slamboard

Does Viacom own the character Doctor Evil? Because I keep hearing One Billion Dollars in my head in that silly voice.

It went totally over my head when a guy on a forum thread that was about an MTV clip said that we all owed them 67 cents. Amazingly, that is about right, 67 cents for every time a user has viewed any of Viacom’s copyright protected material on YouTube.

Wikipedia has the highest ranking item on a Google search for the term Google that is not a Google page. It’s on page three.

On a Google search for the term Boring Facts, the first fact you will see is that Chile is the world’s largest producer of copper.

India is the world’s largest producer of peppers.

Dr Pepper does not, and never has, contained prune juice.

California produces about 70% of the world’s supply of prunes.

Essjay was a Wikipedia editor who claimed to be a tenured professor of Catholic Religion. He was in fact a 24 year old guy from Kentucky.

There is no word as to whether he got his DaVinci Decoder Ring from a cereal box. Wikipedia founders are now considering changes that make this kind of ruse less doable. Some of their proposed changed are being sharply criticized by vocal Wikipedia users.

I think the fear that some people have about mischief lacks perspective. Many of the people that they are worried about are already spending 18 hours a day posting obscene YouTube comments.

NYT report…

This blog is not ranked by ALEXA as of the date of this post. If you look on my sidebar there is now an ALEXA widget. I have heard that installing this improves your standing with ALEXA.

Wikipedia does not have an adequate entry for ALEXA. The specific complaint is that the Primary Source contributed most of the information. That being said, the subjects of bias and manipulation are explored and put into perspective.

Here is a great article, albeit old, that puts the whole ALEXA thing in perspective. The authors personal site has dropped in ranking from the 43,100 described in the article to 96,289 today.

I have two blogs that stand at 2,500,000 and 3,500,000 or thereabouts and I have just installed the ALEXA widget on them, I will be sure to mention if I get any surprising improvement.

My partner in life responded to my mention of what is going on with this guy Jeff Burgar with the phrase ‘Type-in Traffic is Golden’.

You may have never heard of Jeff before, but you have probably heard of Tom Cruise, Bruce Springsteen and Celine Dion. Jeff used the names of these and many other celebrities when registering domain names beginning in the mid 90s. When the stars get lawyered up, Mr. Burgar doesn’t have a leg to stand on. His business model has been to use these iconic URL’s with redirects to a commercial site that he operates.

I have no idea why Tom Cruise waited 10 years to get tomcruise.com taken away from Jeff Burgar. Maybe Tom and other scientologists are asked not to use the Internet.

It was basically love at first site with me and Joost. I watched my first two hour documentary on the evening of the lunar eclipse. Maybe that affected my perception. The long periods with the program on pause while I stepped outside to view the other spectacle.

This week, I have only watched one long program without a crash. I haven’t carefully cross referenced my ISP specs, maybe I am not supposed to be able to view this stuff.

I love the way Joost works when it is working for me. You can browse by channel and program while a video is playing.

The town where I went to college was very much a College Town. One thing that this entailed was that a business like a pizza restaurant or a nightclub would have its clientel change over almost completely every four years.

The bars seemed to change their names an awful lot. I ended up living and working in or near this town for ten years after I graduated.

This is an exceptional situation. Most businesses, like the colleges themselves for instance, take decades to build a reputation that is associated with their name. If there is talk of changing the name of something that is considered an institution, the discussion is usually fraught.

For most businesses, a name change is a big deal. McDonalds is not going to change its name anytime soon. Walmart will be Walmart long after Wally is no longer with us.

Cingular Wireless has recently been renamed The New AT&T. The branding of Cingular was less than a decade old and AT&T is about as iconic as it gets.

KFC was Kentuky Fried Chicken. They killed two birds with one stone with the change, the State of Kentucky was rumored to be after some monetary consideration in exchange for the use of their name and a health conscious society didn’t want to be reminded that the chicken was fried (in deep fat). Interestingly, the company is bringing the old name back in a selective way. It’s exclusion from packaging and advertisement spawned some nostalgia.

I think it would be really interesting if Microsoft were to change its name. Please leave a comment suggesting the new name for Microsoft and I will pass it on to them for you.

In some respects things like page rank and traffic rankings are their own reward. There are situations where you may be granted or denied access to something of value to you and your blog based on these statistics.

When Google is determining the importance of a site, every incoming link is like a vote for that site. It is, of course, way more complicated than that.

Something very important to be consistent about whether or not you put the www prefix in links going back to your blog. If you are inconsistent, you are basically splitting the vote. Slamboard.com is my Nader, please vote for www.Slamboard.com. I’m not sure who I am running against, Maybe YouTube should be my chosen adversary.

The blog is still in its infancy. I experience genuine surprise when one person reads it and feels compelled to comment. Imagine how surprised I was when I got four comments asking me for Joost invitations after I published a post about it.

I think that the strategy being used to introduce Joost is a very good one. I don’t want to rub it in or anything, but Joost is working quite well. I think the smoothness might be enhanced by the relatively small number of users. If they had simply allowed everyone to get on the beta version, it might be an entirely different picture, and that would be bad for word of mouth promotion.

The other aspect that makes the trickle of invites seem like pure genius is the fact that scarcity creates demand. This is going to be a temporary effect, because I believe the supply is increasing exponentially, like the in old shampoo commercial.

joost

Telecommuting is being looked at as an attractive alternative to 9 to 5 for more people every year. There are many tasks that involve receiving some form of electronic data, manipulating it in some skilled way and then returning the data in its altered form. That sounds pretty technical and boring, but lots of jobs fit this description. And none of them should technically require that you put on pants and leave the house.

You could be a reviewer, which would mean you take some form of media and you read it, or listen to it or watch it and then you offer your expert opinion on its qualities.

You could be a translator, you take something that has been produced in one language and you create a document in another language which closely matches the meaning of the original.

You could be a proofreader, you receive a document that has been drafted in a high production manner and you fix the spelling, grammar, style etc. to the point where it can be used for its intended purpose.

You could be a transcriber, you receive audio files and listen to them while using your high level typing skills to work at home to create a text document. The health industry produces massive amounts of operative notes and other information that must be transcribed to stand as a record of patient care. Other fields that outsource transcription are legal, municipal politics, real estate, news media, the list goes on.

I think that filling in surveys for money is mostly a scam, but if you are part of some unique demographic, you may be able to cash in by participating in case studies. I knew a set of identical twins that did this. It’s not really a job of course, just an opportunity for, at most, several hundred dollars.

There are various models for monetizing blogging as well. As this blog develops I am going to consider different ways to use it as an income generator.

work at home