slamboard

Consumer Affairs journalist David Wood wrote an very good article about Kimkins and it hit the net early today. He was pretty critical of Woman’s World, so much so that I want to go back and see if they really wrote some of the stuff that he is quoting. A lot of the hype sounds almost insane in retrospect.

The only new news for people who have been following along are some frank quotes from lawyer John Tiedt.

I am glad to see the story retold on a website with the reach and traffic of a site like ConsumerAffairs.com.

The seven figure sales at Kimkins.com were due in no small part to the favorable coverage in Woman’s World Magazine. This publication has huge circulation, and the print versions will often sit in waiting rooms and salons enjoying months or years of repeated perusal. People seeking to expose the Kimkins fraud did not get very far in trying to convince Woman’s World to make any kind of reversal or apology. We personally received no answers to our questions last year and instead got a cease and desist order. In response to the letter, I made changes to the cover image that I was using to make it arguably transformative. There was no follow up from the magazine. I didn’t send any further correspondence to them. Many, many interested people did.

After a long wait, the magazine has finally apologized in detail, on their website. A print apology is also forthcoming. I thank them for it.

Comments have been enabled on ‘Papers of Record’ since long before the birth of the Internet. A letter to the editor is in many ways the same exercise as making a comment on the website of a newspaper.

The difference is immediacy. I have never in my life written a letter to the editor. My wife has written at least one that I know of, by email.

One of my best friends was very upset about a journalist referring to the smoke that came out of a local industrial complex as steam. By the time he had handwritten a letter, he had lost his head of steam and he didn’t bother actually mailing it.

These days, the major newspapers are adding comments to their online content, with varying levels of moderation. Some appear to be completely unmoderated. Some are reviewed almost as stringently as letters to the editor. I strongly suspect that some are moderated with bias. When you get hundreds or thousands of comments, the opportunity to bolster your agenda by selective approval and rejection is tremendous.

A story in the LA Times about the Obama and Clinton campaigns has almost ten thousand published comments. I only read one page and it contained several comments that were eviscerating a previous comment that had been one of the many comments arguing that Obama lacks substance. It seemed a bit excessive and redundant. Maybe these are unmoderated comments. The TOS for user contributions are very exhaustive.

I was surprised to read that Joe Scarborough had a successful career as a congressman after trying to offer pro bono representation to a terrorist who shot and killed an abortion doctor. The judge at the criminal trial refused to allow it because of his inexperience in criminal defense law. His motivations were based on his pro-life views. I am willing to assume that since he was by no means the best lawyer available, there was self interest and self aggrandizement at play as well. I am not implying that anybody is ever undeserving of a vigorous defense. Joe’s volunteering was something else.

Joe Scarborough is now a controversial broadcaster. I don’t know what his response would be to a question about his views on people who side with terrorists in the present socio-political climate.

I was able to find one transcript that supports my argument that there is a double standard. Terrorism is abominably wrong even if you agree with the viewpoint of the terrorist.

Mississippi has more than its share of obese people. One politician is raising awareness of the problem by making an indecent proposal to enact a law that would force restaurant owners to refuse to serve the obese.

His colleagues aren’t happy about the bill and there has never been any chance of it passing.

There are analogous situations. Bar owners in many areas cannot serve patrons alcohol if they are intoxicated. Obviously that law is ignored to some extent. Drinkers would not be able to make an accusation of discrimination in the same way that obese people could if Mississippi actually tried to play nanny state in such a ridiculous fashion.

Source for this post: AP

So some recently created YouTube videos now have a banner ad that is translucent and comes up across the bottom 15-20% of the video after it begins to play. I saw the same thing on a Revver video, except theirs has a close button, and a text link going out to the advertiser. The Revver video also had a screen with three contextual ads at the end of the video.

Here is an embed of the video that I viewed on Revver this morning. The first ad is actually determined in part by my location on the planet.

I am curious as to whether YouTube will be adding advertising to older videos that may have been embedded by bloggers before this advertising model was initiated.

Back to Revver, I remembered that I had actually uploaded a video to Revver some time ago, I checked and it does have ads at the end now. I am not sure how the revenue sharing works for this. I will update this post if I see any money in the future

Edit: While checking my Revver account to see if i had ever made any money, I noted that I had dozens of messages on my dashboard. One of them was an announcement of the new advertising features. It was sent to me back in October of 2007, so this post is not news to anyone who was paying attention.

I have been critical of scientology in the past on this blog and elsewhere. The organization that sometimes calls itself a religion and sometimes doesn’t is presently under attack by a disorganized group of people who revel in the power of the mob without apology or reflection. The fact that they are focused on a big, bad target at the moment does not make them the good guys. They have been known to wreak havoc on an individual’s online activities and personal privacy for the simple reason that the individual was enjoying what the group perceived as unwarranted celebrity. Another group of people who get attacked are randomly chosen from a list of hacked passwords for MySpace and other social websites.

I am in no way optimistic about their attack on scientology because I know that the group has a very short collective attention span. The only meme that doesn’t get old is complaining about old memes.

Hi, thank you for coming here to read my blog. I appreciate every reader. I enjoy your feedback and I like to think that I am writing something that you will enjoy. I do not, at this time (January 15th, 2008), make any money as a direct consequence to your welcomed visit.

If I had Net Audio Ads on my blog, you would hear a 5 second audio advertisement from someone who had bid for placement in the network in much the same way that advertisers bid for Google ads. NetAudioAds™ Pay-Per-Play advertising has been up and running for a while and the HUGE difference with these ads is that a webmaster or blogger gets paid for everyone who visits.

I listened to the sales pitch for the affiliate program. This program is FREE, but they are only accepting signups until February 1st.

I am tempted… and I am going to think long and hard about the concept. I suggest that anyone reading this who has a blog or website check it out as well. If you start a discussion about it, I predict that someone will suggest that the ads will reduce your return readership. I remember a lot of complaining about Adsense ads in the beginning, too. There were lots of webmasters who rode their high horses around for years about it. I think the VAST majority of internet users accept them as a normal and ubiquitous part of the landscape now. Just like with TV and radio ads, some people take notice of them and some people ignore them. It is kind of sad that so many of us bloggers include contextual ads on our sites when they only generate pennies for most of us. I like the idea of being paid when an audio ad is played on my site regardless of whether or not the reader is listening. I am still apprehensive about the possibility of offending my readers. I know that I don’t like it when I accidentally run the cursor across those stupid smileys that scream Oh My GOD, No WAY?!?!?

If you have the same sort of opinions on this, you should go in as far as the long sales letter because there is a link to some actual ad clips there. They are actually pretty easy on the ears. Obviously, I was expecting to hear them, but I think they are carefully designed to be a moderate intrusion.

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.

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.