slamboard

When I was a kid, I think I learned more language skills from reading the contest details on cereal boxes than I did from my teachers. I used my language skills and my basic knowledge of contests on a few occasions on the blogosphere. Whenever I have had a contest on a blog, I have always written a list of rules that attempt to make things clear. With contests big and small becoming a popular way to promote blogs, I am seeing a lot of contests with incomplete rules or sometimes no rules at all.

Generally speaking, good will and very small prizes have meant that these contests come off without a hitch despite the poor planning. A big part of that is the self selecting nature of the contestants. They will almost always be people who choose to read your blog because they like it.

There was recently a blogger who held a bogus contest with a very large prize, $5,000.

When he eventually did not award the prize, as many people had predicted, there was a vengeful campaign. It basically involved highlighting his dishonesty on pages with good SEO. I couldn’t remember the bloggers name or the details, so I entered the words contest scam blog into a search and the sordid story was the number three item.

I am leaning towards not having contests, because I have not seen a good return on investment with the last few that I have conducted. It hard to measure ROI with these because adding a few readers that stay long after the contest has an immeasurable value.

The most recent news about lead contaminated products imported from China has a new twist. The products were promotional items that government organization gave to people. The canvas lunch boxes were meant to promote healthy eating.

The ‘buyer beware’ edict tends to go out the window when you are getting something for free.

If anybody is nice enough to give you one of those giant foam pointy fingers, don’t give it to your kids to play with.

I hope agencies are testing balloons and party favors as well.

If you like making slick, short promotional videos, then Black Turtle Media wants your work!.

If you type ‘So Much Plastic’ in the search box on YouTube, you will see one of the short films that I made. As you can see, my work is not quite as slick and polished as it could be. Animation is supposed to have at least 16 frames per second to fool the eye and I think I was at about 5 for the middle part of this video. I also have trouble getting the sound levels just right on my videos.

The premise of Black Turtle Media is that they allow open submission of amateur promotional video. Many people are very tired of the advertisements that are produced by mainstream advertisers. I myself agree that they often lack imagination. More accurately, if one imaginative ad works, the industry spends about two years replicating the same idea to try and sell everything from beer to pregnancy tests.

If you want to make an iPhone video, go for it and send it to blackturtlemedia.com. They are even running a contest and the best video stands to win $5,000. For the contest, you can choose from these topics…the Apple iPhone, Halo3 or Decision 2008.

The contest is determined by voting from viewers. I watched a couple of videos on BlackTurtleMedia.com this morning. There is a real range as far as quality and creativity. I think a latecomer with a catchy video would have a good chance of walking away with the money.

I am curious as to whether the company and individuals that are being promoted are aware of this promotion. I am sure Apple and the Makers of Halo3 at least know about Black Turtle. I suspect that some of the Presidential candidates are not aware of this grassroots campaigning. Bear in mind that if a candidate does not officially approve of a message, they should not be held responsible for its content. That is, unless there is evidence of unofficial approval.

There was so much enthusiastic promotion of the iPhone in the lead up to its release and some of the videos on blackturtlemedia.com are prime examples of that atmosphere. Now that the products are in hand, user ads are taking a different tone. They are pretty cool gadgets and if I had one, I would use it for more than finding good calamari.

I did something wrong a few months ago. I added a widget to my sidebar that advertised online auctions. There was some small potential for revenue and it wasn’t very obtrusive. As I found out today, things can change quickly when you have installed javascript from an outside party on your site. It is gone now. I didn’t get to observe first hand what was being loaded onto the computers of visitors to my site this morning.

If the code for a widget has an address ending in js somewhere in the code, you may be in for a surprise when someone makes changes to what exactly your site is calling for with that address.

When I looked through all the other widget codes that I have on Slamboard, I did not find any that were set up in the same way. I may be over reacting a bit, but I was made aware of this by a concerned reader. Readers shouldn’t have to be concerned.

Taser recently introduced a sleek stylish Taser that is being marketed specifically to women.

Law enforcement and human rights groups are not thrilled about this new product.

When fired, it shoots out confetti that is printed to identify the registered owner of the device. Of course, it also shoots two electrical probes that deliver a debilitating 50,000-volts.

Many self defense experts express doubts as to the effectiveness of tasers as a self defense tool, arguing that they are just as likely to merely anger an attacker and may even be used against a victim in retaliation.

Sources for this post: Reuters, Wikipedia

I have been busy with a lot of other things while this whole Kimkins thing rolls along towards some inevitable conclusion. I am making a post at this time because I noticed that the top hits on a Technorati search for Kimkins are all from affililiates and other Kimkins proponents. Technorati searches are listed with the most recent blog posts at the top. Relevance and authority doesn’t factor into the order.

Bloggers who are interested in trying to prevent people from researching Kimkins without seeing the truth should post often.

The event that is pointed to in Wikipedia as a causal factor for the Better Business Bureau was a court case pitting Coca-Cola against the United States Government back in 1906.

Coca-Cola executive Samuel C. Dobbs began the ‘Truth in Advertising’ movement in response to that debacle, which was costly to the company. Various organizations sprang up to act as responsible intermediaries between companies and consumers. It took decades for them to coalesce into the BBB. There are no independent Better Business Bureaus.

The government had just recently brought in the Pure Food and Drug Act which eventually led to the creation of the FDA. Going after Coca-Cola seems like a poor use of resources when the original intent of the act was to rid the USA of toxic patent medicines that were being peddled by hundreds of little companies.

I just had one of those moments, where I decide that it is time to write a post even though I don’t really feel inspired or motivated.

The first topic that came to mind was the ethics of monetized blogging. I typed those three words into Google and I was a bit disappointed to find that this blog was the top hit. It seems like this is a topic that is not being widely discussed in an open and frank way.

The number two hit was from thepaperbull.com. The author of that blog had an issue with the what he perceived as unethical behavior by John Chow. I don’t know if John implemented his plan to charge a subscription for removing the no follow tag from links in his comment section or not. In my mind this seems like a poorly thought out way to get money from your readers. I removed the no follow tags from my personal blog when the practice was being promoted as a good neighbor kind of gesture. I have not implemented ‘do follow’ on Slamboard.

Farther down the page is DoshDosh. Her post was a review of a presentation by a famous Adsense success story guy. Adsense revenue is the money that site owners make when readers click the ads by Google. These ads are meant to be contextual. Google uses keywords present on your blog to decide whose ad to place on your page. The subject of ethics comes into play with this because site owners do not have any editorial control over these ads. The author of DoshDosh felt that she would be a hypocrite if, for example, she was writing a post criticizing MLM schemes and her post triggered a contextual ad for an MLM scheme. The gist of the post is that she wants editorial control and is putting that ahead of the small revenue offered by adsense. This post is about six months old and it now features Adsense ads.

…running Adsense on sites with little content (proxies, parked domains etc.) or weakly branded sites with a very general and wide range of topics means a lesser risk of going against your site’s mission statement or content focus.

I find that here is a real class distinction among bloggers. The people who build a reputation and a following with a personality and/or content that is somehow engaging to a vast number of people have the luxury of selling out in relatively unnoticeable ways and earning thousands of dollars. Other people are adding their stories to the millions and they take advantage of any monetizing scheme that works and quite a few that don’t. Labeling any particular practice in the blogosphere as unethical is typically a judgment call, because there is no code of ethics that is widely recognized (please correct me if I am wrong).

If an addiction to opiates is impacting your life, rapid detox may be a great way to get back on track.

I just did a little bit of research starting at Opiates.com. This site is designed to get the word out about the Waismann Method, which is an accelerated drug detox method that is performed under the supervision of a Board-Certified Anesthesiologist.

I did a search on the method, and I was impressed by it. It makes sense to induce the most serious withdrawal symptoms while an addict is in the hospital. With this method, physical withdrawal can start in a matter of a few hours rather than after days with other detox methods.
Patients are unconscious during most of the initial process. Medicines that remove opiates from receptors are used. This is a complex procedure and patients have to undergo tests beforehand.

I was left wondering why all the high profile celebrity addicts do not opt for this method. I am suspicious that they like to be able to claim that they entered a Malibu type rehab because of exhaustion, or pressure from their management and that they weren’t really addicted. Yeah, right.

Adamant or profane, Sally Field did her bit to put a human face on war. Every soldier is a son or daughter.

The fact that her statement contained the word goddamn gives Fox the luxury of claiming that they censored her words and not her message. Here is a piece on FoxNews.com with the word in print. But this is the internet, we can say almost anything.