|
READY.
FIRE!
AIM!
6/28/2009
5:53 PM
A friend of mine at work lived in Iraq until a few
years ago. His wife is Iranian. (He only admits to having one wife). He
is dismissive of the whole idea of voting in the Middle East. He classes
Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei in the same category as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein:
both nut-jobs. Last time he voted (in Iraq) armed thugs threatened him
with death if he didn’t vote for the candidate of their choice.
During the Saddam period, pretty much every male had to go into the
army, unless they bought their way out. My friend had to pay the
equivalent of 4 automobiles in funds to avoid this.
After the US attacked & invaded Iraq, he was repeatedly contacted by a
militant organization, demanding the equivalent of thousands of dollars
of payment, “so they could kill US soldiers.” The group did not identify
itself. My friend still has no idea whether they were Sunni or Shia, Al
Qaeda, or even possibly some Iraqi government extortion racket that just
wanted money and had no interest in killing US soldiers.
My friend repeatedly refused to pay, and was repeatedly warned, mostly
by telephone. Whoever these people were, they knew all about him. They
knew who his relatives were, they knew what properties he owned, how
many children he had (their names and ages), they knew how much money he
had, they knew of his wife’s relatives in Iran.
After a very angry refusal to pay, his brother and cousin were both shot
and killed. Then came another demand to pay. He abandoned his house &
property, and took his family out of Iraq. I asked him, “Are you ever
going back to Iraq?” “I can’t go back,” he said. “I didn’t pay. One
minute after I am back, I will be dead. They will know.” hg47
6/9/2009
2:57 AM
My Fave Twits, circa 6/9/2009:
http://twitter.com/advancedscience
http://twitter.com/AnAmericanOmen
http://twitter.com/angie1234p
http://twitter.com/Arcadia1
http://twitter.com/arleigh
http://twitter.com/atomicpoet
http://twitter.com/axlarry
http://twitter.com/BakeMyFish/
http://twitter.com/BasilLeaf
http://twitter.com/blankwhitewall
http://twitter.com/BonedaddyKing
http://twitter.com/Cammmalot
http://twitter.com/catttaylor
http://twitter.com/chacharat1
http://twitter.com/ChiNurse
http://twitter.com/ColleenLindsay
http://twitter.com/cyberbonn
http://twitter.com/davegray
http://twitter.com/db
http://twitter.com/djennfree
http://twitter.com/doyouzooloo
http://twitter.com/drnili
http://twitter.com/duffmcduffee
http://twitter.com/edwardboches
http://twitter.com/eunice007
http://twitter.com/evilgrrl
http://twitter.com/expectwonderful
http://twitter.com/FilmTruth
http://twitter.com/Fireland
http://twitter.com/girlmonkey
http://twitter.com/GuysDoMeAFavor
http://twitter.com/hollo
http://twitter.com/jantallent
http://twitter.com/jennipps
http://twitter.com/JessicaGottlieb
http://twitter.com/JosephBTreaster
http://twitter.com/LaughItUp
http://twitter.com/lisahickey
http://twitter.com/luckyshirt
http://twitter.com/MariaParkinson
http://twitter.com/Mark_Braunstein
http://twitter.com/marklish
http://twitter.com/mashable
http://twitter.com/migukin
http://twitter.com/MIWomensForum
http://twitter.com/moonstruckmania
http://twitter.com/msfitznham
http://twitter.com/nomad_chicken
http://twitter.com/norisakitten
http://twitter.com/pamela1986
http://twitter.com/peterfletcher
http://twitter.com/PowerHungryFilm
http://twitter.com/rainesmaker
http://twitter.com/ramkitten
http://twitter.com/Rayke
http://twitter.com/Remiel
http://twitter.com/rlanzara
http://twitter.com/rnBetty
http://twitter.com/sconstantine
http://twitter.com/secrettweet
http://twitter.com/sids
http://twitter.com/Sternenfee
http://twitter.com/TomVMorris
http://twitter.com/TracyOConnor
http://twitter.com/TruckerDesiree
http://twitter.com/vincereardon
http://twitter.com/wildchildeditor
http://twitter.com/wildmonkeysects
http://twitter.com/willingthrall
http://twitter.com/Xtal
http://twitter.com/zjjtrans
4/12/2009
3:32 AM
I keep breaking my home page.
You know those Tweets that go:
I just updated my webpage with new articles;
Well my Tweet would go:
Just threw out a third of my latest updates.
Well, hell, if Twitter can lose 3 days of my
updates, can't I lose a few articles without feeling badly? hg47
3/8/2009
3:25 PM
Super Tweets
Lately, I’ve been messing around with vertical alignment on Twitter. My
basic idea was to use alternate characters to draw pictures or create
multi-line effects. I call them Super Tweets, but they are just
carefully crafted Tweets where each line achieves vertical alignment, so
that the Tweet has a striking visual effect. This is harder than it
sounds, because Twitter uses proportional text.
There are many websites that exhaustively list alternate characters. Or
on my computer, I can simply start going up through the numbers on my
numbers keyboard. Alt-1, Alt-2, Alt-3, etc.
Alt-3 = ♥ (heart)
Something else: An alternate character that appears one way in a Word
document may appear differently if the alt-(number) is entered directly
into Twitter. I’ve seen that a couple of times. To get that character, I
have to create it in Word, then paste it into Twitter.
I see no commercial value to Super Tweets at this time, primarily
because they will only display properly on the standard Twitter web page
with default settings. On third party apps, like TweetDeck, I’m sure
they are just a scrambled mess. So, probably 75% of the TwitterSphere
just sees a retarded mess; but (I hope) 25% sees my finely-crafted gem.
I made a conscious decision, a long time back, not to use an animating
avatar for my Twitter Account. They bug me. And I’ve read a lot of
Tweets from Tweople who also are irritated by animating avatars. I don’t
do Super Tweets very often, for the same reason. It’s like all caps in a
Tweet: it is SHOUTING!
I am slightly worried that perhaps bits or pieces of my Super Tweets
might be lifted, and used by spammers to focus attention on their
Tweets. But I figure it’s coming sooner or later, just like Advertising
on Twitter.
So, if you want to Tweet your own Super Tweets, first do some Google
searches to find out as much as you can about alternate characters.
Second, set up a Test Twitter Account that has the exact same name
length as your Main Twitter Account. Do not Restrict it, because the
restricted icon is part of the first line length, just don’t follow
anybody and don’t let anybody follow that account. Then do all your
testing with the private account, because most of your test Tweets won’t
work.
Another something else: Twitter has rewritten the code for their pages
several times since I joined. Two of my Super Tweets came out slightly
screwed up, because I tested them before Twitter changed the code for
their page. hg47
2/19/2009
4:26 AM
Welcome to my World
(Incoming TweetStream)
My Fave Twits, Circa 2/19/2009, in no particular
order:
http://twitter.com/thesilverhand
http://twitter.com/eunice007
http://twitter.com/waxingpoetic75
http://twitter.com/angie1234p
http://twitter.com/nomad_chicken
http://twitter.com/pamela1986
http://twitter.com/jennipps
http://twitter.com/inkinmytea
http://twitter.com/ramkitten
http://twitter.com/hellotimi
http://twitter.com/heady
http://twitter.com/Pandaran
http://twitter.com/marinemajor
http://twitter.com/vincereardon
http://twitter.com/christinelu
http://twitter.com/stevenimmons
http://twitter.com/katlogictalk
http://twitter.com/BarbaraUechi
http://twitter.com/jantallent
http://twitter.com/Colleen_Lindsay
http://twitter.com/peterfletcher
http://twitter.com/Twit_Traffic
http://twitter.com/deniPath4Change
http://twitter.com/JerryBroughton
http://twitter.com/lyndajohnson
http://twitter.com/RobReevesStudio
http://twitter.com/hollo
http://twitter.com/doyouzooloo
http://twitter.com/barcelonaphotos
http://twitter.com/LeighaB
http://twitter.com/xizhen
http://twitter.com/MariaParkinson
http://twitter.com/lisahickey
http://twitter.com/migukin
http://twitter.com/compulsivereade
http://twitter.com/TruckerDesiree
http://twitter.com/BonedaddyKing
http://twitter.com/TerenceSmelser
http://twitter.com/GiveAndHelpUp
http://twitter.com/Naina
http://twitter.com/djennfree
http://twitter.com/VoteAudrey
http://twitter.com/zayrayves
http://twitter.com/digitalfemme
http://twitter.com/davidbadash
http://twitter.com/Aquentminister
http://twitter.com/awewriter
http://twitter.com/catttaylor
http://twitter.com/chacharat1
http://twitter.com/CosmosGirl
http://twitter.com/expectwonderful
http://twitter.com/FilmTruth
http://twitter.com/Gnuboss
http://twitter.com/JanieAngus
http://twitter.com/kidsnovelistzs
http://twitter.com/melissaruth
http://twitter.com/norisaxnouvelle
http://twitter.com/PowerHungryFilm
http://twitter.com/susankildahl
http://twitter.com/wildchildeditor
http://twitter.com/Rayke
http://twitter.com/1938media
http://twitter.com/rainesmaker
http://twitter.com/duffmcduffee
hg47
1/29/2009
7:04 PM
I’ve read of Twitter horror stories about people
losing 80% of the their followers overnight, through some Ghost in the
Machine.
I have seen the Ghost. He was a silent apparition dragging a chain with
ball at the end.
First off: it’s easy to get me to follow you on Twitter. Just send me a
@hg47 that interests me. I will follow you right then and there. But I
don’t automatically follow everybody who follows me. Some I do, some I
don’t. Depends on my mood, the avatar, the update page, how busy I am,
whatever.
Yesterday, I was tweeting & happened to glance over at my stats. I was
Following 0! My Followers were down about 50. I refreshed the page & my
Following stats were now mostly where they should be, but missing about
280. My Followers had gone down about another 25. I was tired, so I just
logged out and went to bed.
Today, my Following is still shy about 280. But which 280? Don’t have a
clue. And my Followers are now up about 100. So I don’t know what is
going on.
I can’t trust the numbers.
I had read about Twitter back-up sites, so I found one (Tweetake) and
backed-up my stats. But here’s the thing: I know from experience with
computers that just because I have a data back-up, that doesn’t
necessarily mean that the back-up will be useful. Sometimes: click,
click, click – and everything is back to before. Sometimes: I have to
spend a day (or a week!) with the back-up data to get things (mostly)
back to before. And sometimes the back-up is flat-out worthless.
Sometimes it’s just easier on the soul to start over. So if @hg47
suddenly becomes @hg53, you know why. hg47
1/28/2009
12:14 AM
Tweet Less, DM More
No, this is not a hint. It just seems to be what I am doing on Twitter
lately.
A couple of weeks ago I thought I had a First Approximation on Twitter.
I thought I knew, more or less, what I was doing on Twitter, and why. I
thought I had figured out what my “Agenda” was. Well, wrong, wrong,
wrong & wrong.
My Tweet to DM ratio used to be 10:1, now it’s running about 1:5
What the hell am I doing? Going into stealth mode? hg47
1/15/2009
9:48 AM
Follow More, Tweet Less
I’ve been messing with Twitter since mid-November, 2008. 2 Months. Have
a few conclusions.
Full Disclosure: I now have an agenda. (This is new, it took me almost 2
months to even figure out why I was on Twitter.) I want to
establish a “Presence” on Twitter, and hopefully make a few Twitter
Friends along the way. So, my MO seeks a modest steady growth of
Followers, and occasional interaction with those few fine favorite Twits
who warm my heart with their Tweets. I’m gearing up for a run at the
Publishing Industry, so long-range, I hope to prove to Agents and
Publishers that I’m not a total incompetent when it comes to Networking.
Twitter is a kind of networking, isn’t it? I’d like to get my new SF
novel published. I still think the best way to approach editors & agents
is through physical sample chapters & query letters (it’s how I did it
last time), but it might help when they check me out and find my website
& Twitter update page.
There must be something wrong with a Social Networking Website that
would have me for a member and allow me to prosper within it. (Well, I’m
sort of prospering, aren’t I?) Anyway, there is something wrong with
Twitter. It can be GAMED.
Twitter can be used for many things, depending upon the types of
accounts you follow. A news feed, a chat-room, regular text messages
with friends, a place to vent. Most prominently, it sometimes seems,
Twitter is used as a place for self-promotion.
I’m one of those kinds of guys who reads the Owner’s & Operator's Manual
before turning on my new Tech Toy. I may even go online for additional
info before turning it on. Then I play with the Tech Toy, perhaps in
ways the manufacturer did not intend. My basic research on Twitter is
here: (link), although I
haven’t updated it since 12/15/2008 4:36 AM. I’ll try to get around to
updating it soon.
I suggest early on that you decide what you want out of Twitter, what
you want to accomplish, and that you adjust your online behavior
accordingly.
What is more important to you? The quality and spot-on relevance of your
incoming TweetStream (the Tweets from the ones you follow), or the
quantity & quality of your followers (the ones who read your Tweets)?
INPUT or OUTPUT?
If you focus on INPUT, your output will suffer: few will actually read
your Tweets, few will follow. If you focus on OUTPUT, your input will
suffer: you will be buried in irrelevant nonsense, off-target incoming
Tweets that you have to sort through.
If your focus is INPUT, you may now stop reading, as I have nothing here
to help you. You know what you want for INPUT; you don’t need me getting
in the way. You can quite happily do your thing, and succeed in
achieving an awesome incoming TweetStream without me.
If your focus is OUTPUT, I have a hint: Follow More, Tweet Less.
Twitter favors the early-adopters and the aggressive followers. Like an
Amway pyramid scheme, the early ones in will always have an advantage
over you and me. Most of the new Twits will always wind up reading and
clicking on the Top 100 list looking for good people to follow. Those
Top 100 are on Tens of Thousands of Internet lists of good Twitter
people to follow. Most of the Top Twitter 100 not only run multiple
blogs & sites that redirect Internet traffic back to themselves, but are
friends with other Web Heavy-Weights who also run multiple blogs & sites
that redirect Internet traffic back to themselves (and friends who
reciprocate hyperlink redirects). The Top Dogs are going to stay pretty
much right where they are, on the Top Twitter 100, even if they stop
Tweeting for the next four months & vacation in the Caribbean where
there is no phone service or Internet access. But most of the Twitter
Top 100 are working full time to stay on top, because heavy Internet
traffic is big money.
There is a myth going around that there is a relationship between the
value of your Tweets, and the number of Twits who follow you. Bzzzzzzzt!
There is no correlation whatsoever.
There is another myth going around that most of your followers actually
read your Tweets. Bzzzzzzzt! Try clicking through the people who
“follow” you and you will find suspended accounts that are still listed
as accounts that are “following” you. Also, open up the update pages for
a bunch of the accounts that are “following” you and you will find many
accounts that haven’t been updated for days. Further, consider that even
active accounts often are not online and active exactly when you are
Tweeting. Don’t forget the Power-Followers, who follow so many Tweeples
they couldn’t read all the Tweets even if they wanted to. And then there
are the 3rd-Party Apps that most Power Tweeters use these days to filter
their incoming TweetStream, like TweetDeck. These software apps enable
someone to filter your Tweets so they never see any of them, but you
don’t know because they are still listed as one of your followers. I
don’t use any of these apps (I use multiple Twitter tabs in Firefox),
but my guess is that they can filter out even the @messages and DMs you
try to send to them. I have no hard data, but my personal guess is that
every time you Tweet, on average between 5% & 10% of your “followers”
read that Tweet.
(As an aside, I am usually surprised by the reactions to my Tweets. I’ll
spend an hour crafting a special Tweet with loving care and attention,
save it for just the right time; and nothing, no reaction. Another time,
I’ll be half-drunk, can’t think of a damn thing, and throw out some
silly-assed thing, and find a stack of 5 @replys waiting for me, 2 which
state that I’m a genius. Perhaps I should drink more and wordsmith
less.)
If OUTPUT is your focus, the basic strategy is to follow a shit load of
people. Many of those will follow you back out of courtesy or curiosity.
This is how most of the Big Dogs grew to be Big Dogs. Some of the
current Big Dogs don’t follow very many people now, but believe me at
one time they Followed the hell out of the TwitoSphere. Once they were
Big Dogs, they could dump most of the accounts on their Following list
and get away with it: some didn’t notice, some didn’t care, and the lost
followers were quickly replaced by new followers from referral lists on
the Internet and Top 100 Lists.
I’ll tell you another secret: even little dogs like you and me can dump
some of the accounts on the following list and get away with it. Go back
to your back pages in following, starting from the first ones you
followed, find pics that you never see in your TweetStream which are
following you back, and dump a bunch of them. Your Following numbers
won’t change much.
Twitter has certain speed limits. I don’t know exactly what they are, as
I’ve never exceeded them. But apparently, if you try to follow too many
people too fast, you get blocked so you can’t follow any more for
awhile. Again, I do not know the exact limits, and Twitter intentionally
does not make them known so that bots can’t effectively take too much
advantage of them. (Yes, Virginia, there are “following bots” that will
automatically go out and follow shit loads of accounts for you. There
are also websites that will let you know which people you follow aren’t
following you back. Other sites that will, apparently, bulk follow
accounts for you and/or bulk unfollow accounts for you. Probably, you
can even automate it, set it up, and forget it, as the bots do your
following for you.
There’s another limit you have to take into account: the 2000 following
limit. Apparently, when an account approaches or exceeds the 2000
following limit, a real live Twitter person takes an actual look at your
account, your Tweet History, your Following History, to decide if you
are spam. Some accounts they lock them down so they can’t follow any
more accounts until their own following numbers cross the 2000 line.
There may be more limits, there probably are.
Forget the mantra that you have to provide value to the community. I
suggest instead that you just do your own thing; Tweet however the hell
you feel, just don’t rub it in Tweeples’ faces. By this I mean that the
most value packed Tweets online won’t gain you very many followers; but
a good percentage of the Tweeple you follow will follow you back. Also,
the only time I really lost a bunch of followers was when I tweeted real
fast a bunch of sexually suggestive Tweets. In twenty minutes I dropped
13. And I bet I could have avoided most of the loss if I had slowed
things way down; hence my advice: Follow More, Tweet Less. They’re not
going to unfollow you if they don’t see your Tweets, they’re going to
drop & block you if you piss them off.
I have been on Twitter for 2 months, and now (1/14/2009 6:33 PM) have
2,738 Followers. I am not an aggressive follower. I’m in the slow lane;
twits behind me are blinking their lights & honking their horns wanting
to pass. And many zoom around me. So what? I’m doing my thing, they’re
doing theirs.
There’s one gal I’ve been watching for fun. Call her a PowerFollower, a
SuperWoman among PowerFollowers.
@DesignPepper
TwitterCounter Stats Details:
Tracking since: Dec 21, 2008
Followers on Dec 21: 2
Added since then: 6,539
Added since yesterday +492
Average growth per day: 654
On 12/21/2008 @DesignPepper had 2 Followers.
On 1/4/2009 @DesignPepper was following 7,501 and had 6,835 Followers.
Let’s check her today (1/14/2009 7:11 PM):
13,698 Following
13,022 Followers
280 updates
Now there’s a gal who get’s my point! Follow More, Tweet Less!
hg47
11/28/2008
10:15 AM
Identified still 2 more TweetTypes & added them to
the list below. hg47
11/26/2008
8:14 AM
Identified 2 more TweetTypes & added them to the
list below.
Mobasoft on Twitter has an animated picture.
It animates like the favicon on my home page. What's interesting
is that the miniature of the picture animates on everyone's page when
they follow him! It's probably an animated gif. I'm not sure
I could drink that much coffee. hg47
11/25/2008
3:28 AM
I've been messing around with Twitter for about a
week. Too soon to tell if it's useful, or just a time sink.
But I have to admit that it is addictive and fun. I get the
appeal.
I've identified most of the major TweetTypes:
TweetType1
= regular conversation with friends
TweetType2
= news feed
TweetType3
= Here I Am, Deal With It! (hands on hips, scowl on face)
TweetType4
= spit against the wind (reader reaction generally WTF, but sender
feels better)
TweetType5
= the TweetLink (check out this great webpage that *I* found!)
TweetType6
= The New Number Six (testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, anyone listening to
me?)
TweetType7
= Twaiku (a twitter haiku; loosely, any poem)
TweetType8
= self-promotion, self-promotion, mywebsite.com, self-promotion,
myothersite.com
TweetType9
= Tweet-X(of-Y) - MultiPartTweets
TweetType10
= Alt-Language-Tweet (non-understood language, includes programming
language)
TweetType11
= AllQuestionMarksTweet (Asian Tweet)
TweetType12
= the "TweetQuote" (sender often has no clue, but has book of
quotations)
TweetType13
= TweetThirteen - sent in a moment of anger, deleted too late
TweetType14
= the GeekTweet = code; insider language; binary slang
TweetType15
= TomboyTweets - the vibe of most women tweeters
TweetType16
= GirlyTweets - traditionally feminine sweet-sixteen tweets
TweetType17
= AllCapsTweet (shouting, usually with multiple exclamation marks)
TweetType18 = SecretConfessionTweet (via
http://secrettweet.com/ and others)
hg47
TweetType19 =
the Echo (repeats the tweet of another)
TweetType20 =
the RepeatTweet (resends something one already sent) hg47
TweetType21
= the @Tweet (personal message sent publicly)
TweetType22
= the Phony@Tweet (pretend personal message to high & mighty sent
publicly as a publicity ploy)
hg47
11/16/2008
1:56 PM
Friend Rich just turned me on to: slickdeals.net.
If you're into hunting down the best price, this may be for you.
hg47
11/15/2008
1:33 PM
DeepDiscount.com is having
a secret sale till Nov 23 on DVDs & Blu-ray. 25% off. Enter coupon code
SUPERSALE when you checkout. hg47
11/10/2008
9:53 AM
I found the update on
WHO'S ON FIRST? that I heard a couple of times on the radio, on rock
stations decades ago, but never knew who did it. Finally found out.
The Credibility Gap was originally formed as
Lew Irwin & Credibility Gap in May 1968 by, of course, Lew Irwin
and it was comprised of the news department staff of KRLA-AM, a
top-40 station in Los Angeles, California. The group offered daily
satirical sketches of the day's news that was played after the
regular news.
An album of their KPPC and post-KPPC material
was released in 1977 called The Bronze Age Of
Radio. The selected tracks poked fun at their then-favorite
political targets like Nixon and Ted Kennedy, a commercial featuring
a rare recurring Gap character (sportscaster Dave Schwartz)
and a modern rewrite on the classic 'Who's On
First' sketch where instead of the confusion of players' odd names,
it was rock groups' names ("Who's on first, Guess Who's on second
and in the third act??" "Yes?"). You can still hear this
stand out track occasionally on the Dr. Demento show, or you can
hear it on Harry Shearer's site (along with other Gap material).
The track I've been
looking for is posted on Harry Shearer's site:
The problem is that it
is a .ram file! I have an audio file conversion program, as part of
my dB Poweramp player, but it doesn't recognize .ram files. I
wanted to convert it to mp3, and then re-post it here. I'm
afraid to download the RealPlayer software, because it seems like a
major installation, and I'm worried it will mess up my dB Poweramp
player. I have learned the hard way, that I have to refuse all
updates to Windows Media Player, because whenever I update the
Windows Media Player it tries to take over my computer, and I lose
all my convenient right-click options when running dB Poweramp; even
worse, it won't let me re-establish dB Poweramp as the default audio
player!
If you do not have
RealPlayer, here is a smaller installation freeware that will let
you play the track:
Download 'Real Alternative'
The audio quality on the .ram file
sucks! But that doesn't make it any less funny. hg47
10/13/2008
10:37 AM
There are all kinds of high-tech high-cost
solutions to getting music into every room of your home. But if
you just want a cheap solution with
great background sound, this may do the job. Cost: $100 per room.
SONY Mini Hi-Fi Component System
MHC-EC55. Walmart sells them for a hundred
bucks. They have audio in to take the feed from the main
stereo/computer. And they also have AM, FM, 3-disc CD changer that
also plays mp3s burned to CD-R, which lets every room play something
different.
When I moved to El Cajon, the movers trashed my
Advent Loudspeakers. So I had to go shopping for new loudspeakers.
Now, I've been brought up on the KLH Model 6 (my
dad added a folded 12-foot-long air column tuned to 32 cycles per
second, so he could enjoy the lowest notes on his organ tapes), later
the Bose 901, later the original Advent Loudspeaker, and the Smaller
Advent Loudspeaker. After Henry Kloss left the company, Advent
produced many trash loudspeakers, but the original Advent Loudspeaker
and the Smaller Advent Loudspeaker hold up as the finest home
loudspeakers for reproducing music in the home, regardless of price,
regardless of what music you prefer. Neither Advent requires a
subwoofer; in fact, both kick the ass of most of the subwoofers on the
market.
Before my dad died, he traded in his Advent
Loudspeakers for Gale loudspeakers. The GS401A. They were
very pretty, black with silver sides, sitting on silver speaker-stands.
For several months, I used the Gale GS401A as my main speakers.
The sound was very sweet, but it lacked the bottom octave of bass that
the Advents provided. I remember thinking that if I just added a
subwoofer, that these Gales would be the ultimate sound solution.
But eventually, that very sweetness began to bother me: I was listening
to the speakers, not the music. I was also starting to record and
master my own music then, and I realized that I couldn't use the Gales
for monitoring; I needed accuracy, not honey poured over the sound.
So I got rid of them.
It has been a long, long time since I shopped
for loudspeakers. My dad got his Gales at a high-end custom stereo
shop; but I got my Advents at the local Pacific Stereo. So I went
down to the local Best Buy, and was moderately surprised that nothing
regardless of price satisfied me. I Googled some appointment-only
places; but before going to one of them, I tried Circuit City. I
found some Polk Audio speakers that work for me.
I bought four Polk Audio Monitor 30s, and one
Polk Audio powered subwoofer, PSW12. I've had the Polks for about
two years. Are they better than the Advents? Or worse?
I have no idea. I would need to do A-B tests. What I do know
is that they are adequate for my needs; I also trust the Polks to
monitor and master my own music.
I originally bought the Sony MHC-EC55 for work.
It was worth a hundred bucks to put my own music system at work so I
could listen to my own music every workday. The Sony MHC-EC55 has
a 3-disc CD player, audio in, AM, FM, and it plays mp3s burned to CD-R
or CD-RW. And when it is set to the "Pop-DSGX" EQ setting, the
sound is awesome for a hundred bucks. hg47
8/18/2008
1:22 PM
http://www.dvdavenue.tv/
(the same company seems to be doing business at
several different sites, with slightly different availability of
product)
These guys record TV shows off cable onto DVD-Rs
at slow speed, every episode, every year. The sound isn't very
good. The picture isn't very good. Shipping is like
20-bucks. Occasionally, a DVD-R won't even play. But they
have some material that isn't available anywhere else. I'm a nut
for courtroom drama; for me the sound and picture quality is OK for
that. If there's some old show you love, but it isn't available
yet on DVD, and you don't want to wait, this might work for you.
hg47
8/11/2008
5:29 PM
Statistics don't lie.
Your mother lies. Your girlfriend lies.
Your boss lies. The President of the United States lies. But
statistics don't lie.
If you get a pet, you will live longer.
How much do pets cost? How much longer will you live?
It costs you $45,000.00, total, over your
lifetime, average; and you live 7 additional years, average. hg47
http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/
October 15, 2007
Would You Pay $45,000 to Live Seven More Years?
Stick with me on this one. It's a bit of a round-about post, but I
think you'll see where I'm coming from by the end.
I've posted a ton on
the cost of pets and have come to the conclusion that
a pet costs roughly $1,000 a year. Bigger dogs may cost more, a
hamster will cost less, but I use $1,000 as a nice, round number to work
with. And I know that none of you spends this much each year, but
someone is spending a ton because those are average numbers. But we're
not here to talk about that issue today anyway. For now, let's just all
agree that a pet costs roughly $1,000 per year.
So, if you had a pet from the time you were out of your parents house
(we'll say age 22) until age 67, this would give you a pet for 45 years
(I'm assuming three pets that live 15 years each, but you can plug in
your own assumptions here.) In this case, those pets would have cost you
$45,000.
I was watching a commercial for AIG Insurance the other day when they
flashed a startling fact on the screen -- that owning a pet can extend
your life by seven years. Of course, I was skeptical of this claim, but
knowing what I do about advertising and big companies, I knew they
weren't making it up -- they had to have some sort of reasonable back-up
for this claim. So I emailed them and asked where they came up with it.
They emailed me this link on
Ten Small Things That Can Add Big Years to Your Life (which I'll
probably cover in more detail on a later post) which includes the
following:
Several studies have shown that owning a
pet lowers a person's blood pressure, increases self-esteem in children,
decreases the mortality rates of heart attack victims, decreases
cholesterol, decreases depression, relieves stress, and increases family
happiness. Pets also make people, particularly younger people, more
likely to participate in extracurricular activities. On a whole,
research predicts that those who own pets will outlive those who don't
by an average of seven years.
Here's that last sentence again:
On a whole, research predicts that those
who own pets will outlive those who don't by an average of seven years.
Ok, so let's put it all together. Owning a pet during your adult
years will cost you $45,000. Owning a pet during your adult years will
add seven years to your life. Therefore, for a $45,000 investment, you
can get a pet and expect to add seven years to your life.
Sounds like a good deal to me. What do you think?
--
8/11/2008
11:09 AM
Guest Post, from Rich Mansfield:
richman0829@yahoo.com
Meet the Hues.
Hai and Mai Hue are
fictional “boat people”, refugees from Vietnam - and they’d just as
soon never see a boat again! We’ll draw a kindly veil over their early
hardships and pick them up as U.S. citizens and Army Reservists.
They start off not
even speaking English. After they make it to the promised land - the
U.S. - they pick up their English in free classes, through library
videotapes, and on the job at MacDonald’s.
They get a couple
hundred bucks each from one weekend of duty a month with the Reserves,
and another couple of hundred by going to school on the G.I. Bill. They
get teaching credentials and do sub work. Hai calls himself the “Sub
Dude”, because of his subdued personality. When they’re not working,
they’re scouting for better jobs, trying to break into either the movie
industry or longshoring, both of which are like hereditary royalty; hard
to get into, but lucrative. They live in a 15-foot, 30-year-old
aluminum trailer they bought for $100 cash, in a trailer park that’s
cheap but safe, and near a bus stop. Hai asks Mai if this is okay, and
she replies, Ban là kidding? Sau cái gì chúngtôi cho là su xuyên qua
dieu này ca hai là thiên duong! Which of course translates to: “Are you
kidding? After what we’ve both been through, this is paradise!” They
have enough government bonds to buy food and supplies for three years.
They plan to buy a neighbor’s two-bedroom mobile home when he dies; by
that time they hope to have food, supplies, and maintenance covered for
twenty years, and can start a family. Their first child, Hoan Hue, is
born, and he’s such fun that they don’t do much work after that. And
he’s soon followed by twins, Thu and Tri. Hai asks if she wants any
more, Mai says no way... But accidents happen, and little Ngo Hue is
born. Hai swallows his pride and a couple of aspirin and gets a
vasectomy. From what they’ve seen, other parents sacrifice everything
for their kids and are surprised when their kids treat them as
second-class citizens. They decide on a different approach. Their kids
have two choices: Mai Hue or the Hai Hue. The kids eat what’s set
before them, and dress in Thrift Shop duds like their parents (jeans and
t-shirts, mainly) until they can afford to buy their own $150 sneakers.
But Mom and Pop pay the kids to do stuff they’ll need to know when they
go on their own, like cleaning, cooking, and managing money. Most of
the money goes into a Permanent Portfolio for each kid; they’ll each
have enough to buy a trailer and food for life at age 16, when they can
get a GED diploma and gain their freedom. And besides, the kids get a
realistic perspective of the world by flying space-available to every
military base Mom and Pop can get to, whenever school is out. They know
from experience that not having a $3,000 birthday party is not to be
seriously deprived. All the kids wind up joining the Reserves and
becoming officers, doing their monthly weekend and getting their college
education paid for without dunning Mom and Pop - who are by now
retired military, flying space-available around the world, living in
military bases and enjoying the maid service.
8/9/2008
6:21 PM

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But I am
Poptimistic about my future. And your future. hg47
6/23/2008
11:58 AM
My brother Greg gave me a double screen digital
picture frame for my birthday.
He turned me on to digital picture frames.
They’re kind of tiny—but fear not: Target has a thing for $40 to convert
any TV into a digital picture frame. Got a huge LCD or a projection TV?
This can be your digital picture frame.
I put Greg’s gift in my kitchen, so when I stop by for a snack, a hit of
coffee, or some booze, I get a little visual entertainment. I got so
excited that I bought another digital picture frame, a single bigger
one, and put it in my bathroom.
But it turns out that digital picture frames are not ready for prime
time.
The one Greg bought me keeps crashing. I put a special surge protector
ahead of the transformer that powers the thing, and it still crashes
occasionally. Seems like it needs an uninterruptible power supply, which
costs more than the digital picture frame.
The digital frame I bought for the bathroom does not know what to do
with progressive-scan jpegs. Instead of displaying the picture, it
displays an error message. A lot of my favorite pictures snatched from
the web over the years seem to be progressive-scan jpegs. But Windows
doesn’t have any way to identify progressive-scan jpegs. So I had to
download IrfanView and do bulk conversions of all my jpegs to eliminate
any progressive-scan jpegs.
But wait, it gets weirder. Greg sent me a 2G flash memory card “full” of
pictures, along with the double-screen digital picture frame he gave me.
Strange that there was only about 175 pics total on the flash memory
card, at about 5% of the 2G memory limit.
I bought several USB memory chips, 2G & 4G. When I first tried to fill
them up with pictures, I ran into the same limit. At about 175 pictures,
an error message would pop up, stopping any further pictures from going
into the chip. Turns out the memory has to be formatted at fat32 to
fully use the full 2G or 4G capacity—otherwise at about 175 pics, an
error message pops up stopping any further loading of pics. My digital
picture frame for my bathroom has internal memory of 128M, but was also
not formatted to fat32, so it stopped loading pictures to internal
memory at about 175.
I Google-searched the error message, and found that people putting mp3s
onto USB chips and into several portable mp3 players are running into
the same problem. The memory has to be formatted at fat32 to fully use
the capacity, otherwise it maxes out at about 5%.
This tells me that the technology is getting ahead of the consumers. I
read Owners & Operators manuals, whether printed or online. There was
nothing in any of my manuals, printed or online, about these problems.
So the majority of users are filling up their digital picture frames
with only 5% of the actual capacity. And many users of USB chips and mp3
players are not using the full capacity of their devices. hg47
10/29/2007
2:23 PM
". . . and if I filled my shiny new 160gb iPod up legally, buying each
track online at the 99 cents price that the industry has determined, it
would cost me about $32,226. How does that make sense? It's the ugly
truth the record industry wants to ignore as they struggle to find ways
to get people to pay for music in a culture that has already embraced
the idea of music being something you collect in large volumes, and
trade freely with your friends."
(link)
('Nuff said.)
10/29/2007
2:14 PM
Please ship Seattle rain C.O.D. to
Southern California. Admit it: you've got more than you need.
Arnold will pay any amount you stipulate!
Last night I was paranoid, worried
about the wind changing direction and blowing embers onto my
apartment complex. So when I went to work I packed a few extra
things into Mom's car. Software back-ups of my documents & music
files on DVD+R & all my current different corrections of glasses, so
I can see the fire, no matter how far or close it gets to me!
It's important to burn clean: I just
dusted, wiped, vacuumed & mopped my whole apartment.
hg47
10/21/2007
8:41 AM
Subject: emoticons
(o)(o)
perfect
oo A
cup
{O}{O} D
cup
(+)(+)
silicone
(oYo)
Wonderbra
(^)(^) cold
(Q)(O)
pierced
\o/\o/
Grandma's
(@)(@)
big-nipple
|o||o|
android
(-)(-)
flat-against-the-
shower-door
hg47
8/6/2007
7:11 AM
You've probably read this on a
poster somewhere:
"There are 10 types of people in
the world. Those that understand binary. And those that
don't."
There are different levels to
sexual arousal, different degrees of sexual response. Some guys
get it. Most don't.
"Hey, when I get a hard-on, I'm
turned on. If I don't sport wood, that babe is not for me."
There has been considerable laboratory research
on human sexual response. Federally funded. Grants are
available to insert sensors into vaginas. Which brings new meaning
to the phrase "pork barrel politics."
But the point is that guys have been poking into
vaginas forever and twenty minutes, since before the earliest historical
document (porn, actually, papyrus copied from—probably—a broken stone
tablet, some assert, detailing a kind of "dry-hump" sexual activity
supposedly guaranteed to thrill female humans).
I've long been fascinated by the
stats on human sexual response, particularly when human female sexual
response would be measured. The squints would insert their probes
& sensors into vaginas, and show the women naughty pictures, then
measure "sexual response."
According to laboratory testing,
most women are sexually aroused by viewing naughty pictures.
According to the women themselves, most strongly deny this. "No, I
was not aroused. Disgusted, yes."
The mostly male testers most
always conclude that this
discrepancy is due to the
"mystical romantic essence" of their test subjects, "bundles of
contradictions
masquerading as adult
women."
"The silly females don't even
know when they're turned on!"
Allow me to offer a counter-point to this POV.
First off, it's not 100% clear to me that any
guy can fully understand any gal.
Second off, any guy who wants to try can start
by reading Shere Hite & Nancy Friday.
Third off, (pun warning) let me tell you where
I'm coming from. Subjectively, when I am sexually aroused, yes, I
get a hard-on, but I also get a supremely pleasurable feeling, a high
like a drug, endorphins coursing through my bloodstream. It's a
yummy good feeling. A few minutes later I start to leak a slippery
fluid out the tip of my penis.
Fourth off, some years back, I wrote a series of
erotic stories similar to Anais Nin. The surprising thing is that
I usually didn't get a hard-on while I was writing, but I always got
sticky underwear because of all the lubricant my penis was leaking.
What was up with that?
"No, I was not aroused. A bit on
edge, perhaps."
There was no highly pleasurable feelings, no
erection, but I was lubricating. Then I made the connection: if
the lab boys were measuring my lubrication, they would conclude that I
was sexually aroused.
If the lab rats are measuring vaginal
lubrication, and calling that sexual arousal, they are missing the
point.
Lubrication is just the first level, that
doesn't begin to get near the subjective experience of sexual arousal.
hg47
7/13/2007
7:27 AM
Getting some renewed interest in my screenplay
version of BLUES DELUXE. Remind me to keep my casting ideas to
myself. Let's not forget that Margaret Mitchell wanted Groucho
Marx to play Rhett Butler in GONE WITH THE WIND. hg47
7/9/2007
8:59 AM
In Defense Of Colin Powell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Powell
'Nuff Said?
If not, how about this for a Post Script.

Still don't get it? Read the next post for
context. hg47
6/17/2007
12:42 PM
So there's this young smart U.S. Black dude,
with his whole glorious life ahead of him, here in the good ol' United
States of America, circa June 2007. He has no money for school.
But he's not into rap or carjacking or dealing drugs, no, this guy has
the mind of an accountant. Stats. Probability Theory.
He takes a cold hard dim view of his likely future here in the "good ol'
U.S. of A.," and he decides to play it safe. He knows the death
rate for young male Blacks is not good. But he knows how to beat
the odds. He knows how to survive. He knows how to
"beat the system." It's easy. He goes to his worst enemy,
and kills him. Calls 911. Waits for the police patiently,
with his hands upon his head, still, motionless. Confesses to
murder.
Why? Because the safest place for this
young Black man is in prison, and he knows that.
"Factor by which the overall
death rate for U.S. blacks aged 15 to 64 exceeds the rate for blacks in
state prisons: 2" (Bureau of Justice Statistics
<WASHINGTON>/National Center for Health Statistics)
Are you outraged yet? hg47
5/14/2007
5:07 PM
A friend of mine just shared with me a short
story he's written about a near future where a start-up company is able
to extend on Google Earth a bit and get much better resolution, to the
point that it's like having a security camera in the sky, watching down
over every business that signs up for the service.
The owners get rich & retire, the cops are able
to catch the bad guys, crime drops to near zero, and businesses are able
to drop the prices of their goods, consumers get cheaper products, and
they feel much safer.
The story has a happy ending.
I realized that I could never write that story.
Transparency is a
double-edged weapon, in my view. There are costs and benefits. I
do not see increased transparency as reducing crime, however. To me
it seems like the classic race between the safe builders and the
safe crackers, between the lock makers and the lock pickers, etc.
The better cops get at looking, the better the criminals will get at
camouflage & hiding.
I would take that POV,
that "message" as my starting point.
That's how I would
write the story. My writing is not as friendly, as warm and fluffy
as yours. I'd take it to the edge. My writing only gets good when
I get fired up, emotionally involved. To get excited, I'd have to
pervert the original intent. After the first bank robbers got
caught, and the satellite service got expanded, and everything
looked rosy, and crime seemed to be going down . . . I'd have a
major high-tech gang of bad guys move in and concentrate all their
efforts on the area of satellite coverage. I'd have them secretly
tap into the satellite coverage, so they could watch in real time
the location of all the cop cars, I'd have them tracking the money
delivery trucks so they could easily steal the cash when they were
most vulnerable, and I'd probably throw in stuff like using the
satellite coverage to blackmail bank executives having homosexual
affairs into helping them steal hundreds of millions from banks
. . . I'd push it to the limit so that ordinary citizens weren't
safe on the streets anymore! I'd have the gang selling information
to child molesters so they could find easy children to snatch, I'd
have the rapists knowing exactly where and when the foxy female
runners exercised alone. Maybe I'd end the story with a riot, or a
civilian lynching of the owners who started up the satellite
service, but I would probably end with the service shut down of
necessity, BECAUSE IT WASN'T SAFE, AND IT WAS RUINING THE TOWN!
Anyway, that's my
default plot; that's how I would write the story, if I couldn't
think of anything better as I was writing it.
Why would I write it
that way? Because, I answer, with a sneaky grin on my face, Because
It Would Be FUN!
hg47
3/26/2007
8:47 AM
I'm still having life-draining time-consuming
anger-generating problems with my new blog
TruthPics. Everything else
in my life has jammed to a stop while I wrestle with this.
It's more proof for this TruthPic:

Everything good and worthwhile takes longer than
you think it will. hg47
P.S.
3/27/2007
8:42 AM
As a further example of "How Long It Takes," one
surfer correctly pointed out to me that my understanding of metric
sucks. In the above pic, "Actual length of your penis in mm" is
something longer than 35 inches. I have deleted the original post,
fixed the pic & reposted. hg47
3/12/2007
9:50 AM
** My Procrastinations Often Give Me A Necessary
Frame-Of-Reference For The Artistic Work That Follows. **
hg47
3/8/2007
7:31 PM
I'm supposed to be finding a male agent for my
new SF novel 42N8 F8 (the working title). Instead I'm dredging
through Excel help files. I got this great idea for a blog:
TruthPics. Actually, it's
more like Chart-Art.
Excel makes charts from raw data, so I jumped
into the blog before I'm really ready. I did a test with Excel &
Paint that worked well for the first pic. So I posted it & started
the blog. But for my second try, I can't make the chart come out
right.
And It's Pissing Me Off!
I planned to do a few Excel Chart-Arts, then up
grade my software and do a bunch more Chart-Arts, then REALLY UPGRADE my
software, and do animated Chart-Arts with companion dashboard
attachments.
But I can't even figure out the damn Excel
charts! hg47
3/2/2007
10:43 AM
Do an "Inventory of Cutting-Edge Effects" before
you start that new project. Yeah, sure, you could do a Cave
Painting with animal blood and plant dye. Don't write your next
novel on soft stone tablets chiseled with hard rocks. Maybe your
future readers are reading you on their cell phones! hg47
|
RECYCLE BIN |
|
Ctrl-V
- Reality Check.
Reality Check Mate!

4/22/2009 9:50 AM
Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?
http://business.theatlantic.com
Can the Oil Shock Alone Explain the Financial Crisis?
Yes. That's the astonishing conclusion of a paper
presented at the Brookings Institution that I'm still
having trouble wrapping my mind around. The author,
economist James Hamilton, can hardly believe the
conclusions of his economic model, himself (I've got
company), but the findings are remarkable, nonetheless.
Hamilton went back to 2003, when crude oil was around
$30 a gallon and forecast what an oil shock like the one
we experienced in 2007-08 (when oil peaked around $140)
would do to GDP. He graphed the result through the end
of 2008 and, lo and behold, it was damn close to actual
GDP. As though there were no such thing as a
collaterized debt obgligation in the first place! Here's
the graph (the orange dotted line is Hamilton's
projection given oil prices; the black line is actual
GDP):

Perhaps you'll join me in thinking: Huh? Are we really
to believe that this whole thing was caused by oil
shocks? I mean, it certainly makes you appreciate the
mess Detroit is in, but really. How anti-climactic. It
makes this crisis seem so ... 1970s.
What about real estate, subprime mortgages and defaults?
Hamilton says the housing industry had been tightening
up long before the recession -- "subtracting 0.94% from
the average annual GDP growth rate over
2006:Q4-2007:Q3." And housing is factored into
Hamilton's analysis. It was just one of a handful of
multipliers that always turn down during oil shocks.
The Real Time Economics Blog at WSJ moves the theory
forward with a pretty interesting bit of revisionist
history. The grand retelling goes something like this.
Cheap gasoline from the 1990s into this decade
encouraged families to set up their homes farther from
the cities where they worked. But as the price of gas
began to increase, it put a big strain of these
families' commutes. With gas rising from $2 to $4, the
price of these long drives doubled, straining those
families' most expensive payments, namely: mortgages.
When families realized they could not afford their
exurban commutes, they sold their homes for a big loss.
Voila: Their mortgage crisis became a bank crisis and
the rest is our living history.
Hamilton concludes.
Eventually, the declines in income and house prices set
mortgage delinquency rates beyond a threshold at which
the overall solvency of the financial system itself came
to be questioned, and the modest recession of
2007:Q4-2008:Q3 turned into a ferocious downturn in
2008:Q4.
My head's still spinning a bit, but it's interesting to
think about the political consequences of a report like
this being mainstreamed. If the idea somehow stuck that
an oil shock was responsible for the financial crisis,
it could be a significant catalyzer for the push toward
energy reform. Today we're seeing a great national
movement to change Wall Street because the general
consensus is that Wall Street caused this crisis.
Whether Hamilton's theory is wacko or brilliant, just
imagine what a national movement to revolutionize
America's energy consumption would look like. What if we
had oil parties instead of tea parties, demanding more
government investment in alternative fuels and subsidies
for green technologies. That would really be something.
1/23/2009 5:16 PM
http://www.forbes.com/
How To Market To The Modern Mom
Tips for tugging those $2 trillion purse strings.
U.S. moms control the purse strings at home--to the
tune of $2.1 trillion per year, roughly equivalent to
the gross domestic product of Italy, the seventh largest
economy in the world.
But for all their efforts, marketers could do a
better job reaching this audience. According to a recent
survey of 3,500 American moms by BSM Media, a Fort
Lauderdale, Fla.,-based marketing firm that targets the
mother demographic, 65% feel that they are "underserved"
by advertisers--either because the mom-focused ads don't
resonate or because the ads aren't aimed at moms at all.
Strike the right nerve, though, and there's a pile of
money to be made, even in a rough economy.
In Pictures: Eight Ways To Market To The Modern Mom
In Pictures: 12 Innovative Marketing Techniques
Successfully targeting the mom segment means
communicating with them in their lingo, according to
Nancy Lowman LaBadie, an executive vice president at
Marina Maher Communications, a public relations agency
that has handled many of Procter & Gamble's
female-focused products, like Secret deodorant, Dawn
dish soap and Clairol hair color. "I think companies who
learn [that language], understand it and connect with it
will reap the rewards," she says.
How to connect? Start by knowing where moms
mingle--and, increasingly, that means online. According
to the recent BSM Media survey, 71% of moms use the
Internet to get product information.
By contrast, only about 20% of mothers comb newspaper
ads. The action happens at social networks like Maya's
Mom and Café Mom and at blogging sites like BlogHer.
Hint: Don't just rely on banner ads; moms want to
engage in a conversation. Better to blog--and do it with
a sense of purpose. "Don't just blast as many bloggers
as you can find with press releases," says Maria Bailey,
founder of BSM Media. "Moms are all about relationships,
so if you want to approach them, make sure to start with
a personal note."
Video blogs, like newbaby.com, let you upload videos
featuring mothers using your product free of charge,
similar to YouTube; the site boasts 500,000 views per
month and 10 to 15 videos watched per visit, according
to Bailey's research.
While they've taken awhile to gain traction, podcasts
have become an increasingly effective way to push
products to more moms.
According to BSM Media, 85% of American moms now have
mp3 players. And moms ride in their cars (a convenient
place for listening to podcasts) far more than any other
demographic.
The key to making hay with moms in any marketing
medium, especially when it comes to high-tech items like
cameras and computers, is clearly communicating the
benefit of the device. "Making that technology
understandable and approachable is beneficial to the
consumer," says Karen Cage, a spokeswoman for
Hewlett-Packard.
To boost sales, the company recently launched 10
videos on how to take digital pictures of, say, darting
children. Another reason you want hammer home your
product's value proposition: Two out of three moms plan
to eliminate purchases that are not absolutely necessary
in 2009, according to a recent study by Allen &
Gerritsen, a Watertown, Mass.-based advertising agency.
But then, product specs will only get you so far with
moms. What they really want is an experience. "In order
to convince the modern mom to try a new product or
service, marketers need to work with them, not
just throw ads at them," says Bailey.
Example: Rather than inundate moms with horsepower
figures, last year General
Motors (nyse:
GM -
news -
people ) chauffeured some 75 moms in its cars for a
weekend in Newport, R.I., in conjunction with a weekly
podcast called Manic Mommies (produced by two
moms).
"We recognize that we don't always do a really good
job via advertising or providing a comfortable dealer
experience [to women and moms]," says Christopher
Barger, director of global communications technology for
General Motors. "We have been looking at how we can use
[online] social media to improve our efforts there."
If you're lucky enough to have a few extra marketing
bucks lying around, work the celebrity mom angle.
Finding a familiar face to pitch your product is an
expensive but effective strategy.
Last year, talk show host
Kelly Ripa, a mother of three, became the
face of Electrolux kitchen appliances by demonstrating
how fast-heating ovens and microwaves help modern moms
stay on top of their family, work and social lives.
Desperate Housewife Marcia Cross, mother of twin
daughters, is slated to become the new face of Mott's
apple sauce in March.
Finally, recognize that moms engage in a lot of
groupthink--about everything from dining and
relationships to finance and careers. About 55% of those
surveyed by BSM Media said they relied on
recommendations from friends and family when making
purchases for the home; 64% do it when they buy things
for the children.
Your best bet: Identify the key influencers in the
community (through the PTA, social networks and blogs)
and get them to host a party to promote your product.
Videogame maker Nintendo recently did just this when it
selected eight "ambassador moms" to hold parties
promoting its Wii gaming system.
Just because a market is massive doesn't mean you
don't need a smart approach to attack it.
--
1/24/2009 8:40 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org
Computation tree logic (CTL) is a branching-time
logic, meaning that its model of time is a tree-like
structure in which the future is not determined; there
are different paths in the future, any one of which
might be an actual path that is realised.
Check this
out for symbolism on logic
--
1/25/2009 5:58 PM
http://lifehacker.com
Need to do a little online detective work? Track down
anyone from long lost schoolmates to the new friend
whose number you've lost with this assortment of
powerful people-search engines. Photo by
Byrne7214.
Earlier this week we asked you to
share which search engines you use to find people.
The votes have been tallied, and now we're back with the
five most popular people-search engines.
Pipl is
tenacious people-search engine. Pipl's claim to fame is
the depths to which it can plumb the "deep web" to find
information. When you search for a person using Pipl,
you're not limited to a simple white pages search. Pipl
scours databases and indexes that standard search
engines normally don't touch. If it's there to be found,
Pipl returns all manner of things about the person
you're searching for, including blog entires, photos,
publications, donations on public record, profiles on
social and business networking sites, and other
overlooked sources. Pipl supports searching by name,
username, phone number, and email.
Specialized search engines you say? Heresy! Many readers
eschewed fancy people-search engines—many of which often
incorporate Google results into their own—preferring
instead to get their hands dirty at the source. With
more and more people cultivating an online presence,
it's easier than ever to find people with broader search
engines like Google. One of Google's strongpoints is
that you can use additional search parameters that are
unavailable at the other search engines. For example,
it's impossible to search for "John Smith classic car
restoration" to find an old car-obsessed friend of yours
when all you can type in is Last Name, First Name.
Additionally, Google can sometimes find incredibly
obscure references to a person. (I once tracked down an
old classmate through a single reference on an out of
date softball team roster found through Google.)
Facebook
is principally a social network, but its the first stop
for many people searchers due to its widespread
popularity. By Facebook's count, 150 million active
users frequent the site, about a third of which are in
the United States. Even if you take those numbers with a
grain of salt, that's still an enormous number of people
who have put themselves out there to be found. Therein
lies the strength of looking for someone on Facebook: By
joining the service, Facebook users have essentially put
up a big sign that says, "Find me!"
Spock is
another people-search engine that relies on multiple
sources and aggregation to cull as much information as
it can about a subject. In addition to indexing
information from various news sites and social networks,
Spock has a variety of notifications options available.
Like 123people (below), Spock supports email
notifications of changes to a person search, but you can
also subscribe to an RSS feed for your search.
123people
has a broad reach, delving into blogs and public
profiles to increase your chances of finding who you're
looking for. 123people is a strong people-search engine,
but one of the best pieces of functionality available to
123people searchers is its email notification feature,
which sends out an email alert whenever the results of a
specific search changes. It's a little heavy on the
stalk-factor (though in a strange way not all that
different from Facebook's newsfeed), but it saves you
from wasting your time with fruitless return searches.
you might
wanna add
[www.yasni.com]
[www.linkedin.com] and
[martin.atkins.me.uk]
[zabasearch.com] and
[www.lexisnexis.com] are also great engines - but
lexisnexis is a pay site- but can typically be used in
Library Computers in your neighborhood.
Most people who are looking for someone are willing
to pay for the service. That's why you find them teasing
you with a superficial phone number and address search.
Pipl really only skims the surface of the so-called
"deep web." If you want to get more serious about
finding someone, Intelius and Zaba cross correlate your
utilities bills and public records. Those sites can find
your phone numbers and addresses of every residence
you've ever paid utilities on as well as the names of
any relatives that might have claimed to be a relative
of yours (think ex-spouses).
Lexisnexis is the Great Grand Godfather of private
search engines. They cross correlate all the above with
every newspaper and magazine ever written. If you have
already used the pay services of Intellius and still
can't find someone, use LexisNexis. You won't be
disappointed.
--
1/16/2009 11:49 PM
http://edition.cnn.com/
Top Saudi cleric: Ok for young girls to wed
(CNN)
-- The debate over the controversial practice of child
marriage in Saudi Arabia was pushed back into the
spotlight this week, with the kingdom's top cleric
saying that it's OK for girls as young as 10 to wed.
"It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to
marry off girls who are 15 and younger," Sheikh Abdul
Aziz Al-Sheikh, the kingdom's grand mufti, said in
remarks quoted Wednesday in the regional Al-Hayat
newspaper. "A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those
who think she's too young are wrong and they are being
unfair to her."
The issue of child marriage has been a hot-button
topic in the deeply conservative kingdom in recent
weeks.
In December, Saudi judge Sheikh Habib Abdallah al-Habib
refused to annul the marriage of an 8-year-old girl to a
47-year-old man.
The judge rejected a petition from the girl's mother,
whose lawyer said the marriage was arranged by her
father to settle a debt with "a close friend." The judge
required the girl's husband to sign a pledge that he
would not have sex with her until she reaches puberty.
Al-Sheikh was asked during a lecture Monday about
parents forcing their underage daughters to marry.
"We hear a lot in the media about the marriage of
underage girls," he said, according to the newspaper.
"We should know that Shariah law has not brought
injustice to women."
Don't Miss
Christoph Wilcke, a Saudi Arabia researcher for
Human Rights Watch, recently told CNN that his
organization has heard many other cases of child
marriages.
"We've been hearing about these types of cases once
every four or five months because the Saudi public is
now able to express this kind of anger, especially so
when girls are traded off to older men," Wilcke said.
Wilcke explained that while Saudi ministries may make
decisions designed to protect children, "It is still the
religious establishment that holds sway in the courts,
and in many realms beyond the court."
Last month, Zuhair al-Harithi, a spokesman for the
Saudi government-run Human Rights Commission, said his
organization is fighting against child marriages.
"The Human Rights Commission opposes child marriages
in Saudi Arabia," al-Harithi said. "Child marriages
violate international agreements that have been signed
by
Saudi Arabia and should not be allowed." He added
that his organization has been able to intervene and
stop at least one child marriage from taking place.
Wajeha al-Huwaider, co-founder of the Society of
Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia, told CNN in
December that achieving human rights in the kingdom
means standing against those who want to "keep us
backward and in the dark ages."
She said the marriages cause girls to "lose their
sense of security and safety. Also, it destroys their
feeling of being loved and nurtured. It causes them a
lifetime of psychological problems and severe
depression."
The Saudi Ministry of Justice has
not made any public comment on the issue.
--
1/17/2009 3:25 PM
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
awesome pics
Sources and Resources
Related posts
You may want to take a look at the following related
posts:
--
1/13/2009 11:37 AM
http://flowingdata.com
Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
--
http://www.marketwatch.com
Notion of fast U.S. recovery falls flat at parley
At annual meeting, economists see little chance recession
will end in `09
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) - The idea that the U.S.
economy is going to recover in the next six months is
given little credence at a gathering of top academic
economists here over the weekend.
A pickup sometime after June is still the Federal
Reserve's quasi-official forecast. And leading
institutional forecasters surveyed by the Blue Chip
Economic Indicators are optimistic.
But that forecast seemed woefully out of touch to many
experts who spoke at the annual meeting of the American
Economics Association.
"People are getting nervous," said Adam Posen, deputy
director of the Peterson Institute for International
Economics.
The actions by the Federal Reserve and Treasury
Department have driven home the point that policy makers
are at their wits' end.
"We don't know what to do. It's really a
throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-the-problem strategy. It is
hard to argue with it in the middle of the crisis, but
you can bet everyone will 10 years from now," said
Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the
International Monetary Fund.
The Fed has indeed thrown the kitchen sink at the
financial-market crisis, expanding its balance sheet by
$1 trillion, to little obvious effect.
The Treasury Department's management of the $700 billion
rescue plan for the financial markets has seemed
capricious.
And it may just be the first of several rounds of life
preservers for the shattered sector, experts said.
Despite all these efforts, the U.S. economy, hit by an
oil shock, a credit crunch and the global downturn,
seems to be on a steep slide.
Some argue that the recession has just begun, despite
the formal ruling by the business-cycle-dating committee
that it began in December 2007.
Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal
Reserve, said the recession began only in mid-September
when Lehman Brothers collapsed.
"We are in a horrible mess. I believe it is very young
and it is going to be long and deep," he said.
Even in the first quarter of 2010, the economy will
likely be weak enough to need macro stimulus, he said.
Martin Feldstein, the prominent Harvard University
economist, said there was no longer any basis for
believing the recovery could start in the third quarter.
"I think we'll be lucky if by this time next year we see
the economy hit the bottom and start turning up,"
Feldstein said.
"In terms of the level of activity, the end of 2009 is
going to look lower than it is today," he said.
Former Clinton economic adviser Laura Tyson said it is
too speculative to predict a turnaround.
"The slide may stop, but coming out [of the downturn]
will not come until later," she said.
"It is very hard to predict when the situation will turn
around," she said.
The downturn has become "self-reinforcing
downward-spiral effects going on - from the housing
market to the credit market to the real economy and back
to the housing market," she said.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson came under constant
criticism for his handling of the financial-market
crisis.
Rogoff, the former IMF chief economist, said Paulson's
policy was similar to the "Wheel of Fortune" game show.
Some companies spun the wheel and got $300 billion
bailouts. Others spun it and got nothing.
This just added to market insecurity and uncertainty, he
said.
Rogoff said the U.S. is "running right along the tracks"
of past financial crises in developing countries.
Based on experience, the U.S. housing-market collapse
and stock-market weakness should continue until 2010, he
said.
The root of the crisis remains the financial sector,
Rogoff said. "We're going to be seeing second and third
bailouts of the big banks," he said.
The experts generally supported the Fed's unconventional
monetary-policy moves to expand its balance sheet and
try to shore up asset markets.
The Fed has quietly shifted its policy from supporting
institutions to trying to get non-functioning markets
back on track, Blinder said.
The central bank will start buying mortgage-backed
securities issued by Fannie Mae
(FNM:
Soon, he said, the Fed will start buying consumer loans.
The Fed is likely to continue to add markets and could
start buying municipal securities, he said.
But Rogoff said he was worried that these programs were
simply keeping the financial sector on life support and
did not seem to curing the underlying problems.
The Fed programs seem to amount to "temporizing," he
said.
In 2009, commercial real estate, private equity and
hedge funds will suffer, he said.
And the "behemoths" of the financial sector are not
really viable, he said.
--
1/5/2009 3:16 PM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
Holes give edge to new MoD armour
Scientists from the UK Ministry of
Defence (MoD) have devised an ultra-hard vehicle armour
to protect military personnel.
Details of the steel armour, called Super Bainite,
were outlined during a seminar at the University of
Cambridge.
Unexpectedly, the MoD team has given the armour a
protective advantage by introducing an array of holes.
According to scientist Professor Peter Brown, these
perforations help deflect incoming projectiles.
"I wouldn't like to have been the first person to
have suggested that," said Professor Brown, from the
Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) at
Porton Down in Wiltshire.
He explained: "You shouldn't think of them as holes,
you should think of them as edges. When a bullet hits an
edge, it gets deflected, and turns from a sharp
projectile into a blunt fragment - which is much easier
to stop. It doubles the ballistic performance and halves
the weight."
The armour plates have performed well in ballistic
testing at the Ministry of Defence's firing ranges.
Certain heat treatments alter the fine-scale
structure of steel, creating a "phase" known as bainite
- which has been known about since the 1930s.
But the process, developed by DSTL scientists in
collaboration with steelmaker Corus, allows the alloy to
be produced quickly and cost effectively.
Super Bainite develops its exceptional strength
through a new low-temperature process called "isothermal
hardening".
The steel is heated to 1,000C, cooled to about 200C
and then held at this temperature for a period of time
before cooling to room temperature. Initially, the team
held the steel at about 200C for just over two weeks to
achieve the right ballistic protection.
However, this was too slow for the process to be
commercialised. The researchers subsequently reduced the
heat treatment time to eight hours by transforming the
steel at 250C instead of 200C.
Importantly, the work gives the UK an indigenous
armour steel manufacturing capability, benefitting
industry.
Professor Brown also gave details of other current
materials research with potential applications in armour.
An industrial process called "Kolsterising"
(developed by the firm Bodycote) is able to increase the
surface hardness of stainless steel to twice that of
Super Bainite while maintaining its ductility - the
extent to which a material can be deformed without
fracturing.
"It's as hard as a ceramic and as ductile as a metal.
It re-defines, really, what steel is capable of," he
said.
Professor Brown was speaking at the recent Horizon
seminar held at the University of Cambridge.
--
1/10/2009 11:44 PM
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk
Revealed: the environmental impact of Google
searches
Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing
two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling
the kettle for a cup of tea
Performing two Google searches from a desktop
computer can generate about the same amount of carbon
dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according
to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without
considering the environment, a typical search generates
about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g.
“Google operates huge data centres around the world that
consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross,
a Harvard University physicist whose research on the
environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A
Google search has a definite environmental impact.”
Google is secretive about its energy consumption and
carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the
locations of its data centres. However, with more than
200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the
electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions
caused by computers and the internet is provoking
concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry
analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much
greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of
global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most
energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan
Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing
billions of web pages require power.
Though Google says it is in the forefront of green
computing, its search engine generates high levels of
CO2 because of the way it operates. When you type in a
Google search for, say, “energy saving tips”, your
request doesn’t go to just one server. It goes to
several competing against each other.
It may even be sent to servers thousands of miles
apart. Google’s infrastructure sends you data from
whichever produces the answer fastest. The system
minimises delays but raises energy consumption. Google
has servers in the US, Europe, Japan and China.
Wissner-Gross has submitted his research for
publication by the US Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers and has also set up a website
www.CO2stats.com. “Google are very efficient but
their primary concern is to make searches fast and that
means they have a lot of extra capacity that burns
energy,” he said.
Google said: “We are among the most efficient of all
internet search providers.”
Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO2 emissions
caused by individual use of the internet. His research
indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about
0.02g of CO2 per second. This rises tenfold to about
0.2g of CO2 a second when viewing a website with complex
images, animations or videos.
A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing
director of
carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental
consultancy, puts the CO2 emissions of a Google search
at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to
start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates
between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO2 Chris
Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet,
estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g
to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).
Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the
World, has calculated that maintaining a character
(known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality
game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per
year. That is almost as much used by the average
Brazilian.
“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam
Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British
Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy
westerners use on entertainment versus the energy
poverty in some countries.”
Though energy consumption by computers is growing -
and the rate of growth is increasing - Newcombe argues
that what matters most is the type of usage.
If your internet use is in place of more
energy-intensive activities, such as driving your car to
the shops, that’s good. But if it is adding activities
and energy consumption that would not otherwise happen,
that may pose problems.
Newcombe cites Second Life and Twitter, a rapidly
growing website whose 3m users post millions of messages
a month. Last week Stephen Fry, the TV presenter, was
posting “tweets” from New Zealand, imparting such vital
information as “Arrived in Queenstown. Hurrah. Full of
bungy jumping and ‘activewear’ shops”, and “Honestly. NZ
weather makes UK look stable and clement”.
Jonathan Ross was Twittering even more, with posts
such as “Am going to muck out the pigs. It will be cold,
but I’m not the type to go on about it” and “Am now back
indoors and have put on fleecy tracksuit and two pairs
of socks”. Ross also made various “tweets” trying to
ascertain whether Jeremy Clarkson was a Twitter user or
not. Yesterday the Top Gear presenter cleared up the
matter, saying: “I am not a twit. And Jonathan Ross is.”
Such internet phenomena are not simply fun and hot
air, Newcombe warns: the boom in such services has a
carbon cost.
1/12/2009 3:24 PM
http://www.independent.co.uk
Does the credit crunch have a silver lining for
literature?
A
quarter-century ago, a Britain of dole queues, urban
riots and political venom also saw the rise of a great
generation of novelists. Boyd Tonkin asks if this slump
might also have a literary lining of silver
Friday, 9 January 2009
Margaret
Thatcher celebrates on election night in 1987
It hardly sounds like the prelude to a literary
revolution. Under a hard-as-nails free-market
government, old industries sicken and die at a pandemic
rate. Unemployment rockets; inflation spikes as well. As
public spending plummets, riots break out on decrepit
city streets. Rancour and rage dominate the public
realm, twisted up another notch when a skin-saving
foreign war polarises an already fractured nation. To
cap it all, a long-planned final battle with union power
culminates in the mother of all mining strikes.
What else happened in Britain
in the first half of the 1980s? Well, literary fiction –
for a couple of decades, a dowdy old aunt among the arts
– suddenly bred a generation of spellbinders and
seducers. When Anthony Burgess lost the Booker Prize in
1980 (with Earthly Powers) and Salman Rushdie won in
1981 (with Midnight's Children), a fusty coterie game
all at once began to feel like a thrilling battle of the
giants. Two years later, Granta magazine logged its
ascendant stars and – in its first list of "Best of
Young British Novelists", set an agenda for attention
and appeal that has, staggeringly, lasted a full
quarter-century: Rushdie, Julian Barnes, William Boyd,
Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Timothy Mo, Kazuo
Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Rose Tremain – the last a hugely
popular winner of the 2008 Orange Prize.
On the high street, a former
WH Smith executive called Tim Waterstone plunged some
get-lost money into – of all things – classy upmarket
bookshops, just as the retail world froze. Did they fly?
They soared. Culture hounds who, a few years previously
would have burned "modern British novels" for warmth
while they queued to catch the new Scorsese or
Bertolucci or see The Clash, haunted the faux-library
charms of the new chain in search of excitement from new
arrivals or – with JG Ballard and others – resurrected
greats.
Some advances for literary fiction sped –
unsustainably – to the height of a Dynasty hair-do. By
the time that the first light fingers of a service-led
recovery began to dawn, in the metropolis at least, it
felt as if half the fans of Martin Amis's Money (1984)
not only wanted to read him but to be him as well.
As recovery took hold, new publishing houses made
their entrances, committed to innovation and – in a few
cases – destined to triumph. Bloomsbury and Serpent's
Tail both launched in 1986. Within a few years, the
musty tumbler of publisher's sherry had blossomed into a
scintillating, post-colonial glass of New World fizz.
Vision, ambition, even sometimes avant-garde experiment,
for once raised a British cheer.
Sequels always disappoint, we know. Within and beyond
books, things have changed beyond hope of rewind. The
cluster of talent codified by Bill Buford at Granta
largely existed already, but alone and – often –
isolated. If each had their own style and story,
together they opened British fiction to a wide and
interwoven world. You can't step into that river twice.
Tim Waterstone saw the abysmal state of British book
retailing, and knew that a swelling band of younger,
educated readers might heal it. And, if the North
limped, the South strode, with graduate-rich county
towns and suburbs full of buyers prepared to give
something original – and, for the first time, over-hyped
– a try.
Even in the iron years of Thatcherism, vital
booster-fuel to serious writers came from protected
allies such as public-service broadcasting: Channel 4
began in 1982. In no sense did recession – and the
social tension it fostered – make the 1980s BritFiction
boom. All the same, the sense of grave and urgent times
did open readers' minds to new choices of style and
story - which these writers deployed so well.
So could hard times once again not cause but coincide
with high achievement? Few factors at work today quite
match the conditions of the Eighties fiction upsurge.
Waterstone's, now a centralised retail machine,
scrambles to make it through the slump along with every
other business. Advances have
plummeted, with agents obliged to accept ever-thriftier
deals from those publishers who still dare to bite.
Even before this downturn, sales of literary fiction
had fallen away. Few talents who combined large ambition
and broad appeal had come through to match the
millennial cluster that gave us David Mitchell, Sarah
Waters and Zadie Smith. By and large, the class of '83
still rules at the tills and in the headlines.
Whatever their gifts, that
exposes a failure to replenish the stock.
One strong view suggests that, mostly, tough
conditions will mean safe choices: tried and trusted
recipes, even beyond the obvious genre boxes. This
week's Costa First Novel Award has gone to Sadie Jones's
somewhat McEwanesque tale of class and corruption in the
postwar suburbs, The Outcast. No big change there.
Where could the silver lining
lurk? Might the flight of big – or even middling – money
from literary publishing prompt a quest for bolder
choices and wider horizons from authors who know that
their finely-finessed debut now stands no chance of
reaching the Richard-and-Judy sofa or the Waterstone's
front table? If slimmer cheques and smaller expectations
force some novelists to give up altogether, surely they
might inspire others to thumb their noses at a
deep-frozen marketplace and go – as it were – for broke.
The cliché of the decade
demands that web culture zooms in to rescue every
wheezing ambulance-case in the arts and media.
Certainly, the kind of maverick publishing and magazine
production that made a plucky showing in the hard
British winters of the early Eighties migrated online
years ago. Sites such as 3:AM Magazine keep faith with
the old little-review tradition of avant-garde
provocation and seditious literary cheek.
Any would-be Kafka or Kerouac
can bypass the sluggish routine of print entirely. Many
more will try. Yet the critical jury on e-literature
still has very little solid evidence to consider. Even
after years of activity in a climate of back-slapping
boosterism about digital art, where are the masterworks
that started, or stayed, online? Rather, the
cyber-critics have effectively done their print
ancestors' old job, charging into battle for the
overlooked visionaries and the unsung avant-garde – who
write for print. The current bloggers' passion for Paul
Griffiths's Let Me Tell You – a novella composed solely
of the words that Ophelia speaks in Hamlet – shows the
current state of play. Do virtual arbiters still prefer
the whiff of paper?
The authors and publishers I asked of course see the
fragile future through different sorts of lens.
No one proposes that lean years
will lead novelists (still less publishers) to snub the
market, dump all material aspirations and pursue a dream
of perfection. Yet some at least sense a chance that
emptier pockets might bring fuller minds. As for
favoured genres, much escapist pulp and feelgood
schmaltz flourished in the eventful Eighties, and will
no doubt do so again. Celebrity titles also began to
shout then: the same genre, having pampered publishers
though good times, will now be expected to cosset them
through bad.
But new marvels, and new
gifts, will come to light. And even corporate publishers
will find that, to make that quirky, innovative literary
fiction reach the whole gamut of its potential readers,
they will have to act like small-press guerrillas.
Every ambitious writer will need the internet – from
Facebook to Amazon – to tell the world about their
brilliance, to transmit tasters across cyberspace, and
to flog the product.
Even if that remains an
ink-on-paper book, just like we read in 1981.
That year, when Brixton and Toxteth burned, IRA
hunger striker Bobby Sands was elected an MP and died,
the SDP split Labour (and Charles and Di wed to give us
a comfort break), felt as apocalyptic as any since the
Blitz. Yet, in the free state of fiction, a mid-thirties
writer who had tanked with his debut published a second
novel, Midnight's Children. As we brace for the worst,
we should look for the best.
Safety or audacity? Writers and publishers on the
prospects for fiction in a slump
Simon Prosser
Publisher (Hamish Hamilton)
In terms of fiction writing, I think there will be
two very different responses to the downturn in the
market (which is around 12 per cent year on year and
likely to worsen). The first and most obvious reaction
will be for some writers to try to tailor their books
all the more neatly to a perception of what the market
demands... But I think there will be a second and more
exciting response, which is for writers to think that
since the chances of being published successfully in the
mass market are even tougher, they may as well take the
chance to write exactly what they want to write.
Pete Ayrton
Publisher (Serpent's Tail)
Avant-garde fiction thrives where writers do not
expect to live off their writing either because the
publishing industry cannot pay the advances writers need
to live from... or because they are paid by universities
to teach creative writing... Neither condition applies
in the UK where writers (often under the influence of
agents) will stick even closer to the conventional as
mainstream publishers cut their staff, their lists and
their advances.
Geoff Dyer
Novelist & critic
Anyone who has an eye on the market is not a writer
but a whore. Nothing wrong with being a whore, of course
– just don't try to make out you're a writer. Writers
sometimes talk of pressure from their publishers to do
this or that in order to be more commercial. Nine times
out of ten this is sophistry and cowardice... I have
this existential conception of writing not as a career
but as a back-against-the wall option, the thing you
turn to when you've got no other way of making a mark on
the world. In those circumstances, whether or not you're
going to be adequately recompensed is irrelevant.
Carole Welch
Publisher (Sceptre)
These haven't been great times for literary fiction
lately anyway, so in that sense the recession... will
probably just reinforce existing trends... I can't
really see lowered material expectations... making
writers bolder. I can't speak for writers, but I'd say
most of them want as many readers for their books as
possible, so are unlikely to be avant-garde and
experimental unless they believe that's the way to
greater sales... I also can't imagine any publisher
turning down a novel like David Mitchell's 'Cloud Atlas'
now on the grounds that in a recession readers would
find it too structurally innovative. But I do think
publishers will be less inclined than ever to take a
chance on a novel that is seen as bleak and depressing,
or a novel that might be written with great skill but
doesn't have something about it to make it stand out
from the crowd.
Gordon Burn
Novelist & critic
It would be encouraging to think that maybe even just
a handful of the thousands being laid off... might be
encouraged to take time to stop and reflect on their
experience, rather then being goaded into the hopeless
task of chasing after jobs that... no longer exist. [In
the 1980s recession], 'Frieze' with Hirst, Hume, Sarah
Lucas etc happened. They are sometimes seen as
Thatcher's children – single-minded, aspirational,
entrepreneurial. But if the slump could spark a similar
from-the-ground-up invigoration of the publishing scene
in this country, still run by an Oxbridge-dominated, and
largely monocultural establishment, that would be
wonderful to see.
Tom McCarthy
Novelist & critic
I expect the recession will accelerate an already
well-established pattern: mainstream publishers will
concentrate on promoting non-fiction by television
presenters and commercial fiction by creative-writing
graduates (which should never have been confused with
literature in the first place). People wanting to engage
seriously in literature will have to look to other
arenas: the art world and its publication networks, for
example – at least until their work has found a large
enough audience to make it commercially attractive to
bigger houses. While this may be bad news for writers'
bank balances, it's not necessarily a bad thing for
literature, which has always "deterritorialised" itself,
had to detour beyond its own boundaries, in order to be
reinvigorated. The internet has produced some excellent
criticism and debate around literature, but I've yet to
see any good "primary" writing on there.
--
1/13/2009 9:08 AM
http://www.squidoo.com
want
to make money online – this gal may be doing just that.
--
1/2/2009 2:46 PM
http://news.yahoo.com/
The
meaning of the 'Oval' Office
Kirkland, Wash. – The precedent for oval rooms
in American affairs of state can be traced to
George Washington. He modified chambers in the
President's House in Philadelphia with bowed ends so that guests at formal
receptions could all stand equidistant to the president.
It was a symbolic expression of democracy.
While the current
Oval Office goes back to
President Franklin Roosevelt, the White House's first Oval Office was occupied by
William Howard Taft in 1909. He avoided the
rectangular room used by
Theodore Roosevelt,
relocated the presidential office to a central position
in the West Wing, and opted for the oval.
The repositioning of the president's office signified the
central position of the presidency. But here's the funny
thing about ovals, or, in geometric terms, ellipses:
Unlike circles, which are defined by a single center,
ovals are defined by two key points, each,
appropriately, called a "focus."
A focal point is a two-way juncture – a spot not only of
radiance, but also convergence, the position that "takes
the heat." Leaders often deserve the glare of public
criticism. But we should also remember that they are not
aliens who've arrived by spaceships. They are us.
Yet during elections, undue hope blazes forth from ardent
supporters. They project their light onto the candidates
whose every action is a petition to their anonymous
authority. The candidates reflect that focused light
back as their own. The electorate, seeing hope and power
as uniquely beyond themselves, get caught in a spell of
their own making. Everything seems to revolve around the
president.
But the seat of power, the Oval Office, has that other,
unseen focal point, as if to indicate a room with two
"centers" of responsibility. Could that be our spot in
the room? Democracy, after all, is self-government. When
the spell of the campaign is inevitably broken, we awake
to learn anew the lesson of projecting all hopes and
responsibilities, and the cost of not taking our
position.
Currently, our greatest surplus is in difficulties, with an
ever-growing list of designated villains – predatory
lenders, oil companies, polluters, illegal immigrants,
politicians,
Iran, China, greedy CEOs, car
companies, and so on.
Maybe saints are rarer in many of these groups, but that fact
alone does not exonerate the rest of us as victimized
innocents. Either we are completely passive dependents,
or else we share responsibility in shaping the world.
And with responsibility comes a share of the blame.
The candidates hold the public accountable at their own
peril. They can have our vote if they don't make us look
too hard at ourselves. If they propose programs and
bailouts as painless as possible, treating symptoms
rather than root causes, then we can remain safe in our
freedoms, free to point, free of blame.
Democracy is a work in progress. Its imperfections mirror our
blind spots. Each age has its blind
spots, exposed and magnified mostly through history's
lens. The same presidential house in Philadelphia that
employed the beautiful symbolism of democracy also had
slave quarters. Can we be certain that contemporary life
has transcended any remaining counterfeits and abuses of
freedom? And if not, then can we be certain that such
abuses are not fertilizing the roots of our overgrown
difficulties?
Perhaps there is wisdom in calling it the
Oval Office. The word "ellipse" derives from a Greek
root meaning "defect" and "falling short," as in not
being a perfect circle. "Oval" comes from the Latin
ovum, "egg," – birth and new beginnings, a place where
our greatest aspirations might hatch and take wings.
President-elect Obama will soon occupy the desk at one of the
Oval Office's focal points. He campaigned emphasizing
the word "we." Like all presidents, his power will have
its limits. Like all presidents, he will need our help.
We, too, must exercise rightful government, even in the
privacy of our daily thoughts and actions. By doing so,
we make the move along with the new president, confident
there is also a spot reserved for the American people in
the room with two centers.
• David Arzouman is an artist, composer, writer, and educator
who's developing a new art school in Tokyo.
--
1/4/2009 12:09 AM
http://bhc3.wordpress.com/
A Blog Is Your Stake in
the Ground
But
blogs are the professional’s
curriculum vitae.
They are a standing record of strong thin king about a
subject.
My own experience is that if
you blog, every so often you pop out a signature piece.
The kind of post that resonates with others and
establishes your position in your field. These blog
posts receive a lot of views, get linked to and turn up
in Google searches. When you get one of these,
congratulations! You have successfully put your flag in
the ground for your field.
Tweets don’t do that. Tweets
create a tapestry of someone, they foster ambient
awareness. This has value in its own right. But they’re
not vehicles for heavier thinking. They don’t
demonstrate your capacity to size up an issue or idea
and bring it home.
I know this is definitely early adopter stuff.
The number of professionals
spending time tweeting and blogging is still limited.
But I suspect this is going to happen:
Those who can work
blogging and some twittering into their regular
activities are going to earn more money and get promoted
faster.
--
12/31/2008 8:34 AM
http://adjix.com/hxcp
How Much Money Do Bloggers Make Blogging?
Archive for Blogging for Dollars
Written on January 2nd, 2009 at 12:01 am by
Darren Rowse
Blogging for Dollars
Over the last two months I’ve had a sidebar poll
running here at ProBlogger that asked readers to tell us
how much their blog earned in October of 2008.
This is an annual poll that we’ve run for a number of
years now so it is always interesting to see the
results.
As usual - the poll […]
Written on December 18th, 2008 at 12:12 am by
Darren Rowse
Affiliate Programs,
Blogging for Dollars
This week we’ve been looking at a variety of
techniques to help you increase your blogs earnings in
the lead up to Christmas.
Today I want to share 2 similar techniques that I’ve
used in the last week that is a big part of tripling my
Amazon earnings for the month of December - best seller
[…]
Written on December 3rd, 2008 at 12:12 am by
Darren Rowse
Blogging for Dollars
Every now and again I get an email from a ProBlogger
reader excitedly telling me that they’re about quit
their jobs to become full time bloggers. More often than
not they are new bloggers who for one reason or another
have it in their minds that blogging for money is a
quick and easy thing […]
Written on December 1st, 2008 at 12:12 am by
Darren Rowse
Blogging for Dollars,
Reader Questions
It’s time for another annual poll here at ProBlogger
- this one asking readers how much they earned in
October 2008? I’ve run this poll a number of times over
the last couple of years and the results are always
interesting.
Just to qualify it - I’m asking about ALL blogging
revenue that you can tie […]
Written on November 11th, 2008 at 08:11 am by
Darren Rowse
Advertising,
Blogging for Dollars
In this video Gary Vaynerchuk answers how to monetize
your blog or video blog with a practical illustration.
Of course you need to have at least some traffic to
pull in advertisers - but once you do, if the
advertisers are not coming to you yet - go to them.
PS: this actually works. When I started […]
Written on October 29th, 2008 at 06:10 am by
Darren Rowse
Blogging for Dollars,
Reader Questions
Last month I ran a poll here at ProBlogger which
asked readers if they make money online from sources
other than blogging.
The result was almost completely split with 1022 of the
2053 people who responded saying Yes and 1031 saying no.
Some of the comments on the launch post of this poll
revealed some of the […]
Written on August 30th, 2008 at 12:08 am by
Darren Rowse
Blogging for Dollars
What if I told you that there’s a way to make money
as a result of your blog where you don’t need to have a
single ad on your blog, where you don’t have to run any
affiliate programs and where you don’t have to write any
paid reviews?
Would you be interested?
Image by iDream_in_Infrared
Much is […]
Written on August 8th, 2008 at 10:08 am by
Darren Rowse
Blogging for Dollars
If you’re looking for a job as a blogger then the
ProBlogger Blog Job Boards have seen 8 new jobs
advertised in just the last 3 days. Actually there’s
more than that - because some of the ads are for more
than one blogger and one has already been filled.
Here’s the latest batch:
Editor and cross-blog […]
Written on June 23rd, 2008 at 12:06 am by
Daniel Scocco
Blogging for Dollars
In this post Daniel Scocco answers to a question by
Warren:
I started a blog about Professional Lifestyle a
little over a month ago. It already has gotten 16,000
visits, has almost 100 subscribers and has a google page
rank of 4 (somehow). Should I put up advertisements at
this early stage?
Ah, the ever controversial question […]
--
12/30/2008 12:16 PM
http://adjix.com/j8x5
Reputation management is essential to both
individuals and companies. The more popular your brand
is, the more critical it will be to keep tabs on it and
the more time it will consume out of your day. If you
work at a startup and no one has heard of your brand, or
if you’re an individual who has just started blogging,
these tools are still useful to you.
If, on the other hand, you’re brand new to social
media and aren’t known by many people, then
these free tools might be a better place to start.
You should consider paid services if you are unable
to manage and keep your pulse on your online
reputation. Also, paid services help you analyze and
understand the magnitude and sentiment of conversations
around your brand, which would take you even longer if
you did it manually. Services start out at a minimal
price of $1 for individual bloggers and shoot up over
$100,000 for large enterprises. If you are considering
using a paid service, select the one that best matches
your current situation and scale up as your requirements
grow.
How to Begin
You need to decide if you want software for tracking
conversations or if you want to pay a vendor for
consulting and reporting. You might want all three. The
difference is the amount of labor you’ll have to expense
versus the amount of money you’ll want to spend.
Companies should bring all stakeholders involved in
this type of a decision to the table before selecting a
vendor to use. The key for success is to figure out what
groups within your company can benefit from this type of
information. The obvious groups would be in marketing
research, public relations, advertising, and then
executives, who will not only have to sign-off on this
initiative, but are most concerned with how their
corporate brand is being portrayed in the media
(new/traditional).
Depending on the service you are considering, you may
have to select keywords (with pay per keyword/phrase
services), so that you can track your competitors, your
own products or personal brands within your company.
Once you have buy-in and one or more people as dedicated
resources to either use the vendor’s software or analyze
and communicate their reports and strategies across the
business, you are ready to select a vendor.
I recommend the top ten vendors listed below
(in no specific order):
1. Buzzlogic
Buzzlogic offers the “BuzzLogic
Insights” application, where you can discover,
engage and assess influencers in your industry. You get
a collaborative dashboard, which provides you with
insight into whose blogging about you and allows you to
share this data within your company. There are also
watch lists for tracking specific bloggers, blogger
profile lists, and social maps (see who links to who).
They divide their services into two major buckets:
marketers and PR people. Marketers gain product
feedback, understand brand perception and receive
monthly readership statistics. PR people are able to
build relationships with influential bloggers, discover
new influencers and track products that matter to them.
2. Radian6
Radian6 offers a
solution, where you can setup certain keywords to
monitor on a dashboard, automatically track the keywords
on blogs, image sharing sites and microblogging sites,
and then have it report back to you with an analysis of
the results. Data is captured in real-time as discovered
and delivered to dashboard analysis widgets.
The solution covers all forms of social media
including blogs, top video and image sharing sites,
forums, opinion sites, mainstream online media and
emerging media like Twitter. Conversational dynamics are
constantly tallied to track the viral nature of each
post.
3. TNS Cymfony
TNS Cymfony offers the
Orchestra Platform, which is built on a Natural
Language Processing engine that automatically
identifies, classifies, qualifies and benchmarks
important people, places, companies and topics for you.
The platform is able to decipher between different
media sources, such as traditional media and social
media. Cymfony’s differentiation is that their engine
dissects articles, paragraphs and sentences to determine
who and what is being talked about, whether something or
someone is a key focus or a passing reference, and how
the various entities mentioned relate to one another.
4. Nielsen
Nielsen offers
Buzzmetrics, which will supply you with key brand
health metrics and consumer commentary from all
consumer-generated media. They also have ThreatTracker,
which alerts of real-time online reputation threats and
gives you a scorecard to show you how you’re doing
relative to the competition.
Nielsen has a very strong brand name as the world’s
leading provider of marketing information, audience
measurement, and media products and services.
Pete Blackshaw, father of consumer-generated media,
is one of the leaders in charge of this powerful
service.
5. Trackur
Trackur offers a
monitoring plan for individuals ($18 per month),
companies ($88), enterprises ($197) and agencies (N/A).
Like many of the other services mentioned, Trackur works
around your keywords and then organizes the results for
you in the form of a Dashboard. Depending on the
package, you’ll be able to save more keyword searches
and have more frequent updates to your Dashboard.
Trackur was built by one of the leading experts in
reputation management,
Andy Beal, which gives the service some added
credibility.
6. Brands Eye
Brands Eye offers reputation
management
packages for bloggers ($1 per month), small
businesses ($95) and enterprises ($350). The tool tracks
every online mention of your brand, giving you a score
that accurately reflects the state of your reputation
over time. Part of the differentiation is that you can
actually tag mentions of your brand and rank them in
terms of a number of pre-determined criteria.
Like many of the other services, you are paying for
keywords that you can track. The frequency of how many
times you receive updates grows depending on how big
your package is.
7. Reputation Defender
Reputation Defender offers four
different
services, including MyChild (starting at $14.95 per
month), MyReputation ($14.95), MyPrivacy ($9.95) and
MyEdge ($99). MyChild scours the Internet for all
references to your child or teen by name, screen name or
social network profile and reports back to you.
MyReputation allows you to review everything that is
available to you online, and MyPrivacy allows you to
remove your personal information from people search
databases, such as
Pipl and
Peek You.
Finally, MyEdge is a solution for owning your Google
results. All of these services scale in size depending
on your need and how much money you want to spend.
8. Sentiment Metrics
Sentiment Metrics has a
reputation management tool that, just like the other
services mentioned, helps you monitor what is being said
about you, your brand and your products across blogs,
forums and news sites. The reports you’ll receive by
using this software focus on sentiment (it’s in the
name), which tells you if the mention is positive,
negative or neutral.
The reports have nice visual graphs and you can break
them down by gender, age groups and location. One of the
big differentiators and benefits of using this service
is that you get email alerts sent to you whenever you
have bad press.
9. Visible Technologies
Visible Technologies offers two
different
services. The first is TruCast, which is a
comprehensive solution for social media analysis and
participation used by enterprises who want to track,
analyze and participate in social media communities. The
differentiation here is that you can comment on blogs
and forums directly from the tool they provide.
The second is TruView, which protects and promotes
reputations online. This service is similar to
Reputation Defender’s MyEdge in how it helps you take
ownership of your Google results by ensuring there is
positive and relevant content at the top of search
engines for your brand name.
Cision offers the
Cision Social Media service, which claims to monitor
over 100 million blogs, tens of thousands of online
forums, and over 450 leading rich media sites. One of
the main benefits, just like Nielsen Buzzmetrics, is
that these companies have been monitoring and measuring
traditional media sites for decades, so they can provide
a more comprehensive solution across the board.
Cision’s product is unique in that it offers 24/7
buzz reporting. Their service is powered by Radian6,
which is mentioned above. They also have a Dashboard and
daily reports, just like the other services, where they
tell you what’s going on with your brand twice a day
through email.
Final Thoughts
Depending on your work schedule, business needs, how
popular your brand name is and how much money you want
to invest in reputation management, any of these
services may be of great assistance to you. And using a
fee-based reputation management service, in combination
with a number of
free services, is a wise decision. Most of the
services above aren’t real-time, so subscribing to
Google alerts and Twitter feeds is still very important
for monitoring your brand.
The sooner you get ahold of what people are saying
about your brand and plan how you will respond and
manage those relationships, the more successful you will
be in social media. This area is still relatively new
and no company has gotten it 100% right yet. The
complicated part of monitoring a brand in a social world
is that humans are needed (human error). Some posts are
sarcastic or others are using brands as examples to
illustrate a bigger idea and these tools may respond
differently.
Now we get to see which vendors use their own
services to monitor their brand names. Let’s see who
comments on this post 
Interested in more resources? Check these out:
- “Top
10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation”
- “HOW
TO: Build Your Online Brand”
- “10
Ways Personal Branding Can Save You From Getting Fired”
- “Twitter,
Facebook, Digg: Can You Join Too Many Social Networks?”
--
12/28/2008 10:29 PM
http://apnews.myway.com
NEW YORK
(AP) - Investors are preparing to close out the last
three trading days of 2008 with Wall Street's worst
performance since Herbert Hoover was president.
The ongoing recession and global economic shock pummeled
stocks this year, with the Dow Jones industrial average
slumping 36.2 percent. That's the biggest drop since
1931 when the Great Depression sent stocks reeling 40.6
percent.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index is set to record the
biggest drop since its creation in 1957. The index of
America's biggest companies is down 40.9 percent for the
year.
--
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/
How to Start Speaking at Events
One day, I wasn’t a speaker at conferences, and then
I was. And then a little while later, I was a paid
speaker. And now, I’m a decently paid speaker. Some day,
I hope to be a really well-paid speaker. It’s not a bad
way to make a few pesos, if only to fund all the crazy
research I like to do all the time. (Also nice that it
pays for the occasional bowl of Frosted Mini Wheats
-strawberry flavor- for my kids, too.) If you’re
interested in speaking at events, I have some ideas on
how you might get that going.
You might first ask yourself what your goal might be.
Are you speaking to further establish yourself and your
company as thought leaders? Are you trying to pitch some
amazing product? Are you hoping to share the learnings
found in your awesome book (available for 24.95 from
O’Reilly Publishing)? That’s a good first thing to know:
your goal. But after that, my advice is fairly the same.
Blog Your Speech - My first
presentation at a conference was
Content Networks are the New Blogs. I gave it at
BarCamp Boston. I think it went smashingly, but if
you want to know for sure, ask
Christopher S. Penn. He was there. That’s where we
founded
PodCamp. Before I stepped on stage (in this case,
it’s BarCamp, so the barrier to speaking is pretty low),
I looked for support about the blog post, to see if it
fit my potential audience.
Since then, I still use the technique. I write about
the types of speeches I hope to give. It works all the
time. I often hear from various verticals with an
association meeting who want to better understand
something I brought up in a blog post, or they’ll ask me
to further customize something to a specific industry.
In both cases, I love the opportunity. It’s a great way
to find new places to speak.
Make Friends - It never hurts to
actually know some conference organizers. I didn’t know
Rick Calvert well before speaking at the first
BlogWorld Expo, but I met him and Patti Hosking at
Gnomedex and that made it easier to be invited to
speak.
Showing up at conferences and having decent
conversations with people makes it a bit easier to start
speaking at events, because then people come to realize
and appreciate the kinds of things you’re about, and
might want to know more about your ability to speak on a
stage.
Shoot Video- So, you might not have
put this one together, but you don’t have to attend a
conference to speak. You can just set up your video
camera or the iSight in your laptop, and shoot your own
speech. Videobloggers do it all the time. Or haven’t you
ever watched
Gary Vaynerchuk?
Now, if you get to speak at an event, at all costs,
try to get some video capture of it. Why? Because it
means that people will get the chance to see you in
action. And that brings me to my next point .
Have a Speaking Page
One of the best things I ever did was build a
speaking page, which contains a few elements for you
to get a better sense of what I can do for your
organization:
- It starts with a two paragraph
overview of who I am and what I talk about.
- It goes right into sample
speaking topics, which are write-ups of
presentations I’ve given. (These make it really easy
for someone to envision how to use me at their
event.)
- Next comes some sample video
presentations (see why I told you to shoot video?).
These have proven really helpful to me.
- I then follow with the laundry
list of places crazy enough to have had me speak
there.
- Next to last, but vital
are testimonials, which give others the chance to
brag about you.
- And finally, I give people an
email address where to contact me.
Having a
speaking page has given me lots in the way of
evidence that I’m doing okay when it comes to
presenting.
Social Proof
I also use my
LinkedIn profile to get recommendations from people
who’ve seen me speak, and I list professional speaker as
one of my “jobs” on the site. Further, if I’m going to
an event, I blog about the event at least once before
attending, and I use Twitter a lot at the event so that
it’s not unknown that I’m speaking yet again.
This is all under the realm of
social proof. When people see you in the role of
speaker, they better understand how you’re going to
help, and what you’re going to deliver. The more they
see proof of how you’ve delivered, the more they’ll be
interested in hiring you for the next gig.
How to Get Paid to Speak
Ask.
Okay, that’s step 1, and believe me it’s not that
easy. We don’t pay speakers for my
New Marketing Summit, and I couldn’t pay for
speakers at Video on the Net. Lots of shows can’t afford
to pay for speakers, but those are just the shows you
know about. There are very deserving and
interesting shows out there that do pay a speaker’s fee,
and that do want a paid professional speaker who will
deliver quite a lot of value back to their attendees for
that money.
One way to see who might potentially pay is to see
what they charge for admission. If the price is high,
there’s likely a little budget for speaking fees.
**Note: The opportunity to speak at certain
places, even for free, sometimes outweighs a fee.
Don’t discount a speaking opportunity because it
doesn’t pay. Some places even charge for speaking, as
part of a larger sponsorship or exhibitor’s package.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities and value
in speaking there. Instead, it means that you have to
have a conversion plan in mind to transform your efforts
as a speaker into business downstream.
Other Things to Consider
Have a good
About page on your website. People want to know
about the person they’re considering for a slot in their
show. Make sure you’re timely in responding to requests
for information (which I’m horrible at, but people have
been nice to me). Do what you can to make your
presentation worth their time, let alone their money.
And above all else, start somewhere. I’ve done some
rough analysis, and it turns out that exactly 100% of
speakers I’ve met at conferences all started by
speaking.
The Bonus Round
If you want to learn more about what I think makes a
top shelf presentation, I’m going to cover that in my
free newsletter, which is different than my blog
content. That’ll come out by the end of the week, so if
you’re interested in more,
subscribe for free.
What do you think? Did I miss anything? What else
would you tell folks who want to start speaking at
events? How did you get your start? What else can I
answer for you?
And what do you think makes a speaker into a
rockstar?

--
12/27/2008 10:52 AM
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
Structured Procrastination
I have been intending to write this essay for months.
Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some
uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade,
textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee,
dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay
as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the
essence of what I call structured procrastination, an
amazing strategy I have discovered that converts
procrastinators into effective human beings, respected
and admired for all that they can accomplish and the
good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off
things they have to do. Structured procrastination is
the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key
idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing
absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely
nothing; they do marginally useful things, like
gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of
how they will reorganize their files when they get
around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these
things? Because they are a way of not doing something
more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do
was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get
him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated
to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as
these tasks are a way of not doing something more
important.
Structured procrastination means shaping the
structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that
exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind
will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most
urgent and important are on top. But there are also
worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list.
Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things
higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate
task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful
citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as
I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
The most perfect situation for structured
procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I
served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford
dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade,
lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would
leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the
lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk
over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there
and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a
terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on
campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to
know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not
doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr.
Chips.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack.
They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if
they have only a few things to do, they will quit
procrastinating and get them done. But this goes
contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and
destroys his most important source of motivation. The
few tasks on his list will be by definition the most
important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be
to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato,
not an effective human being.
At this point you may be asking, "How about the
important tasks at the top of the list, that one never
does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for
the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two
characteristics, First, they seem to have clear
deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully
important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds
with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of
tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is
true for most other large institutions. Take for example
the item right at the top of my list right now. This is
finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of
language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago.
I have accomplished an enormous number of important
things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months
ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor
saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my
good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was,
of course, a way of not working on the article. It
turned out that I really wasn't much further behind
schedule than anyone else. And how important is this
article anyway? Not so important that at some point
something that seems more important won't come along.
Then I'll get to work on it.
Another example is book order forms. I write this in
June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology.
The book order forms are already overdue at the book
store. It is easy to take this as an important task with
a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will
observe that deadlines really start to press a week or
two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from
the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what
we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits
right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping
from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is
near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me
to do other useful but superficially less important
things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with
forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get
mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need
to order popular well-known books from efficient
publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more
important, task sometime between now and, say, August
1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling
out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.
The observant reader may feel at this point that
structured procrastination requires a certain amount of
self-deception, since one is in effect constantly
perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One
needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to
tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines,
while making oneself feel that they are important and
urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all
procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills
also. And what could be more noble than using one
character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?
--
DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing
unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses
in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors
and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing
drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in
building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile
floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace
kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.
In
Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one
radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but
it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central
Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others
of this design get all the heat and hot water they need
from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a
hair dryer.
“You
don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,”
said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter,
dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the
spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio.
His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy
of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new
energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in
Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United
States, are designing homes with better insulation and
high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into
alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind
turbines.
The
concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of
140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from
a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and
complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a
home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any
heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a
passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but
also by the heat from appliances and even from
occupants’ bodies.
And
in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7
percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated
homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new
passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation
system. The warm air going out passes side by side with
clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90
percent efficiency.
“The
myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating.
Our goal is to create a warm house without energy
demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the
Passivhaus Institut
in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick
pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up
with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less
energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
There
are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the
world, the vast majority built in the past few years in
German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The
first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang
Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was
slowed by language. The courses and literature were
mostly in German, and even now the components are
mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The
industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example,
schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The
European Commission
is promoting passive-house building, and the
European Parliament
has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house
standards by 2011.
The
United States Army, long a presence in this part of
Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up
with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a
California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years,
is completing one of the first passive houses in the
United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a
group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to
encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a
recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan
said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were
examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met
“green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit
for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon
in the United States. “When you think about
passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings
in a different way,” he said.
In
Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one
radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but
it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central
Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others
of this design get all the heat and hot water they need
from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a
hair dryer.
“You
don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,”
said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter,
dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the
spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio.
His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy
of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.
Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new
energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in
Environmental and Energy Design standard in the United
States, are designing homes with better insulation and
high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into
alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind
turbines.
The
concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of
140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from
a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and
complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a
home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any
heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a
passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but
also by the heat from appliances and even from
occupants’ bodies.
And
in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7
percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated
homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new
passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation
system. The warm air going out passes side by side with
clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90
percent efficiency.
“The
myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating.
Our goal is to create a warm house without energy
demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the
Passivhaus Institut
in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick
pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up
with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less
energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
There
are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the
world, the vast majority built in the past few years in
German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The
first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang
Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was
slowed by language. The courses and literature were
mostly in German, and even now the components are
mass-produced only in this part of the world.
The
industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example,
schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The
European Commission
is promoting passive-house building, and the
European Parliament
has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house
standards by 2011.
The
United States Army, long a presence in this part of
Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up
with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a
California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years,
is completing one of the first passive houses in the
United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a
group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to
encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a
recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan
said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”
Ironically, however, when California inspectors were
examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met
“green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit
for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon
in the United States. “When you think about
passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings
in a different way,” he said.
Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different
gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric
car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There
is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and
temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA
filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of
the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are
basically the same temperature.
Look
closer and there are technical differences: When the
windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass
and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the
edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the
living room brings in clean air. In the basement there
is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant
Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger.
Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most
architects put in a switch with three settings, which
can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air
for a party (though you can also just open the windows).
“We’ve found it’s very important to people that they
feel they can influence the system,” Mr. Hasper said.
The
houses may be too radical for those who treasure an
experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold
kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old
house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I
wanted to make something different,” said Georg W.
Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his
family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of
buildings.
In
Germany the added construction costs of passive houses
are modest and, because of their growing popularity and
an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf
components, are shrinking.
But
the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation
systems needed to make passive houses work properly are
not readily available in the United States. So the
construction of passive houses in the United States, at
least initially, is likely to entail a higher price
differential.
Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the
United States are more difficult to adapt to the
standard: residential buildings tend not to have
built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding
windows are hard to seal.
Dr.
Feist’s original passive house — a boxy white building
with four apartments — looks like the science project
that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come
in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut,
which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct
research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make
sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in
Britain and
the United States.
Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in
Europe.
Because a successful passive house requires the
interplay of the building, the sun and the climate,
architects need to be careful about site selection.
Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley
in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no
south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether
the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat
exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in
and warm air out.
And
those who want passive-house mansions may be
disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while
sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat.
Most
passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a
comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr.
Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet
per person should look for another design.
“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he
said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”
Collect life lessons as you pass go

100
Resources for
Science Fiction
Record Labels Learning They Have Little Leverage On
YouTube
from the well,-look-at-that... dept
Over the weekend, the story made the rounds about
Warner Music's
dispute with Google over getting money from YouTube
videos. As we discussed in our post on the topic, it
seemed like Warner had very little leverage here: Google
has no legal responsibility to pay anything, and
removing the videos from YouTube seemed a lot more
likely to harm Warner Music and its artists than Google.
As noted by some folks, for many kids these days,
YouTube is
how they find and listen to music these days.
Forcing your songs off YouTube would be like demanding
their removal from the radio twenty years ago.
Yet, more details are coming out on this story, and it
appears that both Warner Music and Google may recognize
Warner Music's precarious position here. In fact, it
appears that it wasn't Warner Music that demanded its
music be taken down. Instead, reports are coming out
saying that Warner instead went to Google with higher
monetary demands, and it was Google's response
to start pulling the music down, to demonstrate to
Warner Music that YouTube is a lot more valuable to
Warner Music than Warner Music is to YouTube (a lesson
that Warner Music execs desperately need to
learn).
Warner Music's response, apparently, has been to try to
pretend it has some leverage, supposedly leaking a
somewhat questionable story that it, and other major
record labels, are
preparing to launch a "Hulu for music." However, as
Greg Sandoval notes in the News.com link in the
paragraph above, this seems like little more than idle
speculation by the labels. They had talked about this
months ago, and have done nothing since. Instead, it was
a bluff by the record labels in a weak attempt to
convince Google that it needs to play ball or face
competition. Google is likely to call the bluff --
because Google still recognizes what the record labels
seem to have trouble recognizing. The power of YouTube
isn't in having a site that plays videos, it's in the
audience -- and you don't recreate that overnight.
from the
in-case-you-didn't-realize-how-big-the-financial-crisis-has-been
dept
I doubt there's anyone out there who would claim that
the dot com bubble bursting was a bigger deal than the
current global financial restructuring that's been going
on. However, plenty of people (myself included) have
suggested that internet companies are more isolated from
the root causes of the mess this time around -- and
that's almost undeniably true. Last time, a lot of the
trouble came directly from overvalued internet
companies. This time, it's had little, if anything, to
do with internet companies. However, apparently some are
noticing that
the valuations of 50 or so top internet companies have
dipped below their lowest point from when the dot
com bubble popped. Of course, in the aggregate, that's
rather meaningless. Each of the companies looked at have
different circumstances. Besides, the current global
financial mess means that no one's really sure how to
value anything, meaning that current valuations
of pretty much any stock should probably be taken with a
huge grain of salt.
12/22/2008 8:12 AM
http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/
Becoming Credible
Tom Wanek believes
credibility can be “purchased” by risking one or more of
six currencies. The more you put at risk, the more
believable your message.
Currencies that Buy Credibility:
1. Material Wealth
Of the six currencies, we see material wealth risked
most frequently in money-back guarantees and statements
like, “Find a lower price anywhere and we’ll refund the
difference plus 10 percent.” Can you think of a better
way to increase credibility by increasing the customer’s
perception of your risk?
2. Time & Energy
Are you in a business that provides an in-home service?
Imagine the power of an ad that says, “If we’re not
there when we promised, we do the job for free. Unlike
other companies, we would never waste your time, then
ask you to pay for ours.” Variations of this classic
example of risking time and energy to increase
credibility have been used by the Clockworks group to
build a number of America’s most successful in-home
service franchises. How else might you risk time and
energy to increase credibility?
3. Opportunity
Ladies, when a man claims to
love you but continues to date other women, is his
statement credible? A self-imposed restriction on
opportunity – dating you exclusively – adds credibility
to his statement, does it not? Likewise, the
manufacturer who gives access to just one retailer in an
area is perceived as committed to that retailer’s
success. Is there a way your
business might risk opportunity to strengthen
credibility?
4. Power & Control
The original purpose of Amazon.com was to sell books.
But by choosing to allow visitors to write negative
reviews, they increased the credibility of the positive
reviews and quickly became one of the internet giants.
Likewise, your company can gain power by giving it away
and you can increase your credibility by giving up
control. How many ways might you do this?
5. Reputation & Prestige
In a report released two weeks ago by CNN/Opinion
Research, George W. Bush had an approval rating of just
24 percent. In a press conference held the following
week, the President said he regretted saying he wanted
Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and that he had urged
the Iraqi insurgents in 2003, “bring ‘em on.” He said he
was sorry such language made the world believe he was
“not a man of peace.” By putting his prestige at risk
and eating a slice of humble pie, George W. Bush
regained some of his lost credibility, don’t you think?
6. Safety and Well-Being
You're 12 years old. Your stepfather says he loves you
as much as if you were his own, but you’re not sure you
believe him. But when you fall through the ice while
skating on a frozen lake your stepfather dives through
the hole into the freezing water to rescue you. Do you
believe him now?
The president of Lifelock, an identity-theft protection
program, runs ads that say, “My name is Todd Davis.
My social security number is 457-55-5462. So why publish
my social security number? Because I’m absolutely
confident LifeLock is protecting my good name and
personal information, just like it will yours. And we
guarantee our service up to $1 million dollars.”
By risking his personal
well-being through the publication of his Social
Security number and risking his company’s material
wealth by reimbursing up to $1 million in identity-theft
losses, Todd Davis has built Lifelock into the dominant
player in its category. Are you beginning to see how
embracing risk increases credibility?
--
http://stupidevilbastard.com
Self-Illustrating Logical Fallacies
These
Self-Illustrating Logical Fallacies are just too
good to pass up. Many thanks to the author and I hope he
or she doesn’t mind my taking liberties reproducing them
here.
I’ll let them speak for themselves, but you may have
to think about some of these a little:
1. Begging the question, or
petitio principii, is the most common type of
fallacy because it is the one that occurs most
frequently.
2. A bad set of options is either a false
dichotomy or a true dichotomy.
3. You should never label an argument as a
slippery slope argument, because next thing you
know, you’re going to be calling all arguments that and
where will it end?
4. Special pleading is the only type of
logical fallacy that is not fallacious. This is because
it is “special.”
5. If you don’t know what argumentum ad hominem
is, you’re an idiot.
6. An appeal to authority constitutes a
logically sound claim. Even the Pope agrees, and he
knows a lot of things.
7. There’s nothing wrong with a hasty
generalization. After all, most of my friends
believe that.
8. Saying I provided a false analogy is
like me saying you’re just plain wrong.
9. A non-sequitur conclusion is one
which does not follow from the premises, therefore the
premises must be wrong.
10. Argumentum ad logicam is a fallacy,
so it always leads to a false conclusion.
11. Amphibolies will deceive the
foolish, because that is their nature.
12. You can’t accuse someone of the fallacy of
equivocation without being guilty of using
“equivocation” yourself. See?
13. If I am affirming the consequent,
then I am committing a logical fallacy. I am committing
a logical fallacy, thus I must be affirming the
consequent.
14. If I am denying the antecedent then
I am committing a logical fallacy. I am not
denying the antecedent, therefore I am not
committing a logical fallacy.
15. My fallacy of composition is
comprised of sensible words, so naturally it is a
sensible statement.
16. A fallacy of division is nonsense,
therefore it is comprised of nonsensical words.
17. You better damn well believe that I never resort
to an appeal to force.
18. Is your inquiry a loaded question
or a stupid one?
19. People who object to a straw man
are simply prejudiced against the noble straw people.
20. A non causa pro causa argument is
made by nitwits, therefore it is this type of argument
that is the cause of human nitwitism.
21. A lot of people know that an argumentum ad
populum is valid, especially in this democracy
we live in. They can’t all be wrong.
22. Ignoratio elenchi must be a rather
popular fallacy, since sociological studies have shown
that people tend to think emotionally rather than
rationally.
23. My own arguments, by virtue of coming from me,
can never really constitute a true “no true
Scotsman” fallacy.
24. How can you say a claim is guilty of
reification? Where is the empirical evidence for
reification? Show me something solid I can
hold in my hand, else there is no reason to believe you.
--
12/14/2008 12:12 PM
http://www.theregister.co.uk
Take this example from a quality British broadsheet.
One journalist on the paper lamented that:
...it's
becoming all too clear at The Telegraph, whose
online business plan seems to be centred on chasing hits
through Google by rehashing and rewriting stories that
people are already interested in.
|
RECYCLE BIN |
|
My name is Harvey,
I will be your Emergency Evacuation Coordinator,
please leave Area 47 in an orderly fashion,
there is plenty of time,
do not trample the other patrons,
exits are clearly marked.
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Pictures of World War
II
http://www.411locate.com/reverse_lookup.htm - Reverse Lookup - Reverse
Phone, Address, Zip, and Area Code
http://www.matteobertolio.com/#
- DPF, IE
http://sex-and-blogs.com/ - DPF, IE
http://www.kooistra.de/en/ - DPF, IE
Mind Pollen
Kick Books
The Memory Hole
Disinformation
Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong
Russ' Research Requests
Sexblo.gs
Drawn!
Scanner @ Nerve
Technorgasmic
Regina Lynn (her
blog)
Violet Blue
Fleshbot
Sexoteric Blog
Laura Henkel Fine Art
Impure Thoughts (Eric Singley)
http://eroticartgallery.blogspot.com/ - DPF
http://www.my-nightstand.com/
http://rareerotica.blogspot.com/
- Scarce Erotic Material From the Past
http://www.alchemicalwedding.com/arserotica/ - The
Erotic Art Museum (Oldies Erotica)
http://www.imagenetion.com/ -
The
ImageNETion Portal is a huge collection of virtual art galleries, featuring
illustrations and paintings of pin-ups art, fantasy art, sci-fi art, digital
art, comics art, fantastic art, classical art, surreal art, and vintage art,
from many artists.
http://sikym.blogspot.com/ - My
favorite PhotoBlog
http://susanagar.blogspot.com/ -
Hot PhotoBlog
os meus xanaxxx
http://www.deviantart.com/
http://hq.dpics.org/12.htm
http://www.weirdspot.com/ -
Features weird pictures, news and facts - all strange, bizarre, and unusual.
Plus some nice sexy girls.
awesome landscape wallpapers
10712 images / wallpaper sur Annuaire Web France
Some topics:
AI
Acquisition
AdSense
AdWords
Adult
Affiliate
Alerts
Amazon
Analytics
Android
Apple
April 1st
Audio Search
Blackhat
Blog Search
Blogspot
Book
Calendar
Cartoon
Censorship
Checkout
China
Code
Cookie
Creative Commons
DoubleClick
Down
EBay
Eric Schmidt
Evil
Experimental Search
Extension
Finance
Fired
Firefox
Flickr
Future
Gears
Gmail
God
Google AJAX Search
Google API
Google Answers
Google Apps
Google Base
Google Desktop
Google Docs
Google Earth
Google Groups
Google Health
Google Labs
Google Logo
Google Maps
Google Mini
Google News
Google Notebook
Google OS
Google Presentations
Google Product Search
Google Reader
Google Sets
Google Talk
Google Trends
Google Video
Googlebot
Googleplex
Googleshare
Hack
Hired
History
Humor
IGoogle
IPO
Image Search
Image comparison
Interview
Larry Page
Launch
Linux
Live.com
Local
Mac
Maps API
Marissa Mayer
Mashup
Matt Cutts
Meta Search Engine
Microsoft
Mobile
Money
Monopoly
Music
Natural Language
OpenSocial
Orkut
PHP
Page Creator
PageRank
Parody
Patents
Personalization
Picasa
Press Day
Privacy
Programming
Q&A
Redesign
Riddle
SEO Contest
SEO
SMS
Scholar
Screenscraping
Sergey Brin
Spam
Spreadsheets
Store
Technorati
Tips
Toolbar
Tools
Translator
Universal Search
Usenet
Video
Vulnerability
Webmaster
Wikipedia
Yahoo Mail
Yahoo
YouTube
Zeitgeist
http://www.flixxy.com - current
entertaining collection of videos on the web
Publisher's Weekly Daily News
Super
Word Smith Links courtesy of
World Wide Words!
Regional
English:
American Dialect Society - Includes a
searchable archive.
Estuary English - Documents and links
at University College, London.
Dictionary of American Regional English -
A major dictionary project, now on its
last volume.
Scots Online - An introduction to the
spoken and written Scots language.
Slang:
Slang and New Language Archive -
Ongoing research into contemporary slang by Tony Thorne.
Dictionary of Slang - Slang from a
British perspective. Updated monthly.
The Jargon File - A comprehensive
collection of terms relating to computing. The original online
source from which the printed New Hacker’s Dictionary was compiled.
Maledicta - A learned discussion of
multilingual insults, including obscenities. Not for the
faint-hearted or rigid of mind.
Online Slang Dictionary - A large
selection, mainly user-contributed.
Silicon Valley Slang - A compilation
of a hundred or so slang expressions, like lasagna syndrome,
nerd bird and code 18 derived from the California
computer industry.
Dictionaries:
American Heritage Dictionary - Fourth
Edition from Bartleby.com. Searchable.
Barnhart Dictionary Companion - A
quarterly journal of new vocabulary.
Cambridge Dictionaries - Online look
up in any of five dictionaries.
Merriam-Webster - Search the
Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.
OneLook Dictionaries - Gives access to
several hundred online dictionaries.
Oxford English Dictionary online - An
expensive subscription service, but some background documents and a
Word of the Day are available free.
YourDictionary.com - Dictionaries for
200+ languages.
Dictionary Centers:
Australian National Dictionary Centre -
Compilers of the Australian National
Dictionary and other works.
Scottish National Dictionary Association -
Publishers of the standard dictionary of
modern Scots.
Dictionary Unit for South African English -
At Rhodes University. Includes articles on
South African English.
Linguistics/phonetics:
Ask a Linguist - An online questions
and answers service.
FAQs About Linguistics - By Professor
John Lawler.
Linguist List home page - Mailing
lists and archives.
Linguistic Phenomena/Devices - Lesser
known linguistic devices.
Sociolinguistics - From the University
of Oregon.
Phonetics and Linguistics - At
University College, London.
Mailing
lists:
A Word A Day - Sent out every weekday.
dictionary.com - Word of the Day
Merriam-Webster Daily Buzzword -
Follow the links to subscribe.
Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day - A
daily mailing
Take Our Word For It - A weekly
preview mailing list.
VocabularyMail - A daily mailing.
Regular
Web columns:
New York Times Learning Network - A
word of the day mailing.
Take Our Word For It - Updated weekly.
Vocabula Review - A monthly magazine
on language.
The Word Detective - Updated
fortnightly.
General
interest for writers:
alt.usage.english - A vast archive of
material from this very active Usenet newsgroup.
The American Language - The Second
Edition of H L Mencken’s classic is online at Bartleby.com.
Atlantic Unbound - The language page
for the Word Court, Word Fugitives, Puzzler, and language articles.
Banished Word List - A list of words
which, according to Lake Superior State University, should be banned
from the language through overuse or misuse. A slight site, but
thought-provoking.
Martha Barnette’s Fun Words - A
mailing list and archive of some less common words that are great
fun to discover.
Common Errors in English - Paul Brians’
site.
e-editor - A British site for
copyeditors, “mainly aimed at helping and supporting e-editors and
non-news editing staff everywhere”.
English-to-American dictionary - A
large collection of words in British English that are likely to
confuse Americans in particular. Includes slang and colloquialisms.
Focusing On Words - Particularly the
Latin and Greek elements used in English. Mailing list.
Fun With Words - Daniel Austin's
wordplay site, including word puzzles and games. The Funny Signs
gallery is worth a visit alone.
Good English and Bad English - Many
links, especially to British sources and to educational and
linguistics sites.
History of the English Language -
Large collection of material and links.
Jack Lynch’s style guide - A online
style guide with information designed originally for business
writers.
The Language Hat - A regularly updated
and interesting language blog.
Language Miniatures - Mini-essays
about language. Updated fortnightly.
Luciferous Logolepsy - A collection of
over 9,000 obscure English words.
Mondegreens - Jon Carroll on creative
mishearings of lyrics.
Rhetoric - Ross Scaife tells you more
than you ever thought you needed to know about rhetoric, in
alphabetical order from Anacoluthon to Zeugma.
Richard Lederer’s Verbivore Page - The
web site woven for wordaholics, logolepts, and verbivores. He says
“ours is the only language in which you drive in a parkway and park
in a driveway”. He speaks, of course, of American English.
Urban Legends - In which many
etymological myths are demolished.
Dave Wilton’s Etymology Page - A
collection of short articles on the origins of words in English.
Words and Stuff - Jed Hartman’s
language columns, on a great variety of subjects.
Word Play - Judi Wolinsky’s excellent
catalogue of sites on words, including The Pig Latin Converter,
Create Your Own Shakespearean Insults, and The Dictionary
of Mountain Bike Slang.
Word Wizard - Your questions answered,
a selection of new words provided, plus “snappy quotes and elegant
insults”, competitions, Fancy Word Parties and Lexicographer’s Club.
-
Strange and Unusual
dictionaries - Resources for SCRABBLE® games, bar
bets, and other trivial pursuits
How to Speak
About Women and be Politically Correct
How To Speak About Men and Be Politically Correct

Oblique Strategies -
Brian Eno gets you unstuck from your Artistic Rut
http://www.ssrn.com/ -
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research
and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the
social sciences.
broadband
reports - Broadband News.. Want to know
your IP? http://www.broadbandreports.com/whois tells you
success4.html
- Magical Marketing Strategies for Creating an Endless Stream of
New, Repeat, and Referral Business
Find Your Calling
- The Plan - Take three days off and go to the library. Enter the
magazine and periodicals section, and start reading anything and
everything that strikes your fancy. The only rule is this: You must
have fun. "After a few hours," Corcodilos says, "you will
finish with Rolling Stone and Vogue, and you will discover that
there are literally hundreds of publications about countless
professions and industries. Pick up the trade rags that pique your
curiosity and see where they lead you." On the second day, you
will begin to notice a trend in your reading. And if you follow the
"fun" rule, you'll begin heading in a focused direction. When you
return time and time again to a specific industry or function, it's
time to hone in and do some research.
SciTech Daily Review - science,
technology, future development -
Here's the best intelligent, informed science and technology
coverage and analysis you can find on a daily basis, sourcing a huge
range of great writers and excellent publications.
stalled.htm -
Stalled Careers, Writer's Block, and Monsters Under the Bed
state98.htm -
The State of Publishing January 04 2005
index.shtml -
Do you want to build the value of your brand, but not sure how?
-
04_positioning_the_battle_for_your_mind.shtml
- Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - "… positioning is not what
you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the
prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the
prospect." --Al Ries and Jack Trout
features_effect.aspid=137
- "Authors become brands if they write a certain kind of book. They
build up brand loyalty – you know what you're going to get when you
read one of their books. By the nature of their craft you won't get
something wildly different. You know what you are going to get."
-
World of Ends
- What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something
Else.
TCS Defense - IDune-I and Gloom in Iraq
- War with Islam is inevitable; many say it's already here. But if,
in the near future, Americans find themselves planting the flag in
Baghdad, they owe it to themselves and to their posterity -- if they
have any -- to think about whose banner will be held high in the
centuries to come. Dune was a novel, but sometimes art doesn't
imitate life; it anticipates life.
How
Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows
- Rule Number One: The User Is in Charge - "There are people
searching the Web for 'spiritual enlightenment.' " Peter Norvig says
this with such utter solemnity that it's impossible to tell for sure
whether he gets the irony. Then again, Norvig is the guy who
authored a hilarious PowerPoint translation of Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address (available at www.norvig.com), a geek classic. So maybe he's
having fun. - But he's also making a point. When someone enters a
query on Google for "spiritual enlightenment," it's not clear what
he's seeking. The concept of spiritual enlightenment means something
different from what the two words mean individually. Google has to
navigate varying levels of literality to guess at what the user
really wants.
The War on the Web -
Sites to see on the road to Baghdad. By
- Sites to see on the road to Baghdad.
By Avi Zenilman -
Not Updated since Wednesday, March 19,
2003, at 3:05 PM ET but still fascinating for IRAQ WAR BUFFS!
AP Breaking News -
from Tampa Bay Online - Cut To The
Chase NEWS. Raw. Fast!
Animations - eye, ball, button, 4th dimension, and abstract c
- AlienEntity - Avatar Animated Cool Illusions - Original
"animations" - Category: Avatar Animated - Cool - Badass and free
animations. - This set was created to mess with your mind. -
Illusions, cool 4th dimension, badass eye zone robot 4d gnome -
buttons swirl - Avatar Animated Avatar Animated - Cool Illusions -
Badass 4th Dimension Avatar Animated 2 4th dimension
U.S. National Debt
Clock - Circa 6/3/06, the estimated
population of the United States is 298,836,814 so each citizen's
share of this debt is $27,988.64. The National Debt has
continued to increase an average of $1.75 billion per day since
September 30, 2005! Concerned? Then tell Congress and the
White House!
-
Truth Or Fiction - email
reality check - verify rumors
New Scientist.com - The
World's No. 1 Science and Technology
Google - Artists
far out links to digital art
Alessandro Bavari
- Home
The Museum
of Unworkable Devices
The Museum of
Hoaxes
Unusual Museums of the
Internet Web Ring
aartika!
original fractal art and design - fractal art screen
HotSheet web directory - news,
finance, travel, shopping mall
-
Science
Fiction Weekly Interview
Google - SF
Kevin Kelly --
Recomendo
Gizmodo The Gadgets Weblog
cosmic recursive fractal flames
Boing Boing A Directory of
Wonderful Things
Animation
Daypop Top Weblogs
-
Google - IT Employment
Google - IT Education
Google Search computer science degree online
MSN
Learning & Research - More Useful Everyday
Kevin Kelly's Reading
List
Brian Eno Home - EnoWeb
Futurismic
kuro5hin.org technology and
culture, from the trenches
klockwerks - Unique Timepieces
-
City of Tomorrow
Internet Speculative Fiction
DataBase
psychedeliscope
by wjbgrafx
Modern Cellular
Automata
Traditional Cellular Automata Rules
Windows
- screensavers
Super
Toothbrush - Sonicare - Products
enfish - find anything on your
hard drive
-
Computer & IT Job Search and Career Advice
Java(TM) Boutique - Free
Java Applets, Games, Programming Tut
Favorite Applets Online Links
Computerworld Careers
Google Search computer career advice
Screensaver
Editors & Tools - ZDNet Downloads
Art & Graphics
- ZDNet Downloads
Microsoft bCentral - Legal Center
-
Google Image Result for www.fractal-recursions.com-Flux.jpg
Alice
Kelley's Fractals
Screensavers, Alice Kelley Fractals
MSN House & Home - Apartment Living
Ananova - News - Sex life
Interactive Java Applets
Traces
In Supertoroidal Space
Equinox Java section
Fergus Murray's
Homepage - Photography, Animation, Poetry and
-
Amazing Beauty ~
Crazy Colors - Artistic screensavers by Falk
PictureView - Usenet
Newsgroups Archive - Newsgroup Pictures
Project Censored
Disobey --- Content for the
Discontented
Yahoo! Directory Screen Savers Shareware
Stephen Linhart
-
The GIMP Homepage
yourDictionary.com • Specialty Dictionaries
Fleshbot
BBspot - Satire for Smart
People_ Dumb People Can Go to Broke
jwz -
more RFID stupidity on the horizon
Froogle
My Way - News
Alexa Web Search - Top 500
George
Bush vs. the People
-
Google Search how to install a cd-rw drive
{fray} drugs - the things
we do for love
Start up
programs - which are OK to delete
Beginners Guides Annual PC Checkup - PCStats.com
Naples Daily News Columnists
Agenda - Breaking News
middenheap
J@pan Inc Magazine -
Business, Technology, People
isen.blog
-
ResourceShelf
ookworld - Observing
Obscure Kulture - index
Home
Video-DVD - Top Picks - Best Movies, Videos, Top DVDs
http--www.thepoorman.net-
Civilization Watch - February 15, 2004 - Homosexual Marriage
Smart Mobs - The Next
Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
The Doc Searls Weblog Sunday,
February 29, 2004
John Battelle's Searchblog
Search Engine Listing and Web Site
Submission Directory - ISE
-
PCWorld.com - Beyond Google
The
Hollywood Reporter.com
We do stuff.
EDGE THE SECOND COMING
Camille Paglia
Origami Underground
johnny.ihackstuff.com I'm j0hnny. I hack stuff.
faithmaps
-
yourDictionary.com • 100 Most Often Mispronounced Words
yourDictionary.com • 100 Most Often Misspelled Words
Search Engine Watch Tips
About Internet Search Engines & Sear
ShawGuides, Inc. Writers
Conferences & Workshops
Google Directory - Arts Writers Resources Conferences
The
Reality Club The Second Coming
Edge
Google Help
Small Times News about MEMS,
Nanotechnology and Microsystems
Yahoo! Directory Parody News
-
Anil Dash
Excel Pile
Simply Australian Aussie Food Biscuits Tim Tams
Worth1000.com Photoshop Contests Are you Worthy™ home page
FARK.com Comments Thingee (924636)
The Blogging of the President 2004
Inland
Empire California Writers Club Meetings and Membership
Mendocino Coast Writers
Conference Home Page
Google Directory - Arts Writers Resources
CritFinder
Critters Writers'
Workshop
-
George W. Bush, Jr. -
The Dark Side
Record songs
from the radio - Loop Recorder
MixerMixer - Make friends and
meet people in your local commu
Funfurde
Josh Rubin Cool Hunting
THE
MERCK MANUAL--SECOND HOME EDITION, Table of Contents
The Memory Hole [rescuing
knowledge, freeing information]
Travelzoo - Top 20
-
Intelliseek's
BlogPulse
Brand
Autopsy
Internet
Marketing Resources Featuring reviews and links to t
Fast Company Seth Godin
THE MERCK MANUAL--SECOND HOME EDITION, How Ear Disorders Affe
Yahoo! Directory California San Diego Metro Personal Ads an
The Extreme Searcher's Web
Page
gapingvoid
Seth's Blog
Thinking by Peter
Davidson
-
IDEAVIRUS
READ IT!
Meetup Organizing local interest
groups.
The
Propaganda Remix Project
MarketingSherpa.com
Practical News & Case Studies on Interne
DTIG2003
The home
of Spybot-S&D!
How Can Permission
Marketing Work For You shaodesigns@hotmail
Unleashing The IdeaVirus
-
TCS Tech Central
Station - Where Free Markets Meet Technology
National Yellow Pages and Guide - restaurants, nightlife, spa
BuzzMachine ... by Jeff Jarvis
Airport Parking, Ontario Airport, Ontario Airport Parking, ON
Discount Airport Parking Reservations at airports nationwide
Loop Recorder Sound Recording
Software for Windows Record any
The Human Clock - A Photo
for Every Minute of the Day
The Death Clock - When Am I
Going To Die
The
Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art
Network
Overview --- Internet Traffic Report
-
Modern Cellular
Automata - Live Color Cellular Automata
August Addition Cellular Automata Rules
Declare Yourself -
Register to Vote
Monster Cable SVC-75 75W In-Wall Stereo Speaker Volume Contro
Ebert's Great
Movies
One-minute movie reviews
Chicago
Sun-Times - Roger Ebert
Gizmodo
Techdirt.
http--www.temecula.org-com_calendar-com_calendar.asp
-
Feel good more
often, have a better attitude, do better at wo
Riverside Community College Home Page
Engadget - www.engadget.com
tompeters! leadership training
development project management
Crossroads Dispatches
Startup
List
Publishers
Marketplace
Quantum Sleeper
optimistic
quotes, forgiveness quotes, optimistic quote, moti
Google Search optimism
-
WritersDigest.com Short Short Story Competition
ezConverter.convert
wma,wav,wmv,asf,mp3,mpg,mpeg,vcd,dvd,avi,
allworldsoft.com.
MP3
converter.
Google Search reduce file size of pictures
WinSoftMagic
Development - Advanced JPEG Compressor - jpeg im
Task List Programs
Batch
Processing and Conversion Software - Batch Process, Con
Free
Graphics Software
Life
Balance software for Palm OS, Macintosh and Windows
-
CategoryGeometry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William
Gibson
Norton Antivirus Software, Internet Security Firewalls, Downl
UNCW Career
Services What Can I Do With A Major In...
What Can I Do With This
Major-Degree
Cheap College Degrees
Icegiant Software
- Help Photo Resizer
Icegiant Software -
Products
Amazon.com Books Blink The Power of Thinking Without Thinkin
Main Page -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
-
MSN Careers - CareerBuilder.com (Hourly Job Search)
WEBS -
Career & Educational Counseling Service
Google Search midlife career change
Google Search midlife career change (2)
XM Radio
Programming - Full Channel Listing
How to Get a Degree Fast
College online
USAJOBS - The Federal Government's
Official Jobs Site
USAJOBS - USAJOBS FAQs
-
State Government
Job Resources
Top
Picks - Books on Jobs in US Government
XMFan.com #1
Fan Site of XM Satellite Radio
Google Search how to get a government job
FactCheck.org - Annenberg
Political Fact Check
How-to - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Google Directory - Health Mental Health Self-Help
Personal Growth
Talent Development Resources
exceptional ability |