… and I hope there will be many more :)

Here’s the link to my author profile on the site.

There’s a nice and very sensible post on The Loop regarding booth babes at trade shows (like CES and IAA). Peter Cohen quotes a Gizmodo piece by Mat Honan regarding the complaints about booth babes directed at the organiser of CES. Read it here.

A comment by a guest named ‘Coward Anonim’ rubbed me the wrong way, though:

If companies want to pay them and they want to get the job, then what is a problem?

Can’t adults (18+ years) make decisions for themselves? How the h… they are eligible to vote in a public election, then? Is not election more important???

(Let’s leave the elephant in the room — the degradation of women to sex objects — standing there for a minute. Let’s also make a distinction between normally clothed female sales staff and booth babes.)

When I go to a trade show I go there for the products. If companies need scantly clad women to get my attention, I immediately suspect that their product isn’t good enough to impress me on its own.

I like women as much as the next guy, but I find the practice of putting scantly clad women on display at such shows insulting. — Why?

Because what the people hiring them are telling me, is that I’m so controlled by primal urges to serve every female in sight, that I’ll flock to every booth with booth babes.

Good products don’t need booth babes to be sold. Modern men don’t need booth babes to find those products.

He hits the nail square on the head and actually makes a point I haven’t thought about: Search Engine Optimisation.

It’s a good and honest post, with a healthy amount of profanity mixed-in.

My take is that sometimes it doesn’t make sense to add comments to a blog, but many bloggers, developers and journalists who used to have comments on their site, are simply being dishonest about the way the removal of comments influences a potential discussion.
If you want a discussion on the topic you wrote about, allow comments or give people a way to make their opinions heard/read not only by yourself.
If you don’t want a discussion, or simply don’t want to be disagreed with on your own site, you don’t allow comments.

Other explanations, like this one from MG Siegler;

Earn your voice.

are just excuses so you don’t have to tell people the truth:
“I don’t care for your opinion as long as you’re not popular.” — which brings us back to what John Welch was saying. Go ahead, read his article.

Stephen Hackett had a nice post up on his site about how and when to attribute content or links to other people.

Proper attribution is important and sometimes not that easy.
Yesterday he posted a simple attribution rule that Chris Martucci lives by:

My criteria for via links are simple: If someone points me to an article I did not find on my own (either through my RSS reader or at its original source), I’ll include a via. Likewise, if an article I found on my own links to a second article, which I then post to my weblog, I’ll link to the original source.

The only thing I do differently, is to also mention the site I found a link on by my own, if the author of the second article added even the slightest bit of value to the original post.

(Chris Martucci via Stephen Hackett)

A quote from the post:

You can preach all you want about rooting your phone and hacking your tablet to do inane things, like control your refrigerator light, but my family was actually getting things done within 30 minutes of opening and activating their new computers - yes, computers.

Ease of use and seamlessness are some of the things that convince many people of Apple’s products in my opinion.

I had a similar experience with my parents lately: I gave them my MacBook Pro, pre-loaded with OS X Lion, MS Office, the current iLife apps and a few other nifty things that I knew they’re going to use.
After about an hour of showing them around the OS and a few apps, my mother was hooked. Guess by which features?
Mission control and full screen apps, gestures and auto saving.
As long as the innards of OS X are somehow accessible to those who want or need to work with them, Apple can iOS-ify the system as much as they want, if it makes full-blown computers easier to use for normal people.

Click through to Stephen’s site for the link to this video, you won’t regret it. My thought during the first 30 seconds of the video was: “Meh, I’ve built more complicated things back in the day with my Darda tracks, but then at checked the time code and length of the video. My second though was: “I want to believe!”