slamboard

What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging is the tagline for a book of blogging tips written by Lorelle VanFossen. I have not read this book, but I have been made to feel inadequate from the outline alone.

I am not going to tell you anything about blogging. I am going to tell you that you can view sample chapters and get the book at a discount by clicking here. There are things that I know all too well and have yet to act on. Branding my blog should have been a priority. My blog looks very boring. I was shocked by how boring my blog looked when it was on a television screen for a few seconds.

The goal of some comment spam is to resemble real commentary or advice. The sentence that I copied from my comment spam to substantively change the above picture of a fortune cookie is a good example. It reminds me a bit of when Lisa Simpson was trying to have a poignant moment with Ralphy and he commented that his cat’s breath smells like catfood.

I wish I had more of this kind of spam and less of those 9 page long lists of links. I am going to wear out my Pg Dn key

This post does not have much to do with the iPhone. Click on the image to see a full size image of an item that I deleted from my comments. There are a lot of websites these days that do nothing but republish other people’s work. It appears that any blog that is indexed by Google blog search can expect to have their posts lifted in this way. The people who do this do not stand to profit in a big way from any one page. Because the strategy is automated, they can set up many, many of these pages. One blogger had a theory that it is primarily an adsense revenue strategy. Another possible goal is getting the URLs indexed and whitelisted so they can be sold at a profit. I have been advised that reporting the trackback for this type of incoming link as spam is a good idea. If you encourage them you may end up with too many links coming from ‘bad neighborhoods’ and this can effect how Google feels about your blog. Google is very sensitive.

Edit: I knew this would happen…

The iPhone was developed in secrecy and the third party applications that were available before the 1.1.1. software update were not welcomed by Apple. I don’t know if any writers will say that the ’soon’ to arrive software development kit is a change of heart, but if they do they will be wrong. The timing of some actions by Apple may have been driven by emotion to some slight degree, but the stages are cold calculated marketing. I think that the promise of future development of applications that do not void warranty may make users less inclined to try underground apps.

Forums or boards are communities. Almost every bit of advice that you could give or receive about moving into a new community in real life applies to online communities as well. The main difference is that we can move into as many of these online communities that we want to at the same time.

Just like in real life, some of these communities are welcoming to everyone and some of them are virtually gated communities. Just like in real life, the cost of living is higher in some communities than it is in others. Just like in real life, some communities are more tolerant than others. If was writing all this boring stuff on a forum thread, somebody might make an ad hominem upon me. In online communities, several trusted members are given the ability to kick people out of the community. I’m not sure if there is a real life counterpart to this practice, at least not a legal one.

Big-boards.com has an ordered and searchable list of all the most active boards on the Internet.

Baidu is an internet enterprise based in China. There were recent accusations that the Chinese government was redirecting Google searches to the search engine operated by Baidu. Before this reported problem, Wikipedia was getting nowhere with efforts to get Baidu to stop using it’s copyrighted material without permission or credit.

There are reports from inside China that the Google redirect accusation was inaccurate.

Source: www.google.cn

Why isn’t this woman a celebrity? She has such a great personality. Her rant covers a number of topics to which overweight woman can relate.

Joy Nash makes one argument that really fits well with my business and marketing focus. She thinks that woman that are ‘plus-sized’ should boycott boutiques that do not carry good looking clothes in their size. I like her attitude about living an active, healthy lifestyle in which your weight is not being used as an excuse for not living. Her YouTube video has over 11,000 comments. I have not looked at them carefully, but I suspect that there are some mean ones, some cheerleading ones and probably a few that make reasonable arguments against some of what she says. Obesity is a condition that puts people at a greater risk for several adverse health conditions.

I think it is horrible that the news media chooses to devote countless hours to dysfunctional celebrities and yet this is the first time that I have ever heard about the tragic death of Martin Anderson. I did not even find out about it through the news media. I found out about it on an internet forum. I hope that somebody will find out about it from me.

I tagged this with the word education. I think that children who are detained by the State of Florida and everywhere else should be learning skills that might provide them with options other than crime. It seems like the now closed ‘boot camps’ may have had a secondary purpose of grooming people for the army. Yes, you can be an army of one even if you stole your grandmother’s car.

You don’t need to ask the question “How do they get away with stuff like this?”

The 18 or more people who were arrested in a sting operation did not get away with it in the end. I have to wonder about what kind of big ‘holes’ exist in overall airport security for these guys to think that they can carry out this kind of operation.

Back when I was a blue collar plant worker, I had a coworker who had recently been convicted of defrauding video gaming machines. He had a fantastic story about having had a conversation in the courthouse hallway with some other ’scheduled to appear’ dudes. He told them in detail what he had done. Weeks later he saw in the papers that they had been caught in an attempt to replicate his crime. Shouldn’t they have given more consideration to the fact that he had been caught?

Hopefully the drug trafficker who was able to convince all these New York guys that they wouldn’t get caught is sharing a cell with them.

I have been playing musical chairs for months. We have a small home business employing a handful of people. I am not a highly skilled IT worker so I don’t get to sit at this nice work station with the comfy chair and the high desk between 8 and 3. I know how much difference ergonomics makes to your productivity and even your health. Formaspace designs the Workbenches at places like IBM, Hewlett Packard and even Harley Davidson. The jobs that warrant specially designed and manufactured workbenches from this company are things like technical design, electronics assembly, packaging and laboratory work. While many of the items available from Formaspace.com are very specialized, they also have a great basic work table line. You can get a rugged mobile table in a range of sizes right up to 12′X5′ and they can hold from 1000 to 5000 lbs. I have a lot of experience in manufacturing and packaging and I think getting the height of workspaces right is very important for productivity and health.