David Airey Gets His Domain Back

Well, it was a depressing Christmas for David Airey, someone hijacked his domain while he was on holiday. If you wish to read about how it happened, please click here to read WARNING: Google’s GMail security failure leaves my business sabotaged.

Now, three days later, he is the owner of his domain again.

Evil Cracker Loser - zero
David Airey Designer - one

I love these wonderful true life Christmas tales. LOL

Tags: gmail security, hijacked domain

Let the people return home

During the worst housing crisis in New Orleans history, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is pushing to demolish thousands of units of affordable housing. They plan to rebuild only a few. If we let HUD do this, the majority of affordable public housing in the city will be eliminated. This will keep thousands of low-income Katrina survivors from ever returning home.

I joined ColorOfChange.org in calling on the city council to vote against these reckless and premature demolitions and insist on a fair redevelopment plan. I also sent a message to President Bush, calling on him to stop HUD from carrying out its plan. Let the people return home.

http://www.colorofchange.org/hudhousing/?id=2001-335189

Greetings of the Season

Merry Christmas from Texas

The Future of Advertising

I just finished a book set in 2090. Lots of changes, but I did notice that advertising featured prominently. In the future, there were huge LCD screens everywhere. People were constantly blasted with advertising in any commercial space.

Out-of-home video, known as narrowcasting, is distributing video with advertising to captive audiences--in college canteens, popular restaurants, buses, offices, shopping malls.

Interested? Click to view Outdoor Advertising: A New Look - eMarketer

Tags: outdoor advertising, narrowcasting

Sell Your Kids on eBay!

ROI Revolution blog is hosting an Annual Funny Adwords Contest. These are the ads you see when you search for an item and major adwords advertisers try to fit your query into their automatically generated ads. Funny!

Click to vote for Funny Adwords Contest: Round 2 at ROI Evolution blog

Here are the results for Round 1:

Tags: funny adwords contest, contextual ads, roi revolution blog,

How Many Hands Do You Have?

Shadowplay

Volkswagen has a really cool advertisement called "Shadowplay." The entire ad is human hands making shadow creatures. It is incredible. I found myself watching it and trying to replicate the shadows. I did not have enough hands... Click here to view it on VeryFunnyAds.

Tags: shadowplay, veryfunnyads, volkswagen

Comment Using OpenID

On December 13, the Blogger Buzz blog posted that OpenID is being implemented on Blogger. This means that your readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their identities from OpenID-enabled services such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL. OpenID lets users have control of their login and should cut down on spam comments.

You may already have an OpenID. If you use one of the services below, you may login by replacing username with your name. For example, to use WordPress openID, I would be cybercelt.wordpress.com. Feel free to try to comment on this post using one of your openIDs.

You May Already Have an OpenID:

• Technorati
• technorati.com/people/technorati/username
  
  
• WordPress.com
• username.wordpress.com
  
  
• AOL
• openid.aol.com/screenname
  
  
• Vox
• member.vox.com
  
  
• LiveDoor
• profile.livedoor.com/username
  
  
• LiveJournal
• username.livejournal.com
  
  
• SmugMug
• username.smugmug.com

Tags: openid, blogger login, comments

The Voices in My Head

Well, I thought advertising could not get more intrusive. I was wrong. After the scented bus shelters, subliminal advertising, emotional marketing . . . we now have sound waves in a tight beam directed at our brains. Sound that only we can hear inside our heads.

Can you imagine walking down a deserted street and all of a sudden you hear, "Who's that? Who's There? It's not your imagination." This is a billboard advertisement for "Paranormal State," a new series premiering on A&E. Technology developed by Holosonic transmits an audio signal from a speaker to inside your head.

Now imagine that you are a little unhinged to begin with, like the people that truly do hear voices in their heads. This ad technology could provoke a full-blown psychotic episode. Guess where they are currently advertising? New York City! This is an accident waiting to happen.

Click to read about the technology: Audio Spotlight - Put sound where you want it.

There is a place for this type of technology. Museums, art galleries, libraries and Epcot Center have used the technology to interpret exhibits without destroying the ambiance of the surrounding area. But beaming sound waves into random people walking down the street is not a good idea.

What do you think?

Tags: holosconic, voices in my head, intrusive advertising

Next Generation Search Engine

I downloaded SpaceTime, a beta release of a 3D search engine that allows you to search multiple engines, as well as YouTube, RSS, eBay, Amazon, and Flickr. Eventually, they will add functionality for email, shopping, music and social networking.

To use 3D search, you simply choose which site to search on the pull-down menu in the toolbar and enter your search term. SpaceTime displays your search results in 3D visual stacks. There is a timeline at the bottom to help you keep track of where you are in SpaceTime.

You need at least Windows 2000, 512 MB memory and 128 MB of video memory (3D capable), Pentium 4 running at 2.4GHz or AMD 2400xp+, 1280 x 1024 screen resolutions, 32-bit true color, with a network speed of 768 Kbits/sec. You may run SpaceTime with less, but it will be slow.

From the forum:

The Vision:

Imagine a 3D common space that can visually display the output of any computer or web page and can run on any computer . . . creating a new extensible computing PARADIGM. No matter where you are, you can always visit where you left off last, remotely. . . Imagine SpaceTime.

Tags: 3d search, spacetime

Lost Page Rank and Other Things

CoolAdzine for Marketers will be undergoing changes over the next week. A few days ago, I realized that this blog had lost all page rank. It had been ranked PR4 for ages, but now it is PR0.
This is disheartening because I have always been transparent with my blogging. I follow the blogging ethics of WOMMA. I disclose all sponsored reviews and do not recommend something I do not or would not use.

I used the Bad Neighborhood Text Link Tool to find out what might possibly be dragging my page rank down. I had linked to other bloggers and sites who had linked to sites that may be considered to be in bad neighborhoods. Many of the bad neighborhoods were links to Blogger!

Moderating comments has become a quality checkpoint, with most comments NOT passing. This breaks my heart because I am a Do Follow Blogger. However, as an early adopter of do follow, this blog has become a target for every scam site on the Internet.

Also, I have started to add rel="nofollow" to most of the URLs on my blog. I had no idea that I was passing my page rank to other sites.

I also noticed that Blogger has started linking to profiles instead of blogs again. There used to be an option to check "other" and put your blog URL in the comment. Now, unless you do the whole a href process, you will not receive a link back.

I will be moving from Blogger after the holidays.

Tags: lost page rank, passing page rank, do follow, nofollow, blogger bites

Stop Uncommon Uses of Your Content

For those bloggers who are tired of seeing their content on other blogs without attribution, please read the following article for help.

Click to read The 6 Steps to Stop Content Theft : The Blog Herald

From the article:

If you take a few moments to familiarize yourself with the process and technology, you can become a champion plagiarism fighter in short order and get back to the business of running your site before you realize how effective you’ve become.

One easy way to determine if someone is scraping your site is to check your Feedburner Stats. Select the feed you wish to view. Under VIEW is the link for Uncommon Uses.
Click Uncommon Uses (it is a hyperlink) to view the list of uncommon uses. If you see an web site under Referrers that you do not recognize, click it and view the site. If you approve of the use, just check the box next to the referrer and next time you will realize that you have already checked the web site.

If you do not approve the use, you may take steps as outline in the article above.

I must admit that it is sometimes more trouble to try and get the website to stop it than it is just to ignore it. It is your choice. After all, it is your content.

Tags: uncommon uses, copyright, plagiarism, content scraping, splogs