First off, I have started several other blogs and I have become a huge fan of wordpress. This blog isn’t run on wordpress, I intend to change that, along with providing a look and feel overhaul shortly.  A lot of my posts have been on internet marketing because that is the community that I follow and it is where a lot of my interests fall. That wasn’t the initial intention of this website though.  My alexa rank has fallen over 100,000 points in the past month and I’ve done nothing but watch it dwindle.  Some of you might have noticed the monitization, particularly the irrelevant dating site advert on the right and the kontera popups that seem to work for John Chow, but bring me in just pennies a day.  I later read that John Chow is paid to use Kontera, which might explain his success with them in his income reports.

Shoemoney has revamed his blog and I like the new look.  I also like that threaded comments are now following a more structured approach and I intend to use them in a blog that I will be publicly announcing shortly.  I’ve also purchased a flip mino that has collected, dust for the past 2 months.  Again, another trend I intend to change in the revamp. Things will become much more informative and engaging shortly. To aid in this movement I have decided to quit my full time job as a web developer.  I mentioned in a previous post that I fall victim to the newest make money fast schemes often and that I (and anyone interested in the MMO realm) need to focus on what I know and what I can make work. 

One downfall of my current blog is that the RSS feed is unreliable. It’s done through feedburner and more often than not, it’s not broadcast.  I think this may have something to do with the current setup (expression engine). I’m really impressed with the ease of use and functionality of the current WP release.  I like the new features they offer like XML RPC, threaded comments (plugin), and paginated posts.  I’ve also built my own lightweight CMS that I have been using on client sites and I intent to expand on that for future projects. 

When I rebuild, “projects” will probably be the heaviest category, since that is what I will be focusing on full time.  I want to share my journey with you and log my efforts along the way.  I even have a few experiments and successful endeavors that have made my life as a developer / marketer much easier. I intend to share these with you. I am not trying to package together a “Shoemoney Toolbox” for you, these are useful applications and resources that will help you do the every day things that online marketers and web developers need on a regular basis. I am an open source advocate and I hope to sort everything out so that it makes sense for both you and myself as I start this new journey. It should go without saying that I will also be launching a business website, this will give you a little more perspective into who I am and what I’m after.  I will tie this in closely with my blog. I have amassed on a small group of highly talented individuals that I believe can help me achieve my goals and I can refer you to these people as well should you need anything done that is web related.  Stay on the lookout and when the new face comes, things will be much more cut and dry. I am trying to unravel everything I’ve learned in my 5 years experience as a developer, self taught, self made and hopefully soon to be self sufficient .

My credit card was rejected, it said to check my account settings and then call tech support. No number provided. Hmmm… I tried it again, no luck. I thought maybe it was just something w/ the formatting of the address on that credit card.  So I tried another one… again denied.  I Googled it to see if others have had similar issues. I did find something about not putting your apartment number on the second address line, so I tried that.  Again no dice.

WTF?!  Okay, fuck Harold and Kumar then, it’s not worth the aggravation.  I checked my bank account and the other credit card account and I had about 7 hold charges for $1.00 from Sony.  Okay… obviously you are validating this card because you put a hold charge on it.  I went to bed angry.

Next day, I tried it again. This time a new movie… Then on to the billing section of my account. Still nothing.  I updated all of my settings to match the exact name and address used on my credit card, no luck.

So I grabbed the manual. Called tech support as suggested and after a pitch for the Grand Turismo Prologue and at least 3 “press this or that” prompts, I got deferred to another number. Not transfered, just given the number twice and then hung up on.

Ten minutes of hold time later, I got a rep. She had obviously been through this with lots of other people. She suggested completely omitting my apt #.  I tried it and told her it didn’t work. She explained to me that I have to wait 24 hours because my account was locked. Apparently, if it denies you, you have to wait 24 hours before trying it again. What a shit service.

I assume if you’re reading this you are either A) Bored or B) Having the same problem.  Has anyone found a solution? The rep suggested I go guy a Playstation 3 Network Card at my local rite aid.  I have no idea where Rite Aid is… and I don’t care to find out. 

Be careful when sending URL’s to someone and ensure that the URL you paste matches the intended site you’re referencing.  The one I was hijacked w/ was xp-vista-update.net <-- obviously don't go there. Just figured you should watch out for it.

If you do accidentally visit the site, user input does not matter, and it drives towards handing you an Windows EXE file (read virus). 

You can stop the clipboard hijack by closing your browser window (I did and it worked).

Apparently this has hit a lot of major sites recently including MSNBC and DIGG. See the threads below for more information.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1733

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20925461-Malvertisement

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc has lost its lead of the U.S. market for online display advertising to MySpace and its parent company News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media and MySpace, new industry data shows.

Fox Interactive’s collection of sites, led by MySpace, drew 56.8 million advertising views in June, compared with Yahoo’s group of sites which had 53.1 million, according to data from Web audience measurement firm comScore this week.

But while the statistic marks the rapid growth of MySpace in terms of advertising viewership, analysts say the social network site has struggled to draw top-dollar ad rates relative to Yahoo, known for attracting premium advertising rates.

“Social media gets all these ad impressions but not necessarily get the dollars,” said Colin Gillis, analyst at Canaccord Adams. MySpace’s cost per thousand (CPM) page views are significantly lower than that of Yahoo, he said.

A MySpace executive said it is closing the gap with rivals such as Yahoo, Time Warner’s AOL and Microsoft Corp’s MSN after the revamp of its home page in June, which has drawn in big-name sponsors such as Sprint and Wendy’s.

“Our CPMs have grown significantly,” Jeff Berman, MySpace president of sales and marketing, said of June’s growth spike. “Category by category, year over year, we’re up double digits.”

According to comScore data for advertising impressions, June was the first month that Fox Interactive has surpassed Yahoo, which saw ad views dip by around 12 percent from May.

While it may be too soon to say that MySpace has overtaken Yahoo for good, comScore data shows that Yahoo’s share of the display market has been trending down since July of 2007.

Yahoo questioned comScore’s measurement methodology.

“We believe there could be issues with the measurement that could be misrepresenting Yahoo and we are reviewing comScore’s methodology and working with them to resolve these issues,” Spokesman Adam Grossberg said in a statement.

ComScore spokesman Andrew Lipsman countered that Yahoo’s month-on-month drop in display ad view was an “organic decline” unrelated to any changes in the firm’s measurement methods.

Yahoo has often championed its leadership in Web display advertising—based on comScore data—even as it lost ground to Google Inc’s dominant lead in search advertising. Yahoo agreed in June for Google to supply it with ad services to run alongside Yahoo’s own Web search system.

Richard Greenfield, analyst at Pali Research said the redesign of the MySpace home page earlier this summer created a more compelling advertising proposition for brand marketers such as Sprint and Wendy’s.

“It shows how the redesign is allowing MySpace to reach far beyond the ‘social media’ advertising category and to target far larger portal advertising budgets,” said Greenfield in a blog posting for investors. He said this was a negative omen for big portals like Yahoo as well as MSN and AOL.

article source: reuters

Have to narrow it down a bit but it’s a start. Does anyone still care? I noticed a large influx of traffic from the long tail of McKinney Cheerleader keywords on my blog yesterday. Either someone is doing some research (bots?) or we are all a bit stumped…

I’m sure the MySpace page is closed down, but their are alternatives, the wayback machine for example.  This is why you shouldn’t have built that MySpace page during your younger, wilder years (provided you’re still young and possibly not wild now).

By the way, for those who are curious… here is Karissa Theret’s myspace profile (shockingly set to private now): http://www.myspace.com/karrissa_30

Think it’s real?

The idea is that if you drink a cup of coffee and then take a 15-25 min nap; you will wake up energized and refreshed. It was a tip intended for college students, but my life isn’t that far off of a stressed and restless college kid. So I tried it tonight.  I was going to drink the cup of coffee and plug away on some projects I had tonight, but I figured what the heck, let’s try the caffeine nap.

If one cup is good, two cups must be better and if coffee works, than espresso has got to do really bump up the effectiveness. So I drank two cups of espresso (or whatever you want to call the juice that comes out of a Senseo) and hit the sleep timer on my alarm clock.

I’ve never used the sleep timer, apparently it doesn’t work as intended. I just woke up an hour and a half later with a bad headache, acid indigestion and 6 hours left until I have to go back to work. 

Ed McMahon’s story was of epic fail proportions. Here you have this guy, eighty five years old with five kids and trophy wife… you think he has a large enough nest egg to ride it out to the end. He was living it up and leaving nothing to legacy. He lived hard, drank hard, and drowned himself in frivolous luxuries. The problem is; he outlived his life expectancy. He ran out of of money before he could die on his last dollar. Ooops.

We hear the opposite side of the spectrum all of the time, those who lived modest and died with hundreds of millions in their account. Some people make money just to make it, because they are good at it, others make it to spend it. Trump is both archetypes, Ed McMahon is only one them.

We like to watch this happen. The Britney Spears burnout, the Lohan drug induced downfall, Paris Hilton’s DUI. The opposite of the American dream is America’s guilty pleasure.  Mike Tyson burned through over $300 million faster than it took him to make it. Nobody expected it from Ed McMahon though. Ed McMahon was the black swan, and that makes the story even juicier.

While America was Googling Ed McMahon’s salary, investigating his alcoholic intake and throwing money at trash rags capitalizing on an old man’s downfall, Trump fixed the glitch and walked out a hero.

We haven’t heard much from Trump lately, he is busy, buying things out from imminent foreclosure, investing in a buyers market, having a hay day during our “economic crisis”.  I highly doubt he is too interested in flipping houses, but a 7.5 million dollar home on the market for 4.5, the cost benefit analysis doesn’t leave you stuck with chump change. I’m sure Ed McMahon got a fair lease rate, I am also sure it is as much as he could possible afford to give without going broke. 

Trump is known for his philanthropy, and I believe that he gives back more than most people credit him for. It’s not just a tax write off, he really is trying to help and he really did bail Ed out when he needed it. However, you would be horribly mistaken to believe that Trump wasn’t walking out ahead on just another day’s work.

The Chinese company responsible for the ad has sidestepped the initial outrage, claiming that the photo wasn’t meant to be racist.  Chinese officials are outraged and disheartened by the gesture. The Organization of Chinese-American’s has publicly denounced the ad campaign stating “It is unfortunate that this type of imagery would rear its head during something that is supposed to be a time of world unity”.

The Spanish basketball team defeated China in an 85-75 victory, during which the Chinese crowd continuously booed the Spaniard’s efforts. 

Well.... kind of. Anyone who has lost money quickly on PPC ad campaigns will tell you that conversion rates drop when numbers increase. The trick it to tweak your ad copy to convert better, and to continue to split test and tweak until the well runs dry. Some times, you have no control over the decline, you just have to ride it out. Last Friday as a result of the MSN rush (The A-List effect?) I had over 3,500 people hit my page.  I’m sure you can tell by my Alexa ranking, that was well beyond my conventional traffic numbers. My Adsense ads were relevant to the topic less often that I would’ve liked and I converted around 4% of my leads. Not bad, but not great either. Beleive it or not, Cheerleading photographers don’t pay much for internet advertising. Damn Shame. 

So hidden in this post I had to give you a little morsel of what you were looking for.  Right?

How do we uncover those MySpace photos? The girls identies have been hidden… but the internet often leaves little left to be untraced. If you stuck it out and read through my rant, it will pay off, I promise.

The start. McKinney Texas is a relatively small city, it has 107,530 residents.

The Newsweek story about the girls MySpace page photos quoted…

“The pictures posted on MySpace.com looked like the latest installment of ‘Girls Gone Wild.’ In them, cheerleaders from McKinney North High School in Texas exhibited all variety of bawdy behavior. One shot showed a bikini-clad girl sharing a bottle of booze with a friend. Another featured a cheerleader and several other girls in risqué poses offering glimpses of their panties. But the most infamous photo of all was taken in a Condoms To Go store. Five smiling cheerleaders dressed in uniform posed with large candles shaped like penises. At least one of them appeared to be simulating fellatio. ‘It would be an overstatement to describe any of the photographs as pornographic, but it would be an understatement to describe them as harmless high jinks,’”

The above clip was from a magazine article published in Newsweek on January 2nd of 2007. Here is the full article: http://www.newsweek.com/id/37993/page/1

Get to the point already?!

Okay, so best guess is that the McKinney Cheerleaders ran rampant during the 2006 school year.

Classmates.com (you have all seen the banner ads).

We find all students that graduated between the years of 2005 and 2007:

There are no Therets....Cross referencing photos does reveal a possible match....

There are some cute girls and a few look eerily similar to the girls in the publicized photos. 

(to be continued)