Copyblogger has posted a great overview of the problems with SOPA:

SOPA is the Stop Online Piracy Act, written with the intent of more vigorously protecting copyright around the web. The entertainment industry wants to come down harder on file sharing and the theft of copyrighted material, so it lobbied for a draconian law to add to the many anti-piracy laws that are already on the books.

SOPA would be a sweet deal for giant music and entertainment companies. That’s why the law got written in the first place.

But it’s not a good deal for countless small businesses in the U.S., including yours.

Go and read the full thing at www.copyblogger.com/sopa

Last week in an attempt to clear out the house I put a few items up for sale on eBay. Among them was an Apple iMac computer that belonged to my wife. It wasn’t particularly old but she was selling it because those glossy screens aren’t great for accurate colour matching, which is essential for her work. So she’d replaced it with a different set-up.

The auction wasn’t due to end until Sunday 10th April but on the preceding Tuesday at around 17.30 I noticed I’d had two missed calls and a voicemail from a man saying that he had bought the iMac using eBay’s Buy it now feature. It was a slightly garbled voice-mail so I called him back. The number was +44 7550 710 157. The conversation was also difficult to follow; it wasn’t a great line and at the time I was walking through a crowded Holborn in central London. I asked for his name and he told me it was “David Anderson”. With hindsight he did sound a little bit dodgy. I said I’d check and call him back.

I checked my emails and the eBay app on the phone and confirmed what he told me. The buyer’s username was sharisace – Sharon Anderson, and I’d been left a note on the item:

“please call me on 07550 710 157 or 0207 1400071, i am in LONDON for 2days”

Back on the phone to “Mr. Anderson” I told him he could collect the item if he wanted later that evening. He said it would be a “bit later tonight”, because he was still at work. I jumped on the tube back home.

I got home at about twenty past six and sent a PayPal invoice through eBay to the buyer. I figured that PayPal is safer than using cash because there is a record of the transaction and besides: they’d already requested it. My wife and I went out for some dinner, five minutes walk from home.

Shortly after we’d paid for our meal our friend Mr Anderson called again. He said he’d paid for the iMac and that there was a car waiting to pick it up but that nobody seemed to be home. I told him I’d be back in a few minutes. At this point – and this is the most annoying thing – I was pretty sure there was something dodgy going on. I checked eBay on my phone as I walked home, and the payment had still not been made.

On arriving home I walked past the waiting cab and straight into the house to check PayPal on my laptop: Still no payment. I called Mr Anderson: “Oh really? Let me just check.” Then he mumbled something about using his brother’s PayPal account.

At about 20:20 I received an email:

Subject: You received a payment of 900.00 GBP from sharisace (r.taylor57@virgin.net)

Given that I was already a bit suspicious I logged into PayPal to check that the email was not a fraud. It wasn’t. I had indeed been paid, so I was happy it was legitimate.

At this stage, in my mind I had they money so I didn’t really care about much else. So I took the iMac outside and carefully placed it in the back of the cab. We even wrapped it in some protective foam. The cab driver was complaining in broken English about having waited for 30 minutes and how we’d have to pay waiting fees, so I told him to speak to the people at the drop-off address. He drove off.

And no, I didn’t get the numberplate or details of the taxi firm, nor his phone number.

I called David to tell him it was on its way, that we’d wrapped it carefully and that I’d created a fresh user account on the computer and set the password to ‘password’ for him. You know what? He didn’t seem that interested.

Five minutes later my heart sank when I received this email from PayPal:

Subject: Please respond by 12/04/2011 regarding Case no.PP-001-268-479-221

Dear Adrian Rowbotham,

A review of recent transactions indicates that you might have received a
payment that the PayPal account holder did not authorise.

To protect you from problematic transactions, we sometimes request
additional information about PayPal payments.

We need more information about this transaction. Please log in to your
PayPal account, click the “Resolution Centre” tab, and provide more
information by 12/04/2011.

I phoned Mr Anderson who kept up the act: “Really? Oh that’s weird. Let me check. Maybe there’s a limit on my brother’s account”. He even sent me a text to which I responded:

I duly filled in the PayPal dispute forms, at this stage assuming that the buyer had simply decided to cancel his payment. Maybe it was an honest mix-up. Maybe. I’m an optimist.

Then the following morning, to my dismay, I received a another email from PayPal:

Subject: A payment has been reversed

Dear Adrian Rowbotham,

We’ve concluded our investigation into the transaction detailed below.

Because you did not meet the eligibility requirements for the PayPal Seller
Protection Policy, you will be charged for this reversed transaction. We’ve
returned the funds to the PayPal account holder. Your account will be
debited for the amount of this transaction.
Helping ensure safe transactionsMost payments<sic> you receive will be from
good, honest buyers. However, there may be some that are not.

You can often reduce your risk to these payments by paying close attention
to payment details and unusual requests.

Watch for address inconsistencies:

Although it’s fairly common for a buyer’s postal address to be different
from the billing address, in some cases it could indicate fraud. For
instance, a high-priced item that has a billing address in one country and
a postal address in another may be suspicious.

…

Shit.

The transaction details were as follows:

Robert Taylor
sharisace
r.taylor57@virgin.net

Shipping address – confirmed
Sharon Anderson
58 The Dukeries
Westgate
Gloucester, Gloucestershire
GL1 2PU
United Kingdom

I sent an email to the contact address on the transaction saying that I was going to call the Police. I promptly received a call from a confused-sounding Robert Taylor, who lives in county Durham, and knew nothing about any iMac or eBay transaction, nor the fact that his PayPal account had been hacked. The penny dropped.

Unsurprisingly Mr Anderson was no longer picking up the phone, I guess because by this time it was most likely sitting in a public waste bin.

Cash is the safer option

Having raised the case with both parties, neither eBay nor PayPal seem willing to cover this, despite the fact that PayPal’s system has been compromised.

Retrospectively, looking at the small print I’m not actually covered by their Seller Protection Policy. So actually, if you are handing an item over in person you are not covered by PayPal.

The mistake I made was to think that once I had received payment through PayPal it meant that the money was mine. This belief alone led me to hand over the item. I was completely unaware that a PayPal transaction could be reversed by the payer once it had been made.

Now, looking back at the text further down the payment notification email it does actually say:

Please be aware that your payment can still be reversed, (e.g. if it is subject to a chargeback), even after you have posted the item to your buyer. Complying with PayPal’s protection programs and following the trading guidelines, in our Safety Advice Centre helps to protect you from things like chargebacks.

This needs to be made more obvious. The conclusion to draw is that for the seller cash is actually safer. I guess PayPal just don’t want to draw your attention to the fact. eBay should disable PayPal as an option for sales with the delivery type set to Collection in person.

I’ve reported it to the police but unless it happens to shed light on some larger case I don’t imagine a S.W.A.T. team will be crashing through Mr Anderson’s skylight anytime soon.

I think Twitter is fantastic. And having been a member since early 2007 I say that without any of the giddy excitement one often has over new things. If you’re not a fan then I can perhaps best respond by quoting Flo Heiss:

“I really don’t understand how people can think Twitter is crap. It’s just like saying the telephone is crap. It’s what you do with it that matters.”

It’s a communication channel – a real-time one much like the telephone. No doubt there are millions of mundane telephone calls made each day, but over the years lots of very important messages have been passed over the phone. It’s changed the course of history.

Now when it comes to technology and all things geeky I most definitely fall into the early adopter category, and that’s to be expected because it’s what I do for a living. And – to be fair – it’s more likely that the people who don’t use Twitter don’t actually think “it’s crap”, and instead think something along the lines of “Why would I bother?”

I remember feeling the same about the Internet itself before I got that first 33.6kbps modem: “What’s it for?” And to be honest, once I got online my eyes didn’t immediately light up because the web was a pretty barren place back then. But over time… well, it’s taken off a bit hasn’t it?

But my point here isn’t to defend Twitter. You can take it or leave it. You don’t need it, it’s just one of many great things about the internet. I happen to work in an industry where 8/10 people have a Twitter account. If you don’t have friends on Twitter I can understand how it might seem less appealing to you. And for the record, I don’t deny the common accusation that there are some incredibly uninteresting comments on there – I’m as guilty as anyone. And let’s not even mention those Tweets posted after a few drinks.

To make sense of Twitter, you need to take a step back and look at a large number of Tweets in context. And that context is always ‘now’. For example, what is happening right now in Manchester ? At the time of writing this, I discovered (in creating that link) that there was a protest going on in Piccadilly Gardens. I found several photos, and comments from people on both sides of the dispute. It only appeared on the news a couple of hours later. You can usually get a good roundup of what the population thinks about any popular subject or event while it is still ongoing.

The role of the blog

I used to blog more often, and when Twitter came along it dropped off sharply. Perhaps there’s some innate desire to have a public published voice which blogging fulfils, yet which Twitter fulfils so much more easily. One thought at a time. From my phone. On the bus.

So rather than hold in all my frustrations about my iPhone / O2 / 3G woes then write a big ranting blog post about it, I complain about it on Twitter instead. A few people reply, I get some advice, job done.

A few weeks ago I was thinking to myself that this might be the beginning of the end for blogging. There are certainly fewer blog posts for me to read when I check in on Google Reader every few days than there were a year ago. And I’d wager that that’s related to those bloggers also having a Twitter account.

But maybe that’s a good thing. There may be fewer blog posts overall*, but if that means fewer mundane blog posts (those thoughts offloaded onto Twitter) then by definition there’ll be a higher proportion of more interesting blogs among those that remain.

And bigger than that – it’s since occurred to me that Twitter is lacking in one crucial way that means that blogging still has a crucial role: archive.

Twitter is all about realtime, what’s happening now. Any given user’s Tweets used to be available through pagination on their Twitter profile page. But even then they lost their context as time passed. Because a large proportion of Tweets are part of a real-time conversation, once they’re consigned to the history pages they become isolated comments again. True, you can still see who replied to whom, but there’s no easy way of returning to and replaying that moment in time. At least not as far as I know. As a user I’d like (among other things) to be easily able to rewind time and return the same conversation thread I had a year ago.

And the recent changes to the Twitter site, that present it more as a realtime search engine (which was a very smart move in terms of exposing its usefulness) included the removal of that pagination feature. So it’s now even harder to look back in time. This was more than just a change of interface design.

Of course the preferred method of accessing Twitter is through its API and the plethora of apps that utilise it. But the API is all about searching the most recent results for any given user, term, location or a combination of them. While they’re still accessible in one respect I’d argue that the immense database which is all of Twitter’s history is mostly useless at the moment.

Blog posts on the other hand, usually being longer than 140 characters (this one could definitely do with some trimming) remain meaningful as standalone units. You can go back and read a three-year-old blog post and still make sense of it straight away.

So keep blogging! Twitter has its place, and will doubtless become more powerful as its API improves over time. Indeed I think Twitter – as an idea – is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ways human beings will be able communicate in the future. But while we all get excited about the realtime web let’s not forget to write things up properly too where it’s apt.

*Incidentally, I know that there’s no overall decrease in blogging, and this is no doubt due to the large number of people still coming online for the first time each week globally. But from a given set of bloggers that I’ve been following for a few years (around 80) there is a marked decrease in the amount of posts made.

This is our latest piece of work at PIRATA – a collaboration with BBH London for Britvic / Robinsons. On the site the user is guided by Robin Heuser (world-famous panto producer) to put on their own panto at home.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes that I won’t bore you with here, but suffice to say it was a great team effort involving lots of late nights and weekends over the course of just over a month.

Check it out, and while you’re there don’t forget to make your own poster, download it and stick it on your fridge.

http://www.putonapanto.com/

At Pirata (did I mention that I now work there?) we’ve just put our new website live: www.piratalondon.com.

We think it’s lovely. We hope you do too. Go and check it out, send the link to all your friends, post it on Facebook ad Twitter, scrawl the URL on your forehead, et cetera. You know the drill…

I’ve just sort of finished putting together my partner Rachael’s new website. I say “sort of” because there are a few minor technical things to iron out, but it’s pretty much there.

I put a lot of work into the “under the bonnet” side of things, and the result is that it’s incredibly easy to chop and change images and whole sections without having to ever look at single a line of code again. Which is good because I’ve been looking at rather a lot of it recently. And there are more images to add in the near future.

But enough about the site, please go and have a look at all the lovely photographs.

If you’re not aroused by such geekiness I suggest you look away now.

I just heard, via Clive’s Blog that Today is CSS Naked Day. The idea, I gather, is to disable your website’s stylesheets for the day, stripping it of its design, in the name of promoting web standards.

Well, if you’re reading this in a standard web browser you’ll probably notice that I haven’t actually done this. No, not on this blog. But, as it happens, I’m such a geek that I already built in the functionality to disable the CSS on my design site by appending ?css=none onto its URL. I can’t remember why – probably just “because I could”.

So, if you’re that way inclined, pop over to http://design.aderowbotham.com/?css=none and check it out in all its unstylish glory, any day of the year.

No, not very exciting was it? Actually, I’m not sure such a lazy contribution to their cause really counts.

My Netvibes account was just upgraded to ‘Ginger’, which is the name they’ve given to their latest version. They’ve added the ability to share your tabs in a publicly available personal ‘universe’, which in my case basically means you can see what blogs I’m following.

It’s an interesting idea because until now Netvibes has essentially been a glorified web-based RSS reader: accessed through a browser but still private to each user. But now I can share what I’m reading, what inspires me, and explore what other people are looking at. In other words, it now ticks a couple more of those Web2 buzzword boxes. I’m almost sick of hearing them. You know the ones.

I’m sure there are other features too but I only set it up half an hour ago. I have no idea why one of the blogs is highlighted in orange!

Visit my universe here or use the button below to add my blogs tab to your own Netvibes page.