Month: October 2007

We’ll miss you, David…

WIStv.com Columbia, SC: Family says soldier from Marion killed in Afghanistan

David was my cousin, but functioned more as a brother.  While growing up, there wasn’t a week that went by when we didn’t see each other.  We spent countless hours reading comics, drawing comics, watching Beavis and Butthead, playing with GI Joe’s and re-enacting our Transformers scenes in the backyards.  He was always Superman and I was always Batman.

My favorite memory of David?  The day we decided to walk to the comic shop a few miles from his house without telling anyone when we were 12 or so.  To make matters worse, he had just had surgery on his toe, so he was on crutches.  My dad finally found us walking the streets (we made it to the comic shop!) a few hours later and drove us home. 

I love you, David… can’t tell you how much we’ll miss you.

A Marion soldier serving in Afghanistan has died in action, his family confirmed Tuesday.

Staff Sgt. James David Bullard, 28, was serving with the Army National Guard 1st Battalion 263rd Cavalry (Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition) S.C. National Guard Unit B Company based in Dillon, his brother-in-law Harold Caldwell said.

Marion soldier killed in Afghanistan – News – South Carolina Now (SCNow.com)

Blogged with Flock

Embedded Video

Blogged with Flock

I’m seeing a few subtle and not so subtle changes in GMail tonight.

1) Quicker message loading
2) New graphics (the yellow type found in Google Reader) at the top of the screen for loading messages
3) New contacts manager which is very slick and a great upgrade
4) The ability to add an event invitation when composing or replying to messages.

Nothing revolutionary, but pretty neat tweaks given last week’s big inclusion of IMAP in GMail. After a couple of years of stagnation, it’s nice to see a few new additions to the interface.

MORE: Evidently Google is rolling this out to all users (whew, I’m not crazy). Thanks to Andy Beal for the pointer!

My pal Jim Kukral has just launched ScratchBack after a long period of development and testing. I’ve blogged about all of the specifics on ReveNews.

If you have a blog and are looking for a way to make a few extra bucks via a tipjar system (the links are “nofollow” which means Google won’t punish you for selling them), this is a easy way to do so. Plus, Jim has built in a little social flavor since you can encourage people to outbid each other for the top spot via snarky political messages or your momma jokes (ok, not really… but it could be done).

You can see an example (or tip me if you’d like!) over in the sidebar –>

Looking forward to travelling to Bean Town for the Affiliate Summit next summer…

It’s official – Affiliate Summit is going to Boston next summer from August 10-12, 2008.

Affiliate Summit Goes to Boston | Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins

Merlin Mann lays down the smack on SEO.  Good stuff that I can’t agree with more (and a darn fine analogy to Cargo Cults):

Most SEOs are making headphones out of coconuts, hoping it brings traffic, and then wondering why the gods are so angry at them. They never get that the headphones probably aren’t hooked up to anything but their make-believe radio.

Kung Fu Grippe: Cargo Cult

Last Friday during my ConvergeSouth workshop on affiliate marketing for citizen media, I made the comment that it is very hard to make a ton of money with Amazon’s affiliate program. Looks like John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog found the sweet spot for making money with Amazon affiliate links…

Who ever said blogging doesn’t pay? Last Tuesday, Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber — one of Apple’s biggest cheerleaders — asked his readers to pre-order the newest version of Max OS X, “Leopard,” through his Amazon affiliate links. “If you pre-order through these links, Amazon will send me a 7.5 percent kickback,” he wrote. “I.e., you get a good price and free shipping, and I get about $10.”

Like any other type of affiliate program, the trick to Amazon is creating, sustaining and supporting a healthy community of readers and participants via blogging, etc then explaining to your readers what you’re doing with your affiliate links (especially if that community of readers is as passionate about something as the Mac fanboys/girls/squirrels are about Apple.

Silicon Alley Insider: John Gruber’s Leopard Windfall $5800 in 8 Days

Asheville, NC really is the most beautiful place in the world in October. Mountains, trees and lots of leaves…

“It’s a series of TUBESSSSS!”

But seriously, we Americans are a pretty frightening lot indeed:

To summarize: an alarming percentage of respondents are open to brain implants that allow them to access the internet with their minds and that allow their children’s locations to be tracked, they think government censorship of online video content is acceptable, the internet makes them feel closer to God and less close their significant others – but their own identities on the internet are not very important to them. This is frightening stuff…

More than half of respondents believe that internet content, like video, should be controlled in some way by the government. Only 36% said the blocking of internet video would be unconstitutional.

Wow.  I’m as apple pie American as anyone, but with thinking like that, it’s no wonder we elect clowns like Ted Stevens to represent us in Washington.

Somewhere Karl Rove is stroking a bald cat and thinking “exceeelent.”

Poll: US Attitudes About The Internet Are Insane

Um…

Wow, this is definitely not cool:

“I was checking out the natural search results for Affiliate Summit on Google, as I do regularly, and I was surprised at one of the paid ads that was triggered.

There was an ad for the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in Chicago.”

There’s a general rule in the highly competitive affiliate space… don’t piss in the town well.  Looks like SES is definitely doing that by bidding on Affiliate Summit’s name.

That’s sleezy in my book and won’t win SES any fans (or attendees if they realize what’s going on).

Search Engine Strategies of SES

I’m incredibly excited that GMail now has IMAP.

Why? I’ve been a devoted GMail user since ’04 just after the launch and have gigs and gigs of emails and content locked up in GMail (bought extra storage to make due).  While GMail has always allowed for POP downloads, IMAP is different.

Here’s why… with IMAP, you can have a more seamless email experience because IMAP allows you to sync your email where ever you access it from.  So, for example you can interact with your email (read, label, etc) in Thunderbird or Outlook and see the changes in your GMail interface on the web.  POP access doesn’t allow for this. 

So, for those of us who prefer to keep webmail and offline mail nice and synced, this is a huge step forward for GMail.

There are even larger ramifications for people who have iPhones since the mail client there is heavily dependent on IMAP for sanity reasons. 

Thank you, Google.  You made my day.

Official Gmail Blog

According to my new ConvergeSouth pal Wayne Sutton, he’s seeing an IMAP option in his GMail account.

Oh please please please let this be true and spread quickly to my account!

Google’s Gmail has just integrated IMAP. However, its only appearing in a select accounts.

w4 network » Blog Archive » Gmail gets IMAP

Update: Looks like it’s official according to Techmeme! Hooray!

Update 2: I’ve got IMAP ON MY GMAIL!!

Sean Coon has a great post on the ability of laypersons (in this case musicians) to get their messages, voices and music out to an increasingly large number of folks from desirable demographics by leveraging web services and social platforms.

While Sean sticks to the music scene, his post certainly rings true for all of marketing (music is a form of marketing in my book) in general.

Recommended reading (especially if you like catchy diagrams):

What’s becoming obvious is that as more domains decide to make their APIs available in the public arena — to both independent developers and to the very same domains they compete with — our internet rapidly progresses from a linearly connective space to a multi-layered, inter-connected environment — more akin to a network — ripe with exposed hooks to latch onto and build upon.

The most powerful part of this equation? How about the fact that a great number of internet services — across numerous industries — have evolved to a point where Joe Layman can now leverage our internet’s many to many power of connectivity and discovery, yet never have to bust out one line of code in the process of doing so.

the dotmatrix project

Yahoo’s redirection of links and its “Paid Inclusion” platform is nothing new or newsworthy. However, it’s always a good thing to shine a light on the process of how affiliate links are treated by the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask) in order to understand where the affiliate industry stands in its attempt to gain mainstream understanding.

Clearly, we in the affiliate marketing industry need to do more in the way of outreach and general education initiatives to let companies and individuals understand how the industry works and how concepts like affiliate links should interact with search engines.

In other words, not much new here.

(Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for the link):

If you search on Yahoo, all of their organic results (not the sponsored links) are redirected through http://rds.yahoo.com. This is nothing new and they have been doing this for quite some time to record click metrics.

However, sometimes Yahoo gets sneaky and slips some affiliate links in those redirects. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a close look at the results for “cheap flights:”

Yahoo Is Dropping Affiliate Cookies

After having played around with my first Nokia device (the Nokia N800) for about a month now, I can say that Nokia makes some darn snappy gadgets. 

The N95 looks like the real JesusPhone to me, and the thought of bundling it as a utilitarian device for the purpose of mobile journalism opens all sorts of future doors…

The rise of the cameraphone has certainly changed the face of journalism, and old-guard wire service Reuters isn’t about to get passed by — the company has entered into a long-term partnership with Nokia to develop new mobile reporting technologies, and the two companies have recently completed trials of an N95-based “Mobile Journalism Tookit” that takes moblogging to a whole new level.

Engadget

I’ve been reworking to “rebrand” this site a bit as my homebase since I’m so scattered across the various social networks and places like ReveNews.

So, I wanted to give this place a little personality and spruce it up with a new look and feel.  I’m a big fan of white space in design as you can probably tell.

Let me know if you see any bugs or have any problems!

Sam Harrelson

Dave Winer (early blogging, podcasting, syndication pioneer and all around scripting god) has put together a new disruptive (and better in my opinion) means of reading the New York Times.

Great stuff…

NY Times outline

NY Times outline

There is an interesting piece in the NY Times today on the problem of web analytics.  Briefly, the web might allow for radical transparency of authorial intention, statistical reports and click counting… but when you try to hammer down the attention value of individuals using or viewing web pages, it gets very murky.

This won’t get better until advertisers realize that performance is a much more accurate thing to measure than interaction or eyeball interaction.

But far from solving the squishy-numbers problem, the Internet seems to have added more confusion. Many advertisers pay Web publishers each time their ad gets an impression, meaning that it is viewed by a reader, but each company uses its own methodology to count impressions.

“One of them can be right, or the other one is right, but they can’t all be right,” said Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting System. “It’s interesting that people keep talking about it as much more accountable than other media, but we’re not finding that to be the case yet because there’s no agreement on metrics or accounting methods.”

How Many Site Hits? Depends Who’s Counting – New York Times

http://research.uchicago.edu/highlights/resources/media/roth_512k.mov

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is coming to completion (if that’s possible for a dictionary of this scope!) after 80 years of hard work:

Martha Roth, Ph.D., Professor of Assyriology, discusses the final volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, a comprehensive lexicon of ancient Akkadian dialects 86 years in the making. Roth has served as Editor-in-Charge of the project for the past 11 years.

The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary: The Final Chapter

Um… yes.

I was fortunate enough to take a couple of courses on Shakespeare from the great Dr. John Cobb at Wofford College.  Prof Cobb was beyond phenomenal and his presentation of Shakespeare changed my life and helped me understand the power of word, language and literature.

Evidently that’s not the case for almost half of NC college students (unfortunately):

According to a study by The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy study, 48 percent of North Carolina colleges and universities do not require English majors to take a Shakespeare class to graduate. The center is a Raleigh-based nonprofit.

CITIZEN-TIMES.com: Schools mixed on requiring Shakespeare-devoted classes

DSCN2211 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

ConvergeSouth is a tremendous conference held in Greensboro, NC that you should definitely attend next year.  It’s hard to classify since there is a mix of students, middle age folks, bloggers, old folks, whites, blacks, hispanics, asians, social progressives, tech geeks and people who are dedicated to the causes of good barbeque and citizen journalism (or both).

I led a workshop on “affiliate marketing and web.20 convergence” at the conference and had a full room and tons of questions and insights from the attendees.  I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but by the end, I was wishing that we had two hours to converse rather than the allotted 1 hour.  I guess that’s the sign of a good crowd and conference, though.

There’s a film festival tonight and I’m sad that I won’t be able to make it.  However, I wish my new friends Farrah and Mitchell Davis good luck as they present a film tonight.  It was great to also meet people like Francis Shepherd and gain a few new friends on Twitter and Facebook (Jason Calacanis led a great workshop on the social force that are platforms like Twitter and I think he made a few new converts).

I’d also like to thank Sue and the great folks at ConvergeSouth, North Carolina A&T and the City of Greensboro for having the guts and vision to put on such an ambitious and diverse conference.

I’m presenting a workshop that’s sort of a “how to” on affiliate marketing and “web2.0” (blogs, video, etc).

You can see the slides from the presentation here:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ahndmmnhz3b_2475n7xvp

I’ve been loving Tumblr since the early part of this year. In a nutshell, it’s a tumblelog service which allows you to aggregate feeds from various parts of your online existence (like Flickr, blogs, YouTube, Digg, etc).

You can see my Tumblr page at http://www.samharrelson.net

We’ll see what the new Tumblr has in store soon it seems!

11-1-07 « Davidville

I was amazed at the last Buncombe County Democrats convention that there was such a strong presence of delegates who wanted to pass a measure stating that the NC State Gov’t should not require vaccinations of children based on fears of heavy metal poisoning, autism, etc. 

I’ve followed some of Robert Kennedy Jr’s work in this area, but I have to tell you that I’m not convinced.  Anna (who is a physician) and I have had many conversations about childhood vaccinations, especially since the birth of Mary Hudson.  Sure there is some corruption by the big pharma companies, but in general, I’d rather have MH protected from such preventable things as the whopping cough (which seems to be prevalent here in Asheville b/c of the number of children that aren’t vaccinated by choice). 

Here’s a fun riff on the subject:

On the other hand, pharma-funded think tank wingnuts say the real problem is baseless lawsuits by money-grubbing autistic kids. Either way, you just know the issue is screwed up when Mississippi and West Virginia come off sounding like the reasonable ones.

Crazy Hippies Pose As Jesusfreaks To Avoid Vaccinating Their Kids — Daddy Types

JANES (Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society) is online at the Jewish Theological Seminary!  Lots of fun Assyriology and Hebrew Bible material to dig through!

Thanks to PaleoJudaica for the tip.

JANES, the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society, was founded in 1968 at Columbia University, and has been housed at the Jewish Theological Seminary since 1982. Over these approximately forty years 30 volumes have been published under the editorship of JTS professors Ed Greenstein and David Marcus.

Articles have been written on all aspects of the Bible and Ancient Near East covering areas such as art history, archaeology, anthropology, language, linguistics, philology, and religion. There are articles on Assyriology, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hittite, and all areas of Hebrew and Aramaic and on almost every book of the Bible.

JANES at the JTS

Since Google owns my email, feed reading, docs&spreadsheets, web history, attention data, calendaring, etc I could proclaim them as a deity as well (thanks to Larry McGehee for the link):

The Church of Google – Googlism – Proof Google is God!
We at the Church of Google believe the search engine Google is the closest humankind has ever come to directly experiencing an actual God (as typically defined). We believe there is much more evidence in favour of Google’s divinity than there is for the divinity of other more traditional gods.

» The Church of Google