slamboard

With fuel costs breaking new records everyday, lots of people are considering curtailing their driving. For some people, this may involve putting a car into storage for months or longer. I was considering it and I realized that there are probably a few things that I should do to the car if I want it to stay in the condition that it is in. Here are a few links with helpful information:

Mothballing your car

AAA has advice that seems to cater to people with really nice cars.

After moving in 2005, we went carless for a whole year. It can be done. I consider my 1990 Skoda to be a time saving device. It is not a necessity and it is not a part of my identity.

The above video is best presented without commentary.

I want to make a short post about how I recently found a VISA card that had been left in an ATM. I approached the machine that was outside on a main street. It was beeping frantically and displaying in a language that I cannot read. I pressed a random button and the card came out. I looked at the name and then looked around for possible card owners. I didn’t see any, but I saw a police officer and I showed the card to her. She pointed way up the hill at an old man walking with a cane and told me to run after him. He responded to the name on the card and I gave it to him with a pat on the shoulder. He thanked me.

Tom Cruise was back on an Oprah set. The audience of the taped interview has been sworn to secrecy. I suspect that some of them will anonymously blog about it before the show airs.

Tom is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the movie in which he played a minor living of the avails of (heterosexual) prostitution and occasionally dancing in tighty-whiteys.

There are several third parties who are standing up and condemning the actions taken by Anonymous against scientology. Many of them point to the fact that they are giving scientologists the perfect opportunity to claim that they are experiencing religious persecution. I agree with this argument, and I would like to point out that many countries do not recognize scientology’s claim to be a religion, choosing instead to view scientology as a business enterprise.

In some respects, scientology is very much a multi-level marketing scheme. I was hesitant in writing that because I don’t want to give MLMs a bad name.

My site gets search traffic from a few people everyday who are curious about Walmart Prepaid Visa Cards. I assumed that this was because I was one of the few business bloggers that made a point of commenting on their launch last year. I also assumed that the product was popular. I was surprised to learn that when a firm surveyed 800 lower-income consumers, only 1% of them actually got these cards. These are people that go to Wal*Mart almost 5 times per month.

So, the cards aren’t explosively popular. The issuers are still happy with their bottom line, although there are worries that the government may make additional rules about terms and charges that will restrict the potential for profit. General Electric Co.’s GE Money subsidiary is the issuer of the Walmart card.

Source:Digital Transactions

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.

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.

I found an article that is a year and a half old expressing doubts as to whether YouTube can ever make money. A few points seem almost prophetic, and they were right about how much users would object to any major changes that would have to take place in order to turn the thing into a cash cow. I have to confess that I haven’t been paying close attention to all the little changes on YouTube. I saw a video title that seemed to indicate that a high profile user was upset about some kind of profit motivated change and I can’t figure out what that change was…

Ok, I did a little research “YouTube Becomes MoneyTube: Removes Non-partner Clips” is the gripe. Some people point to actions taken by YouTube as being commercially motivated. I think they decided to remove clips that their ‘Partners’ created before they became partners. I can understand YouTubes motivations and I can understand the users reactions.

Sugar Land, Texas is a nice place to live, according to Forbes and CNN. It is the headquarters for Imperial Sugar. This company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2001. It has since managed to turn itself around partly through smart business decision, downsizing and effective implementation of new technologies. Having a Texas politician in the White House may have been beneficial as well.

Another large sugar company is Flo-Sun, Inc. Its owners, the Fanjul brothers, make huge donations to politicians both Red and Blue. Their reward, in the form of their share of protective tariffs and price floors, equals approximately $65 million annually.

NAFTA may mean that Mexico will be able to step up sugar exports. I can only assume that lobbyists for the US sugar industry have the ear of government and that they are looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

This post is an example of me starting out with an assumption and then not finding any really interesting facts to support it. I find it interesting that the Fanjul brothers belong to two groups of people that are pointed to as being special interest groups that buy politicians. They are owners of a huge agribusiness and they are also Cuban Americans. They get to have two interests served for the price of one. It’s no wonder they are so generous.

I have heard several different success stories relating to online marketing and I have noticed some recurring trends. Often there is an engaging personality who creates something in an online social setting to which other people ascribe a value. At first there may be an informal non-monetized way in which the supply and demand is met within the original social network. And then a voice says “You should have you own website and have an online store!”

This voice might be inside the creator’s head, or it might be a friend or a fan.

I have actually witnessed one instance where the person in question ignored that voice. If you have heard that voice but you are having trepidation, take some time to look at the ecommerce hosting and cheap business web hosting solutions offered by AQHost. They are a design and hosting service with packages ranging from an amazingly affordable starter pack right up to corporate hosting.

All packages include an easy to use control panel. When you get a business level, you do away with a few limitations that are inherent in the starter packages. You get an unlimited number of email accounts. You get an unlimited number of FTP accounts. You even get unlimited MySQL 4 Databases. Money making websites range from eStores that sell homemade jewelry to paid membership sites that sell ideas and insider information. A merchant account with AQHost will mean that you can accept credit card payment from major credit cards. I was not surprised to read that 85% of transactions online involve credit card payment. If you have a business model up and running that does not accept credit cards, you could expect at least a 40% increase in business from just that one change.