RSS feeds, and I like it a lot. The one flaw in my use of it, which is more my fault than Sage’s fault, is that I use multiple computers throughout the day. During the workday, I’m at work. When I go home, I could be on the study desktop or the living room laptop. It’s easy to copy the list of Sage feeds from computer to computer, but it’s not possible to synchronize across computers its notion of “old” and “new” news.

Today I decided sacrifice my normal aversion to web-based services and switch full-time to a web-based RSS reader. Some of the ones I didn’t like:

• The Google reader easily wins the “buzz” factor, but it isn’t very usable. It follows the “labels” motif found in their GMail product (I like hierarchical folders, dammit), and it is somewhat wasteful of screen real estate. To be fair, it is still officially “beta”, but I don’t expect the “labels” UI motif to change.
• The My Yahoo! RSS feature isn’t very full-featured. All you get is “news headlines” integration with other news sources (headlines only, annoying click-through required to read text).

After an hour or two of fiddling around with various web-based readers, I settled on Bloglines, which I discovered through some of Tsaiberspace’s readers. It has a decent interface and is easy to migrate to from Sage:

• Bloglines’ interface very closely matches that of Sage: on the left, you get a Windows Explorer-like hierarchical user-configurable tree of folders, subfolders, and RSS feeds; on the right, you get the headlines and article content. It is easy to keep up with all your RSS feeds in one screen. Bloglines remembers which articles have been read and removes them from your view as you catch up on your reading. And of course, since you log in to a web-based account, there is no problem of re-reading old news when you change computers.
• Bloglines provides an OPML import/export facility to copy your RSS feeds from Sage into your Bloglines account.
• Various tools exist to simply administration of a Bloglines account. The third-party LiveLines Firefox extension overloads the Firefox “RSS” icon to integrate your RSS feed management with a good number of RSS managers (including Bloglines and Sage). Bloglines also provides a bookmark toolbar button (for non-Firefox users).
• You get AJAX-y keyboard navigation between feeds, folders, and articles.

This wouldn’t be a real blog if I didn’t have some bad things to say:

• Initial setup isn’t as snappy as it should be. The OPML import/export facility it there, but it’s kind of buried in the UI; you’ll have to click around to find it. But initial setup only happens once, so this isn’t really a deal-breaker.
• “Old” articles are too hidden. In Sage, “old” articles are distinguished from “new” articles by being displayed in a less-intense gray-ed out font color. In Bloglines, “old” articles are simply hidden from view. Suppose that you are completely caught up on all your RSS reading (such as on a slow workday). In Sage, you will still see the last few most-recent headlines in a light-gray font. In Bloglines, you just get a “there are no new items to display”, but it’s not very reassuring; I’m left feeling that I might have missed something while bouncing around between computers. Bloglines does allow you to click your way through to see “old” articles, but it does require clicking; it’s not as immediately intuitive as simply seeing the last most recent “old” articles to reassure you that you haven’t missed anything. Since I can’t think of a better way to reassure the reader that nothing is wrong, I can’t fairly call this a deal-breaker either.

I bought a Brookstone umbrella in 1995. It was very nifty for its time because not only was it automatic open, it was also automatic close (common today, but not so common back then). Yesterday, my trusty 11-year-old $30 umbrella finally gave up the ghost (as Murphy would have it, in the middle of the Harvard bridge, during drizzling rain, on my walk to work). Some spring must have broken or something, because the umbrella would no longer extend or open.

Their 100% satisfaction guarantee is also a product guarantee for “normal life of the product, under standard use”. I knew the umbrella had seen nothing but “standard use”, but I had no idea what the “normal life of the [umbrella]” was supposed to be. There was only one way to find out: I retrieved my 1995 receipt from my trusty envelope of “things with lifetime warranties” and went to the store to determine whether or not my umbrella was still covered under warranty.

The exchange went without a hitch, no questions asked, and not even a request for the original receipt! Of course, they don’t carry my model of broken umbrella anymore. The equivalent model that I received in exchange (“Super Size Family Umbrella”) is actually an upgrade; the new umbrella is lighter, and its canopy includes ventilation for graceful resistance to high-speed winds.

I am a happy Brookstone customer.

My sports-fan-related complaints are usually related to Boston Red Sox home games. After the games, the streets directly below my apartment are filled with the sounds of celebratory car honking, drunk yelling, etc.

We must have new tenants in my building or something. All evening I’ve been treated to the sounds of jumping up and down and hoots and hollers after nearly every basket from upstairs; I don’t remember this from years past.

I suppose I should be thankful there isn’t a baseball game tonight; otherwise I’d be getting the full sports-fan treatment in upstairs/downstairs stereo.