SEO Software

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?