slamboard

Do you have a message that you would like to have printed on a tiny piece of paper and dropped onto the heads of drunken New Yorkers? Act fast this page that allows you to submit a New Years Message to be delivered in this unique fashion has a fast approaching deadline.

The Aptera has a certain appeal. It is an electric car that looks sleek and goes fast. It is competitively priced. I am not sure how the oil companies are going to kill it. It is interesting to note that the company thought outside the box when it came to dealing with present regulations. In the eyes of the DOT it is a motorcycle.

I just finished reading a lengthy and thought provoking post on the blog at WhyDoWork.com that highlights some of the flaws and limitations of blogs. The criticisms are from the point of view of someone who is looking for relevant information about making money online. John Chow is used an example of a popular blogger. If you go to JohnChow.com and spend a portion of your free time reading his advice and opinions, you may not be seeing the big picture on a given topic. If you find an active forum thread that relates to the same topic, you will find more opinions and you may find some information that is more useful. Another minus for blogs is the possibility that critical responses may be deleted.

I don’t delete critical comments, but I think the approval process itself discourages people from commenting. I went to full moderation during a critical period of the Kimkins stuff because people were making comments that started with ‘Please don’t post.’

I think that I will remove the moderation soon, allowing any post that is not caught by the spam catcher to be published immediately.[edit: I am presently not moderating comments, anyone who is not in Akismet’s bad books and does not have more than two outgoing links will have their comment instantly posted.]

I think one disadvantage with forums is the volume of information/chat that can eat up your free time while you wade through it looking for information that is of value. The best example that I can think of in this regard is the Why the fascination with Kimmer? thread(s) on the Low Carb Friends board. This forum has been a valuable source of information for the Kimkins story, but I do not read it. I wait for other people to read it and quote the interesting stuff in blogs. For the uninitiated who might want to read these threads, be warned, there are 12 threads totaling 42,675 replies and counting.

What is a Search Engine? Many of us use them everyday. Google, MSN, Yahoo, whatever your poison is the basic act of using a search engine involves typing a word into a box and clicking on a button. The search engine gives us a big list of pages that it has determined to be relevant to our words. EarthFrisk.org is claiming to be the worlds first Hybrid Meta-Community Search Engine. It is harnessing the power of several major search engines and melding them borg-style with some cutting edge social functionality. The official launch of EarthFrisk.org is on Monday, but it is up and running now. I am going to do a trial run and compare the results to Google and Yahoo.

I used the term ’slamboard’… very unimaginative… and the results from EarthFrisk.org seemed to be an amalgam of the results for major search engines. Since the real perks of using EarthFrisk.org are social aspects, it will have to build up a user base before its full potential is apparent. The word Democratic is being used to describe how the sites ranking system will work. that sounds kinda cool.

I am way late in making any kind of commentary about John Chow getting manually punished by Google for his not not evil ways, so I won’t bother. I will focus instead on page two of the Google search query for John Chow. It contains an entry for John Chow’s MyBlogLog page and the text blurb is written by John Chow. It is the highest ranking page over which he has any editorial control. His holiday wishes are expressed on this page at this time. I suspect that JohnCow.com is getting more Google traffic than MyBlogLog.com/buzz/community/JohnChow/, but every little bit helps.

The URL for my full name is taken, but I really need to make a point of getting domains for my kids. Having a your name as a URL is a tremendous asset if you don’t blow it by ticking Google off.

This early report comes from the folks at Mastercard. Growth in consumer spending from last year’s Christmas shopping season is a low 3.6%. While it is disappointing, it is not unexpected. Gas prices and economic pressures related to the housing market are major factors. I think another factor was the lack of cool stuff. I am a bit out of the loop, but I can’t think of an iconic must have toy for Christmas 2007. There was a largely failed attempt to get people worked up about a possible Wii shortage. There have to be more buyers than there are items for a shortage to exist.

“If you see one, buy it. Don’t assume that you can come back later and find one.”

On a brighter note, the same report says that online spending for the same period is up 22% from last year.

Sources for this story: NYT, engadget

I was a bit dismayed when I saw a blogger telling a bald faced lie on the official Google blog. If you read the official Google blog and you truly believe that NORAD tracks Santa with Google, I have some news for you. There is no Santa Claus. Your parent or legal guardian wrote that letter from Santa apologizing for not being able to get a Wii

If you have a few names left on your list and you have run out of ideas I have a quick suggestion. FAIR TRADE GIFTS will let people know that you care. Certified fair trade products provide a fair return to the farmers and crafts people that produce them. Coffee is probably the most well known product that can carry a fair trade certification, but fair trade certification is expanding to many other goods, the most recent being flowers.

This is a comprehensive list of stores that may have fair trade products. I found the list at TransfairUSA and I added a few stores to the list. The ones in bold are personal recommendations.

10,000 Villages

Costco
Carr’s
CostPlus World Market
Dominick’s Finer Foods
Fred Meyer
Genuardi’s
Giant
H-E-B
Harris Teeter
Kroger
Publix
Quality Food Center
Randall’s
Safeway
Sam’s Club
Shaw’s Supermarket
Stop ‘n’ Shop
Target
TJ Maxx
Tops
Trader Joe’s

Vons
Wegman’s
Whole Foods Market

Wild Oats

Merry Christmas Everyone

At this point in time, the information age has progressed to the point that computers are ubiquitous. Has a local area network in your house is about as big a deal as having a second TV was when I was a kid. Yes, to answer your question , I am old.

We run a business in our home and it involves using several computers. We generally discount the time that we spend trouble shooting network difficulties when we have moved past them, but reading an article about Uplogix has made it so I might think differently the next time we are in the rhubarb with a network issue. Apparently, big businesses that actually have designated IT guys use a term that goes by the initials MTTR. It means mean-time-to-recover. They mean the mean that means ‘average’ not the mean that means MEAN as in angry. One of us usually gets mean during this recovery time when we have an interruption. Uplogix has technology that automate several of the steps that IT guys go through when they are fixing a problem, thus reducing your MTTR for every problem. This kind of efficiency could have a big impact on the bottom line for some businesses.

In a lot of ways, I hated tree planting. I spent a season performing this job in Nova Scotia when I was still in high school and I lived the cliché of planting trees in Ontario after my first year of college. This is a job that is almost always paid based on production. I made about half the amount that was printed on the poster that lured me there. I have many interesting stories from those few months. None of them fit well in this business blog.

There is a line in a BareNakedLadies song about not planting trees. The song is called Never is Enough. In a lot of ways, I hate BNL, but that’s a different story.