Day: <span>April 9, 2002</span>

I just saw a TV ad on the History Channel for websites hosted by Verisign.

What on Earth are they thinking? No demos. No screenshots of their editing interface. No FAQ. No mention of browser-based editing, web services integration, browser compatibility, web standards, shopping carts, credit card acceptance, automated features, etc… All they have is a pretty woman smiling at you next to a fancy banner graphic which reads, “It’s as easy as 1-2-3…” [their emphasis, not mine].

In fact, there’s not a single hyperlink on the entire page!

$65.00 per year (domain name regisration not included)? Looks like a money-grab to me. A company as wealthy and powerful as Verisign could do much better than this. I’ll stick with what I’m using for $39.95/year, thank-you-very-much.

Oh by the way,… Like, what–ever!

Paolo Vlademarin reminds us what you can accomplish with Radio UserLand in 30 minutes:

“Just a couple of days ago a friend called me on the phone to discuss totally different things, and during the conversation he told me something about outliners (as I discovered later, he was a More user). So I told him about Radio and the new Instant Outliners feature. Then I guided him trough the Radio web site, software download, install, opening of his weblog, software update, quick introduction to the news aggregator, initialization of his new I/O and how to subscribe to my public outline…

“Now, consider for a while what this person has actually done in about half an hour:

• downloaded and installed a web server
• created a public web site
• started a news aggregator
• got a new form of communication (the I/O) working

“…And, btw, have you had better support on a $40 application from any other software company? Microsoft? Intuit? Adobe? Apple? It didn’t happen to me.”