BiggAndyy the Magazine

The most popular male exercise in the United States today is sitting in a comfy chair, remote control in hand, and giving your right thumb a 4 or 5 hour workout.

Point Click - Point Click - Point Click - Point Click

One does not really NEED to point the remote directly at the television, but you get the picture.

“1,000 channels and still nothing to watch,” is the common grumble during this grueling workout routine. Yet we still pay upwards of $100.00 per month for hundreds of cable channels, hundreds more “music” channels, and on demand movies, etc. But the paradigm works. Advertisers get their campaigns in front of many people who are “channel surfing” despite the fact that the expert channel surfer can spend as little as 2 seconds on a channel before moving on to the next one down the list.

This paradigm, however, never really had a successful extension on the internet. At first a website was at the mercy of a few static pages that linked to it. One would need to either know the website name verbatim or know where a link was to get to it. Fortunately, the number of websites to actually visit was still small in number.

As the availability of domain names increased with decreasing prices, and places like Geocities and Tripod offering free webpage hosting to Joe Enduser, the amount of places to visit grew exponentially. Categorizing and chronicling those sites gave rise to the Search Engine (Yahoo, Altavista, Google, etc). It has been the search engine that has driven the identity and advertising campaigns for commercial as well as private web pages for the last 10 years.

The paradigm is shifting again. Static content is being replaced with dynamic content, blogs and CMS sites. Search engines are slowly being overtaken by the rise of social networks like Myspace, Faceparty and Digg. Where the search engine is revenue and equation driven the social network is community driven. Not driven like the much maligned “wiki” concept, but driven by the votes of the individual users.

This type of paradigm brings us right to Stumbleupon and what some are calling the Stumble Effect. In a nutshell Stumbleupon is a browser addon that gives the user the ability to “channel surf” the Stumble community based upon the users preferred viewing topics. And the topic choices are considerable. Very specific websites can be “stumbled upon” with careful consideration by the user and the people initially “stumbling” a website or article.

If enough care is given to keyword choice, article content or appearance, and appeal of the topic to an audience or audiences, the results can be very impressive.

Take for instance a website my partner and I put up as a “hobby site”. One that we wanted to see online but could not really find. A place for “Work Safe/Family Safe” images, stories, websites, animations. We found a good domain name and put it “out there” without much thought to promotions or advertising. Just a place to have to experiment with and have some fun.

The website is www.coolthingstolookat.com and it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of content yet, it is a diversion from our normal duties and commitments. But one of the experiments went horribly right… so right that the thinking is changing for the domain.

Here was the experiment. My partner found a cool picture and wanted to put to use all of his SEO skills that he had gleaned and garnered from the web and classes he has taken over the last few months. So he wrote a small article for some background information on the image and went all out on keyword choice, promotion of the article to social networks, the whole nine yards. Stumbleupon was one of many social networks to which this image and article was submitted. Here are the results as far as hits and visits to the site using the Word Press plugin Popstats.

The article was submitted on February 3rd and you can see a “blip” on the chart just past the midway point as the initial few users and bots checked out the new submission.

The giant spike happened about 8 days later as the article reached a “critical mass” point in Stumble where it had enough “thumbs ups” to start getting displayed with more frequency in the topic areas chosen. But those lines don’t mean much without the numbers to go with them.

That is right. From Stumble the visits went from 24 per day to a high of nearly 3,000 in only 3 DAYS. Once the point was reached where the article was being offered more regularly it was being awarded “Thumbs Up” more regularly, an upwards cycle has started. Where it will end or taper off we have no idea.

But the entire situation has lead to other new thoughts on the web design and hosting front. Half way through the month and we are already getting bandwidth warnings. Design elements that did not come into consideration such as the size of common images, 404 page redirects, and other things now matter a great deal when 12,000 page views are being served up per day.

And such things as Google Ad placement are now much bigger considerations. With the 100x increase in traffic there has NOT been a 100x increase in ad revenue. Ad placement is of course one thing, but a bigger factor is the “channel surf” mentality that Stumble Upon engenders.

Even for myself, I find myself visiting websites and lingering less and less because the initial appeal of the site or the content did not draw me in within the first few seconds. Or it took too long to load, or maybe even a temporary dead link. Whatever the factor, with the Stumble Button on the browser bar if I do not get instant gratification from my first “channel” I hit the button again and “surf” to the next webpage.

Some new thinking has to be applied to ad placement, content presentation, and overall site design if the SEO is going to translate a potential 100x increase in visits and page views into a comparable increase in ad revenue. Just as the Television ad producers had to adapt over a decade ago to the television remote control web designers and SEOs must adapt to the Stumble Effect, the 21st Century remote control for the World Wide Web.

While doing the mandatory posting of my articles to all the social networking websites I dugg up this nugget of fear. From thenewspaper.com quote:

Arlington, Virginia has taken the next step in automated camera enforcement. Next month, it will expand its use of “BootFinder,” a camera device that scans license plates of parked cars and compares it against a database of unpaid fines. If the car’s owner is listed as delinquent, the car can be towed — and if the owner doesn’t pay within 10 days the car is auctioned.

Currently Arlington’s program focuses on unpaid car and property taxes, and the city’s one camera has collected $90,000. In March, however, any unpaid fine is fair game, “anything from late park and recreation fees to overdue library books.”

New Haven, Connecticut has towed 1,800 cars and collected $1,000,000 with its BootFinder. Bridgeport is ready to get on board as well.

The system uses a $25,000 camera mounted in a laptop-equipped minivan and is capable of taking a thousand photos every minute. Arlington County Treasurer Frank O’Leary told the Washington Times, “We’re just always looking for new ways to skin the cat.”

Update: New Haven, Connecticut used Bootfinder to tow a woman’s car out of her driveway for $85 in unpaid parking tickets.

You can find the referenced article at Forbes.com

I like my tinfoil hat. It fits firmly and snugly and protects me from all the mind beams seeking to brainwash me into the latest fad and government thought experiment. But it doesn’t take a tinfoil hat mentality to see that greed is the real motivating factor behind much of the ubiquitous video all around us.

There are products out to obscure our license plates from overhead traffic cams but now it appears that the police car or meter maid can just cruise down the street and whatever falls into its view is scrutinized for whatever petty crime it can find. And not for the common welfare or the protection of the innocent.

For the ever increasing love of taking your money.

By fees. By taxes. By licenses. By hook. By crook. Laws are supposed to be there to outline what is acceptable behavior in a civilized society NOT to provide a revenue stream for the bloated liberal nanny-state. Now, have a library book overdue like I did? If my license plate were captured by the BootFinder (well now call it the FeeCam) I would likely have had to pay the entire $675.00 overdue book fee AND the towing and impound fees.

We can all learn from these other folks. Don’t let government get any bigger. And don’t hold on to those library books.

Maybe I am finally figuring out that being a procrastinator is much harder work than actually doing things in a timely and orderly fashion. Maybe it is because I now have the numeral “4″ in my age, and it is not the second number. Maybe I am finding out that if I want my kids to do as I say I need to do as I say as well.

Maybe I need to explain what “it” is before I go on.

“IT”, I should say “THEY”, are library books. Overdue library books. But they weren’t always overdue. I checked them out in August of 2006 and even told you all about renewing them online if you are a student or work for the University of Pittsburgh.

I renewed them. And then I renewed them again. And I renewed them yet again. They are books on sign language and I was using them in augmenting my autistic son’s education. Those particular books are a great resource and I did not want to part with them so I kept on renewing them. But a series of Red Flags should have alerted me that something was amiss.

Red Flag number one should have been when I stopped getting renewal notices. But, I figured, since it was over Winter Break the folks there at ULS (University Library System) just did not get around to sending the renewal emails. Isn’t it strange that just because we personally posses a certain proclivity, say procrastination, that we expect everyone else to exhibit those same qualities. Since I procrastinate I assume that everyone else does as well.

That may be the case for PEOPLE. But the overdue notices are sent via email and are generated automatically by a CRON job in the ULS system. Even if people procrastinate CRON jobs do not. But procrastinators are also hopelessly optimistic that whatever can delay a project WILL delay a project. Curse you oh inventor of the CRON job.

Red Flag number two should have been the realization that those notices ARE SENT BY CRON JOBS. Even though I wished someone forgot, I knew someone did not. I was tempting fate, and for a procrastinator tempting fate is a thrill on par with a gambler flopping a nut flush in Texas Hold’em. Once you get a taste of not doing anything and getting away with it, you want to do more nothing and get away with it some more.

Finally, Red Flag number three should have been 2 months passing since my last overdue notice from the ULS. The long and the short of their side of the story is a library member can only renew books three times before they NEED to be returned. After my third online renewal the system merely did not allow my books to be included in the renewable list. Once they became overdue it was MY responsibility to get them back.

If I had renewed them in person at the library desk a helpful desk assistant would have reminded me that I can only renew books three times and that they needed to be physically returned on the next due date. The CRON job did not know to remind me, it is a CRON job and doesn’t care if I return the books or not.

And now we come to today and I receive an email from notices@pitt.edu. I figured that I owed SOMETHING because I did not renew on time and they did not send a renewal notice for the last couple of months. No big deal, to a procrastinator paying a few dollars to keep on procrastinating is a small price.

$675.00

W - T - F ??? That is not a freaking fine that is 2 months of mortgage payments! Procrastination time over. Real quick.

The $675.00 was for replacing books that the library considered lost/stolen. Since I was the person to have them checked out I am the lucky winner of a huge restocking bill. The books weren’t stolen, just procrastinated. I knew I owed them some money and I was happy to pay overdue fees. But not replacement fees since I still had possession of the books. I grabbed the books and headed over to the library.

In my previous 40 years on this Earth I have learned that procrastination is a very poor starting point from which to claim “righteous indignation” against a “perceived injustice”. Especially since the perception of injustice is almost always just that, a perception… and a FALSE perception at that.

In other words, I do not march into an office or store, knowing that my procrastination has brought whatever woe upon me, and then try to act as if I am some sort of victim of their unfeeling capitalistic evil. It never works, and I always look the fool. Instead, since I am at fault I try to go into the confrontation knowing that I owe something. But in this case, since I had the books, I was hoping that I would not have to owe the full $675.00

The librarian on duty was most helpful. The way the ULS system works is that after 45 days overdue the books are automatically declared LOST and a bill for replacement is emailed to the patron who checked them out. The library folks find that a $675.00 bill will get their books back MUCH faster than a never ending stream of “nickel and dime” fees sent over the next few decades.

I can’t argue with that logic. My fine was reduced to $35.00, the actual amount owed for the time I had the materials overdue.

And they will let me pay at my convenience.

Red Flag Number One.

I tried to find out who first came up with this Heptagon of Human Depravity but was unable. It appears to be a recent innovation, at least on the internet. So I will leave it unattributed for now and recognize it as a humorous stab at a subject that can be very weighty indeed.

I have seen some folks try to argue that instead of 21 combinations there are 127 using binomial expansion but realistically, line AC is the same as line CA, the particular combinations are transitive in this example.

I like Texas Hold’em Poker. Not necessarily at the Friday Night poker game down the street, but in Vegas and at the local firehall tournaments, it is da shiznit.

And for some good Texas Hold’em insights and strategy I recommend you read this fellers’ blog:

http://www.pokerlabrat.com/poker_tournaments_blog/

The only true teacher of poker is thousands of hands in countless games, but when you want to start “thinking” poker, this guy has as good strategy tips as anyone else. Well, maybe Doyle and Scarne might be better, but they are better than everyone at everything cards.