Yellow Something Something Moves

by Bryan

PO’ed at demands from Haloscan during the NoDWISH holidays, Steve Bates has moved his site to http://yellowdoggereldemocrat.blogspot.com/.

He is maintaining the old site for archival purposes at http://www.yellowdoggereldemocrat.org/doggerel.htm, so your legacy links will still work.

The people who bought out HaloScan, JS-Kit, have quite possibly made the worst marketing decision since New Coke. Sending out a demand during the holidays, during the biggest economic down turn since the Great Depression, a period when people are not thinking about blogging comments, but a multitude of other things, might qualify these guys for the Obama administration, but not for the real world.

11 comments

1 Steve Bates { 12.21.09 at 4:56 pm }: Thanks, Bryan.

Those JS-Kit team members: their name are what? French for sure, but Russian? Polish? Probably techno-wizards, but who wants to put up with the crap? They clearly don’t understand American business well enough to avoid offending a lot of people with their this-is-a-stickup-fork-over-your-money-NOW approach.

(FTR, the “/doggerel.htm” is not strictly necessary for a human user; that’s to avoid some otherwise possible circular redirects which probably never really happen. But who wants the hassle?)

– Your 36-hour-wakeful friend, Steve
.-= last blog ..Moved, Left Forwarding Address =-.
2 Steve Bates { 12.21.09 at 4:59 pm }: … and THIS comment has the correct site URL in it; I’d changed it in some commenting systems, but not all…
.-= last blog ..Welcome! =-.
3 Bryan { 12.21.09 at 5:56 pm }: I fixed the original, and added the /doggerel.htm because it really does go to the archives, and it was what you posted at the new site.

The CEO, Loux is from Maryland, and is the financial side. He built the venture capital package that enabled JK Kit to buy up the companies that wrote the code, and the programmers behind the code have probably taken the money and run, so good luck on support.
4 Jack K., the Grumpy Forester { 12.21.09 at 6:23 pm }: …wait…What? Haloscan is going commercial? I haven’t seen this email yet.
.-= last blog ..On The Twin Curses Of Perfidy And Emails =-.
5 Kryten42 { 12.21.09 at 7:11 pm }: ..and another one bites the dust! And good riddance! (JK Kit & co).

What a bunch of ‘Wall St.’ wannabe morons. I’ve had a quick look… and I don’t like what I see.

Good luck and best wishes Steve!! I really hope all goes well now. 🙂 I also hope many others will be smart and follow your lead. 🙂

Oh… and have a Great Christmas all!! 😀
6 Steve Bates { 12.21.09 at 9:17 pm }: JK the GF: I believe they say “JS-Kit is monetized” these days, but it would be more accurate to say “JS-Kit is running off its customer base as fast as it can.” How wrongheaded can one be about one’s business? I don’t know; watch that team for a while and you’ll probably learn the answer to that question.

Kryten: thanks for the good wishes. If I had some standard blog format, it would be much easier to port. But hey, all I’m really sacrificing is sleep and recreation in a busy time of year, right?
7 Kryten42 { 12.21.09 at 9:39 pm }: But hey, all I’m really sacrificing is sleep and recreation in a busy time of year, right?

Ahhhh, well… we have that in common then! 😀

I’m not getting a lot of sleep myself right now, or time for myself, so I understand. 🙂

There is a VERY good book called “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis (he who became a blogger and almost destroyed Dell before they changed their ways). 😉

I highly recommend it to everyone (and I don’t even get one penny for doing so! Hmmph!) 😆 It’s by HarperCollins e-Books

Here’s an excerpt from the preface:

It seems as if no company, executive, or institution truly understands how
to survive and prosper in the internet age.
Except Google.
So, faced with most any challenge today, it makes sense to ask: WWGD?
What would Google do?
In management, commerce, news, media, manufacturing, marketing,
service industries, investing, politics, government, and even education and
religion, answering that question is a key to navigating a world that has
changed radically and forever.
hat world is upside-down, inside-out, counterintuitive, and confusing.
Who could have imagined that a free classiﬁ ed service could have had a
profound and permanent eﬀect on the entire newspaper industry, that kids
with cameras and internet connections could gather larger audiences than
cable networks could, that loners with keyboards could bring down politi-
cians and companies, and that dropouts could build companies worth
billions? hey didn’t do it by breaking rules. hey operate by new rules of
a new age, among them:
• Customers are now in charge. hey can be heard around the globe
and have an impact on huge institutions in an instant.
• People can ﬁnd each other anywhere and coalesce around you—or
against you.
• he mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches.
• “Markets are conversations,” decreed he Cluetrain Manifesto, the
seminal work of the internet age, in 2000. hat means the key skill
in any organization today is no longer marketing but conversing.
• We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based
on abundance. he control of products or distribution will no
longer guarantee a premium and a proﬁ t.
• Enabling customers to collaborate with you—in creating, distributing, marketing, and supporting products—is what creates a premium
in today’s market.
• he most successful enterprises today are networks—which extract
as little value as possible so they can grow as big as possible—and
the platforms on which those networks are built.
• Owning pipelines, people, products, or even intellectual property is
no longer the key to success. Openness is.

I don’t aree with Google on some areas, but they do know how to make their business work, and they really understand the new medium.

I just thought it was worth mentioning, as J-Kit appear to be the kind of ignorant self-destructive business the book is aimed at. 🙂
8 Bryan { 12.21.09 at 9:45 pm }: Whoever is in charge of the e-mails has been incredibly spotty about this, Jack. The people who have said something make it seem like it is a hit and miss proposition.

Kryten, some companies are so arrogant as to believe that whatever they do is the most important piece of software on their users’ machine. They just don’t understand their market, or the current financial times. If you don’t have an essential piece of the system, people will drop you like a hot iron if you try to jack up prices. Money is tight, and that extra $10 has a lot of places it can go.

Have a Happy Winter Holiday of your choice, Kryten. Go visit the beach and soak up some sun.

It just makes me happier that I made the decision when I did, I didn’t lose much, and have been satisfied dealing with my own WordPress demons.
9 Steve Bates { 12.22.09 at 6:23 pm }: Is this a WordPress demon? 😈
10 Steve Bates { 12.22.09 at 6:27 pm }: I chose Blogger for some rather pedestrian reasons. To start with, I already had the domain and a very rough prototype on it, no features, etc. Beyond that, I already had some… not much… familiarity with Blogger blogs from helping numerous friends who have them. Blogger used to be a serious PITA, but Google has improved it considerably since the old days… I run screaming from the chair only about once an hour now. 😆
11 Bryan { 12.22.09 at 9:03 pm }: Actually 👿 is more in line, as I work to reinstall my comment hack to use all the tags people have requested.

I moved because BlogSpot was giving me unmitigated grief at the time, so nothing based on Blogger was even considered.

WordPress has its peculiarities, but it has worked fairly reliably for a long time. The most annoying bit are the upgrades designed to help people do things I don’t want to do.