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hiredhacker.com
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Mark Curphey - SecurityBuddha.com
Liminal states
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Zero in a bit
SEO
I saw this over at the BBC: A breakdown of traffic for the top 100 sites.
Their infographic was helpful, but it needed a slight correction. After careful study (many hard hours), I have concluded that this updated Infographic more accurately represents the traffic breakdown:
Margin of error +-50%
Today, I saw what I thought was an interesting thread over on reddit:
If we could transmit a single, 140 character message back to the year 2000, what should it be?
But I misread it as:
If you could send a single 140 character message back 2000 years, what should it be.
And I think my misread is way more interesting. So much so, that I’m making a $200 twitter contest out of it.
Now we’ll need room for link, so lets make it 122 characters.
The ContestAssume for a second that the message will be widely read, and that the readers can all understand English. What 122 character message would you send back to the year 10 AD (2000 years ago)?
Answer in a tweet: Up to 122 character answer followed by a space and then this url: http://tr.im/RllZ
Whoever comes up with the best answer wins $200 (via paypal). Best answer decided by me, but I may be influenced by the comments on this post.
Right now, Ask, Bing, Yahoo and Google control 99% of the search market. In Europe, Google controls close to 90% of that.
That sounds like about the same market penetration that lead to the EU decision to force MS to offer browser choice this month on new machines.
But right now, most (all?) of those browsers default to Google search.
Europeans need more choice. Just like they needed choice on the browsers. On new machines, after they download whichever browser, they need a screen with the top 6 search engines and to ask people who will be their default search provider.
Even if the browser is Chrome.
It’s only “fair.”
What’s good for the Goose is good for the Google.
Via download squad:
It’s the same game, the same code, compiled to run on three different Microsoft devices. This type of thing really is going to be huge.
Canadian Premier Danny Williams goes to the US for heart surgery.
An unapologetic Danny Williams says he was aware his trip to the United States for heart surgery earlier this month would spark outcry, but he concluded his personal health trumped any public fallout over the decision.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Williams said he went to Miami to have a “minimally invasive” surgery for an ailment first detected nearly a year ago, based on the advice of his doctors.
“This was my heart, my choice and my health,” Williams said late Monday from his condominium in Sarasota, Fla.
“I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics.”
But . . . but . . . Canada has teh best health cares system evah!
There’s no place in the world I’d rather be sick or injured than the good old USA.
“If the US enacts these so-called reforms, where will the Canadians go for care?” – Jay Leno
So you’ve probably heard that Google has decided to drop IE6 support for Youtube.
At first I just figured “Cool, we’ll get more people away from IE6.” But the real reason is that they want to promote Chrome:
That first Slot will get a majority of the clicks.
Very clever Google. Evil. But Clever.
When I was in 3rd grade, I got in trouble for putting curses in a Mad Libs book during lunch hour. We were laughing our asses off and the lunch lady monitor came over, took the Mad Libs book and sent me and my cohort “to the principals office.”
I remember crying for like 2 hours thinking I was going to be in so much trouble as they “called my parrents”. But when my mom came in she was like “OK but look, he got all the parts of speech right: adj, verb, noun – even the adverbs.”
Who gives a shit?
Well, probably no one, but it’s an anecdote that’s tangentially related to this cool case study: so go fuck yourself if you don’t like hearing my life’s story.
In the case study (should I hotlink the pic? – Fuck it, i gave ‘em a link, I’m gonna hotlink the pic.) here’s what they did:
And supposedly “Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40%. ” If true that certainly doesn’t suck and should be added to your arsenal of split run testing.
Now zoom out: What other “games” can you incorporate into the offers you’re promoting? Off the top of my head, I do remember those banners that were like “shoot the duck” or “swat the fly”. They ran forever, so they must have worked.
What other games can you play with your potential conversions to get them to interact more?
Aaron, Aaron. You still don’t know the difference between a spam site and a newsmaster site?
While they may appear similar, they are actually quite different.
Since you’re having trouble with it (and you ARE an SEO expert), no doubt some of my other readers are struggling with it as well. So for all of you, I’ll give you this infographic cheat sheet:
It’s pretty clear to me.
Also note: If you spout off bullshit about purple cows or you have already made millions selling off your steaming pile of shit web “business” during a bubble, then from that point onward, you are incapable of making a spam site. The sociopaths over at Google are too starstruck to ever consider anything you do “spam.”
Hope that helps!
-q
I logged into my Hotmail account today and saw this:
.
It links here. (among other places).
Basically, Microsoft is integrating all the social media site into their Live platform. There was a hint of it on the Windows 7 Series phone video, but what this does is let’s you update your “status” at all the sites at once and integrates seamlessly into all the sites you already use.
I don’t use Google’s “Buzz”, but isn’t this the meat of it?
But somehow I doubt we’ll see umpteen million posts about how it’s this crazy game changer. Microsoft is just quietly executing on all fronts this year while the blogosphere almost completely fails to notice.
Looking for links to the best banner designers out there.
Shameless self promotions invited.
As many of you know, I’m a pretty staunch climate change skeptic. From the “value added” and selective temperature readings to the evidence that CO2 has not been the primary driver of climate in the distant past to the even tacitly agreed upon increase over the last 100 years (~.6C) being too small to worry about to – I just don’t agree that catastrophic AGW is even close to likely.
But I could be wrong.
And while I don’t think that CO2 is a pollutant, combustion does result in other pollution that I’d rather see curbed.
But not by scams like cap and trade.
The solution is to take all this money we are pouring into climate change bullshit, and funnel it instead developing and mass producing modern nuclear power plants and distributing them all over the world: like 20,000 of them. Take all that money that our government is going to use to “create jobs” and instead use it to create nuclear power plants and ship them all over the world.
Iran says their nuclear program is only to produce nuclear power. Well, let’s build 4 nuclear power plants over there for free them and sell them the energy.
Forget telling developing countries that they need to cap emissions. Let’s build nuclear power plants everywhere and sell the energy. We can even discount the sale at first to help them spur their economy. Think in terms of something like the Marshall plan but on a Global scale for nuclear energy.
If we start doing this, China will do it too. I’m sure some other countries will get into the mix as well. Then we’ll have real competition in the nuclear reactor space.
Let’s make energy so damn cheep that only a fool would use Oil, Gas or Coal.
With all the buzz so far this year about iPad and, well, Buzz, the anticipation for the Windows 7 Series Phone was really non-existent.
But after watching the like this one videos:
It looks like the Windows 7 Series phone might be the most important launch this year.
Are they a little late to the game? Sure. But as was pointed out:
History is on Microsoft’s side here—we know what happened the last time Apple had a massive head start. Microsoft is, if nothing else, incredibly patient. Remember the first Xbox? Back when it was crazy that Microsoft was getting into videogames? It’s cost them about a billion dollars and taken nearly 10 years, but now, with Xbox Live, Project Natal and their massive software ecosystem, they arguably have the most impressive gaming console you can buy. That was a pet project. Now, mobile is the future of computing. What do you think Microsoft will sink into that?
This looks like it’s gonna be huge.
I know I want one.
If you recall, I wrote about Giggle, Google’s upcoming twitter clone.
Apparently, they went with the name Buzz instead.
My guess is that no one but SEOs will use it. And then once SEOs figure out it’s not effecting rankings, even they won’t bother.
But what the hell do I know? I still have no fucking clue why people twitter.
“First they came …” is a popular poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group. In Niemöller’s first utterance of it, in a January 6, 1946 speech before representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt, it went (in German):
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me. – Wikipedia
Now “they” are coming for the bankers.
Is there Anything more anti-capitalist than executive salary caps and / or regulating the maximum that people can make? Well yes: those bailouts in the first place. But it actually appears that the US will recover almost all the TARP money that was not given out as a freebe to the unions (read the American Auto Industry). That money was thrown into a black hole. Many of the banks were really on sound financial footing, but were forced to take the money so as not to single out the ones that actually needed it.
Now there is all this talk about limiting the salaries of bankers. Over in the Police State of England, “Banks told to comply on bonuses or lose UK banking licences in shock FSA ultimatum“.
The shocker here is that the UK has said in effect that the banks must BREAK their existing contracts with employees in order to comply with regulations:
One pay executive in a major bank told The Daily Telegraph: “The message came back that while the FSA agreed that it does not have jurisdiction over contractual law, it does have jurisdiction over issuing bank licences in London, and that we should go away and unwind the contracts.”
Wow.
But that’s England. They’re accustomed to Big Brother. There are more public video cameras in London than their are American Made Cars (Hell, I think there were 15 public camera’s in that Brothel I visited . .. but I digress).
Here in America, it seems to be some kind of top priority to limit the pay of Banking executives. The line goes “That kind of outlandish blah blah blah is what got us into this recession.”
No.
The pay of executives is not what caused the recession. What caused the recession was people buying a payment, rather than house, getting in over their head, inflating housing prices and now defaulting in droves.
Someone needs to stand up for the bankers. Put aside that this is antisemitism wrapped in the cloak of populism. Jews have their roots in finance going back to when usury (then lending with interest) was considered a Sin by the Church.
The real issue here is that limiting the compensation of private industry will stifle innovation and growth. If we let it happen to the bankers, Internet Marketers can’t be far down that list. We’ll wake up one day and find that the best Gormet Chef is only allowed by law to make $100k per year. Then, before we know it, we’ll have a command economy where the only way to get your pay raised in any industry is through political influence rather than through merit.
Stand up for the Bankers. It’s not the popular thing to do. But it’s the right thing to do.
If you don’t speak out, you’ll have only yourself to blame when they come for you.
Update: Related.
“First they came …” is a popular poem attributed to Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) about the inactivity of German intellectuals following the Nazi rise to power and the purging of their chosen targets, group after group. In Niemöller’s first utterance of it, in a January 6, 1946 speech before representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt, it went (in German):
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me. – Wikipedia
Now “they” are coming for the bankers.
Is their Anything more anti-capitalist than executive salary caps and / or regulating the maximum that people can make? Well yes: those bailouts in the first place. But it actually appears that the US will recover almost all the TARP money that was not given out as a freebe to the unions (read the American Auto Industry). That money was thrown into a black hole. Many of the banks were really on sound financial footing, but were forced to take the money so as not to single out the ones that actually needed it.
Now there is all this talk about limiting the salaries of bankers. Over in the Police State of England, “Banks told to comply on bonuses or lose UK banking licences in shock FSA ultimatum“.
The shocker here is that the UK has said in effect that the banks must BREAK their existing contracts with employees in order to comply with regulations:
One pay executive in a major bank told The Daily Telegraph: “The message came back that while the FSA agreed that it does not have jurisdiction over contractual law, it does have jurisdiction over issuing bank licences in London, and that we should go away and unwind the contracts.”
Wow.
But that’s England. They’re accustomed to Big Brother. There are more public video cameras in London than their are American Made Cars (Hell, I think there were 15 public camera’s in that Brothel I visited . .. but I digress).
Here in America, it seems to be some kind of top priority to limit the pay of Banking executives. The line goes “That kind of outlandish blah blah blah is what got us into this recession.”
No.
The pay of executives is not what caused the recession. What caused the recession was people buying a payment, rather than house, getting in over their head, inflating housing prices and now defaulting in droves.
Someone needs to stand up for the bankers. Put aside that this is antisemitism wrapped in the cloak of populism. Jews have their roots in finance going back to when it usury (then lending with interest) was considered a Sin by the Church.
The real issue here is that limiting the compensation of private industry will stifle innovation and growth. If we let it happen to the bankers, Internet Marketers can’t be far down that list. We’ll wake up one day and find that the best Gormet Chef is only allowed by law to make $100k per year. Then, before we know it, we’ll have a command economy where the only way to get your pay raised in any industry is through political influence rather than through merit.
Stand up for the Bankers. It’s not the popular thing to do. But it’s the right thing to do.
If you don’t speak out, you’ll have only yourself to blame when they come for you.
All it takes to make a successful pop song:
1. Good Looking Artist.
2. Autotune just about any lyrics (probably best about love or relationships)
3. Set to a beat with a catchy synth.
Check this video out for a great examples of 2 + 3:
How is that link building going for you? Still a pain in the ass?
Building the lower layer of links can be a royal pain the behind.
Lately I’ve come across this tool that can automate a lot of the painful routines for you or your contractors.
Specifically:
* Create worpdress blogs in WPMU hosts
* Create blogspot blogs
* Create tumblr blogs
* Post comments on Pligg hosts
It does it automatically too. Creates the email accounts, fills the forms, breaks the captchas, pretty much everything.
You can also enter your own {spun | creatively written | machine generated} content on it using the typical content spinner export format.
If you spend some time mastering the tool you can create networks of blogs and manage them using a blog network manager. Haven’t tried this yet but looks pretty decent. This means you can build different layers of link equity without worrying about your own self hosted domains.
Check these videos for some more detail:
Getting links:
Getting Links from LFE on Vimeo.
Managing your blog farm:
Managing Blogs from LFE on Vimeo.
This tool could work wonders for spammers trying to build the bottom layer of their link pyramids. Don’t be a lazy ass, do a good job avoiding footprints and generating good quality content.
I’m told Version 2.0 is being worked on. The big promise is a task manager/scheduler with which you will be able to set up your projects and forget about them for as long as you like.
Check it out: link farm evolution.
Have you seen this?
_
Interesting stuff.
On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars
Fake Steve Jobs had a great writeup too, a few weeks ago in a similar vein:
I’m like, Dude, do you not remember all that stuff you told me about not making a phone, back when you were still not recusing yourself from iPhone discussions during board meetings? You swore, and I mean you looked me in the eye and swore, that you would never make a phone. He says, We’re not making a phone. HTC is making it.
I was talking to Phil Schiller about this and he pointed out that even Microsoft never was brazen enough to pull something like this. Even Microsoft had some tiny bit of shame. Google is a different beast altogether. They’re like nothing anyone has ever seen in our business. Not only are they not ashamed — they think they’re the good guys!
It boggles the mind. They’re pure sociopaths.
All this stuff about not being evil? And being open, and transparent? All this crap about how they think everyone should just share all the information in the world? Yeah. Except you don’t see them sharing their search algorithms, do you? You don’t see them sharing the stuff they’ve done to Linux in their data center.
They’re pure sociopaths. So well put!
The other day i needed to upgrade my flash plugin (so I could watch porn, obviously). What did I see when I went to install? A fucking PRE CHECKED Google Chrome Spyware kit. Why is Adobe pushing it? Well it probably has something to do with the $2++ spiff they get for each install.
Why the fuck would I want Chrome if I’m updating a flash plugin? That makes 0 sense. Chrome is the ultimate in spyware. It’s fucking evil to the core.
Any other company does half the spying or is half as intrusive as chrome is would get WAY more heat that Google’s taken on it. But Google just gets a pass. Imagine if Microsoft tried to pull that shit. They’re be public fucking hearings about it!
I think this is the year the worm turns. This is the year that both FSJ and the real SJ told the world that: The fact of the mater is, Google is full of shit – and I think the world just might listen.
Starcraft, the original, is such an incredible game. It came out 13 years ago, and even today has one of the biggest fan bases of any game.
How big? Check this out:
15,000 people packed in that arena. Starcraft is so huge in Korea, that even girls play it. I’m not talking like a few girls here and there. It’s like more than 50% of the girls over there play.
The bar could not be higher for Starcraft 2. But this is Blizzard and they execute. If they execute on this, there will be huge affiliate marketing and fan site potential for Starcraft 2.
If you’re looking for a niche, that’s one that has HUGE potential this year.
How many times do I have to mark a sender “not spam” before EVERY message with a .exe extension in it gets sent to the spam folder with:
“Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information. Learn more.”
I’m tired of telling my partners and developers that I never got their email when I’ve already marked the sender as safe multiple times.
Twurder
Pronunciation: ˈtwər-dər
Function: noun
Etymology: Combining the English term Murder with the with the word for sending a message a message on twitter (Tweet), the term The word twurder was created after an argument between two men on twitter lead to murder.
Date: Jan 2010
1. A twitter argument that leads to murder. Most commonly, this occurs because of a Grammar Nazi calling someone out over the improper use of an indefinite article, chose vs. choose, or to vs. too.
Just saw that 2 ads were submitted today to my sponsor module.
The two savvy investors are The Green PPC and Sick Profile maker.
Welcome!
It’s so fucking tired. People with their posts like “Is iSlate the Real Kindle Killer?”, “Is Facebook Status the Twitter Killer?” “Is Wibblewit the next Farfugnugen Killer?”
Who fucking gives a shit?
There’s only one way anyone’s gonna know if product X or strategy Y is the Z-Killer; and that’s 10 years from now looking back at Z. No one cares if you called it a little early.
And it’s not like even one of these damn predictions have come true yet: out of the 120931204820 that have been posted over the last 5 years.
Enough already!
Who’s with me?
It’s time to put this dog down.
Anyone who brings up 9/11 on any day other than September 11th going forward, is officially a fucktard.
I don’t care if what your political philosophy is: right, left, conservative, liberal, anarchist, Marxist . . . whatever! If you use the phrase 9/11 from this day onward (except on 9/11) you’re a fucktard.
Who’s with me?
How long before Google’s suggestions actually cause measurable harm to a person or company?
.
We’ve already seen the tendency for Google to suggest the rather inappropriate.
So what would happen if someone who owned a enough boxes sent out enough Google queries on seemingly legitimate accounts? Could this type of activity damage a competitor’s brand?
Could it go far enough toward ruining someone’s life that Google would be held responsible in court?
Google suggest is a useful feature and perhaps we’re still just in the beta format (isn’t everything there considered beta for years?).
Regardless of what they do with this tool, they’re gonna take some heat. If they suggest sponsors – well if they do that, I’d love to sign up! But I’m sure people will bitch and moan about it.
If they clearly augment the suggestions by human review, then it’s going to be increasingly difficult for them to retain the image of being agnostic about the results. Google won’t be able to hide behind “oh, well that’s just what the big machine behind the curtain spits out”.
This type of suggestion is very powerful. The potential for abuse (whatever that means) is enormous. This is Orwell’s Ministry of Truth incarnate: only stronger. That 1984 vision only had the power to change the answer.
Google takes that one step further: they have the power to change the very question.
I, for one, am certainly happy that this power rests in the hands of a company that “don’t be evil.”
Aren’t you?.
Open letter to Google:
Dear Google,
Matt, Sergei, Eric, Larry . . . anyone over at Google – you gotta help. Today I saw this crap in your SERPs:
Twitter is a steaming cesspool of shit and I don’t give a rats ass about what the latest nitwit twitted or tweeted or whatever about anything I’m searching for.
I’m not alone.
Please add one of those Xs or some place in preferences that I can check to never see this shit again.
Sincerely,
Almost Everyone
__________________________
So why is Google doing this? My guess:
Let’s forget for a second that more than 70% of twitter users are already bots. This shit in Google SERPs is a call to arms for spammers. If we can get mid SERP placement on incredibly high volume terms just by spamming twitter, well then I guess we’re just gonna have to step up our spamming efforts!
This is how Google is going to kill twitter: by giving all the blackhats and botrunners far too much incentive to spam the shit out of twitter for them to ignore.
When the signal to noise ratio drops too low, people will leave Twitter for Giggle: Google’s Reduced Spam Twitter Clone.
Don’t be evil: MY ASS.
To celebrate Christmas, I was going through and watching the 100 Incredible Lectures from the World’s Top Scientists.
When I got to A Passion for Discovery, I was pissed that they didn’t want me to be able to download it. So I used my web developer toolbar to “Disable all Styles” and then “Display object Information”. From there I was able to see that the lecture was being served from the CERN Document Server and a quick search later I found the lecture in a format that I could download.
Why did I want to download it? So I could use the VlC player’s option of ‘Playback -> Faster’ to watch the video 50% faster than normal speed.
At the 9:00 mark Peter Freund put up a slide of Einstein and other scientists appearing on actual currency. So here’s two of the things I love most coming together: science and money. Immediately I paused the video and searched for “Isaac Newton British Pound.”
That lead me to this fantastic website showing a collection of Banknotes featuring Scientists and Mathematicians. This guy has collected more than 50 images of banknotes featuring the likes of Einstein, Newton, Schrödinger, Euler, Galileo . . . etc. at 600 DPI!
The first thing I thought of was “How freaking cool (in a geeky way) would it be to have a poster with all these Bank Notes on it?” It would be easy to put these images together on a huge tiff file and then have it printed. But how much would printing cost?
My first few searches led to pretty high prices. But then I found a printer that will print 1000 24″X36″ posters for $871.50 – just 87 cents per poster (I was gonna sign up for their affiliate program but just can’t be bothered).
If I weren’t already making bank, and I didn’t mind dealing with fulfillment, I would totally buy 1000 of those posters and set up a site to sell them for $7.99 + $4.95 S&H. Then I would get a post on sites like geekdad to promote the posters, hit up the social media circuit with a video of me getting and opening the posters, and maybe even do some PPC or CPM advertising on science and math sites.
If you sell 125, you break even. If you sell all 1000, you make about $10k profit.
I can’t stand it when people whine about not knowing what to do; there are so many things to do to make money that I can’t be bothered to stop and do even 1% of them (like skipping the affiliate link above). If you can’t figure out a way to make money online, it’s because you’re just not trying.
By the way, if you DO make the poster I talked about above, let me know: I’ll be your first customer.
Malcom Gladwell is an incredible writer. His prose are so simple to read. Gladwell does a great job of walking his reader down a psudo-scientific path to reach a predestined conclusion.
The problem is that his theories are mostly just feel good bullshit that do not stand up to experimental scrutiny. Intuititively, I sensed this when reading his book. But here we have someone who’s actually done some experimental research to blow the whole “connectors” crap out of the water:
Watts set the test in motion by randomly picking one person as a trendsetter, then sat back to see if the trend would spread. He did so thousands of times in a row.
The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.
Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend–not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
This is important for you to understand for viral marketing. Sure, it helps to have your viral picked up by highly visible personas or sites. But it’s far more important to create a meme that wants to go viral.
So for viral campaigns it would seem that it will be much more productive to attempt to emulate the viral characteristics of the content of a meme than it would be to try to emulate the propagation method. IE: spend less time trying to get the perfect Digg submitter and more time making it so that people really want to Digg your shit.
That’s not to say you can’t push your boarderline story over the top with the help of an aggressive social media network: you can. But at least for social media and viral ROI, you’re better off focusing the bulk of your efforts on the meme.
I can’t be the only one.
I can’t be the only one who’s biggest hump to get over for the cardio portion of my workouts is pure boredom.
For me, running is boring. The elliptical machine is boring. Rollerblading, bike, Stairmaster: boring, Boring, BORING!
But cardio has to be done if you don’t want to be a fat, out of shape blob. So what can we do to make these workouts less boring? Here’s what I do:
Audiobooks, TTC, other lectures and podcasts can all be a great source of knowledge. So why not listen to these while you’re doing cardio?
I’ll tell you why not:
A. They generally talk too damn slow to hold your interest and
B. Without some high energy music beats, it’s hard to keep your pace when doing cardio.
You take your teaching company lectures, podcasts, audiobooks, auio read magazines, or open course mp3s and open them in Audacity.
Go to Effects ->Change Tempo:
Increase the tempo. I generally find 50-75% to be ideal. If it’s more technical or the people are speaking quickly, then increase the tempo less.
Increasing the tempo makes the speaker talk quicker, while maintaining the pitch. This is important if you don’t want to feel like you are listening to Mickey Mouse on Crack. Note: there’s something about the British accent that makes it much more difficult to understand when sped up.
Next step: open up your high-energy work out music (uncut is easier to work with). It’s also a good idea to eliminate or keep vocals to a minimum. Another cool thing about tempo shift is you can increase the BPM of your tunes to make them better geared toward work outs.
Now listen to a sample of how these two sound when played together. Generally the Podcast, Audiobook, or Course portion of the combined audio will need to have it’s volume increase (+db).
Once you are satisfied of the balance, highlight the entire portion where both exist.
Go to File -> Export Selection as an MP3.
Rinse and repeat.
Now load up the completed track to your mp3 player and get to the gym!
The case study of Duke Nukem forever is powerful a lesson in publishing. It’s so much more important to get it out there than it is to get it perfect.
The same is true for so many online ventures. If you wait to get it perfect, it just may not get published. Speed is so critical to success that it would be hard to understate. If you look at the successful online businesses out there, it’s the rare exception that looks anything like what it looked like when it launched.
Once upon a Google query, while I web searched, on a theory,
That page seven supplemental might have what I was looking for,
My computer started yapping, that a virus needed trapping,
And that threat – it needed zapping, zapping now: “Proceed / Ignore?”
“Fucking Advert,” this I muttered, as I promptly clicked “Ignore”-
‘Twas a popup, nothing more,
Ah, distinctly I remember, I was searching for a Kender,
With the keyword “gender-bender” amidst the Net’s forgotten lore,
Short and surly I require to satisfy my strange desire,
That’s why nothing gets me higher than a tranny midget whore,
Judge me no less a person; I’d love a tranny midget whore,
‘Tis a fetish, nothing more.
With my Facebook status stating that “I’m going roller–skating,”
‘Til I’m done with masturbating, interruptions I’d deplore,
Leaning forward I was perching on my chair where I was lurching,
Through the SERPs that I was searching, searching deeper than before,
What precious prize did I discover searching deeper than before?
Only spam and nothing more,
Apt results were sorely lacking, Eric Schmit I felt like smacking,
Else how can I start my whacking? tell me – tell me, I implore!
Searching deeper then I stumbled, ‘pon a title slightly jumbled,
Then my mouse I faintly fumbled, when I gazed “Kender hardcore”,
Videos of what I wanted as I clicked “Kender hardcore”?
‘Twas just text and nothing more.
Google’s SERPs were damned disjointed, so I pondered, disappointed,
Until Bing was thus anointed to help me find what I adore,
My initial query haltered, though I only slightly faltered,
SafeSearch settings must be altered, altered for a midget whore,
With that final hurdle hurdled I search for shemale midget whore,
This I sought and nothing more.
Beholding what Bing had vaunted, it still wasn’t what I wanted,
Yet I still endured undaunted – pages two, then three, then four,
Then my cursor coyly hovered ‘cross a website I discovered,
There I thought I had uncovered, uncovered her: my next amour,
Beguiled by a beautiful thumbnail bound to be my next amour.
How I wanted nothing more,
That tiny pic was such a splendor it portrayed a carnal Kender,
With a link that read: transgender movie click here to see more,
But while the website tout a token, that most crucial link was broken!
‘Twas about to start my stroken but the page was there no more,
The link worded what I wanted but the page was there no more,
Quoth the server, `404.’
Foiled heart was slowly sinking; what was that webmaster thinking?
Was it simply sloppy linking to a gender bender whore?
So I probed some permutation of that URL’s location,
Thus I strained imagination to morph that message from before,
Oh, how I sighed for something sweeter than that message from before,
Quoth the server, `404.’
“The URL you requested can not be found” so I tested,
What my inner muse suggested by subbing dash for underscore,
On a mission proud and pressing keyboard buttons toward accessing,
Where I could enjoy crossdressing and shemale midget sex galore,
Thusly I dared the devil show me shemale midget sex galore,
Quoth the server, `404.’
Such a callous cold rejection quickly killing my erection,
And the depth of my dejection – little relevancy bore,
Nothing more infuriating and I couldn’t help but hating,
The knave guilty of creating that vile error I deplore,
What base and banal geek bestowed that vile error I deplore,
With such name as `404′?
____________________
Legend has it that Edgar Allen Zilla is a direct desendent of Sun Zilla.
There’s an article over at the new york times:
This vision, once the stuff of science fiction, took a significant step forward this month when Google unveiled a smartphone application called Goggles. It allows users to search the Web, not by typing or by speaking keywords, but by snapping an image with a cellphone and feeding it into Google’s search engine.
Here’s the video about Goggles:
Obviously it’s still in it’s infancy, but it has incredible potential applications. There is a similar yet simpler thing called snappic on iphone that I haven’t tried either. If you’ve given either a try, I’d love to hear your take.
As you can see on the homepages, I am now running a new theme. Please, if you see any glaring errors with the theme, let me know.
But part of having a new theme is that I now have a spot for sponsors. You can see on the right where the 125X125 ads will appear.
Update: There is now a system in place for accepting sponsors. Check it out on the sidebar.
So I finally upgraded from wordpress 2.0.8. My old theme is broken with:
Object of class WP_Error could not be converted to string in …/wp-content/themes/blackhat/header.php on line 14
Perhaps it’s time for a new theme anyway. In the meantime, you can get to the forums by clicking here.
Sriram Krishnan has an great post on “things I’ve picked up along the way that I definitely didn’t know about when I left college. Call them core values, things I’ve learned, lessons learned, things I scream at my friends to do more of, whatever – they’ve served me well.”
It’s very worth reading.
**updated** Added link.
Just noticed this today:
How long before we see sponsor results in there?
If you’re gonna get into the online video game, you had better be able to deliver fast enough for your users to not have to wait for a rebuffer:
Whatever happened to patience? More than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by Tubemogul. The Emeryville-based video distribution and analytics startup took a close look at 192 million video streams over the course of 14 days to figure out how much rebuffers matter. The result: 6.81 percent of all streams rebuffer at some point, and around 2.5 percent rebuffer twice.
Interesting stats.
First off, Congrats to Search Engine Land on a front page story on Google News.
Today I went over to news.google.com and saw something rather impressive above the fold: a link to a search engine land article. The article was about “Personalized Search” so I immediately thought that the article was there targeting me specifically.
I logged out of my Google account and reloaded the page.
Still there. Here’s a screenshot and a link to the article entitled “Personalized Results the new Normal”.
So now I’m wondering: Am i still getting personalized results even though I’ve logged out? Surely Google still knows my IP. Is big brother still watching?
It’s an interesting question considering Schmidt’s recently publisized stance on privacy:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Yea – tell that to the Jews of Hitler’s Germany.
I think I finally understand Google’s Motto of “Don’t Be Evil.” They’re not referring to their actions. No. Rather “don’t be evil” is a command to you, Google Users. Don’t be evil; in fact, don’t do anything that any government official anywhere may construe as evil now or at anytime in the future.
Caveat Quaeror
Let the searcher beware.
I was looking for some Bing logo variations in Google (ironically).
Nice how they have an AVN (Adult Video Network – ie porn) as the first result.
Gotta say, Bing looks like their doing a better job on this (which has been happing quite a bit lately)
and they’re not so petty about their competitors.
I’m calling it: 2010 is the year Bing gets serious traction. Even without the Yahoo deal, they’re set to go from 10% market share right now to more than 15% by Dec 2010. Remember: you heard it here first.
This is an introduction for folks who are relatively new or inexperienced with SEO and the examples within are provided strictly for educational purposes. I do not claim that any particular link structure is the key to fantastic riches and search domination.
In this post I am going to use the term linkwheel. I don’t know who came up with that term first. I think I first saw it on some marketing literature from lemonarian. In that context, linkwheeling is a specific formula for linking between particular hosts and a money page, to create some sort of circle of authority, aka “How To Rank #1 in Google in 30 Minutes”. Marketing spin. I will use the term linkwheel generically to describe any non-reciprocal interlinking between parasites.
What are parasites? Any host which allows us to register a profile, create a blog, post to a blog, comment, start a thread, respond to a thread, share an article etc. Examples of parasites are Squidoo, Hubpages, Ezine Articles, Tumblr, Blogger, Pligg sites, Wordpress MU hosts, and so on. Parasites are different from our own sites where we control the hosting, the code, the domain, and have editorial control over all content.
Simply, any site we don’t own which lets us add our links and content. We can linkwheel our own sites but that is outside the scope of this blog post.
One of the questions I get asked most often by people using Link Farm Evolution is,
“How should I setup or pattern my links?”
The following is a simple pyramid link structure for Link Farm Evolution.
Click the image to see the full pyramid structure
Let’s break it down as it should be constructed.
First, we build from the top down, primarily for efficiency. Whenever possible, finish what you start, then move on. It is very hard to scale when we leave unfinished business in our wake. This requires being organized with content, keywords, tags and anchors in advance.
Second, I think it is important to parasite on a trusted host or in a trusted network. This means that the link to your money page comes from a decent source, and that all less valuable mass linking you do is laundered through the parasite rather than pointing directly to your site. This level can be a linkwheel or single trusted parasite host.
Wetpaint, Webgarden, Weebly, Vox, Wordpress, Multiply, xFruits, Virb etc. can all be used as trusted parasites for this level. There are many, many more such parasites.
Third, your Link Farm Evolution WPMU blogs. In some cases, you can linkwheel these via the blogroll, but I have been really down on mass interlinking for the last half year. If you link everything too tight, it is easy to spot your network, and stupidly easy for the SEs to wipe it out. The power of WPMU is having so many different hosts, templates and ip addresses in your backlink profile. That provides a lot of diversity and differentiation. It also makes your backlink profile look more natural.
Fourth, Pligg stories. In my diagram, they are only linking to the WPMU blogs. You can also story your parasite(s).
Fifth, Pligg comments. Link up out of Pligg to WPMU and your trusted host.
It is as simple as that.
Where do you start?
KISS. Start very simple and small. A money page, a single level one parasite, and then follow the chart. The ratios on the chart aren’t fussy, but it’s not a bad place to start. Understand how to build a small pyramid, adjust it to your expectations and results, and refine your approach.
How do you scale?
Build one pyramid to your money page, then build another, and another.
Click on the image to see the full pyramid mininet.
Why not just build huge pyramids?
By building smaller networks, we don’t get lost pursuing projects that don’t have a clearly defined end. We can measure, monitor and evaluate a smaller network, or series of smaller networks much more easily than a big lump of hundreds and hundreds of links.
Summary
Building these one way link pyramids give us structure, control, easy maintenance and fast deployment. Because they are compartmentalized, we can lose one, and replicate it quickly again, we can double up on the same titles and anchors to push harder for a particular ranking. Competitors will have trouble seeing the scope of our link power by passing it through tiers and maintaining discrete networks will keep them from being able to map out our approach easily.
Post your questions in the comments if you have any, and I will follow up with another post to answer them to the best of my ability.
Notes in the margin
Titles are important. Your blog titles (blog names) should be less than 15 characters if possible. Anything longer makes for messy urls.
coloradolawyer.blogsite.com
blogsite.com/coloradolawyer
instead of
denvercoloradodrinkanddrivelawyer.blogsite.com
blogsite.com/denvercoloradodrinkanddrivelawyer
Pligg story and blog post titles should probably be under 50 characters. I shoot for 40, but you might be able to cheat all of the way to 60. Smart titles look better in the SERPs, they have a higher keyword density, they match more long tail searches, they attract organic clicks, and they look natural which is great for camouflage. If your content is absolute dross, at least make your titles decent to give yourself a fighting chance.
Titles and short copy can be scraped from PPC ads
Know your action words! Get, find, buy, now, review, purchase, order, order online, cheap, discount, sale etc.
If you are short on inspiration for titles, look at Google’s Sponsored Listings on the SERPs. I borrow PPC ad copy all of the time.
Quality matters. Quality content and links will last longer and perform better. Link Farm Evolution is automation. It mass produces links and completes registrations. So the question always is, how do you balance one against the other. No one can answer that for you. It is different for every niche and keyword and search engine. The trick is to get out there and start building links, start building these supports to raise your money pages higher in the SERPs and attract more organic traffic. The discovery process differentiates what you are doing from what your competitors are doing. That marginal advantage helps you rank high and make money while others rank low and make little.
The magic in the formula is your experience and creativity.
This is a guest post by guerilla. His new project is Web Automation Lab.
Via Hacker news, this story is a gem:
“Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”
Cool way to get attention.
Howdy everybody!
We are going to migrate [getyacg.com] and [blackhatseo-blog.com] today, so you should expect them to be offline for some hours.
We are going to pimp out everything, so you should expect faster and better forums and tickets system.
If you are a [YACG] Mass Installer or Link Farm Evolution customer, you can send us all your support inquiries to support@blackhatseo-blog.com while the ticket system is offline.
EDIT: Everything is back to normal now! We apologize for such a long downtime, all the open issues and e-mails will be answered shortly. Thank you for your patience.
I know, I know . . . selling books is sooo 10 years ago. 
But the occasion may arise where you want to go old school and use amazon Images in your promotions. Let’s say you want to use Amazon Images in your website to promote Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. You search amazon for “wealth of nations” and see these results:
You right click on 1. Image and click view image (in firefox). and are taken to this url:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL._SL160_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-dp,TopRight,12,-18_SH30_OU01_AA115_.jpg
which looks like this:
Now I don’t know about you, but that image is not all that sexy to me: it’s too small, and has that annoying “Look Inside!” at the top. You’ve probably also seen it with the kindle edition wrapper.
Here’s the trick. All of amazon’s images appear to be created on the fly from a single base image for the product. In the case above, the “original” is the image name up to the first dot followed by a .jpg.
So in the above example, that would be:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL.jpg
which as you can see, resolves as
Now you have access to the high quality original without the look inside sticker or all the extra white space.
The properties after the first dot in the image tell Amazon how to process the image on the fly. These calculations are not done in the crude way of having html resize a bigger image. They are done on the backend.
To resize the above image, after the first dot add _SL followed by the number of pixels you want in the height of the image. So, to make the above bookcover a height of, say, 240 pixels the expression would be written:
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/517E1E0T4DL._SL240.jpg
It’s not rocket science; but it’s a neat little trick that uses amazon’s incredible infrastructure to support your sites. The ability to integrate this into your larger computer generated spam thoughtfully constructed mashups should be self evident.
Enjoy!
“Market competition often achieves what usually only love can do: the divination of the innermost wishes of the other, even before he himself becomes aware of them. Antagonistic tension with his competitor sharpens the businessman’s sensitivity to the tendencies of the public, even to the point of clairvoyance, regarding the future changes in the public’s tastes, fashions, interests . . .”
-by Georg Simmel in his 1907 The Philosophy of Money
This is one of the more interesting takes I’ve seen on Google’s Business Model going forward.
Great write up over on TC on the various scams on Facebook and Myspace.
Gotta love Mike bitching about scams on facebook with ads like this appearing on the same page of his site:
Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black. That or maybe by clicking that ad, the majority of people can make $1000 per day from 60 mins a day of work.
Via Hacker News we have this video out of the Stanford technology venture program.
****** Spoiler (also from hacker news) ******
She teaches a class at Stanford and offers each team $5 of ‘funding’ in an envelope. She tells them that once they open the envelope, they have 2 hours to make as much money as they can.
She cites three teams’ approaches:
1) First team opens a free stand that offers to check peoples bike tire pressure for free, then charges $1 to inflate if necessary. This team changes midstream to accepting donations instead of charging, and makes more money. Lauded for rapid iteration.
2) Second team makes lots of reservations at local restaurants, and then sells them to people waiting in line for same restaurant. Didn’t use the $5 at all. Lauded for realizing that the $5 constraint was artificial, and that using it constrained their thinking.
3) Third team skipped the exercise, and sold their 3 minute class presentation time as a advertisement to a local company. Made the most money. Instead of presenting, they recruited. Lauded for realizing that the 2 hours was also artificially hampering their thinking.
She hands out two artificial constraints, and then praises the teams who ignore the constraints. “Thinking outside the box” is a great skill and all, but basically all these teams are doing is finding creative ways of breaking the rules. It means the puzzle isn’t “make the most money in 2 hours with $5″, it means the puzzle is “find out how far you can stretch these rules without being disqualified”.
Ignore the rules that don’t matter. Is that something holding you back real? or is it just in your head?
What artificial constraints will you chose to ignore today?
Our only limits are in our minds.
