noisylime

Funny video showing almost all of the famous Internet People over the last 8-10 years. Enjoy!

This may be the most useful website you ever read about on TechCrunch.

New La Jolla, California startup ProQuo launches this evening to help you battle all the evil that is being perpetually perpetrated against your personal information. Get countless credit card offers, catalogs and other junk in your mailbox everyday? ProQuo intends to do what the NoCall list did for telesales calls for all that stuff, too. Which means, kill it off.

ProQuo users not only save the hassle of dealing with junk mail (and the resulting identity theft risk), but also benefit the environment by cutting down on the amount of paper that’s shoved in their face.

After registration you are presented with a dozen or so types of mailing lists (coupons, credit cards, catalogs, etc.). You can stop most of them with a single click. Others require printing out a form or going to another website. But at the end of the process, you can kill off a ton of unwanted mail.

The company was founded in July 2006 and has raised $5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. In the future, they plan to expand to give users more control over other types of personal information, including financial and medical records.

Note that we’ve also recently written about CatalogChoice, which focuses on stopping unwanted catalogs. Services we’ve covered which focus on stopping identity theft include TrustedID and LifeLock.

As an aside, in my interview with CEO Steven Gal, he mentioned that the five year anniversary of the Do Not Call Registry is coming up this January. Anyone who registered at the site when it first went live is in for a nasty surprise - the opt out is valid for only five years. If you wait until January to do it again, you’ll have to put up with thirty days of telesales calls while the request goes active. And telesales companies are gearing up to make your life a living hell for those thirty days.

[via TechCrunch]

New York Magazine has compiled a set of links to the ten most incomprehensible Bob Dylan interviews of all time. Man, when Dylan rambles, he really rambles. It must be that all his articulateness neurons have been given over to writing some of the greatest poetry in living memory, leaving none left over for pointless little TV interviews. Link (Thanks, Danny!)

[via Boing Boing]

The true hard core geek/fanboy crowd loved ValleySchwag when it launched in the Spring of 2006. For $15 per month you would receive a package containing tshirts, stickers, pens and other junk that new startups pay a fortune to have created with their logo printed on it. Usually this stuff is handed out at parties and conferences, but ValleySchwag created a way for people to get it even if they didn’t, or couldn’t, attend the events.

Sadly, ValleySchwag faded away as the founders moved on to other projects. Now another service, Startup Schwag, is taking its place with a similar business model. For $15/month, plus shipping, you receive a monthly shipment containing a startup tshirt and possibly other stuff as well.

Startup Schwag was created by Roddy Richards, a web developer, and is based in Chicago. Richards says he’s going to tweak the way they fulfill demand substantially to allow it to scale up. ValleySchwag failed, he says, because too many subscribers wanted a limited supply of schwag, and it became a real burden on startups to get enough actual stuff to fulfill that demand.

Startup Schwag won’t be looking to startups to send them stuff to pass on to subscribers. Instead, Richards says they’ll be licensing logo rights from hot startups and creating the schwag themselves, at exactly the amount to fulfill demand.

That means tech geeks who think a Digg or Twitter tshirt is cooler than a Nike logo will have a way of getting exactly what they want. Startups will pay nothing for the stuff, although they will be expected to license their logo to Startup Schwag for free. Something tells me that PR hungry companies will be more than willing to do exactly that.

The first shipments will go out in early to mid October. Sign up now - Richards says that first shipment will contain a TechCrunch tshirt, to kick things off.

[via TechCrunch]

With blogging comes great responsibilty. You define the content of your weblog and you carry the full responsibility for every word you’ve published online. More than that, you are responsible for comments in your posts. To make sure you fulfill your legal obligations, it’s important to know, what you, as blogger, may or should do; and you have to know, how to achieve this. After all, the ignorance of the law does not make one exempt from compliance thereof.

From the legal point of view, Copyright in Web is often considered as the grey area; as such it’s often misunderstood and violated - mostly simply because bloggers don’t know, what laws they have to abide and what issues they have to consider. In fact, copyright myths are common, as well as numerous copyright debates in the Web.

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Almost no one who makes websites works in their company or organization's web division—because almost no company or organization has a web division. That void on the org chart is one reason we have so many bloated, unusable websites. While many good people work in IT and marketing, neither area is ideally suited to craft usable websites or to encourage the blossoming of vital web communities. Business and non-profit decision makers, let there be web divisions.
[via Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report]

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don’t have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)
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Fujiya & Miyagi

My local alderman dropped by the other day, it seems he’s running for Mayor. He handed me a little postcard with his campaign slogan on one side and a calendar on the other side - how nice. When I got it inside the house and looked at it - the calendar was a mashup (to use a virtual term in the analog world) of election dates and the Red Sox game schedule.

Red Sox Game schedule?!!! Hold the phone! What has that got to do with anything?

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Everybody is using it, but (almost) nobody really knows, how it works. Google PageRank is probably one of the most important algorithms ever developed for the Web. With billions of existing pages and millions of pages generated every day, the search issue in the Web is more complex than you probably think it is. PageRank, only one of hunderds of factors used by Google to determine best search results, helps to keep our search clean and efficient. But how is it actually done? How does Google PageRank work, which factors do have an impact on it and which don’t? And what do we really know about PageRank?

[via Smashing Magazine]