Thursday, September 30, 2004

Freeganism? A bit of a stretch for me

Boing posted something today on the concept of "Freeganism" folks who are converting to a "Freegan" lifestyle. The term is derived from the word Vegan, folks who basically dont eat any food made from animal products, the strictest of the veg-heads. Now I am all about this, I was a vegan for quite a while, and a very strict vegetarian as well. In fact I still don't eat any beef, chicken, pork, etc of the sorts, however, I do indulge in seafood as of just recently. So not sure if that makes me a "vegetarian" anymore or not.

Anyway, I digress. The Freegan movement though is a bit on the fringe, these are people who are strict to the point of picking their food from the trash of health food stores and super markets, or as Newsday.com reports:

"They call themselves freegans, and though some fill their fridges with food from garbage bins to save money, many choose not to buy food for philosophical reasons."

The report goes on to quote a Freegan that says:

"It's about being aware of the insane waste by our culture of overproduction and overconsumption"

I agree with that, and have my own thoughts of the sustainability of our food cycle, but picking your food out of the garbage if you dont have to? C'mon....




Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Bloggers By City

Here is a new release that went online this week. This is an aggregation of localized bloggers by city. Add to the directory to list your site, the inventory is still VERY light.

Blogs By City

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Google Keyword: "Motionizer"

This reminded me of AOL Keywords. Now this guy really has his dealio optimized, clearly he has no worries about not ranking numeral uno on Google. Then again, what a keyword "motionizer"

Only the strong organically optimized search candidates can bust out the "Google: (your key word)" as an advertising technique. Impressive marketing technique if you can sustain it in a very competitive industry.





Photo and discover props to Pam Parker Caird

Monday, September 27, 2004

Have a Seat on the Grass...

All I can say is WOW! I wonder if its just a super eco / granola type that thought this one up or what. Yes, that is a "true" lawn chair made from your own lawn. Found this on Boing, courteousy of Funfurde. Here is a link to the product online.



Saturday, September 25, 2004

Shades and Sounds

This is cool, once again are we on the verge of an emerging trend? Oakley is always on top of the game. Enter "The world's first digital music eyewear" Currently capable of storing up to 256mb of your own selected tunage.


Friday, September 24, 2004

MetroNaps? WOW!

You have to check this out! Metronaps the first ever urban daytime sleeping salon. Emerging Trend? They say the process takes less than 25 minutes, you check in and get in one of these slick "pods" doze off, and you also get the option of ordering your lunch and having it waiting for you when you wake.

Pretty cool. Check out the MetroNaps Pod:


Thursday, September 23, 2004

Seriously Kick Ass Design

Here are a couple of kick ass design company / designer websites from around the globe. I have been reading the Digital Thread blog / "newswire" for the past couple of weeks and have really been catching glimpses of some cutting edge sites, check these bad boys out:

http://artificial.mru-vru.com/ - this is strange
http://www.werf.se/flash.php - totaly kick ass navigation, out of the box
http://www.bridgehouse.net/ - the "boing" concept done well

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

About that "other blog" I mentioned.....

The shot of the day would be something like this...



Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Blogging From The Hot Spot

NYC MOBLOGGING

Checking it from NYC.....you know its the place to be. This is my first attempt to "moblog"... Yes you know this "mobile blogging" I am writing this in short order from my Blackberry on a train somewhere in NJ at 11pm.

Hope all is well. Send me some of your eye candy pix if you have any good ones to share. Let's get this bad boy going. Which reminds me, we are thinking of starting a new blog for the candy... More later on that... it must be the NYC candy. Peace for now.

Monday, September 20, 2004

YUMMY...an appreciation for the eye candy!

Ron Mac rules! I gotta say this cat is a great photographer. I absolutely love beautifully articulated photography of gorgeous women. Check out his beauty and fashion pix series. HOT!

PS - if anyone comes across other great artist sites or "eye candy" sites please let me know!

Peace.


Saturday, September 18, 2004

This is out of control. Hilarious. Check this concept out!


Sunday, September 12, 2004

Electoral Vote Tracker

This is pretty cool.

Actually, I hear its accurate as well. These people are on it.
Gmail Invites.. Anyone interested?

I am one of the many who have been tinkering around with the new Gmail system. I am pretty sure that a lot of people have an account already, but there may be some of you still waiting for an invite. Today after checking my gmail account, I noticed that I have 6 Gmail account invites. I would be happy to give them all out to the first 6 people who comment on this blog and request one. A comment would be nice as well but is not required :-)

Saturday, September 11, 2004

In honor of my cousin SJC. We miss you.



art by Wojtek Kozak

Friday, September 10, 2004

Blogging for Dollars?

They say that the last thing you want to do is start a blog to make money. I certainly agree. However, as a supplement I can see how it can be attractive, so as mentioned I am I am now officially testing out the AdSense program offered by Google as mentioned in my last post, mostly for experimental purposes. I can assure you I have my own job, make a decent living and am in no way expecting any dollars for a LONG time, or anything at all in regards to the program. Google won't even cut you a check until you accumulate at least $100 in ad revenue. I am curious to know how many visitors I get on my blog and the percentage of click throughs I get on any of the ads displated on the lower right hand column of this weblog. We shall see, I am going to run it for a month and then will report the stats. I may be late to the game here in regards to putting ads on blogs, but online advertising as it relates to this medium interests me, and like a trend "everyones doing it." More to report later.

Thursday, September 09, 2004

AdSense - Make Sense?

I am curious to see how much people are making off of this whole Google AdSense program with their blogs. I am NOT skeptical of the power of contextually targeted advertising whatsoever, however I am curious to know what a blog with maybe 30-40k unique visitors a month will yield on average in terms of a payout for displaying the text ads.

Now I have absolutely no clue how much traffic this blog gets or some of my other blogs, but I just signed up for AdSense for experimental reasons. So, let this be the start of it. Hopefully by next week I will throw the code up and see how many click I get on my ads over the course of a month and answer my own question. My readership is really, really, reeeeeeeeeeeeeally high so best case scenario I get lucky and can retire soon :-)

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

This could be sexy: Crackberry 2

As a devout Blackberry user of the past 2 years I must say its good to see the company evolving a bit. I always dug the retro scaled back look of the berry, however this new model of berry is trying to go head to head with the Treo, which it very may well succeed at. Notice though the keyboard is a little funky from the standard berry keyboard. It touts the natural language recognition due to the fact that in an effort to shrink the keyboard a bit they put two letters on each key. Now I am not sure about you, but that seems to be a bit ridiculous. I am not sure if that is going to fly at all. However, with the modest price of only $199.00 they are going to creep up hard on the Treo audience. We will see how this pans out. It is also only being offered on T-Mobiles' network, which will limit its reach, but its a start.

Monday, September 06, 2004

The Seasoning of Behavioral Targeting

I am feeling quite a convergence of new things occuring with online media. I am fascinated by some of the ways people are linking and connecting and sharing and learning and innovating.... the web has so many online communities and sites that form cohort social groups, made of interesting like minded people.

www.meetup.com, www.myspace.com, www.friendster.com, www.linkedin.com, www.xanga.com, etc...

I can see so many ways that this could all evolve in regards to a targeted advertising medium. This particular sector is growing rapidly in terms of online advertising. Between the targeted content, and advertising opportunites this presents, all the way down to the creation of some of the most niched out messaging ever thought of in terms of "modern and traditional advertising"

Think about belonging to a small cohort demographic group of the population, its you along with the other likeminded folks. Your talking and interacting both online and offline, your part of a "society" and engaged in a lifestyle, regularly getting together and being who you are.

As you interact online through online communities and social networking sites, it becomes very much a possibility that through behavioral profiling and modeling, your little niched online world, your community, starts sending ads that are "speaking" only towards people like you. Only certain products, services, brands, etc are shown to you in an advertiser supported social network. The network is catered to you.... More later on the ethics side... there are pros and cons to discuss.