It used to be that when domains expired, they were either redirected to some scam product site or overpriced “you can buy this domain” page, depending on their pagerank.

Now they’re turned into ad sites that look exactly like the original site, graphics and all. So, for instance, what was once the promotional site for the US release of Kino’s Journey is now a bunch of links to online “pharmacies” hidden behind the original text and graphics, and the domain itself is now registered in Costa Rica by a Russian.

Lt. Smash’s blog went the same way a while ago. It looks like his old site, but it’s just spam, with the HTML and images scraped from some archive. I’ve run into others, enough that I’m now wary of all my old bookmarks that still seem to work.

(…and which Apple now uses for auto-completion when typing URLs in Safari 5, one more reason that’s a really stupid feature…)

Best music video I’ve seen in quite a while. Oddly enough, it isn’t even in Japanese… or Korean…

It ain’t just the thought that counts. Especially when it’s an afterthought.

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If you’re going to redirect people from versiontracker.com now that you’ve closed it down and replaced it with a less-useful site, could you at least redirect them to a similar page? Honestly, how hard is it to forward versiontracker.com/macosx to download.cnet.com/mac?

[Update: ah, it seems they did a very narrow redirect with an exact string match, without checking for all the common variations saved in bookmarks, including trailing slashes, index pages, etc. The exact example above now works, but some of the other variations still don’t.]

So, the new kid on the MMORPG block will be Tera. All I want to know is, how did they make it so far without realizing that they named one of their races potpourri?

Did I say “fresh air”? I meant “air freshener”.

…and it’s for a coffee commercial. Seven former members of Morning Musume are the new kimono-clad coffee cuties for Georgia Coffee (only five featured in this ad), Afternoon Musume:

Surprising that someone didn’t think of it earlier, given that their first single was called Morning Coffee.

[Update: the actual commercial is up now]

In other promotional news, Yuko Nakazawa (front and center in this picture) has another campaign running at the moment, for a weight-loss product. 37 looks good on her.

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That is, “people who are currently taking their first class in basic tech support”.

Me: “Hey, Apple, in Ping’s user profile display, song titles that contain apostrophes are cut off at the apostrophe, so that Don’t stand so close to me comes out as Don.”

Them: “I see you have written in with a concern about Ping and word recognition.”

Me: “Um, no; let me break it down into a nice numbered list for you.”

Them: “To resolve this issue, I suggest you uninstall and re-install iTunes. I have consulted with another Agent, and we have found that this is the best solution for this issue.”

Me: “…or I could wait 24 hours for Apple to fix the problem on their end, which they just did.”

“Uninstall and reinstall”, the fuck-off-and-die of customer service.

As the strongest vocalist in the sadly-defunct Melon Kinenbi, I think you could have done without the crap autotune effects on your debut solo single, 「killing my caddy」. And maybe made it sound a bit less like something cut from the soundtrack of Project Gotham Racing.

And maybe released it through something other than a Japan-only, cellphone-only streaming site. Look into selling on iTunes; any distribution mechanism that requires more effort than “Google for a torrent or a Hotfiles link” will never put money in your pocket. You have ten years worth of loyal fans who will click a simple “buy now” button, and you didn’t give them one.

It’s catchy, at least, even if it doesn’t sound much like you.