Convicted Spammer, escapes from prison, kills his family, then kills himself.

This story is pretty darn horrible, and pretty unbelievable.

Edward Davidson is known as the “Spam King” he was sentenced to 21 months in jail and ordered to pay $714,139 to the IRS for spamming and tax evasion.

Apparently his wife helped him escape from prison. Once escaped he took a gun and shot her, their 3 year old daughter, a teenage girl, and finally himself.

I personally can’t see what was so bad, 21 months is hardly a jail sentence, I mean if Martha Stewart can do hard time…Maybe the fine was too much? Could’nt he just wait till he got out of prison, moved to a country that allows spamming, and made enough to pay off his debts and live peaceably?

Funny enough, he and his family just drove off from a minimum security prison – it don’t get any more ‘minimum security’ than that.

He went for some cash and a change of clothes and that’s when he turned the gun on the teenage girl, his wife, three year old, and finally himself.

A baby was found in the car seat unharmed. At least that much of it was a blessing.

[MSNBC via Geekologie via gizmodo]

Image by BigBlue via Flickr

So much to do…So little time. How do we overcome the time trap?

I don’t know about you, but this trap has plagued me from the get-go. Time management is a very important part of being successful online. Without proper time management skills you’re setting yourself up for failure.

With any home-business the hardest part of staying on track, and making money is keeping focused. With blogging this is intensified by a factor of 32,548 give or take, because you have the biggest distraction known to man right at your fingertips – the world wide web. Learning time management skills is a must, if we are to succeed at becoming a professional blogger.

Before we discuss ways to combat time management pressures, lets discuss the cause of the problem.

First off we have life distractions such as: Baby, Dogs, Hunger, Potty, Phone, Tv, Radio, etc…

Second we have online distractions such as: Twitter(BIG ONE!), facebook, myspace, google, blog feeds, email, 25,352,520 different things to do online, and then some….

With all of these distractions it’s becoming easier and easier to lose track of time. It’s now more important than ever to take control of your day, and learn time management skills.

I don’t know about you, but I have 200 TV channels. I find it very hard to pick one that I want to watch there’s just too many choices. Same goes for the internet, first you browse, then you find something else to browse, and it keeps going until you’ve spent an entire 8 hour day browsing sites, and not working.

I’ve done this many times myself. Sometimes we like to see what someone else is doing to be successful, and that leads us to other successful blogs, and all the while those successful bloggers are writing new posts, which draw you back, and you spend all your time reading, and no time writing.

Well today we’re going to take a stand against distractions. I want you to say aloud: No More Distractions! I’m going to Blog like a pro!

Go on – Say it aloud. Make it your mantra!

No More Distractions! I’m going to Blog like a pro!

Now for the meat and potatoes…mmm potatoes (stupid low carb diet, lol)…thus we see how easily I am distracted. LOL!

Step 1 – Focus on the tasks that are the most important.

In order to better manage your time – you need to make a schedule and commit yourself to sticking to it. The easiest way to do this is to write down all the important tasks you have as a blogger.

For me my important daily tasks are:

• Check Email – No more than 3 times per day.
• Check and star items in feed reader for the day. I come back to these items when I am having bloggers block, to gather ideas for new blog posts.
• Check for updates / comments / messages on twitter, facebook, friendfeed, and my blog.
• Stumble 15 blog posts – I usually choose the best posts from my feedreader.
• Write a daily pillar article. This is a hard one, because somedays I just don’t have a pillar article in me – but I try hard, and if I don’t make a pillar article I at least make a really decent post that will draw in a little traffic from my network.
• 30 Minute Lunch & 30 Minute Walk.
• Add my daily limit of friends on facebook.
• Add friends on Twitter. Adding friends is a good way to get new followers, it’s the same method used by Robert Scoble,
  

  Image via Wikipedia

  and Jason Calacanis

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  It does work – just don’t spam your followers.

• Add friends on friendfeed. Friendfeed is a great way to share the conversations that you have online.
• Write 2 mini-posts. These are decent blog posts but easier to write than a full out pillar article. The more blog posts that you have, the more google juice your blog will carry – just don’t publish crap. Make sure your blog posts have a point. I was actually surprised by ProBlogger Darren Rowse last week when he posted this crap post most likely with the intent of getting iphone traffic from google. It’s not what I’ve come to expect from ProBlogger.net; In fact it would’ve fit much better on twitter or plurk.
• Comment on 15 Blog Posts. I use comment hut to make this a lot easier – it searches for blog posts that are relevant to the keyword you’re looking to target.
• 15 Minute Snack Break.
• Post 5 posts on 5 of the top forums related to my blog. That’s 5 posts per forum, or 25 total posts.
• Record a podcast / video.
• Other tasks as they come up…

Now that I have my tasks labeled, I need to prioritize which ones are most important, and which ones are secondary tasks.

My most important tasks are (IN order of importance):

1. Write 1 Pillar Article per day.
2. Write at least 2 small but informative posts.
3. Record podcast / video and submit it to the appropriate directories.
4. Comment on 15 Blog Posts.
5. Add friends on facebook / twitter / friendfeed.
6. Stumble 15 Blog Posts from my feed reader.
7. Check for updates / comments / messages on blog, email, and social networks.
8. Submit 25 posts to forums online.
9. Research new ways to brand my blog / business online.
10. Devote time to web design if needed.

Next you will need to decide how much of each work-day you will be spending on each task. Example: I spend 1.5 hours on my pillar article, if I go past the alotted time I continue writing the post tomorrow.

Which brings me to another bullet point: Know when to quit. In other words know when you’re done with a task for the day, it’s okay if you don’t finish the task at hand. It’s better that you stick to your schedule, and finish the post tomorrow than it is to go over schedule and get behind schedule.

Keeping your tasks and time in order is also a very good stress reliever. When you know what you’re doing and have a plan, it essentially makes it a lot easier to accomplish your goals.

Step 2 – Write down the tasks and time devoted to them.

It is very important when developing a time management plan to write down your tasks, when you’re going to do them, and how much time you’re going to give yourself for doing each task.

Outlook has a good task manager / calendar that you can use, and there are also many great software programs available out there, my favorite is Essential PIM.

Writing down tasks also increases productivity by decreasing thought-load in relation to task management. For example, say you finish one task, now it’s time to figure out what else to do, in this ‘limbo’ between one task and the next you have a few options.

First you can just choose an activity at random, which does require a little brainstorming and may waist maybe 5 minutes a day, do this 10 times a day and you’re looking at at a waist of 50 minutes. Just from the process of deciding what to do next.

Let’s go one step further with this – 50 minutes waisted per day equals 4.1 hours in a 5 day work week, or 216 hours a year. That’s 5 work weeks. Imagine having an extra 5 week vacation every year. If you were working for someone else you’d be losing them about $2,160 per year if you only earned $10 an hour.

But the fact is as a blogger you’re working for yourself, each minute waisted is a minute you cannot get back. Each minute we spend waisting time is time that has been thrown away. Life is precious, and waisting time is losing out on precious moments you could spend with those that matter most in your life. Each minute for a blogger is priceless – which is why it is imperative that we take actions to increase our time management skills today. Don’t wait till some future day, take action now.

Back to choosing an activity at random – if you would’ve written down your tasks by priority, and scheduled them out you would’ve not only saved the frustration of thinking ‘what’s next’, but you would save 216 hours of lost time. Over a life time you will have reclaimed a whopping 8,640 working hours. Over 4 years worth. I know many on their deathbed who’d give the world for 4 more years, yet we frivolously just throw out time away.

Also when we automagically know “what’s next?”, we can smoothly start our next task easier and more efficiently and are more likely to finish that task, because we didn’t have to waist time thinking about it.

Step 3 – Stay Committed to your Schedule.

In order to stay on track you will need to stick to your schedule, it’s not always going to be easy, and if you find after a week that there are certain high priority tasks not getting done, don’t be afraid to rearrange your schedule. You can add more time or take away time from one task and apply it to another, just as long as you’re only doing what’s written down.

A great way to stay committed is to make it a game. Try to see how many tasks on your list you can get 100% completed in a given week. As you accomplish more and more you will feel much better about your online business, and you’ll also start seeing a lot of results that will keep you motivated for the long haul.

Part of staying committed is to facilitate a conversation with your family and friends about what you’re doing, you can even blog about it – many of these tips are things that I’ve come across and found myself as I’ve been trying to get my time in order.

By bringing your loved ones on board, they will be able to support you better, either emotionally or by just not distracting you during your scheduled work hours. Also by staying committed to your schedule you will be taking the first step towards running a successful business. Success is about equal consistent effort on a regular basis.

When your spouse / loved ones know your schedule they may even help keep you motivated by keeping you accountable, I know my wife does. With her help, I’ve become much better at time management.

Step 4 – Keep a small journal of your successes and failures in Time Management.

I can go on and on about ways to do this or that, but sometimes it does come down to the fact that each of us is different.

Everyone has their own way of doing certain things. Keeping a journal of your successes and failures with time management will help you improve your own time management plan. Some things may work for you, some may not.

A journal may also give you new ideas on how to improve your time management. Just don’t spend all your time planning your time management plan and no time on following it.

Step 5 – If there’s an easier way – do it!

Each day we do many tasks over and over. My favorite part of successful time management is coming up with quicker ways to do everyday tasks.

For example, each day when I turn on my computer I usually load about 5-10 different tabs in firefox. To make this easier, I created a bookmark group for when I ’startup firefox’. I automatically load Gmail, Twitter, Plurk, My Blog, My Blog Admin, My Feed Reader, Google Adsense, Facebook, etc…

I found this list on ZenHabits it’s a huge list of articles just on increasing productivity it’s definitely a great place to start when trying to manage your time.  Here’s the meat and potatoes from the post:

• Lifehacker: Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters
• Lifehack.org: Top 10 Firefox Extensions to Improve Your Productivity.
• 43 Folders: Merlin’s top 5 super-obvious, “no-duh” ways to immediately improve your life.
• Dumb Little Man: Productivity Ninja: 101 Ways to Rock the Keyboard.
• LifeDev.net: 10 Ways History’s Finest Kept Their Focus at Work.
• FreelanceSwitch: 46 Must-Read Productivity Tips for Freelancers.
• Life Clever: 5 simple steps to greater productivity.
• Wise Bread: 5 Efficient Ways To Boost Productivity.
• Scott H. Young: Twenty Unique Ways to Use the 80/20 Rule Today.
• Cranking Widgets: 6 Ways to Limit Interruptions at Work (That You Can Use Right Now).
• Pick the Brain: 7 Ways to Grow the Action Habit.
• Zen Habits: Top 10 Productivity Hacks.
• Life Optimizer: Top 10 Ways NOT to Become a Productivity Ninja.
• HD BizBlog: 3 Essential Tools for Productivity.
• Matthew Cornell: 10 GTD “holes” (and how to plug them).
• Ian’s Messy Desk: 10 Resources to Help Overcome Procrastination.
• Instigator Blog: Over 100 Great Productivity Tips.
• Stephen Aitchison: 8 Ways to get out of the rut.
• Organize IT: The Top 10 GTD & Productivity Sites/Blogs.
• Dumb Little Man: The 20 Biggest Online Time Wasters, and 6 Strategies for Beating Them.

GTD is a term you might see used a lot in terms of time management – it means ‘Get Things Done’ and is an action management method devised by David Allen.

The key is: Find the easiest fastest way to accomplish the most tasks. A couple tips to accomplish this includes:

• Learn to use firefox addons, if you haven’t already – and use them – there are many that make life a lot simpler.
• Learn to use a feed reader, again this is also crucial to succeeding online. My favorite is google reader, but there are many other good feed readers, find the one that works best for you.
• Subscribe to the blogs that you visit most often – don’t waste the time visiting their site – view their newest posts in your reader, this saves a lot of time. I also like to star the headlines of articles that look interesting, and ignore the rest, then I come back and read the starred articles when I’m having writers block. You can subscribe to this blog here.
• etc….

To recap the five biggest productivity and time management steps that I can offer are:

1. Focus on the tasks that are most important.
2. Write down the tasks and the time allotted for the tasks.
3. Stay Committed to your Schedule.
4. Keep a journal of your time management experiences.
5. If there’s an easier way – do it! Find ways to increase your productivity.

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• Tim Ferriss (4hr Work Week): Hype or Notable?
• Are Pro Bloggers Going Extinct Soon?
• Blogging Productivity Tip: Clear the Rubbish
• The Future of Blogging Revealed
• Blogs are so over, Wired magazine says

Tonight, I  asked this question: “How many of you face time management issues & how do you personally manage to overcome these issues?”.

I sent it out via ping.fm to all my twitter like services, and got some really good feedback – if you’d like to follow this conversation, please head over to the friendfeed post where a lot of comments have been made.

While you’re at friendfeed, don’t forget to add me as a friend!

You can also leave comments on this post, about what you do to better manage your time online. I look forward to delving deeper into this topic over the coming week.

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You know that stupid news, that’s sooo stupid, it can’t be made up?

This issue of stupid news is brought to you by McDonalds – Have it your Way..

Or is that Burger King?

Apparently McDonalds teamed up with myspace to come up with a new jingle, via some sort of social network contest. Lets call it Mc-Idol. It’s basically to come up with a jingle to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Big Mac(As if 5 Billion heart-attacks are something to celebrate.)

The original jingle was created in 1974(you know: two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, pickle, 500 grams of fat, etc… notice sarcasm – please or I’ll shoot you.);

Over 1000 users submitted videos and audio submissions, well the winner’s song will become the new official Big Mac jingle, and be featured on upcoming McDonald’s commercials, and yada yada yada.

The 4th finalist in the Big Mac Chant contest(the guy with the white tshirt and baseball cap); is none other than 29 year old, Tamien Bain, who actually held up a McDonald’s at gun point when he was 14 years old. Tamien Bain was convicted as an adult and served 12 years in prison for the deed.

The finalists were picked by a panel of judges, and apparently no background checks were done, or as techcrunch suggests perhaps they did a background check, and this is just a publicity stunt. Reportedly, Tamien Bain has hired a PR firm and is making the most from the publicity as he can.

Actually, it does seem that he may have turned his life around, only time can tell of course, and name one person who hasn’t done something stupid when they were 14, maybe not robbing a McDonald’s but still..Here’s what his profile says:

BAiNG “The Locksmith”, a top up and coming Miami rapper who went to prison at the age of 14 and did 12 years for robbing a McDonalds, now works with West Palm Beach State representative Maria Sachs on a project called “REAL TALK” which features him visiting juvenile detention centers to speak to the youth about overcoming negativity. BAiNG LOVES THE BIG MAC!! In the video he rides day and night through the drive through to get his favorite sandwich! He starts the song by saying: “see this is the chant”(the big mac chant), “and im just giving back” (making up for his error at the age of 12), “real talk though…” (because of the real talk project). HOPE YOU ENJOY IT!

Now watch the video for yourself – it’s actually really good at least in my opinion – I really do hope he does win – it’ll keep him from robbing another McDonald’s right? LOL.

Big Mac Chant

Related articles by Zemanta

• Finalist In McDonalds/MySpace Jingle Contest Is Former McDonalds Armed Robber
• Man who robbed McDonald’s to win McDonald’s jingle contest?
• Advertising: Remember ‘2 All-Beef Patties?’ McDonald’s Hopes You Do
• McDonald’s Robber Among Finalists For New Jingle

TabmixPlus and Firefox 3.01

I don’t know about you, but my favorite firefox plugin for the ages has been TabMixPlus. Recently(past 24 hours) firefox released a new update, and upon loading it said that the TabmixPlus addon will no longer work with Firefox 3.01.

I quickly went to google to find me a solution. I found the solution over at the plugin’s forum, however I thought I’d repost it here to make it easy for you to fix it.

There’s actually two ways you can fix it. First off you can just install my updated program – if you trust me, I’m in no way affiliated with the plug-in makers, and I make absolutely no claims here, but it worked for me, or you can follow my steps to modify the plugin yourself.

To download my updated version click here.

And here are the steps for doing it yourself. Please note you will need winrar to perform this upgrade.

1. Download the original plugin – save it to your desktop.
2. Right Click on the file. Choose open with if available, or just ‘open’, and open it with WinRar.
3. Drag the ‘install.rdf’ to the desktop, right click on it, and choose open with notepad, textpad, or any text editor that you prefer.
4. Next you’re going to want to find the line that says: em:maxVersion=”3.0″
5. Change the 3.0 to a higher number, 4.0 will work until firefox 4.0 comes out, or you could just change it to 3.01 if you prefer.
   
6. Save the ‘install.rdf’ file. Drag it back into the winrar window overwriting the existing file.
7. Close the winrar window. Drag the xpi file into the firefox window, install it and enjoy!

Please leave a comment if this helped, if it didn’t help – also let me know and I will try to find another fix for ya.

Corporate Blog, or Corporate Blog Network?

A corporate blog, is of course a wonderful way to build seo, and recognition of your company. Most corporate blogs only have a few writers, and blog posts are often few and far between.

Enter the corporate blog network.

What if you had everyone in your company write 1 blog post daily? Say your company is a call center and you have 1000 employees. You give each employee who wants to blog, 45 minutes to do their research and blog. You could even do this just as a test project and only accept a certain number of applicants.

One good thing would be to train them on blogging. Blogging is NOT just about writing blog posts. It is about socializing and bringing a conversation to the table. To be successful at this, you would need to hold regular training and teach them how to use conversational marketing techniches and build relationships.

You’re best bloggers are a goldmine, and if you can afford to, it would be well worth it to make them full-time bloggers, give them weekly requirements, make sure they’re in the know with company happenings, and they could also be the managers of the lesser bloggers.

You can manage the tone of the blog, by making sure that each blog post is edited first for professionalism, language, and grammer. If someone isn’t cutting it, whether they’re not proofreading or using the best language skills, you can drop them from the program and add new bloggers.

If you’re a company that sells products you could have each blogger blog about certain makes / models, give reviews, etc.. The key here is building keywords. You want as many related and relevant keywords pointing from google to your website as possible.

6 Conversation Marketing Tactics to get you Started!

1. Link out to other’s blog posts as often as possible.

2. Comment on related blog posts EVERY time you have an a+ article. An a+ article is a top notch article that you’re certain will bring value to your site. Usually it’s lengthy and in-depth. When you comment, instead of using your website address, use the address directly for that blog post.

3. All bloggers working for the corporate site should have full-profiles on as many social networks / social media sites as possible, and they should have as many contacts as they can add without distracting them from their writing. The top three networks to focus on, are facebook, linkedin, and myspace.

4. Use video. Social media is huge right now, and getting a video on youtube can bring huge results – especially if it’s humorous. You may also have your corporate staff do interviews with bloggers.

There are many bloggers who would love to interview a CEO of any big company – all you need to do is ask. Also note – When submitting videos, don’t just limit them to youtube, submit them to all the big video sites.

5. Along with conversational marketing should be an emphasis to get people to subscribe to a newsletter AND to your blog feed.

6. Use Twitter. Twitter is huge right now, and there are plugins that will automatically post blog updates to a twitter account. There are many plugins and tools for twitter. You should use twitter, and so should all the corporate bloggers. Twitter is a great place to get feedback, and build relationships. There are also some clones, and similar sites, some good ones include: friendfeed and plurk.

Are you Using Social Bookmarks like a Pro?

When you add a social bookmark link, whether it’s one of your own or not, you are helping other people sort the web, so to speak.

By tagging each link that you submit, others looking for the same material are able to find only the best information on a given topic.

By building a network of friends, and working to expand your network as far as you can, you can in turn build your brand recognition, and your website’s traffic as well.

If you have really good content to share, or really targeted content, it will get shared between many different users. Don’t ever discount Social Bookmarking – it does work.

Now that you know what social bookmark links are – are you using them?

You should have a script or program setup where every page that you want traffic to is easily bookmarkable.

The best way to do this is add a script or plugin (if you’re using wordpress or another such blog platform). You can use third-party widgets two good ones are: AddThis and Sharethis

You could lose out on a huge amount of traffic and clicks to your website if you’re not using bookmark icons on every important page. Here’s a good video overview to make social bookmarking even more clear:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English:

Social Bookmark Strategy: Diversify.

When you do decide to add social bookmarking links to your blog or website, you absolutely must go big – add at least 10-20 of the most popular sites. The major ones include digg, stumbleupon, reddit, mixx, delicious.

You absolutely must build networks of contacts on these social bookmarking and news networks, the more the merrier because they will be able to see the links that you bookmark, and they will share them and it will make for something pretty darn exciting – if a web page goes viral on a social bookmark site it can bring as many as 50,000 hits over a 1 week period.

It seems that wordpress has released their newest update – wordpress 2.6.

So far I’ve upgraded to wordpress 2.6, without any hitches, most of my plugins seem to work.

Here’s a list of new Wordpress 2.6 features from the official wordpress blog:

• Version/revision saves a copy of a post every time you edit it, allows you to view (not edit) each of those copies (revisions), Shows forward (in time) diffs between any two revisions.
• Display captions of images alongside them in posts and pages.
• Add paging of Themes in Design panel
• Word Count displayed when writing and editing posts and pages
• Press This bookmarklet
• Add sorting to gallery
• Export/import post excerpts
• Theme Previewer
• Check (assigned) Categories at top Category box in Write/Manage Post
• Show when a term is both a tag and a category
• Wider Profile fields
• TinyMCE 3.1 [Maybe the horizontal rule issue is fixed]
• Two categories can have sub-categories with the same name

Wordpress 2.6 Poll:

Have you upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 yet? If not are you planning to? If so, when?

Image via Wikipedia

Have you tried out the Google Nemesis program?

If you sign up with Google Nemesis, and comment on this blog post, you’ll get FREE web hosting for 1 year, and a free domain name. Not to mention the fact that you’ll be entered into a great contest to win a Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Iphone, or equivalent prize.

Not to mention the fact that many people are using Chris X’s brilliant tactics and software in Google Nemesis to make thousands daily(yes daily, not monthly).

Read my complete review on Google Nemesis.

Image via Wikipedia

This movie was totally amazing. The story line was perhaps a bit unbelievable, but I believe the movie was targetted at youngsters, so the unbelievability is ok. What stands out of course is the 3-d effects. You have yo-yo’s in your face, objects flying all over the place, at one point a prehistoric pirrahna attacks, and I just about lost it.

The movie follows a geologist (Trevor, played by Brenden Frasier) and his nephew who’s visiting. They find his brother Max’s copy of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, inside they find a ton of notations, deciding that perhaps there is more to the story than meets the eye, they end up in Iceland to meet with a contact that was  listed in the book.

Upon arrival they find out that Max’s friend was dead, and her daughter calls him a “Verne-ian”, or a believer that Jules Vernes‘ novels were not works of fiction.

She’s a mountain guide and they elicit her services to go up on the mountain where they believe Max may have disappeared at. The rest you can probably guess…

Journey to the Center of the Earth 3d was a lot of fun, I mostly loved the 3d aspect. It was very trippy and freaky, and was like a rollercoaster ride. I don’t know if I’d watch the movie again on dvd or anything but in the theater with 3d glasses it’s definitely a good time!

Related articles:

• Brendan Fraser Defies You To Not Have A Good Time At ‘Journey’
• Journey to the Center of the Earth
• EXCLUSIVE: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D’ Poster Premiere!
• Weekend Movie Forecast: Hellboy 2 or 3D Brendan Fraser
• Review: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’ Pops in 3-D
• Film reviews: Mamma Mia! and Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Film review: Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D
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Jason Calacanis, one of the most influential bloggers on the scene right now, founder of Mahalo, exploiter of twitter and facebook, has announced he is going to quit blogging. What has the world come to? Eh, maybe it’s for the better.

I’m waiting to see a social network popup just around ‘betting’ whether or not he will come back to blogging. After-all I’ve quit blogging for a bit usually during the summer slow-down, but I always come back. For a true blogger, it’s almost an addiction, I can’t see how one can claim to completely give it up..but we will see.

After all Jason is known for link-bait scams, perhaps this is another one of his publicity stunts.

My personal message to Jason Calacanis: If this truly is the end for you, I tease, but I hardly know you, I regret not having the opportunity to get to know you better, or form any kind of relationship. I do however wish you the best of luck in any endeavor that you go to from here. Have a happy retirement!

Related articles:

• Life without JC
• Jason Nation leads to resignation [Jason Calacanis]
• Official announcement regarding my retirement from blogging.
• Jason Calacanis picks fight in Palo Alto with missing Wikipedia founder [Jimmy Wales]
• From the Pipeline – 7.11.08

Friendfeed driving you nuts!?

Friendfeed is interesting, I’ve logged in a bit – but I find that it’s extremely hard to keep up with everything going on.

Yes it’s nice to have all this info in one place, after all it is the information age, but sometimes it just bombards us and we can’t make heads or tails.

Enter Moopz. Moops aggregates friendfeed conversations and groups them into relevant categories, it then features conversations which include links to the same “interesting story”.

Basically Moopz claims to weed out pointless banter that doesn’t link to anything exciting. On top of that Moopz tries to pull only the best information possible from each story to give readers a preview, so they can decide for themselves if they want to read more, or move on to the next.

Each story is tagged with related keywords, so you can search for stories quickly and efficiently by tag cloud or keyword.

Finally, you can also browse the “popular” category, for the most active conversations in the past 24 hours.

Moopz may be the answer to ending the clutter on friendfeed, only time will tell.

Have you had experience with Moopz? Please share your stories, ideas, and thoughts on this social network tool.

Related articles:

• Get A Less Noisy FriendFeed With Moopz
• Moopz.com – Reduce Noisy FriendFeeds

Alright – I’m a big fan of Ghost Hunters – the show on Scifi every wednesday evening. I like it mostly because they have real encounters even though they are trying their hardest to debunk / disprove that anything paranormal exists.

Being a fan, I have to admit I rushed out and bought a digital recorder to do my own EVPs.

So far I haven’t had much success. I’m hoping to get a night vision camera, and an emf detector to help find the ghosts.

Maybe I’m crazy – but this just sounds like fun. I must say though I did go to a supposedly haunted location, I wasn’t alone – but having not seen a ghost personally yet – I’m afraid what might happen when I do. I can be a bit of a scaredy cat from time to time…

My question is – how many ghost hunter fans – have actually gone out and bought any kind of equipment – and / or gone ghost hunting themeselve.

If you have gone Ghost Hunting let me know if you’ve had any kind of success.  I’m quite interested in this field, not necessarily as a profession, but as a hobbyiest.

Here are some related articles:

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• Ghostbusters come to Iowa
• Ghost Hunting Groups Becoming Popular
• What to do if your house has ghosts
• Paranormal encounters stirred ‘Ghost Hunters’ duo
• Got Ghosts? Meet the Paranormal Plumbers
• Got ghosts?

Geeks, tired of waiting for the flying saucers to come and abduct them, have decided to build their own working version.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Roy, form the University of Florida, has submitted a patent for a viable flying saucer. The craft can hover, and take off vertically.

The government has been toying with the idea of circular aircraft since the 60s.

The WEAV(Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle), only measures 6 inches across, obviously designed for mice and other small creatures, is scalable and could be modified for larger crews.

Without getting too technical, the WEAV uses a process called magnetohydrodynamics to create lift. You can read more about the technology from the source: [WEAV via gizmag]

Everyone is feeling the crunch with the rise in gas prices. Higher gas prices not only affect our pockets but that of companies. Higher gas prices leads to higher costs for all goods that you purchase. It leads to higher costs for air travel as well. It is just one factor in our great economic struggle that is building.

On top of the high gas prices is the mass exodus of American jobs. As many businesses close their doors and even Starbucks is closing 600 stores, we will see a yearly job loss perhaps as high 1 million jobs by the end of 2008.

That’s 1 million new people living on welfare, or food stamps, or collecting unemployment. That’s 1 million people potentially homeless if things don’t change…

But there is a shining sun behind every storm cloud, and here’s an opportunity that I’m taking to make some lemonade from the lemons, so to speak.

First off I’m going to give ways to save on gas, as I’m sure we all could benefit from these:

1. Take walks to save gas. Not only will you be burning less gas, but you will start burning more calories, and who can’t afford a little less gut these days?
2. Buy / Ride a bicycle instead. Heck even a horse and buggy would be better and more cost effective if you can afford one, and it’s of course legal in your area to ride one. Of course an added benefit of riding a bike is it helps the environment and helps your waistline.
3. Carpool if you can. This is an obvious way. If two people are going to the same place it just makes sense that they share the trip.
4. Plan each trip that you take. Knowing exactly where you’re going and having a plan, will help you to not get lost, or distracted. If you have a goal of where you’re going, you won’t spend extra gas / time driving around looking for what you need or want to do.
5. Learn fuel-efficient driving. Experts relate that it’s possible to save as much as 25-30% off your fuel if you make a few simple changes to your driving. These include:
   • Turning off the engine for stops over 10 seconds long – Idling is never good for your car or gas mileage – and idling to warm up your car is bad read more.
   • Keep a moderate speed. Don’t drive above 60mph, and be use your cruise control to maintain a consistent speed.
   • Make sure tires are properly inflated.
   • If driving a car with a manual transmission, be sure to drive in the correct gear for your situation.
   • Know when to use the A/C and when to turn it off and roll down the windows. A good rule of thumb is when it’s hot use your windows for city miles, and roll them up and turn on the A/C for highway miles. When driving higher speeds having the window down creates drag, but when driving slower having the A/C on can lower your gas mileage.
   • Drive smoothly, avoid rapid acceleration and hard braking. Try to maintain a steady speed. If you can coast down hills and try to keep your foot off the break as much as possible.
6. Buy tires with lower rolling resistence. Less friction means less wasted energy means more money saved.
7. Don’t buy premium gas unless you absolutely have to. If you’re car is designed to run on regular, premium won’t help it, and will just eat up your money.
8. Buy a fuel efficient car. Of course most of us can’t afford a new car right now with the economy the way it is – but buying a fuel efficient car or hybrid will save you gas in the long run. If you’re debating a vehicle purchase anyways, you might as well buy one that will save you hundred a year in gas. When gas hits $7 per gallon in 2010 (just 2 years), you will be glad you bought that hybrid.
9. Get cash-back on your gas purchases. Last but not least, try getting a credit card that pays cash-back on gas purchases, a good one to get is the Discover more card. You’ll receive around 5% back for gas purchases. Apply for the Discover® More Card
   

Alrighty I’ve talked long and hard now about how to save money on gas, now let me tell you why I believe that the hike in gas prices may be a blessing in disguise. Here are ___ reasons:

1. It gets gas guzzlers off the road. Due to the high gas prices many people are trading their SUVs and Hummers for smaller more efficient cars.
2. Of course with less traffic, means better environment. There’s less emissions, and so at least the environment may stand a chance of healing itself.
3. New green technologies are on the rise. With people struggling to pay for gas, green technology companies are growing in leaps and bounds. The technological advances that the higher gas prices have brought is extraordinary to say the least.
4. High gas will help stamp out Obesity. How? People who can’t afford to drive will walk more, take bikes, or take public transportation – but even with public transportation you still end up walking more than if you were driving yourself around.
5. People are now taking closer look at finances. People are in debt over their heads, they’re losing their cars and houses at record rates. With the rise in gas prices people are watching every little penny. Gas prices bring up the prices for just about everything that people buy, when everything costs more we’re each going to have to take a hard look and decide if we need a plasma tv or if we can make do with our 32 inch old style tube tv.
6. Higher gas prices will lead to better public transportation. Now that people can’t afford to drive themselves around, we need to relook at our methods of public transportation. In Europe you can travel to almost any big city by train, I think we need to look at our current rail systems and possibly expand them.
7. The rising fuel costs are leading to more gas friendly perks for their employees. Some employees are beginning to allow telecommuting, some are switching to a 4 day work week instead of the traditional 5 hour. Utah is implementing a plan to make all government jobs work four 10 hour work days instead of five. This not only saves the workers’ gas, but it also cuts back on the costs of energy to run their computers, and the lights in their offices. Of course important jobs like emergency personell will still work normal shifts, but this will be a huge experiment to see how much it will affect the environment.
8. Less travelling means better communities. As people are travelling less to see friends, and relatives they will need to reach out to each other for their socializing needs. People will stay closer to home, and the community will grow as a result.
9. Finally, the government may actually consider increasing fuel economy standards. In Europe – non-hybrid cars routinely get 50+ miles per gallon. In America we’re stuck with cars(non-hybrid) that get 30 mpg or less. Maybe we’ll get some of the European models.
10. High gas prices may help the internet. If you blog, or run an online business, high gas prices may actually help you out, if people can’t leave their homes they’ll stay home and surf the net, which could mean more advertising dollars for your blog or website.

Also – I’m going to take this moment to let you know about a contest running. You can win a free $25 gas card, and who couldn’t use this? Check out the contest here, or Read some tips from their site on  “Saving Money at the Gas Pump”

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Obama is somewhat of a newcomer on the political scene, and yet he has garnered a huge following.

He has beat great odds to become the number 1 candidate for presidency. He is even beating McCain out by many points in states that normally go to republicans, like Montana.

Why is this?

Because Obama has embraced web 2.0.

He has embraced sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube. He, and / or those on his marketing team know the power that social media holds. Not to mention many fans of Obama can be found embracing social media – for instance this popular video by Obamagirl.

Obama, is also the only candidate suggesting a cabinet position aimed at web / technology.

I personally believe that Obama’s use of web 2.0 and social media may be the beginning of a paradigm shift in America. I believe that we may be on the verge of a new era in US politics. Call me optimistic, but I believe with social media, politicians will hold less power, and more power will be put in the hands of the people.

Most Americans believe that we’re headed in the wrong direction. Many believe that a huge catastrophe is on the horizon. Whether natural or economic, our future is not certain anymore.

All things change, and many things always need change but go unchanged. I believe for America to survive that there will come a day of reckoning where the great minds of the country will have to get together and re-organize our country from the ground up.

The reason we have a representative democracy and not a full democracy is mostly because in the days of the founding fathers it would’ve been a logistical nightmare. They didn’t have the lines of communication that we have today.

If you’re a skeptic on the power of social media, you really should check out opencongress.org it is a refreshing social network brought to us by: Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

This is a great site for following the politicians that you want to follow. You can see their voting patterns, history, etc. You can also see other politicians like them, or those who are totally the opposite.

You can follow the issues that matter most to you, like Access to Health care, Abortion, etc…

You can actually vote on the issues, and bills that you’d like to see pass legislation.

The site doesn’t get as much publicity as it should – yet. But I can see it becoming a huge playing field for bi-partisan politics to take hold.

Those who aren’t net-savvy may miss out here on this great opportunity to share their voice / opinion, but I believe this is a great start to a new democracy 2.0.

To read more about the features of OpenCongress.Org check out this article at ReadWriteWeb.

Here are some good related articles:

• The Facebooker Who Friended Obama
• Obama and the Facebooker
• Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, Has Big Role in Obama Campaign
• How Barack Obama won Facebook

It appears that our funding isn’t coming through for our roadtrip as planned.

The problem: I need $$ to buy equipment to make videos for roadtrip, and the company giving money needs / wants a video to show to the team. How can I make the video if I don’t have the equipment?

Obviously I Can’t….

But it’s ok… I have other plans…I’ll just have to put the roadtrip on hiatus. But be aware that I will complete the roadtrip.

Feel free to submit your blog to our American Blog Directory. Stay tuned though, I may do some interviews shortly via skype video conference.