The Open Road

Do you really need (or want) Ski Magazine through the summer months, talking about how to keep in ski shape for the coming winter...which is eight months away? Or maybe you generally only read Cooking Light during the summer months for backyard picnic recipes?

You're in luck. Time Inc. has created MAGHOUND, a magazine service that operates much like Netflix. Instead of subscribing to particular magazine titles, you actually subscribe to a number of magazines, which you can swap out for other magazines at any time.

Getting tired of Time? Go online and schedule People to hit the following week instead. It's that easy and, importantly, the service is not merely tied to the Time Inc. portfolio of 120 magazines. It offers magazines from Conde and other competitors, too.

(Credit: MAGHOUND)

Why did it take the magazine industry so long to come up with something like this? This strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that can help to drive more magazine subscriptions (and hence advertising and all the good things that drive revenue for struggling media/publishing companies). It might not have worked with the library of any one company's magazines, but by combining with its competitors Time Inc. may have a winner on its hands.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. The only disappointing thing is that I can't transfer existing subscriptions into the MAGHOUND service. The Atlantic, Businessweek, Ski, and others would be MAGHOUND-ified in seconds....

Based on a nudge from Luke Kanies, I installed the TripIt application for LinkedIn. Others have been prodding me to use TripIt for at least a year, but this is the first time it made sense.

In one view, I could see my network activity, but right next to it is an upcoming trip to New York and people that I might want to reach out to while there, like my cousin.

What a perfect complement.

Names have been smudged to protect the innocent.

This is what Dopplr should have been, but it requires me to recreate my schedule (and network) just for it. I tried it for a few weeks and then gave up.

I use LinkedIn exclusively to recruit for Alfresco. I've also started to use it to track Tweets about Alfresco. With the addition of TripIt (you guessed it!), I'm going to start using LinkedIn to help remind me of customers, partners, and prospects I should be seeing when I travel.

LinkedIn does social networking right. It gives me relevant information, doesn't pretend that everyone I've ever thought of (and many that I haven't) are my "friends," and generally treats me like an adult. With the addition of applications like TripIt, it just became even better.

Now, it just needs a repository for storing the blogs and other communications that it will no doubt shortly integrate. I know of one....

As usual, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley delivers an interesting bit of news from Redmond. Microsoft, it would seem, launched a significant new support offering as of August 18.

(T)he new offering, Premier Ultimate, is aimed at the company's largest customers. Via the new program, Microsoft works with customers to create a three-year roadmap, including a suggested set of services. Reactive support becomes something provided on an "as needed" basis, said Charlie DeJong, general manager of Support and Health Services for Microsoft.

Customers who sign up for Premier Ultimate get unlimited problem resolution support (with some unspecified possible restrictions), plus IT health assessments, account management (both on-site and dedicated) and on-site support, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to Microsoft.

This sounds like an impressive support offering, in my opinion. The unlimited part isn't all that great, given that most other vendors offer this (including all of the open-source companies with which I'm familiar).

No, it's the consultative approach to support that perhaps breaks new ground. Good for Microsoft for doing this.

I've written before about AT&T Wireless' terrible international roaming rates for the iPhone. Well, imagine my surprise to discover that its roaming rates for its wireless cards is even worse. How much worse? Consider the bill I received from AT&T today:

(Credit: Matt Asay)

Yes, that's really $1520.76 for one month's usage of my wireless card. But the shocking thing is that $1450.19 of it came from using the card for under three hours to pull down a total of 96 megabytes of data. That's roughly $15 per megabyte. What a bargain!

Given that my calling plan covers the US and Canada, I assumed my data plan would, too. Nope. I pay $59.99 per month for an "unlimited" data plan on my wireless card. It's surprising just how limited that "unlimited" plan is.

AT&T Wireless is gouging its customers (and no, I'm not the only one - this hapless fellow got dinged $6,000 by AT&T for using his phone in Mexico, while this iPhone user got hit with $3,000). $1,450 for a 96 megabytes is unconscionable. It bears no rational relation to AT&T's own costs of delivering the service.

UPDATE: TechCrunch has data that indicates AT&T's text messaging rates aren't so great, either. How about $1,310 per megabyte?

I will admit to having a mild fetish for Google Analytics. Yes, I wish it updated more often as I would gladly stare at a real-time traffic analysis for this blog, but perhaps it's healthier this way....

At any rate, Piwik (formerly Phpmyvisites.com) looks to be a reasonable (and open-source) alternative to Google Analytics. You can watch a demo of it here.

Who cares if it's open source? Well, perhaps you should:

Since Piwik is open source, SEO's can adjust it to fit their company needs. For example, publishing sites may feel that referrals from Digg, Google News and Reddit are more important than the basic search engines and set up their reporting to flag these referral trends first. Bloggers and affiliates may want to view the amount or quality of outgoing links and reference them with referrals and specific keywords, the possibilities are limitless.

Amen. The power to tweak. The right to fork. That's open source.

This is my first trip overseas with my iPhone, and it's hard to express in polite language how disappointed I am with Apple's international data roaming packages. I say "Apple's" instead of "AT&T's" because with my old Blackberry on AT&T I didn't have the problem, so I'm laying the blame at Apple's feet.

What's the problem? The cost. With my old Blackberry, I paid an additional $9.95/month for unlimited data while roaming internationally. With my iPhone, I pay $24.99 per month for just 20MB. Scratch that: Last night I upgraded to the only other plan Apple/AT&T offer: $59.95 per month for 50MB of data (on top of the $40/month I already pay for domestic data).

Sound like a lot of MB? Nope. I hit nearly 10MB in just one day, and that's with Saturday email traffic (not much) and very, very little web browsing. No pictures or attachments.

Apple fan that I am, I'm trying to think of a good reason why it should be so much more expensive to access email and browse the web internationally on my iPhone than it was with my Blackberry. (Same sites, same email volume.) It has put a huge crimp on how I use my iPhone. I'm actually frightened to use it at all, lest I go over the 50MB limit (when overage prices hit $5 to $20 per MB(!!!)).

I love my iPhone, Apple. I'd just like to be able to use it internationally. On the plans you currently offer through AT&T, I can't.

P.S. Don't tell me this is AT&T's fault. Apple has had so much control over everything to do with the relationship that if international roaming is ridiculously pricey, it's with Apple's blessing or direction.

Carrying the tag line "Because the internet needs prophylactics for memetically transmitted diseases," StupidFilter just launched to rid the world of inane comment spam, wasted messages on mailing lists, etc. I'm wondering if it will simply filter out my entire blog.... :-)

Here's the project's aim:

The solution we're creating is simple: an open-source filter software that can detect rampant stupidity in written English. This will be accomplished with weighted Bayesian or similar analysis and some rules-based processing, similar to spam detection engines. The primary challenge inherent in our task is that stupidity is not a binary distinction, but rather a matter of degree. To this end, we're collecting a ranked corpus of stupid text, gleaned from user comments on public websites and ranked on a five-point scale.

... Read more

It's not surprising that Billy Marshall, former Red Hatter and current CEO of rPath, would be dismissive of Red Hat's new appliance operating system, given that he will be competing with it. But what I did find surprising is how dead-on his assessment is of enterprise software.

We talk about certification a lot (i.e., "Yes, we are certified to run on SQL Server"). The customer takes this to mean, "It will work well with SQL Server." But this isn't always the case. In fact, as Billy points out, it is often not the case:

According to Red Hat, the product will be a valuable alternative to rPath because it preserves application "certification." Apparently this means that customers will still need to assemble, configure, and maintain the components inside the virtual appliance. After all, "certification" is only valuable when the components are not provided as an integrated, optimized, and tested unit.

... Read more

Wow. I had no idea when I stumbled across Microsoft's internal positioning against Zimbra just how little Microsoft feels there is to recommend its Exchange 2007 software against Zimbra. I'm not exaggerating. The best Microsoft can come up with to slam Zimbra falls into three buckets:

1. Zimbra is a small company.
2. Zimbra doesn't integrate as tightly with Microsoft technology as Microsoft's Exchange does.
3. Zimbra only offers Exchange-to-Zimbra migration.

I don't know about you, but I'm having a hard time getting myself pumped up to go fight the good fight against Zimbra after that battle cry. When the best Microsoft can say for itself is that its technology is incestuous and that it's a big company, it's time to look for alternatives.

Speaking of which, Microsoft lists several Zimbra strengths that sound much more compelling than its defense of Exchange 2007: