In thoery, eBay is a place where shoppers enter their maximum bids for items, and then the system sells them to the highest bidder for the lowest amount necessary to beat all other bidders. In practice, there's more to the game than that.

I haven't done any studies, but I've purchased a few items on...
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A long time ago in an IETF working group not so far away, there was a big discussion over whether an Atom feed is really just an Atom entry that contains other entries. At the time, I wrote a long email on the subject, but kept putting off sending it, so it's been languishing in...
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With all the efforts we go through to stop spam and to convince people not to respond to it, the fact that we still get so much proves that it must be working for somebody. Why does it work, and how can we try to stop it?

Even though only a tiny, tiny percentage of...
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A while back, I thought of two numbers that can be calculated using their digits: 25 = 52 and 127 = 27-1. Are there any others? At the time, I concluded that there aren't, but I don't remember everything I went through to decide that. For now, I'll record the idea here to ensure it's...
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Today I'm not talking about how RSS or Atom feeds can bring lots of traffic into your site, I'm honestly wondering where all the traffic to my site is coming from. Since some time around midnight last night, the CaRP homepage has been getting a lot more traffic than usual. Naturally, after happily noticing the...
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Tim Bray sent a message to the Atom Working group mailing list today declaring that, other than changes to the last draft that consensus has already been reached on, the Atom format is, for all practical purposes, done. There are a few more steps to be completed before it's official, as Tim notes:

"Note that...
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I recently moved one of my CD racks out by my computer, and picked my favorite 100 CDs to put in it. The rest stay in the bedroom where they're less accessible. The process of shuffling all those CDs around reminded me of one of the really annoying things about CD racks--unless you don't bother...
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How's this for ironic: I just listened to a podcast from Church of the Customer talking with Seth Godin about his book Are all marketers really liars?, and as my MP3 player finished playing it and went to the next track, the first words to come out were, "Hey, shut up. Don't lie to me."...
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Wired News: FTC Would Kill the Messenger: "Home computer users who unwittingly send out spam e-mail should be disconnected from the internet until their machines are fixed, the Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday."

Yeah! Let's hope that zombies used for purposes other than spamming are cleaned up at the same time!

"The FTC said...
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As I mentioned a while back, my business is increasing focusing on RSS & Atom tools, leaving me little time to maintain SPAMbaffle. So I've decided to sell the codebase and the SPAMbaffle.com domain name. The price, which I didn't mention previously, is $2000 (US) for both. Contact me if you're interested.