slamboard

The information in my title is a statistic taken from AmeriPlan’s® own disclosure page. They use ‘text as image’ for anything discouraging that they are obligated to disclose. This means that they meet their obligation without having to worry about the facts showing up in any kind of diligent search by someone who is considering working with AmeriPlan® .

I was not considering Ameriplan® , I was weeding through work at home scams and I had to look very closely at their business model in order to figure it out. It was hard, because the company and its IBO’s do everything they can to obscure two things. First, the product being sold is designed to look like a viable alternative to medical insurance but it is not. Second, the whole thing is an MLM.

If you are not risk averse and if you don’t have a problem selling people on something that may not be of much use to them, you might want to consider AmeriPlan® . You will, of course have to convince several other people that it is a good idea in order to ever see any money for your efforts.

If you are reading this post, you are a member of a very small group. I was somewhat surprised to see how quickly traffic dropped as soon as I stopped making posts that were relevant to my core readership.

My core readership for the last year has been been people with an interest in the Kimkins scam. I published Part I well over a year ago. I think I would be doing a service to those people by stating that it is very unlikely that I will have anything else to say on the subject.

I am fascinated by people who decide to become full time bloggers. Jimmy Moore is one example. He has a compelling personal story and an engaging personality, but I’m sure that he would tell anyone who asks that his blogging is HARD work. I like to think that I am smart enough and determined enough to become a professional blogger, but I am far too risk averse.

This blog was part of an advertising marketplace up until recently. I have to be honest about my reasons for the change. The money that could be earned through ‘paid posts’ dwindled to the point where it became a waste of time. This happened for two reasons.

The demand for this type of advertising dwindled after Google penalized blogs that were participating in the practice.

Tens of thousands of bloggers from Malaysia and other low wage countries joined the first come first served marketplace.

I wasn’t paying that much attention in economics class, but I think that a reduction in demand combined with a surge in supply is a situation that forces a market shift.

So, anyway, I was able to justify spending several hours blogging everyday when it was helping to provide for my family. That is not the case anymore.

I doubt that there is
anyone reading this
who has not
witnessed long term
relationships that
were begun and/or
ended as the result
of social activities on
the Internet.

Early adopters of
social media are
not representative
of the general population, but there have been many waves of adopters recently. I think it is time for someone to start a serious study to determine whether social media and online dating have been beneficial or detrimental overall.

My wife and I were aghast when we found out that a certain blogger had left his wife for another blogger after a few months of mostly online flirtation. Wait, we were not aghast at that point. It was more mild disappointment and guilty bemusement. The man had left his wife and driven 11 hours or something to be with his new lady who had just recently left her spouse. The two started playing house in a new place. It was blogged about. The ‘aghast’ part came when he returned to his wife after only a few weeks. Oh, and he stopped blogging (yeah, right.)

Successful online matchups are not as apparent. I know of at least one personally. I just heard about a self help book for single women that deals extensively with online dating.

Even though I am not an American, I followed the Democratic primary quite closely. I was intrigued by the character and the behavior of the front runners. I was especially interested in observing how they both utilized new media like YouTube. If the contest had been about YouTube popularity, Obama would have won much sooner and with a huge margin. That difference didn’t interest me that much because it was a simple matter of demographics.

I was fascinated by the evolution of comment moderation. I feel that Team Obama had a edge with that. Both sides moderated comments on the majority of videos, with a few exceptions.

Figuring out a comment moderation policy based on the ones that get approved is quite an exercise in conjecture. Based on my observations, the moderators at HillaryClintondotcom generally only allowed positive commentary while their counterparts at BarrackObamadotcom tended to approve comments that created the appearance of an open discussion. At first, I thought they should allow comments to appear without prior approval, but I changed my mind when I looked at the level of discussion elsewhere on YouTube. I am still frustrated because it seems like the approval process on an individual video is abandoned once it is a few days old.

Hillary Clinton at this point only has six videos that have more than 100 comments. A dozen Obama videos have more than 1000 comments each. ‘A More Perfect Union’ has nearly 10,000 comments.

Now that Obama has shifted focus to the general election, it appears that there has also been a slight shift in comment moderation policy. The folks with their fingers on the approval buttons seem to be more willing to approve moronic and vicious comments because now they come predominantly from Republicans and they are just making themselves look bad.

To save my readers some time, here is an example of an critical comment that was approved by Barack Obama’s official YouTube channel:

Shame on you, Barack Obama! You just destroyed the only hope of restraining already obscene Presidential campaign costs. You’ve made it clear that you’d rather bludgeoning McCain with TV ads rather than engage him in debates or other free mediums. How can you refuse millions in public money to ask for MORE from the very supporters you acknowledge are hurting so badly??? You call that “change?” I gave money to you in the primary, but you won’t see a dime from me again.

Here is one for Hillary on her channel

Long Live Hillary Clinton! The true president of the people. I hope to be able to vote for you soon as candidate for the democratic party in 2016! I campaign all i could all i went overboard for this campaign. So Hillary I thank you for running I am sadden for you not being president in 2008. Hillary we all supporters did these for you campaign and we pledge our vote to you and we did not see the candidate we wanted but Hillary we love you!

The Obama video that drew the sample comment currently has about 580 comments, while the Hillary video has 7.

That question is just an extension of what people were discussing in 1995 in relation to the picture in this video. I looked into it and it is indeed becoming a trend…

Vanity Fair

Carroll Daily Times Herald

Men’s Fitness

In the interest of ethics, I should point out that I got all those links from a blog that focuses on Ethics in a Digital World.

This is great software marketing, I think.

FF3 is coming out today and Mozilla has decided to try for a World record. As I write this, 1,540,366 people has ‘pledged’ to download.

SpreadFireFox.com has a dynamic map showing the numbers for each country. The numbers in Iraq are surprisingly small. I wonder if military personnel are prohibited from downloading new browsers.

I have actually taken a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I chose my title based on my experience. People who are learning English as adults generally love idioms. This post is mostly a shout out to a school with a very cool advertising campaign. I first saw this video on something called The Pop Culture Translator. This thing is a promotional tool for the Canadian College of English Language.

I was just checking out one of many online businesses that claim to operate on Christian principles. I am skeptical but respectful of this practice. Basically, I consider it a branding decision and the degree to which it is ethical is entirely dependent on how well they follow through with that promise. Actual churches don’t always measure up, so it is highly probable that many ‘Christian’ businesses register fairly high on the hypocrisy meter.

This particular Christian business seemed okay and what caught my eye was that they felt it was necessary to have a front page disclaimer related to advertising. The most prominent advertising was coming from Google.

Many webmasters and bloggers put contextual ads on their sites and take a buyer beware approach. These ads are so ubiquitous that we tend to feel zero responsibility for their content. Maybe we are wrong.

I get a trickle of traffic coming to this blog based on searches for lingerie. I have done a handful of reviews on online stores that sell the stuff. I do not pretend to be an expert on lingerie and I may have even misspelled it at some point, which accounts for the search engine traffic that I get from people who are looking for pictures of lingeri.