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Spanish Basketball Photo Disgraces China

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Spain’s Olympic basketball team posed for an advertisement just prior to the Olympic games that is spurring a lot of controversy. The ad which was made for the Chinese footwear manufacturer Li Ning, portrays the Spanish players in a team photo tugging on their faces in order to deliberately slant their eyes, while surrounding a center court outline of a Chinese dragon. 

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. 

McKinney Cheerleaders Fab Five MySpace Page

Sunday, August 10, 2008

MSN posted a story on the McKinney Cheerleaders (Fab Five) on their A-List Page. Apparently articles featured on this page are followed by a list of “live search” listings. My Blog was #3 on those listings, resulting in a huge rush of traffic to my blog. On the internet they say content is king, but finding the right content will make you king. Well, that and a huge dose of traffic and notoriety. The point is, for those of you following my blog, I did a short post on spotting trends before they happen, in this instance, it paid off well for me. 

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)

McKinney Cheerleaders fab five controversy resurfacing

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Almost a year and a half ago a story broke about a group of 5 cheerleaders, known as the Fab Five, terrorizing their local school and apparently taking control over the teachers and principal. The principal resigned in shame. The girls: Linda Theret, Michaela Ward, Karissa Theret and several others victimized everyone in their surroundings by committing such atrocities as “talking on their cell phones despite being told not to” and photographing themselves in uniform in a “condom shop.”

The story held little weight when it was first released and was probably laughed off. However, just before the dust settled a Hollywood agent contacted the girls and offered them a contract for their story. Now, after just having enough time for production, perhaps on the brink of the film’s release; the story is coming back as “breaking news” and it’s HOT!

This is definitely a case where truth is stranger than fiction, but did the actions of the “fab 5” really warrant this kind of attention? It sounds like nothing more than your average varsity cheerleading squad. 

How to Add an External Hard Drive to a Playstation 3

Saturday, July 26, 2008

Article Republished with permission from wikihow.com

If you have the 20 gigabyte PS3, which is no longer produced, you may want to have a bigger hard drive. It was quickly found out that you can replace the internal hard drive in it using a standard laptop hard drive, but they are overly priced due to their size. It has been figured out how to add an external hard drive (which is much cheaper) to the Playstation 3 and still get all the benefits of having it all internal.

Steps

Purchase your external hard drive. Most hard drives will do, but some may have incompatibilities. Western Digital is one that works fine.

Once you have your external hard drive purchased, use the USB cord provided to connect it to a COMPUTER (not your Playstation 3).

IMPORTANT* Once your external hard drive is connected to your computer, go to START, CONTROL PANEL, ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS, COMPUTER MANAGEMENT, and select DISK MANAGER on the left hand side options. Select the external drive and read the “File System” type. If it says “NTFS”, right click the disk and select “Delete Partition”.

A. The reason you needed to delete the partition is because it MUST be FAT32. However, Windows XP will partition a hard drive into FAT32 but only in 32 GB partitions. Go to start,settings, control panel, administrative tools, computer management, disk management in the new box that opens. Using an open source OS like Linux will allow you to use the built in Gparted to partition the hard drive in most file structure formats with no size limit like on XP. This way will allow you to partition a drive into FAT32. You must instead go to DOWNLOAD.COM and search for “Swiss Knife”. Download the program that comes up (CompuApps SwissKnife V3 x.xx) and install it when the download completes. Once the install is complete, run the application and select the external hard drive you need to partition. On the top select the following settings: (Partition Type: Primary), (File System: FAT32), and (Volume Label: [whatever you want]). Then at the bottom, select “Create” and you’re done.

Alternatively you can format using the command prompt: format h: /FS:FAT32 (This works if you are running Windows Server 2003.)

If you are on Mac OS X, open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app, pick the drive, and click on the ‘Erase’ tab. Pick ‘MS-DOS (FAT)’ for the file system type, and click on the ‘Erase’ button. This will reformat the drive in FAT-32.

Once you are SURE the partition is FAT32, open “My Computer” and double-click on your empty external hard drive. Now, you will want to create a folder system identical to that on the Playstation 3. Right click to create a new folder and name the first folder “Photo”. Do this for “Music”, “Video” and “Game”. When you are finished, you should have 4 folders total in the hard drive. Each folder should (at this point) be empty.

Now, you can load all the music you want into your music folder, all the video you want into your video folder, and all the photos you want into your photo folder. Your game folder should still be empty.

At the bottom right hand corner of the screen, left click the green arrow in your icons list and select “Safely remove...” Once your computer tells you “XXX drive can now be safely removed”, unplug the hard drive from your computer.

Now, you can connect the hard drive to your Playstation 3 and use the extra space to save information and access all your extra content saved on your external hard drive.
Congratulations, you now have turned your 40, 60, or 80 gigabyte Playstation 3 into a much larger one for all your multi-media needs. Enjoy!

Tips

Adding an external hard drive to your Playstation 3 does not void your warranty.

It is unknown if there is a maximum size limit that the Playstation will be able to recognize. A 1000GB HDD has been proven to work, however the maximum size is probably much higher.

Information had to be gathered from several sites before these steps were successfully completed, so this is some of the best information you are going to find on how to do this on the web.
If you want to play video on ps3, you can use Aimersoft PSP Video Converter, it fully support output of PS3 Video(480p, 720p, 1080i) MPEG-4 perfectly:http://www.aimersoft.com/psp-video-converter.html or you can use Red Kawa PS3 VIDEO 9 which will do exactly the same thing as the Aimersoft converter :http://www.redkawa.com/videoconverters/ps3video9/

PS3 now supports DivX movies, so if your movies are in DivX format, you do not need to convert them.

Alternatively, or in addition, you can replace the factory installed internal hard drive with a 2.5” mobile drive of any desired capacity.

Warnings

Do not try to connect an external hard drive formatted in NTFS to your Playstation. It will not cause any kind of damage, but your Playstation 3 will not recognize the drive at all if you do. Also, if you lay your Playstation horizontally, do not place the external hard drive on the right side where the exhaust fans are aimed. The air coming out of the Playstation is very hot and will surely cause your external hard drive to malfunction… possibly permanently!

Related wikiHows

How to Change the Wallpaper on a Playstation 3
How to Burn a Playstation Disc Using Nero

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Add an External Hard Drive to a Playstation 3.  All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Steve Jobs Missed the Mobile Web - Bill Gates Missed the Web

Monday, July 21, 2008

When the web was still in it’s infancy Microsoft and Netscape both strayed away from following an open set of standards in hopes of securing their foothold. Microsoft and Netscape wrote proprietary JavaScript and JScript rescpectively, both companies rendered HTML and CSS loosely and neither browser manufacturer seemed to have much regard for giving the developers, the pioneers of the web space, a path to follow. This lead to tacky grey buttons that read “This website is best viewed in IE on Windows” or “Optimized for Netscape Communicator”. 

It wasn’t until the W3C called in the big guns and created a standards coalition that we began to have websites that rendered properly in more than one browser. The transition certainly wasn’t a smooth one and probably created more forks than it did band aids. Developers were forced to use browser detection and create compliant sites (to show that they could) in addition to browser specific sites, to accommodate for the millions of internet users still using archaic browsers.

Modern browsers like FF2+, IE7+ and Opera 9+ are closer to spec while still remaining backwards compatible. Code hacks, and browser detection can be left behind of the most part, aside from a few IE Conditional comments and such.  It has been over 15 years since the first browser was created and we are just now starting to settle on standards that have been in place (albeit evolving) since the beginning. 

Commercial interest in pwning the web created this mess, and you would think we would’ve learned something from it. 

Steve Jobs, the do-no-evil savior behind Apple revolutionized music by introducing the iPod. The iPod was (and still is) more than just a way to store, transport and listen to music on the go, it’s a fashion icon. The white earbuds, the smaller the sleek design and soft curves, the innovative wheel dial… it worked and it worked in a big way.

Steve Jobs last big hoorah of his career is undoubtedly the iphone. Unless you want to count the macbook air, which is neat, but not certainly not an icon. 3G iPhones are near impossible to get a hold of and their second hand market prices are ridiculously inflated, just as the first gen device was when it was released.  When the iPhone was announced Apple’s stock was at around $85.00 a share, it’s tripled and come back to a double. Apple is a hot commodity right now and they are quickly gaining market share. 

Apple’s success has not come without it’s pitfalls.  The iPhone, which is opening up the mobile web in fad fashion, the way the iPod did music has it’s flaws. There was a lot of controversy over the delayed release of a Developers Kit for the iPhone. I wont get into that controversy, the bottom line is, the iPhone does require specific, proprietary code to develop applications on their platform. Yes you can view the NY Times on the 3” screen, but any iPhone user will tell you that doing so is a lesson in futility. iPhone specific websites are popping up as big name companies push for an entrance into the new platform and therein lies the rub.

Are you going to need a Treo Site, a Voyager Site, a Razr Site and iPhone site to reach the .mobi community? Well, maybe not… developers are resorting back to their old ways and implementing browser sniffing and platform sniffing redirects (read code forking) only this time it’s worse. There is more to account for on a mobile site, structure and navigation on a mobile platform is often radically different from a usability standpoint. In other words, developers are forced to create entirely new sites, not just entirely new pages. You can’t blame this all on Steve Jobs, he just brought a product to market to fill a need. However, he didn’t make it easy for competing browser manufacturers to create a mobile browser on his device. Don’t expect firefox on the iPhone any time soon, in fact John Lilly, the CEO of Mozilla openly states that Mozilla has no intentions of creating a browser for the iPhone because Apple intentionally makes it difficult to do so. They don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience.

The resolution of the iPhone’s native resolution is 320 X 240, which consequentially is exactly half that of the computers that were capable of when the web was born (640 X 480). The iPhone doesn’t need a web browser, mobile devices for that matter, really have no NEED for a web browser. Dot Mobis and the introduction of mobile specific “web sites” give us an opportunity to rethink the purpose of the platform. What should this device do, how can it do it effectively and how can we develop a set of standards to allow this venture to grow into an economy of scale? We have to stop forcing the square peg into the round hole.

What should your iPhone do for you?

Catching Trends Before they Blow Up

Saturday, July 19, 2008

It’s easy to get caught up in hype and get all excited about an idea that you think will be the next big thing online. The problem is, by the time you hear about it, a lot of times it’s too late to act upon it.

I was reading an article in an old Domainers Magazine about investing in profitable ccTLDs.  Frank Shilling, a highly successful domainer with millions invested in his properties, stated that the domaining industry is becoming gentrified.  Large VC firms and hedge fund investors are now taking note in the value of online assets which is pumping the value of the properties held by first generation domainers.  One of the more controversial “golden rules” of online marketing is that you need to have first movers advantage to really profit from a new idea or trend.  A lot of us jump in early at every profitable opening that we see, we don’t invest the proper amount of time to exploit the effort and we jump out as become discouraged and enticed by the next big thing. 

However, as Frank pointed out, first movers advantage does help, the rich will always get richer, but exposure and publicity allow MMO efforts to remain profitable as they head into the the long tail.  For example, in domaining, quality, industry specific domains that lend well to the online arena have always commanded top dollar. Purchasing a domain like cars.com, sex.com or even something plain like “walkers.com” is going to be a 8,7 or 6 six figure investment respectively. What the general public doesn’t understand is that ccTLDs and platform specific TLD’s (like .mobi) can still command a good 6 figure sell price.  If the domain industry didn’t garner the attention and participiation that it has today, this wouldn’t be possible. The more eyeballs you have monitoring something, the more profitable it becomes. Domaining is often compared to the real estate market since it is in a since a “virtual property”, but as investors build domain portfolios, we know have a currency exchange on our hands, a stock market if you will.

As I mentioned in my about me page, I often catch myself losing focus and getting caught up in the next big trend. The ”Crazy Catch by Ball Girl” viral video post on my blog received over 1,000 uniques this month as a result of one small digg comment that was later deleted.  I tried to spike traffic again in a similar trend post (the one just before this) and failed miserably. I even took a risk and posted something that could be seen as controversial, knowing controversy sells. In this case, it didn’t. 

The moral of the story (for those of us with morals remaining) is that jumping after trends will leave you empty handed. You need to make a solid investment of time and money into your efforts to make money online (and in life for that matter).  Get rich quick is always appealing, no matter how many times we fail at it.  So it’s back to the grind.  I promised a projects post on a few MMO blogs earlier and I didn’t come through w/ it.  I’ll try to get that up by the end of this weekend. I hinted at it in an early post… it’s related to proven methods to make small amounts of money on a reoccurring basis.  We will see how it works out, but the lure has been cast and I’ll continue to throw bait out there (just maybe not jail bait).

Top Affiliate Challenge Secret

Sunday, July 13, 2008

There was one good secret shared on this season of the TAC. While throwing out acronyms on flash cards Randal mentioned “BANS”. He didn’t elaborate, he just spelled it out for us. BANS, Build a Niche Stores are simple eBay API driven sites that can be set up based on a specific niche. So when someone searches for “polly pocket jewelry” on Google, your custom store complete with live eBay listings pops up. BANS are very search engine friendly and they are starting to breach the tops of the SERPS for both long tail key phrases and large niches. It’s not too late to try, take a look for yourself…

Click here to Build a Niche Site

Jason Henderson Hacked Big Marketing Blog Down

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Big Jason, the consummate MMO Internet Reality contestant, seems to be in a bit of a bind. His plan of attack for the TAC was to leverage his network and use his blog to give away over $25,000 worth of ebooks, seminar tickets and other worthless garbage in hopes to gather money to buy his win. Unfortunately his clever “big marketing blog” appears to have been hacked. I say “appears to be” because it’s possible that he just crashed his wordpress installation, it got upset, went back to it’s default template and changed it’s title to “Fuck Jason”.  You never know, computers sometimes have a mind of their own. 

In other news, the only good thing about the show, the hot host, is now single. Just in time for the release of her new blog. John Chow posted a quick flip video of a parking lot bachelorette episode, during which on of the contestants “Chan Van Norman”, escapes in a minivan to avoid having to talk to a girl.  Monica seems to be a little cozy with John and you would think she was milking him for exposure up until the point that you read “powered by johnchow.com” on the bottom of her blog. Now that my friends, is pimp work at it’s finest.

**UPDATE: Big Jason appears to have regained control of his blog. He now has a “hello world” post up and he changed the title back to “Big Marketing”. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that big jason never did a mysql dump and will probably be starting over at this point.  Ouch!

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