A LOT of people leech my images for blog posts, forum posts and social networking profiles. When it's a one-off and it isn't too much of a bandwidth hog, I chalk it up as a cost of doing business. Honestly, the face that 15 year olds think my work is cool enough for their purposes pleases me to no end. Still, I do put a stop to it under several circumstances- with high traffic sites, when people use large images (over 50k) for message board avatars or signatures and when people basically redistribute a leeched image as part of a theme.

Such is the case with this MySpace theme.

At least it was the case. For a while that theme used the top edge of one of my black book images as an accent. Since I moved the original source image as part of the site reorganization over at robreact.com, it was generating a lot of 404s. Investigating the 404s and seeing how often it was being used, I decided to use the leeching to my advantage with a little bit of an advertisement.

I guess they should be happy I'm so nice. There are a lot of less savory variations I could have chosen….

In the middle of moving all those underscore delineated URLs to dash delineated URLs*, Google went ahead and announced the rel="canonical" scheme for defining the preferred URL for a piece of content. While it's not the biggest deal for me, other than the "/" vs "/index.php" question, for many people with more dynamic systems it's a big deal. Bravo to everyone involved as it's a really straightforward, easy-to-implement solution to a common, troublesome problem.
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To continue the trend I started with last night's post, I present:

The problem in many people’s thinking is the belief that there’s always a magic business model lurking around the corner that will circumvent the normal laws of capitalism just because the internet’s involved. There isn’t. Reducing marginal costs certainly opens up a few doors to businesses, but it doesn’t mean that any product can suddenly be profitably supported by advertising alone.

"there’s always a magic business model lurking around the corner" describes the attitude of a lot of folks these days. I guess they deserve points for optimism, but when there are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and thousands of people's jobs, optimism should cede some control to reality-based worldviews.

From: MattMaroon.com » Blog Archive » The Gray Lady

I read this.

Which lead me to this series of tweets:

• "Has the world become so blind to the basics of commerce that it needs reminding of such a basic tenet?" Yes! http://is.gd/iW7t
• I can hear it now. "No, Rob teh twitterz is worth $500 million!" "Rob, you so crazy! Facebook is worth Billions!"
• No and no. I went through this already in the late 90s, early 00s. Businesses need to make money. PERIOD. Everything else is a hobby.
• Twitter? A hobby.

I then read this quote in the latest issue of The Economist:
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robreact.com was relaunched over the weekend. There's a completely new visual design, some slightly adjusted architecture and a whole bunch of technical improvements.

Here are some things to keep in mind…
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