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In clearing out my spam folder today, I found the following message:

Bad Link on hyperborea.org

Dear webmaster,

There was a link that didn’t work for me on this page of your website, http://www.hyperborea.org/flash/flashpoint.html. It points to a Constitution Day page that doesn’t seem to be there any more, [link removed].

We published a great resource on the U.S. Constitution Day on Online Law School.Net: [link removed]. It would make a great addition to your resources and replacement for the page that no longer works.

Sincerely,

Maddie Bryant
[email removed]

On the surface, it sounds like a reasonable message. If you’ve got a broken link, then you want to know, and hey, if they’ve got an alternative, so much the better, right?

But here’s the thing: The broken link isn’t on the page. I don’t think I link to that page anywhere on my site. There is a reference to the 22nd Amendment, but not to anything about Constitution Day.

In short, it’s another form of link swap spam based on automatic keyword matches with no real intelligence to it.

That’s not really something I want to be linking to.

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Book cover featuring a sketch of a room inside a spaceship.I stumbled on “Crusade: What the Hell Happened? vol.1” (released last August) while packing, and wondered what happened to book 2. Apparently I’m not the only one wondering that, because it turns out that the website just posted an update last week, saying:

Volume 2 is still a work-in-progress. We will send out a news alert the moment it is released.

Now there’s timing!

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Microsoft has jumped on the ditch-IE6 bandwagon with IE6Countdown.com, following in the footsteps of such campaigns as Browse Happy, End 6, and Save the Developers.

Of course, since it’s a Microsoft-sponsored campaign, it’s only promoting upgrades, rather than promoting an upgrade-or-switch message.

Static HTML points out why you might want to put your effort into some other campaign instead. Because IE6 Countdown is only an upgrade campaign, and IE6 users are all on Windows XP or below (Vista ships with IE7), they can only ever upgrade as far as IE8. Given the huge gap between IE8 and IE9 in terms of standards support, HTML5, CSS3, and so forth, IE8 will soon become the new millstone around the web’s neck.

So instead of plugging IE, consider plugging your own favorite browser, be it Firefox, Chrome or Opera. Or perhaps plug another switch campaign. After all, there are quite a few alternative web browsers out there!

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I use navigation on my Android phone to pick out the best route to work each morning. The problem is, it bases time estimates on traffic conditions now — not traffic conditions as they’ll be when I get to each point along the route. I’ve gotten used to the morning drive taking at least 15 minutes* longer and the evening drive taking around 10 minutes less than predicted, but a little more precision would be helpful.

Obviously, Google isn’t psychic. They can’t predict where and when car crashes will happen. But they do have historical traffic data. If you go to Google Maps on the web and display traffic, you can switch between live data and an average for a given time and day of the week.

It would be fantastic if Google used that data to predict how much slower (or faster) traffic will be moving at each point along each projected route, and use that for the time estimates. It would be nice for the “Are we there yet?” factor, but it would be incredibly useful for route planning!

*Sometimes more. This morning, it predicted a 55-minute trip. It took me an hour and 35 minutes.