LINK Gothamist: What's Fresh: Tomatoes »
An article dedicated to my favorite fruit. I’m a fan of the heirloom variety.

LINK I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass »
Matador tries its hands on “viral marketing” with Yo La Tengo’s latest album with said title.

And this is why we have YouTube.

“Now how did you arrive at the Lemon.. heads?” – Regis

Regis and Kathie Lee ask Evan some dumb questions.

More Lemonheads videos here. »

Having spent more time than I would’ve liked with Authorize.net support on the phone over the last week, it’s clear to me that our current account with them will simply not work with our hosted service products.

Should you be looking to buy a gateway + merchant account package from Authorize.net, DO NOT GET THE SECURESOURCE PACKAGE. The third-party merchant account for this package is WellsFargo (none of this was disclosed to me as I was signing up btw). They sound like a decent bank, but with this package, you have NO CONTROL over your acceptance of credit card orders. You want to turn Address Verification Services (AVS) off? Nope, can’t do it (even though the Authorize.net payment gateway interface lets you check off those little boxes–it actually doesn’t do anything). You want to be more lenient on accepting international orders? Not if WellsFargo isn’t comfortable with that too, you don’t.

Our nightmare with Authorize.net started when a few of our customers’ credit card transactions started being declined, and we couldn’t figure out why this was the case. We kept receiving a “general decline” message from our “payment processor” aka WellsFargo. After a few calls to figure out the problem, we find out that it’s a simple case where we have no control over what we accept as valid orders. They were being declined for possible AVS issues. Now when you run a web service, the rate of credit card fraud amongst your customers is going to be extremely low, especially if it’s a business tool. People are not going to jeopardize their business data by putting in a hokey card to save a few bucks a month. So we have reason to be very lienient with our credit card processing parameters.

We are now left with no choice but to move our recurring payments over to another processing setup. Authorize.net is already hinting at the need for me to go through their usual sales channel (i.e. pay another set up fee?–no thanks). In any case, I’m glad this problem has surfaced now rather than later and I hope you, dear reader, will be wary of Authorize.net’s package products which you have no control over. »

LINK Poster Hangers »
Clean, minimalistic alternative to framing posters for display.

LINK iPod Has Only 8% of Market in Taiwan »
Not nearly as ubiquitous as we may think living here in the States.

LINK Americans Seen Living Large in 'Micro Homes' »
An ABC report on Americans across the country seeking to live in smaller homes. However, even a 700 sqft home would be considered extra roomy by New York City standards here. Watch the video.

LINK "Free To Choose" TV Series by Milton Friedman »
“The legendary economist Milton Friedman’s television show ‘Free to Choose’ is now available on Google Video for free.”

LINK Kevin Smith on his worst sexual experience »
Quite the comedic speaker that Kevin Smith. All is okay for Kevin though because it was an experience he shared with his future wife.

This little anecdote provided by Caterina of Flickr/Yahoo helps to illustrate that sometimes when you’re selling yourself, you need to go beyond the conventional means.

Several companies — probably more than a dozen — have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal — and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that’s customer service, and BizDev 2.0.

And sometime when you want to do something, just do it and work out the fine details afterwards. This has been a somewhat proven model as illustrated by Napster’s free-for-all file sharing, ringtone businesses not clearing music rights at first, or YouTube’s dominance in video delivery with its sketchy copyright violations, etc. »

LINK NPR : Does Age Quash Our Spirit of Adventure? »
The story ponders why (backed by research) from ages 14-21, we are open to exploring our musical horizon, but by 29 and after, we all just about had it with listening to any unfamiliar stuff. Does growing old equate to stagnating?

LINK Getting traffic »
Guy from lovelyblogs.com talks about how he got traffic.

Back in June, we ran a series of ads for our time tracking service, Harvest. We came up with a few fun ads for the Deck, one of them being this with ‘ol Ben:

More recently we saw this little ad pop up over at the popular web2.0-absorbed-tech-lovefest known as TechCrunch:

Our Ben looks a bit more proper, yeah? »

LINK One for the bored at work network »
The U.S. workforce at its highest level of productivity.

LINK Why Do They Hate Us? »
“The anger and hatred that Arabs and Muslims have for the United States is rooted in decades of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.”

LINK Text* Snippets: Use Google's API to search your rails site [rails] [google] [search] [wsdl] [webservices] »

LINK BusinessWeek Marketing Gallery »
a collection of marketing-related slideshows.

LINK OK Go - Here It Goes Again »
Through a lo-fi setup and a lot of practice and creativity, this no-so-indie band does produced an ingenious video/marketing piece for themselves.

LINK Documentaries »
Various documentaries and tv specials spreading the other side of “truth.” Iraq’s Missing Billions is a good one to start with.