slamboard

I went to a diet site that I was thinking about possibly reviewing and I found myself slightly offended by the degree to which the web designer had attempted to make the Google Ads look like content. I don’t want to be accused of hypocrisy, I have ads by Google on this blog. They are placed on the page in a very conventional way. I have seen a discussion in the blogosphere in which someone said that a page looks naked to them without these standard, unobtrusive contextual ads.

Anyway, I don’t put ads inside the body of my blog posts, even though that is an accepted practice. The website that I am criticizing has a landing page in which the title indicates that a list is to follow. The title even has a colon at the end. Immediately below the title are a series of ads. When the content starts below the ads, they are almost identical in size and format to the ads. It seems deceptive and dishonest to me.

Below the jump on this page is a long form sales pitch for the Magnetic Diet, which seems to be a scam.

IZEARANKS.com is new. I took a quick visit to the ranking page for my blog and then I made this graph comparing it to a semi-random selection of blogs. These blogs belong to people that are on the periphery of my networking efforts. I don’t visit these blogs everyday, but I know that the authors take their blogging seriously.

I think that this graph illustrates what you can expect from a ranking system that tracks a relatively small number of blogs. There are several thousand blogs that contain the coding tools from IZEA, but it is small when you compare it to a ranking system like Alexa. A have a virtually abandoned blog that I looked at recently and its Alexa rank is in the tens of millions. Slamboard spent a few days this month in the top 100 with IZEA.

Here are the urls for the blogs that I included on my graph:

http://slamboard.com

http://simplekindoflife.com

http://www.macewan.org

http://www.u-g-h.com

I have blogged about McCafe before as if it was an anomaly in the marketplace. Things change fast in the fast food business…

McDonald’s, whose U.S. coffee sales increased 39 percent during the first nine months of 2007, plans to add espresso counters at as many as 14,000 locations.

I had the theory that McDonalds were sticking to areas with little or no Starbucks presence for their cafe add-ons. It turns out that they are now going head to head in many markets. Starbucks has 15,000 locations in 43 countries.

I used to be a professional coffee roaster. I found out during the course of my thousands of coffee tastings that my sense of taste is less keen than a lot of experts. Using my average palate, I have decided that McCafe coffee is just as good as Starbucks. Starbucks does have a wider variety of specialty coffees and coffee drinks. The quality of espresso is somewhat dependent on how well the equipment is maintained and operated.

Source: Bloomberg

I was checking out a contest at some random girl’s blog and I discovered an interesting web tool at Random.org.

If you have a list that you want to put in random order, you can just paste it into this box and click on randomize to have your items put in a truly random order. I think this would be a cool way to organize polls for your blog.

The creator of the website warns against entering sensitive, private information into this tool because there is no encryption. Third parties could intercept the data.

Here is an amusing aside. There were some kids who heard the story of the Kimkins fraud. They happened to be using part of their allowance to buy cat food to feed feral cats in the backyard. They had named one Kimmy and one kid hatched a facetious plan to take an ‘after’ picture of this skinny cat and then fatten her up before taking a ‘before’ picture. She was then going to build a website marketing a cat diet. It was to be called Kimmykins.

This needs to be seen.

I am posting this because of it’s implications about how big business is in control of how news is reported. I don’t want to be alarmist about the story that FOX killed at the behest of Monsanto. I have a degree in agriculture and I was part of a big discussion about the use of hormone injections in the dairy industry in one of my classes. My professor was very much in favor of the practice. This was during the period of time in which it was unclear which way the Canadian government agency was going to swing on this issue. The use of low levels of antibiotics in feed for animals that are raised for meat production is, in my mind, a much greater human risk and it is a practice that is widespread.

Canada prohibits the use of rbST because of its adverse health effects on cows, not humans.

Controversy is a great selling point for news. Sometimes the details of a story are stretched to fit the definition of controversy. I did a search on Google News using the term ‘controversial’ and one of the most recent items involved a store selling ‘goggle jackets‘ in a mall that prohibits people from wearing hoodies and other items of clothing that obscure their face.

Reporter Charlotte McDonald does not use an inappropriate amount of hyperbole. She doesn’t offer any opinion. She does use the language of controversy when presenting the facts related to the Mall’s policies and the opinions about the particular item of clothing.

The goggle jackets are knockoffs that sell for about 10% of what a person would have to pay for the original designed by an Italian company. A spokesman for the British manufacturer understands what the controversy is about and explained that the apparel would not be useful for criminal activity because the goggles would steam up so that the perp couldn’t see if they tried to run from the scene of a theft. I think he misunderstands crime. The point is to be anonymous when you are at the scene being recorded by security cameras.

This question probably has as many answers as there are users for both social websites combined. The thing that I keep coming back to is this… While I dislike both of them, I feel conflicted about abandoning Facebook because it is populated by so many family and friends from the tertiary wave of internet users. I had a telephone conversation with one of my Facebook friends this month and we talked about our mutual underwhelmedness of Facebook. I just don’t care about MySpace, I added all the puppets as friends and then abandoned it. The fact that it is full of viruses is just that much more reason to stay away.

While I was writing this post slagging Facebook, I went there and sent a video to everybody… and I looked at an old school friend’s photo album.