What would be nice is a conference organizer/searcher. Yes there are sites like AllConferences.com but the data isn’t “rich”. I want to be able to say - hrmm … I want to do business with Company X - what conferences are they attending? Or even better, Person Y - what conferences are speaking at?

Anything like that out there?

So I had talked about the Dallas Cowboys and their mishap with cowboys.com. Now our good friendly domain of Cowboys.com features ads for gay porn.

I am sure the fact that the landing page uses the exact same colors as the Dallas Cowboys is just a delicious coincidence.

We do a lot of stuff in the local space that never sees the light of day. Be it internal analysis, coding projects, little snippets, ‘widgets’, and so forth. A set of non-core and (even) non-useful stuff that still should be published online.

So hopefully in the next week or two we can launch a little version of our own ‘labs’ here at iBegin. Shouldn’t be taken too seriously - just some random testing, thoughts, and projects of our own (most half completed) for the world to enjoy.

Update: and it be here.

What’s going on with Marchex? They seem to be tanking - badly.

Perhaps time to sell their non-local domains? Are are there non-local domains bringing in the revenue?

I’ve argued for a long time that having anonymous contributions is a good thing - even with the increase in spam, there is enough legitimate content to make it worthwhile. Plus - once a user has contributed, they are more likely to register and contribute even more.

A recent blog post by Topix validates my argument (huzzah!) The one surprise (for me) was that the amount of spam by non-registered was only 50% higher than registered. My experience is more along the lines of 100-200% more.

Of course there was no qualitative measurement done, but we could argue that in general about UGC Skrenta also has some good takeaways from the #s.

A common attack method of gaining access to a login is to brute force attack. That means on a login page, you enter a username, and then put in a random password. If it fails, you repeat. And repeat. Ad nauseum. If the user uses a simple password (eg ‘food’ or ‘password’), after enough attempts you will eventually guess the right password.

So to stop such behavior, software like vBulletin gives you five tries to get it right. If you fail, you get locked out.

Facebook extended it intelligently - if you fail enough times (I think I failed six times), it doesn’t just lock you out - it also redirects you to the password reset feature. Fill that out, and voila! You are back into business.

A nice little touch since vBulletin (and similar) lock you out for 15 minutes, regardless of you trying to reset your password.

Just a nice UI touch to have.