Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

We recently got SpamAssassin set up with a ruleset that seems to be working fairly well. Not only has this made my inbox much nicer to look at, but it has also created a new game in our office. We now have the "Spam Olympics". What is that you ask? Well, each piece of spam is given a score by the SpamAssassin judging bots. We just watch those scores, looking for the top marks from the algo. Initially, we were looking at 30 somethings as being good, but it quickly moved into the 40 range, and we had a few break 60 over the weekend. Not exactly the most productive game, but at least it makes the SPAM worth double checking for false positives. I wonder how many other offices partake in the "Spam Olympics"...

Matt was reading his weekly Woot email today and had to send me a link to this support article about an error that had surfaced. Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password that meets these requirements in both text boxes. Well, if I saw that error and had to choose a new password, I'd have to begin it with 1hat3m1cr0s0ft4mak1ngm3ch00s3th1sr3a11y10ngpa55w0rd (translates to "I hate Microsoft for making me choose this really long password" - for those that don't speak l33t). After that, it's anyone's guess. Before someone starts calling me out, yes I know that this isn't supposed to be an interactive password, and that the encryption process makes them much longer than what you type in. But the error message doesn't exactly state that this is the case, so my password would have to start with that. If enough people actually chose a password that ...

Being the CTO of an online company, I am aware that we don't want to keep our eggs in one virtual basket. I've done a lot of things to broaden our reach, including PPC advertising on Google, Overture, and Kanoodle. Shopping engines have become an integral part of our marketing mix as well. I've also worked on our organic search rankings in MSN, Yahoo, and Google. Ask Jeeves is on our radar as well, but the whole Hubs and Authorities makes it very important to have a lot of content, which we just don't have anyone to write currently. When the Google update "Florida" hit us back in 2003, we realized we had a problem. Our sales were pretty well gone overnight. That's not a good feeling. At that point, I started looking to see what we could do, and I attended my first "Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo" in New York. After some trial and error, we are diverse enough that we totally missed a problem recently, which is a problem. While it...