slamboard

I want to present you with what might possibly be the worst business promotion idea ever. The frugal people in my neighborhood place t-shirts over their front car seats to save them from UV damage. Companies all over the World have t-shirts printed up for promotional purposes. Companies all over the World pay websites for banner ad placement.

Here is my proposal. The first company that sends me a matched pair of (large or bigger) t-shirts will get to have them displayed on my car seats, parked out on a busy street. I will also post a picture linked as per your request at the top of my blog forever. Some restrictions apply*

t-shirts advertising

* I will not put a Che Guevera t-shirt or an I’m with stupid t-shirt on my car seat.

BlogHer is ‘where the women bloggers are.’

I am not going to go looking on this nasty thing called the internet for criticism of this website. I’m sure it is there. I am sure some of the criticism illustrates the need for such a community better than they can themselves.

Is there a BlogHim? I am just about to check. Bloghim.org is a personal blog with four posts, none from this year. I wonder if the domain is for sale? BlogHim.com is a directory page with no content to speak of. BlogHim is a theme utilized by some male bloggers for the purposes of humor.

I’m glad that I just discovered Citizen of the Month. Neil is he man.

I work at home now and, while I get some direction from my partner in life and work, I am pretty much on my own as far as time management. I think that there has to be some firm policies about non-work related internet activities for any company that is dependant on having a productive human resource. In a perfect World, people should be managed in such a way that they are given a reasonable work load and regular progress checks. Some people actually work better when they can have relatively frequent distractions. I know that blogging and work sometimes does not mix well. I have a 2-3 hour task that I do 6 days per week. If I try to work on blog entries or social activities related to the Blogosphere in the morning, I can drag this task out until the late afternoon. It is ideally supposed to be finished before noon my time because it involves updates for a site for which people have paid subscriptions. Blogging at work should be OK for some people, but you have to be realistic about time management. You should also be aware of what your employers expectations are with regard to internet usage during company time. If you are working somewhere that does not have a firm policy, you should go check out the policies of other companies. Find one that you think is reasonable and have it stored somewhere so you can suggest it if the subject comes up. A former employer of mine operated on the trust model until something that I never heard the particulars of made the employer decide to draft a policy that included a strict no MSN Messenger policy. That was inconvenient. You should be aware that employers could put keystroke loggers on company equipment. There are even keystroke loggers that are external devices.

As far as blogging about work goes, I suggest that if you are an employee you should completely avoid blogging about work. Just don’t do it. You might notice that I don’t have my face plastered all over this blog. I could lull myself into thinking that I was anonymous but I would be fooling myself. If you blog in a conversational style, using anecdotes and bits and pieces of your personal experience, you will gradualy reveal more and more of who you are. I have recently abandoned anonymity on another blog and I am fairly pleased with the reception that I am getting from other bloggers who put their names and faces on their blogs. If my blog was unknown to friends and coworkers I would have less self editing to do. Sometimes I get my wife to do my self-editing for me. Sometimes things get published and then self edited shortly afterwards.

This is not something that I have the skill set to accomplish. I stress out sticking a memory card into the slots in a PCU. It might have come in handy back when I had a wireless network that I was sharing with my neighbor (ligitimately) in an old duplex. I think I moved my desk about 5 times before I found a spot that would work all the time.

IBM has this very good looking page on their website highlighting the IBM personnel who blog and who have integrated their blogging with their work. Surprisingly, some of these IBM employees have well balanced lives and they even approach the state of being cool. Andy Piper’s blog is worth a look.

I am on the lookout for a blogroll for which this blog would be well suited. As I mentioned before, adding a blogroll to another blog that I write had almost immediate results for Alexa rank, and the number is continuing to improve. The number for www.slamboard.com improved a great deal too, but it really had nowhere to go but up. The work involved in making improvements in a ranking when you are down in the multiple millions is nothing compared to what you have to do to get into 5 figure territory.

My Alexa for this site has seen a marked improvement. The only things that I have done, aside from regular content, is asking a popular blogger to post about my blog in exchange for participating in a theme and linking to her blog.

The title of this blog Slamboard is the legacy of a website idea that failed.

The Idea: Create an free unmoderated forum that members of heavily moderated forums can use to SLAM other people in an unfettered and anonymous way.

Main Reasons for Failure: Unmoderated means that spammers had free reign. Eventually they would have filled the site to capacity with porn and pharma spam.

Promoting the site essentially required disregarding the TOS of the popular boards. A certain board’s moderators were so offended by the approach that they sent me a nice picture of a man’s genitalia with a tarantula crawling on them. That bothered me somewhat. That board has an ingenius business model. It costs $10 to join, everyone is very rude and offensive and banning is done partly as a way of generating further $10 payments.

Bitching about other members of the ‘nice’ boards is the realm of PM’s, there is no need for an offsight venue.

I don’t know anything about Palm products or PDA’s in general. My business sense is tingling though when I read about Palm’s announcement about an upcoming Linux platform.

Developing and marketing PDA products seems like a very tricky business. I was at a trade conference where I was once subjected to a seminar in which the lecturer went off topic for about 2/3 of his time giving a hard sell to some PDA software that he had developed. I’m a pretty easy going guy and I just shrugged it off. The experience really rubbed some other people the wrong way and they managed to get us all a partial refund for the seminar. I guess the fact that I wasn’t paying my own way may have played a part in my complacency. I also recognized that it really was a good program, and I already knew most of what he was scheduled to talk about.

Back to Palm, they have been successful at carving out a niche for themselves. This figure of speech just reminded me of another…’Painting yourself into a corner’

Source…

palm

I promised that I was going to invent a jelly-fish eating robotic solar powered sea turtle, and I have not yet done so. I have excuses.

I was disheartened to look in Wikipedia, my faulty default resource for information about everything, to find that there is no reference to a relationship between sea turtle populations and jellfish populations. The key causes of jellyfish population explosions are overfishing of competing species and lowered O2 in seawater due to pollution and climate change.

I think a better business model would be to sell protective suits to tourists. This is already being done. I think they are overpriced.

My child had to receive medical treatment for a serious jellyfish sting last summer. If you are at risk for jellyfish stings, your easiest to obtain first aid tools are a credit card and a bottle of vinegar. The card can be used to scrape the nematocysts from the affected area after first pouring vinegar on the sting to help neutralize the toxin.

failure

I wanted to go snorkelling. There were too many jellyfish. There is an abundance of these dangerous invertebrates because human activity has reduced the sea turtle population. Sea Turtles are predators of jellyfish.

I think it is time for us to make solar powered, jellyfish-eating robot turtles for resort areas. I am going to do a rough blue print this evening and post it here