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Yep, thank god it's Friday! This week is one that I think both Steve and I would prefer to forget; it's not that anything bad has happened but it's just been one of those weeks were we seem to have achieved very little and we've both been fighting head colds and those who work for us have been unwell too.

One of the things that put us off this week was a major job that had been on the shelf for some months suddenly became alive last Friday ... only to go back on the shelf by Tuesday. When that job first came to us we turned away a couple of new smaller clients so we would have plenty of time to devote to the big job so we weren't very happy when it was put on hold.

This time though we were a lot more cautious so it's no big deal that it's been stopped yet again. And all along, somewhere in the back of my mind ... and Steve's too ... was the nagging doubt that this job is just too good to be true so maybe it is. Only time will tell.

So I certainly hope that your week was a whole lot better than ours and a whole lot better than the week that some small Internet start-ups must have endured this week. Lots of people still remember the dotcom boom of a few years ago and wondered if a bubble wasn't forming under all the Web 2.0 hype and now it seems that if there is a bubble it's beginning to burst.

It seems that the LA Times certainly thinks that the bubble is bursting and in an article on Monday suggested that funding for many startups was beginning to dry up. That's not surprising because many of those startups had little in the way of a business plan and if they did have one that they could articulate it usually consisted of something like 'start the business and hope to god that some big company buys us out before we actually have to make a profit'

As one commentator pointed out, many of those startups wanted to be online destinations but that meant they had to get traffic. That's where they failed because they either had no idea of how to get traffic or had nothing that would really attract it and as we all know, without traffic you're just not going to make real money.

Of course you can make a comfortable living without huge amounts of traffic but if you want to be able to service the loans that come with venture capital you do need much more traffic than would give you a comfortable living.

Memory storage
If you've invested in some of the latest Flash memory storage technology and you're using it to store important data then I wish you the best of luck. I saw some figures last week that suggested that the failure rate for the new technology was something that most of us would describe as scary.

If you want to store data you want it to be there when you come back to retrieve it but the failure rate of the larger flash storage units, as we're beginning to see in some small laptops, does not encourage me to move from the old-fashioned hard drive type of storage just yet. However IBM seems to have come up with an interesting concept that will not only increase the storage capacity of flash memory but also reduce the cost ... now if only someone could improve that reliability.

Subdomains - are they really yours?
And just to end today's column here's some interesting news about Network Solutions and GoDaddy. It seems that Network Solutions - and possibly GoDaddy - have been caught exploiting unused subdomains on various people's domains. They tack them onto the domain and then fill them full of spammy links.

So you own the domain but without your knowledge Network Solutions comes along and builds a subdomain. Google finds it, considers it spam and the whole domain goes down in the search engine rankings. Now that definitely is a very classy act wouldn't you say?

There's also an interesting question of who is legally responsible for the advertising that's appearing on those subdomains. One domain owner found that the links Network Solutions had put up on his subdomain were to poker sites.

Evidently Network Solutions did have the Service Agreement worded in such a way that anyone buying a domain name from them was giving Network Solutions permission to use any subdomains that they wanted but it was buried deep in the agreement where the vast majority of people wouldn't have seen it.

And that's it for this Friday. I'll be back on Monday looking forward to a much better week for us all.