Now, if you have a field in a form that only accepts certain values don’t you think that it would be a good idea to tell the users of the form what those values are before they’ve filled them in? I am sick of the “invalid email” error after a form has been submitted. Why is so hard to indicate what valid values are beside the field? Or why can’t this be validated in JavaScript? It’s simply a lack of thought by the page designer/programmer.

The Economist has a survey on “New Media” Where have I heard that term before?

Fascinating study from Google on HTML tag usage in over one billion pages. Also gives useful references to other similar studies. It makes sense for a search company to be interested in this kind of information since what make a page relevant is what is unique or unusual about the page. Here’s a tip - start using the least used valid tags and watch your sites Google ranking climb.

Web Two Point Oh Fantastic little app to generate a company name and product description for “Web 2.0” ventures. Take it to your favorite idiot VC.

Google’s 2005 Zeitgeist Guess the most popular news search in 2005. It’s not what you think.

In the past two months we’ve had two phone calls from Chinese ISP and domain registrars telling us that some one wants to register a domain name that corresponds to or sounds like our company name in Chinese. They tell us that if we don’t agree we can stop this by paying them RMB 13,000. Yeah right! This is one big con. And it is not just some small operator - we’re getting calls from the major network backbone operators. They explain all this to my secretary (who knows nothing about DNS of course) and make it…

Just before Christmas we stayed in a very nice hotel with very little clue about what is going on with their network. To cut down on the support calls to their “IT Butler” they, via their network service provider, had re-directed all SMTP port 25 traffic to the service provider’s open relay SMTP server.