Andrew Teman recently posted a tirade against Attention Trust, citing this article by Seth Goldstein. To Andrew, this article made no sense. It was a company forming around a bunch of doublespeak, with no business plan, nothing. It’s almost like the 1990-era dot com boom all over again. I tend to agree. Andy calls for anyone to read that article and summarize what they do in fifty words or less.

Here it is, my fifty-words or less on what the article means: the effort of seeing stuff online should be treated as capital. There, I did it in eleven words. That doesn’t change the fact that this is a bunch of nonsense.

The idea they’re trying to play up is that machines are automating the process of demographic profiling and targeting. This is not only true, it’s efficient. They’re trying to place the targeting back in the consumer’s hands, to let them “traffick” in their “attention”, as it were.

This also, is nonsense.

There is no need to set up an attention trust, as it were, to let people treat their attention as currency. This already happens. We don’t call it attention currency, and we don’t need to. We do it automatically. The idea of “brokering” your attention is absolutely rediculous. What are they going to do, say “If you read this page, I’ll read that one”? This not only is not only dumb, it reduces the value placed on attention itself: it’s less valuable to have forced attention. Think of it this way: would it be more valuable to have someone who searched and found your site, or to have someone who was just pointed there?

About the only value I see here is the potential to build on word of mouth referrals. This is not a new concept either.

The kicker here is the lack of a true business plan. It’s like a bunch of people got together, got high, and said, “Whoa, think about the Internet and people and stuff. We should do something with that.” Providing textual references and vague ideas will get you nowhere, except, I guess, with the blindly investing VCers. They could have redeemed themselves by giving an inkling of how this was going to provide value to anyone.

Is everything bigger in Texas? And is that necessarily better? The picture here is a sculpture outside of Grapevine Mills Mall in Dallas, Texas. the whole mall is a giant loop with, naturally, a ton of shops.

The thing is, it’s pretty much clothing store after clothing store, broken up by the occasional shoe store. Is it really useful to have that thirty-sixth clothing store with much the same crap?

Then again, I guess they can’t have a mall of bars and porn — that’s reserved for Vegas.

I’ve had enough of all the buzz about the hot coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Enough already. Some smart hacker figured out that there was a “sex” option in dating in this game, and provided instructions for how to unlock it. If you’ve watched the example video in the above link, you’ll be struck by how uninteresting this actually is.

Nonetheless, this has people up in storm. Even Hillary Clinton joined the fray, stating, “The disturbing material in Grand Theft Auto and other games like it is stealing the innocence of our children and it’s making the difficult job of being a parent even harder.” Really. Because otherwise, GTA: SA would make a fine game for a child. The pimping, crime lording, drug running, killing, and racial stereotyping were acceptable — it’s the sex that’s abhorrent. There is something really, really wrong with that prioritization.

Let’s look at the technical aspects of this. The game itself does not provide this scene in the game by default. In fact, you have to mess around with the files, which no average gamer does, in order to even enable the thing. So, in terms of presentation to the public, the game doesn’t even really have this functionality, unless you’re messing around with the game getting it to do something it wasn’t meant to do as released. Yes, the functionality was there. But broken. This is technically different than, say, releasing a nude mod to a game (which has been around since at least Doom days), because the publisher created the functionality, not some random hormone-rampant horny third party indy developer. However, for most, the actual steps taken are much the same: download a patch from a third party on the Internet, install, and wow, boobies.

The legal aspect of this is also strange: it centers around the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s rating system. GTA: SA was released with an M (mature) rating, while the talk is that this game should have been released with an AO (adults only) rating. Supposedly. After all, M games, by ESRB definition, “have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content, and/or strong language.” AO games “have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.” So the argument is for the difference between sexual content and graphic sexual content with nudity.

When I think of games that might make the AO list, one game pops up in my head: Manhunt. This was, interestingly enough, a Rockstar game as well. In it, you stalk victims to kill, and the better you do, the more graphic the death. The game was all about intense violence — that was all the game was for. Yet, the ESRB rating for that game is M. I guess they have to go a little stronger on the violence, or maybe be a little more realistic. Better luck next time, Rockstar! How about nudity? God Of War had nudity, yet only gained an M rating. Fine, fine, but what about graphic sex scenes? Did you miss the intense, detailed, and high resolution sex scene in Gothic II? Plus, in all of the above, the content wasn’t locked away: it was in the basic gameplay. Historically, the ESRB didn’t blink an eye at things like this. Perhaps it’s a flaw in the ESRB. It is hard to give a good rating to games, as they come out, and find all possible content within a game — especially content that’s locked away from all but hackers.

So, why now? Did the strip clubs in the games not bother them before? Have they seen Duke Nukem? Did the extra approximately 0.3% of gameplay here (presuming 10 minutes in a 50 hour game) really make all the difference?

You can’t even argue that this should send a message to Rockstar. I’m betting sales of this game increase on all this buzz. Certainly, Rockstar can appreciate free publicity. (Which makes you wonder if someone on the inside intentionally leaked the mod, but I digress.)

Perhaps it’s just politically profitable to go after an easy target like Rockstar, to boost your image as one who maintains conservative family values. Nah, that would make too much sense. They’d never try that in New York.

Update: As if that weren’t enough, the ESRB is revising its rating on the current version of GTA: SA to ‘AO’. This seems to me at best a knee jerk reaction. Hey, this is getting lots of press! Let’s join in!

What gamer in their right mind would choose an ‘M’ title over ‘AO’, anyway? That’s like getting an album with ‘Clean’ lyrics instead of the ‘Uncensored’ — it just feels like I’m cheating myself out of the full experience.

If you’re in the Boston area and haven’t checked out Minado, you’re missing out. That is, unless you don’t like good all you can eat sushi. Located right off Route 9 in Natick, they boast a rather large buffet-style lineup to satisfy your insatiable hunger for maki, nigiri, sashimi, tempura, and more.

I checked them out this weekend (tip: go around 6pm on Saturday, and you won’t have to fight the lines!), and was pretty impressed. The food quality was pretty good, and the variety was fantastic. Pricing is a little heavy, running around $26 a head on the weekends, but if you’re looking for a lot of different kinds of sushi and want to eat until you can’t move, it’s a great spot.

I love Dreamhost. There, I’ve said it. I can’t help it. I’ve been using them for a few months, and so far, they’ve been great. I’ve switched between three different hosting providers, and so far, have loved them the best. Read on for why.

When looking for a web host, there are a three main considerations: reliability (uptime), features, and price. Rarely do you find all three in one place.

When it came to uptime, I came from a host that had rather spotty issues in that regard. They would go down for a few hours at a time. They would have a crash, restore from backup, and my site would have reverse-aged itself a week. One time, after a particularly nasty crash, they were redirecting my site to someone else’s poster site, because of some DNS issues. I decided it was time to move on.

When it came to features, I found that on a previous host with great uptime, features were quite lacking. No shell accounts, no scripting, no options. I’m beyond the point where I want to concern myself with static pages — that’s just so 1990’s.

As far as price went, I went from being gouged with the reliable host, to getting a good rate at the other host in exchange for that reliability.

Then, a friend told me about Dreamhost. I’m generally skeptical of new services, so I decided to do a little research. How reliable were they? What did they offer? What were their prices like? The answers to those questions are “very”, “a lot”, and “good”.

Reliability is reported to be and has been good. I haven’t had downtime yet (knock on wood). It may not have the reputation of pear Networks, but they have a good standing in the field.

Some things people look for as far as features go include shell access, FTP access, IMAP mail, POP mail, web mail, multiple accounts, Perl, spam filtering, PHP, one-click installs, and fine-grained DNS control. Check. This is a full-fledged host in that regard. If you like to develop your own applications in Perl / Apache / PHP, that’s not a problem. They even have procmail support, if mail processing is your thing.

However, all is not well in Dreamhostville. You can forget about CPanel and WHM. In fact, no reseller accounts of any kind. (Webmaster referrals don’t really count, but they are nice.) No Fantastico either. Those are dealbreakers for many publishers. The homebrewed control panel at Dreamhost isn’t as easy to use as CPanel, nor does it offer as immediate results. Doing a one click install of Wordpress? No problem! Click this button and…come back in an hour. Some manual setup also may be needed to tweak settings. This is fine for me, as a reasonably tech-savvy user. I wouldn’t put my wife through it unattended, though.

When it comes to price, Dreamhost also shines. For $9.95 a month ($7.95 if you pre-pay for two years) you get 2,400 MB of disk, 120 GB of monthly bandwidth. That’s nothing to sneeze at, though at only one domain, it’s a little limiting. Stepping up to the next level at $19.95 a month ($15.95 if you pre-pay for two years) gets you 7,680 MB of disk, and 192 GB of monthly bandwidth, for 15 domains. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with 3,000 email accounts and 375 shell accounts.

What got me to write this post, however, was none of that. Rather, it was their insane newsletter. Here’s a random quote from it:

In actuality, I love dog food! In fact, I was just in China for my honeymoon and ate a lot of “dog” food. And I’m not talking about Purina.

I don’t think he’s serious. That’s just the sort or weird, random flavor their newsletter has. However, it wasn’t this quirky character that made me write, either. It was this:

Every week, your plan limits will grow as follows, at
absolutely no charge:

L1: 20MB disk and 1GB bandwidth each week!
L2: 40MB disk and 1.5GB bandwidth each week!
L3: 60MB disk and 2GB bandwidth each week!
L4: 80MB disk and 2.5GB bandwidth each week!

Wait…so as long as I host with Dreamhost, they’re going to keep upping my disk and bandwidth limits? For no apparent reason? They were already reasonably priced, but apparently, they like to keep pushing the edge. I have to appreciate a company that continues to go that extra step, rather than just resting on their laurels.

So, I’m not going to go so far as to say they’re perfect. They’re not. They’re not even the most user-friendly: it helps to either be a techie, or know someone who is, to help you through the setup. However, I am going to say that as far as reliability, features, and pricing are concerned, they’re the best I’ve seen and used so far. Plus, they continue to try new things, to see what they can do to offer their users even more. I like that. Let’s hope they continue to live up to their reputation.

Is that a boat on the track? Why yes, yes it is. Over the fourth, I forayed into white trash territory by checking out the demolition derby in Greenville, Maine.

Actually, what they usually have up there are dirt track races — take your beater cars, paint a number on the side, and smash your way to victory, if necessary.

On the fourth, they had a few extra events, such as the demolition derby (which an aquaintance of mine won, with his ‘Cadziller’), and a boat trailer race, the outcome of which you can see above.

Somehow, this just seems like a bad idea: trucks with boat trailers and boats racing around a dirt track, with no regard for smashing one another. Even more peculiar is the rule that you only have to start the race with a boat. Feel free to lose the boat on that first lap around.

I have to admit, it was a pretty good time. Watching racing amateurs tear around the track with little regard for smashing one another is quite amusing. I just can’t imagine doing it every weekend.

I’ll have to go back and check out the ice racing sometime, where they take their beaters and run around a track on the frozen lake.