Oh, so many fun labels can be made from this. I didn't know about this site when I went around labeling our safety equipment at work with funny stuff. Now I am going to have to go back and do it all over again.
Warning Label Generator - Thanks for pointing it out Gadgetophile!
The purpose of this list is to get some crazy link love going, the instructions are simple, and if everyone participates, then the results should be very good.
To Continue this Link Love list:
1. Copy and paste the list below into your blog post. Hopefully your blog editing software will be smart enough to copy the links over. If not, you can always look at the page source to get the HTML.
2. Add any blogs you want to the list, including the blog that listed you (this blog).
That's all there is to it, if the list continues, then everyone should get a bunch of links from other blogs, and everyone will be happy.
The List:
- Making Money on the Web
- Steve Wilson Marketing
- The Thinking Blog
- Affiliate Marketing Wave
- Your Blogging Guide
I could have sworn that I heard that Google had made changes so there could be no more Google Bombing.
However:
I did the "Win a Nintendo Wii from John Chow" post to enter John Chow's contest, and one of the requirements was to refer to him as the "root of all evil", and have that phrase linked to his blog. Currently, if you do a Google search for the "Root of all evil" (in quotation marks), his blog is the 3rd result.
Is this more John Chow evilness?
In the post I did last night, "633 days of Technorati Ignoring me", I mentioned that I had posted to the Technorati forum about my problem. Well, when I checked this morning, they had started to crawl my blog again.
I had an email from a Technorati Support person, Jose, apologizing for the problems, and someone even commented on my blog to let me know it was fixed.
The final count was 634 days, and to be fair to Technorati, I had only put in a trouble ticket about a week ago. I'm glad that they are indexing me again.
Also, my blog's rank in their index went from 2,831,421 to 1,282,695, whatever that means. I'm curious to see if I start getting traffic from Technorati.
Related Posts:
- 633 days of Technorati Ignoring Me
- Tecnorati is Officially off my Christmas Card List
In February I posted about how Technorati was off my Christmas list, and as of today they say that I have not updated my blog in 633 days.
I'm kind of curious how long it will continue.
I have deleted my claim, then re-claimed my blog, and a week ago today entered a support ticket, but all to no avail.
Now, what I was going to do is compile a list of all the people in the forum who have that they are having the same problem, but everyone I looked at is now being updated. Hmmm....
Let me post there, and see what happens. Here is the Forum Post.
That evil blog mogul John Chow is at it again.
I think this man is the root of all evil.
This time, he is giving away a Nintendo Wii to some random blogger who is able to follow the intricate rules of his contest. The rules are so complicated, that I doubt there will be many posts that qualify, and only the most pathetic blog monkeys will be able to jump through all of the hoops necessary.
You can see these ridiculous rules at "Evil Blog Contest - Win a Nintendo Wii", evidently the Wii was given to him by a promotional pens company 1234Pens.
In a comment on my Technorati Post, the helpful rip referred to some of her sites as being a PR4, PR6, or PR7. I didn't think to ask, but after I replied I was wondering what that meant.
In short, PR is PageRank, and the number following it is the actual PageRank. If you would like to find out the page rank of your site, then you are reading the right post. I ran across this PageRank Lookup tool on the site SEO Tools which allows you to find out.
In case you weren't sure, the higher your page rank is, the better off you are. Also, in case you were wondering, SEO is "Search Engine Optimization"(I had to look that one up a couple of weeks ago).
Unfortunately for me, it isn't like Golf, if it were I would have people asking me what I did to get such a great page rank.
Just to see if my PageRank from this tool was a verifiable result, not some random number pulled out of the air, I went ahead and checked it with PageRank Checker at Top25Web and the results were the same. Not entirely scientific, but good enough for me. Thanks to an anonymous commenter on this post, I also tried the "Verify Google Page Rank" site, and it confirmed the number.
Now SEO Tools has a great deal of stuff packed onto their page, lots of links topics and some ads, but Top25Web looks like they fell out of the AdSense tree and hit every branch on the way down. The tool still works though.
I'm not terribly worried about my PageRank, at least not yet. I'm still working on just getting some content on the site, and maybe even start posting on a regular basis. Once I have that straightened out, then I'll start to put some time into PageRank, Keywords, and all that jazz.
Now, if you found this post because of the SEO and PageRank keywords, I don't want to leave you disappointed.
My Opinion
I think that the most read blogs in the blog-o-verse, or intra-blog-o-sphere-orama-2.0 are the ones about how to make money with your blogs. Of course, like any blogger with dreams of making a Scrooge McDuck pile of cash through blogging, I have read my fair share of "blogging for money" blogs, and "make your blog popular blogs". To sum it up, there are a lot of "blogging about blogging" blogs out there. So let me point you to a couple of blogs that I think are very worth reading, and that I bet you will find helpful in this area:
Some Recomendations
- The eMoms at Home Blog - Don't let the "Mom" in the title throw you off (if you happen to be a guy), this is an outstanding blog, with tons of great tips. She even has a free blog traffic e-course. When I first found this blog, I just went crazy following links, and I think that I gave her a ton of pageloads those days. The e-course also has some really great tips. Nothing underhanded about her tactics. Thanks Wendy!
- Pro Blogger - Everyone links to this site. Go visit it and you will see why. This is another blog that becomes a click fest once you get there. On top of all the great tips and content, the guy is bald too. Fellow follicle challenged bloggers unite!
References:
- PageRank Lookup - SEO Tools
- 10 Related page Rank Tools & 136 SEO tools - SEOCompany
- PageRank Checker - Top25Web
- Verify Google Page Rank
- eMoms at Home
- 10 Days to a Better Blog - eCourse from eMoms at home.
- ProBlogger
1. How to re-initialize the offline files cache and database in Windows XP - This is one of my favorite articles, since I can never remember how to do it, and it is easier to come here then to search somewhere else. If you are receiving "incorrect function" errors when trying to sync, this is a handy trick to know.
2. The Outlook Dumpster - Adventures in Deleted Item Recovery - Very handy to know how to use the outlook dumpster.
3. Winamp Site Hacked? -This was one event that my friend Art pointed out. I posted about it, and within 2 hours the site was fixed.
4. Microsoft Access error: Compile error . in query expression -Pesky problem which took a good deal of research, but ended up having a nice straightforward fix.
5. Remove a Service with the Command Prompt -Another post that I end up looking up more often then I care to admit. I'm glad that others have found it useful.
Did you ever have a cousin that you met once at a family reunion? Maybe you talked it up some, and really enjoyed the conversation. Then after the reunion, well life gets in the way, and the next thing you know, you haven’t talked to that cousin in a very long time. Maybe you feel like a big heel for not calling.
OK, if you are still with me, imagine that the cousin has made attempts to contact you, letters, phone calls, yet when you see the name on the caller ID, you let the answering machine answer the call.
You also make sure that you are really quiet, since you never tested to see if the microphone on the machine is actually off when it is taking a message, and you would hate for him to hear you and start yelling “I know your home; I can hear you breathing in the background!!!”
In this case, Technorati is the one being quiet, and this blog is that ignored cousin.
What I am referring to is the inability of Technorati to find my blog, and the stubborn refusal of my pings. As you can see from the image above, Technorati doesn’t think my blog has been updated in 620 days. If you scroll down a little bit, you will notice, that I have in fact posted in 2006, and shockingly, in 2007 as well. Granted, I haven’t posted with any consistency, but come on, there have been posts!
I don’t quite understand why, I use their handy dandy ping button, and when I use Performancing, I set it to ping Technorati, but for some reason, Technorati continues to ignore me.
So I say to you Technorati, in front of all my loyal readers reader, no soup for you! You shall remain without soup until you update your stats on my blog. At such a point, there will be soup aplenty, but not until then.
Some blogs that Technorati and I both love:
- The How to Geek
- Tech-Recipes
- Windows Connected
- LifeHacker
- 43 Folders
Update: Johnny Cash over at "Making Money on the Web" posted a comment that he has the same problem with Technorati. A quick look in their blog directory says that his site hasn't been updated in 52 Days, and I am up to 626 days without an update. He also has a post about his problems titled "My Technorati Woe"
"Pricing is set at $50 per user per year, less expensive than Microsoft Office but with much the same functionality. Microsoft has its own web-based suite of tools in Office Live, but the company's offering doesn't match Google's. And Google isn't going after Office Live, it's going after Office."Um, no Offense Michal Calore, but have you actually used the two sets of applications?
Bloglines Image Wall – Not Work Friendly
The Bloglines image wall crawls a bunch of blogs, and takes an image from them, which it then places in this wall. Each Image is linked to the blog which originated it. The Wall is constantly updated, and sometimes you will see an image and just have to click on it to see what the heck is going on. The first time I looked at it there was some weird pictures, and the second time there were some adult images.
The wall itself is 6 images wide by 4 images tall, but before you view it you have to agree that you are an adult, and that you understand that you may be exposed to horrific adult images (Gasp).
Yahoo pipes is a “do your own mashup” platform. It looks like you can do some really crazy stuff with it. It has a very interesting GUI interface which you use to build your pipes. One of the pipes on the site takes headlines from the New York Times, and searches for key words. Then those keywords are used to search through Flickr.
After you create a Pipes set (not sure of the exact terminology), you can publish it, and subscribe to it via RSS. You can also take Pipes that others have made, clone them, and modify them to your liking. All in all, I think some really neat stuff is going to come out of this. The one think I don't like very much is the name, and only because it sounds strange to refer to single items with a plural.
Me: "I built some neat pipes today"
My imaginary friend: "Oh, how many?"
Me: "Just one."
Oh never mind, just go check it out if you are into this type of thing.
- Yahoo Pipes
- New York Times through Flickr
I heard part of this video on Net@Night, and had to see it for myself. It was just pretty funny. I'm not a big fan of the Mac vs. PC commercials, they were funny at first, but then they really started to grasp at straws.
This next one is a little long, about 4 minutes. It is supposed to be a bunch of rejected ads, and some of them are pretty funny. I'm glad to see Amiga make an appearance.
I would still like to see a spoof where the Mac has a midget, maybe Mini me from Austin Powers, and when asked Mac replies "Oh, this is my Market Share".
Other Links:
- iTunes doesn't work on Vista yet?
- Mike has Finally bought an iPod
This is all from the article "RSA: Attendees drop ball on Wi-Fi security" over at ComputerWorld. The wireless security vendor AirDefense Inc was monitoring the Wireless networks during the conference. Here are some of their findings, and the reasons I would have my wireless turned off if I were at the RSA conference.
1. 30 Devices pretending to be access points.
Not only were they pretending to be access points, but they were pretending to be access points from the conference network. One of them even had a self-sign certificate made to look like the conference authentication server. Others were configured to look like T-Mobile and IBAHN access points, as well as the access points of local hotels.
2. I like my service, so please don't Deny it.
There were 57 Denial of Service attacks on the first day of the conference, including jamming and de-authenticating clients. What fun.
3. Lots of Scanning
NetStumbler and similar programs were scanning for access points regularly. The article says that it was by attendees, but who can really be sure.
4. I don't want anyone else controlling my computer.
On the second day of the conference, one attacker had taken over 8 machines, and was using them to launch attacks on other machines.
5. I should be the only one who knows my password
A whole bunch of the clients connecting to the bogus access points were advertising domain information, including authentication server, user name, computer name, as well as sending out the authentication hashes which contained username and password.
Making it a little easier for the bad guys
AirDefense Inc, also found that more than half of the wireless devices in use at the RSA conference were not secure. Remember, the RSA is the security division of EMC, and the attendees are the people responsible for their company's computer security.
This would be like finding out Bill Gates uses Linux, that Steve Jobs has a Windows Logo tattooed on his rear, or going to a hair stylist who has a mullet.
Some other things they found were unsecured wireless access points with two notorious names, one named "Free Internet Access" and one called "Linksys". Not only were these access points out there, but 70 devices connected to them on the first day, and 87 on the second day!
There were obviously other "security experts" in attendance
Obviously there were hackers there, trying to mess around with the experts. I think that I will make sure to turn my wireless off anytime I go to a big conference like this one. I remember reading something about all the stuff going on at the last DEF CON.
I wonder if anyone was checking this at CES. I know there were a whole slew of people blogging from there.
I found this CNET article kind of strange, evidently Apple is telling iTunes users not to install Windows Vista. Evidently, there is a patch to fix some problems specific to music which was purchased from the iTunes store, but it doesn't fix any of the compatibility issues, one of which is corrupting your iPod.
Although not a conclusive number by any means, and it may be affected by the gaining popularity of the iPod, in October 2004, CNet reported that since iTunes was ported to Windows, Apple's iPod sales have more than doubled. I don't think Apple has released these numbers, or at least I haven't been able to find them. If you know what they are, feel free to post a link.
What I found strange about this whole thing, is that Microsoft made 2 release candidates available, and there is still an issue with iTunes? Didn't apple bother to get one of them and test iTunes out?
I am sure that if I can get my hands on one, so can Apple. Heck, the release version of Windows Vista has been out for over a month, just not to retail. I know Apple has to have at least 5 Windows Licenses, they have to have a Software Assurance package, or at least a MSDN subscription.
Maybe I am way off base here. Maybe at the last possible minute, Microsoft changed the way everything works in Vista, and told Apple that everything was hunky dory. Maybe Steve Jobs was way too busy with the iPhone, maybe John Gruber over at Daring Fireball can fill me in on what is going on here, or at least call me a jackass for saying something negative about Apple.
UPDATE 3/6/2007 : Apple has released an updated version of iTunes, version 7.1 (you can get it here) which is supposed to address the issues mentioned above with Vista. Thanks to Paul Thurrott for pointing it out. His thoughts on it are available here. More information from Apple.
Related Links:
- Mike has finally bought an IPod!?!?
References:
- Apple Whistles a happy iTunes - CNET News
- Apple Releases Vista Compatibility Patch For iTunes, But Problems Remain - CRN Australia
- Speaking of Clowns - DaringFireball.net
- iTunes and Windows Vista - Paul Thurrott's blog
- iTunes and Windows Vista - Apple
- iTunes Download - Apple
Strange thing today, I tried to download Winamp, and as soon as you make all of your selections, and click download, instead of a download screen, you get this:
I thought at first that this might be displayed while I am waiting for the download to start. The URL listed was:
http://download.nullsoft.com/
It gets a little bit stranger, I pinged download.nullsoft.com, and it is resolving to 172.30.74.154, which is in a reserved address range. A ping from www.network-tools.com resolves it to 172.20.149.50.
If you do a whois on nullsoft, the ip address is 205.188.234.120
Wow! I had almost forgotten about Undo.tv, but today I received an invite! My profile page says that I am member number 3159.
I don't see any way to invite other people, so please don't ask me for an invite. You can register for an invitation code on the Undo.tv web page. I can't even remember how long ago it was when I first signed up. The site has a banner, after you log in, that states that they are in "Private Beta".
I remember listening to either Net@Night or Inside the Net (which is not net@night), and Chris Pirollo was on the show talking about UndoTV. They also had someone from PikSpot, which is the company hosting the site. It sounded to me like UndoTV was going to be the first real big launch of PikSpot. If you go to the PikSpot site, you can register for a invitation to PikSpot there (don't confues it with an invitation to UndoTV).
I went in to update my profile, and I was utterly amazed at the amount of personal information, and site memberships that you can enter into the form. They include:
Communications
- Yahoo
- AIM
- MSN
- ICQ (I didn't even know ICQ was still around)
- Google Talk
Site Memberships
- Flickr
- LiveJournal
- MySpace
- SecondLife
- Upcoming.org
- LinkedIn
They have spots for sites you own, favorite links, and a bunch of other stuff too.
I was looking through the members, and of course, Leo Laporte and Chris Pirillo are on the site (they were the driving force behind the creation of the site, if you didn't already know), but Amber Mac is on there too.
As far as I can tell, besides just searching for content, you can subscribe to content that particular members are creating. Each piece of media has links and code on it so that you can embed it on your web site, and the system seems to work with "Kudos". If you like something, you can send them a Kudo, which I think may be like Diggs, but both the member and the media collects the Kudo.
Looks pretty interesting, I am looking forward to poking around some more.
I was listening to "Twit Episode 84: Hahn, I'm Home!" and I will have to say that I was very impressed with some of the things that one of the guests, Cory Doctorow said. TWIT has had many guests, and although all of them are likable, I will have to say that I don't think I have ever been as impressed with any of them as much as I was with Cory.
One of the first things that made me kind of sit up and take notice was when the group was talking about viewing media on various screens, like the ones on IPods and cell phones, and John C. Dvorak didn't think that there was much of a future for smaller screens, and that he would never watch a movie on a smaller screen like the one on an IPod.
Cory was talking about how the computer, being as much of a multi-function device as it is, really demands media that doesn't require much of an attention span. This was mentioned as kind of a backup to what many people had said about E-Books, that no one would sit in front of their computers long enough to read a book, which really isn't true, as he points out.
Of course, partly because of my job, and partly because of my love of computers, I spend at least 8 hours a day in front of a computer, which is more than long enough to read a book.
Of course, what I am doing is looking at or reading things which don't require large blocks of time. Web page snippets and other items related to what it takes to do my job. I'm not even going to talk about some other things that people spend an ungodly amount of time doing on a computer, such as World of Warcraft, or blogging :-)
When it comes to all of these screens that we are seeing in cell phones and IPods, it isn't Screen size and resolution that is important, and this is also something that Cory pointed out, what is important is the context that the screen is being used in.
If I am waiting in line at a DMV, then I would be extremely happy with a screen the size of an IPod's screen, of course if I am in my living room, then I probably will not pull out that smaller screen in order to watch a different show. Leo backs it up with saying that what we as consumers are really after is a wide selection of screens, we want the screen that fits where we are, and what we are doing.
After listening to the Podcast, I decided to go ahead and look Cory up. They had mentioned on the air that he just released a new book of short science fiction stories called "Overclocked", but I was really surprised to learn that you can download the entire book online, either in print or in podcast form for free. He also has a whole slew of other stories available for download in print or podcast form, for free.
So I went ahead and subscribed to the site, and I plan on checking out his writing. You should too.
Related Links:
Cory's Website - CrapHound.com
Twit.tv - The Twit Netcast Network
Twit Netcast - The Week in Tech
TWIT makes Time Magazine's Top 10 Podcasts
The TechTV Crew
