It's no secret I'm not a big fan of planning ahead of holidays. I tend instead to ignore them until they have crept up and there's no time to prepare anything big. That's true whether it's Halloween or Christmas, anniversaries or birthdays. As far as I'm concerned, most holidays are completely overdone as it is, and they don't need my help to push them to higher levels of grandiose. This year's Halloween is no different. I didn't purchase a costume, I didn't buy candy for potential trick or treaters, and I didn't plan on dressing up for a Halloween event at the office today. Yet somehow, despite a lack of any planning, it all worked out.

This morning, while considering what it would be like to ignore the holiday altogether, and be a "Bah Hambug" to the day's events, I started to think how I could use piecemeal items I already owned to make something resembling a costume. I ran through the items I had around, in my head - from PJs, to t-shirts, to ball caps, shorts - anything... and I came up with the idea to go as a software engineer, simply by wearing a company t-shirt, shorts, flip-flops and black socks pulled up to the knees. After all, some of our engineers wear this stuff every day. 

In my mind, the "costume" fit the minimum criteria needed to say that I had "dressed up" for Halloween, but obviously the minimum. Nobody could say that I had spent too much money, worn too much makeup or any of that. In fact, I ran a very real risk of people not knowing what the heck I had planned. But surprisingly, more than two-thirds of the people who saw my outfit had me rightly pegged as a company engineer, and some specifically identified a colleague who most resembled my getup.

In the afternoon, we gathered to award prizes and offer colleagues' kids the chance to trick-or-treat from cubicle to cubicle. Gathered in the main conference room, they announced costume winners - from most scary, to most funny, and finally, most original. I looked around at every one else's costumes - from ninjas to ballplayers, vampires, princesses and butchers. But it was my name called as "most original", winning me a $25 Starbucks gift card, which I'll probably exchange to someone else at some point. But the point had been made. With almost zero planning, and no investment, I ended up a winner. Surprisingly, nobody asked for a recount. They got the trick, and I got the treat.

Listening to ''4.Five ft 5-Live Sofia 6-7-05'', by Underworld (Play Count: 11)

In September, Apple hinted they would be adding new features to the company's .Mac Web-based e-mail, utilizing tools including Ajax, to make the user experience more like a desktop application, and less limited. Last night, with little fanfare, the Webmail site was upgraded to do just that, and after using it to send/receive, delete, open and forward messages, it's not at all dramatic - especially when contrasted with the upgrades at Gmail by Google, Yahoo! Mail, etc. Where Apple could have leapfrogged the competition, they instead opted to play catchup.

Over the last decade, we've picked up and dropped a wide variety of e-mails, Web-based and otherwise, having at various used AOL, Earthlink, @Home, AT&T, Comcast, Netscape, Excite, GMail, Mail.com, Yahoo!, a number of work-based accounts, and Mac.com. On a daily basis, however, I only use two e-mail accounts - the one for work, and my Mac.com account. GMail I use as a repository for lists with high volume, and everything else is a waste. In fact, right now I have 452 new e-mails in GMail, and 1,093 unread messages in Yahoo! mail, 672 of which have been classified as "Bulk". It's not even worth looking at the other abandoned accounts.

Years ago, I bought the $99 a year .Mac subscription to have an e-mail address I could keep using regardless of the underlying ISP. If I ever switch away from Comcast, or need my e-mail on the road, the e-mail moves with me. Thanks to Apple's Backup and iSync services, the e-mails are backed up and won't be obliterated if I suffer a dead hard drive or user error. But aside from that, Apple hasn't given the same amount of focus to their Web-based services as they have the iPod or their desktops, by any means, and even with last night's upgrade, they haven't emerged as anything resembling a market leader.

In the new .Mac Webmail service, replying or double-clicking a message pops it open in a new window, with a simplified button structure - automatically guessing at your next move. The service also comes with a standard 1 GB of available space (compared to nearly 3 GB for GMail), and search functionality - which works fairly well. The major difference between the Web version and that of the desktop would be the archives. While on the Web, you only have your In Box, Sent Items, Deleted Items, and Junk. As I've saved mountains of e-mail from friends, family and commerce transactions over the last decade, I don't have access to those remotely, as they live on the desktop and don't hit my Webmail quota. If Apple tried to use their storage space to give me access to all my e-mail, that would be pretty cool, and that would put them ahead of competitive services at something.

For other views of Apple's Webmail upgrades, check here:
Mac Rumors: .Mac Webmail Updated
GigaOM: New Dot Mac Mail - Live Now

Google seems to rapidly waking up to the world of blogs. Although their own official corporate blog is typically bland, and was recently hacked, and their blog search engine has trailed the capabilities of others, including Technorati, the company is taking steps to catch up. Today, Google added the option to search blogs alongside news search, and enhanced their Google Alerts service so you could track keywords across blogs, Google Groups, and news.

Meanwhile, following some very public "unplanned outages" in the company's Blogger engine, some of the techies behind the service have come forward to explain how its happened, and how it won't happen again. The culprit? "Quirky hardware", they say - which isn't too impressive, given Google's cash horde and technical acumen.

In the late 1990s, during dot com mania, the Media Metrix rankings ruled the business world. Geocities fought with Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Excite and others to show they had the most unique visitors, the most click-throughs, and the most eyeballs. Talking heads on CNBC were ecstatic when a company with major eyeball momentum was readying to go public. But, as we know, the only way your eyeballs will see a lot of these dot mania companies now is if you look in the obituaries or in the history books.

So, if you're not yet ready to focus on profit/loss statements, but think your company has some serious wind behind its back, how do you value yourself? Is it done through the number of users, the number of hits on your Web page? The number of units shipped, or megabytes served, and downloads or views?

Robert Scoble says in this new world, a new audience metric is needed, which he terms "engagement", or how actively participatory the audience is. It's not just about the raw number of eyeballs, but how involved they are - does coverage in said media result in click-throughs? Does a post generate comments and further linkage?

In case you think this is a bunch of flim-flammery disguised as new economy logic, the debate over statistics can make or break company valuations. Recently, Digg has been rumored in TechCrunch to be in discussions with News Corporation for a potential acquisition, to the tune of $150 million. But VentureBeat says that conflicting statistics on the site's reach may kill the acquisition altogether. After all, if you can't agree just how many eyeballs are on the site, then how can you decide how much each eyeball is worth, and eventually, what the purchase price should be?

There isn't a quick fix easy answer, but if a business model isn't sustainable to the point of profitability, then regardless of how popular a service is, it may never be worth it to an acquiring company, for whom the newly acquired service will just be a future drag on EPS and P&L. Just look at Time Warner/AOL. AOL had an incredible user base, but there was no synergy there. Time Warner didn't see the popularity of its content skyrocket, but instead, it eroded from within as AOL became a massive boat anchor. Trying to make a business based on click throughs, page views, user count, downloads, video plays and eyeballs doesn't work any better in 2006 than it did in 2001. I thought we had learned this by now.

Listening to ''Never Knew Love'', by Stella Browne (Play Count: 8)