What do right and left wing, Democrat and Republican Americans who use twitter have in common? They’re using a domain registered from the Libyan government. Both bit.ly and ow.ly use the Libyan country domain .ly for their URL shorteners, which people who twitter use to shorten their links to fit in the 140 character limit imposed by twitter. Both are US companies who are using the .ly domain for branding…what were they thinking? Who’s next, .ir and Ahmadinejad’s Iran?

These tools can take this URL
http://www.transworldnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=156359&cat=12

and create a 2nd link that is much shorter and saves space in twitter tweets.
http://4wrd.us/ahox

We’ve launched an American competitor to bit.ly, it’s 4wrd.US the american URL shortener it’s simple to use and it’s owned, operated and hosted in the USA. So tell muammar gaddafi goodbye.

Tell everyone your know USE http://4wrd.US

I apologize for the crappy template this blog uses. The guy who set it up supposedly knew what he was doing, but it’s clear that wasn’t the case. I’m tired of Wordpress and plan on working with drupal on new sites.

Given the shift to social media, facebook and twitter, i don’t see the time on this blog as being that valuable.

if you want to follow my Online Marketing Twitter feed

Check out WhineyOldGuy and ShitMyDadSays is you don’t have another sarcasm in your life!

These days most of us are used to not being allowed to bring any drinks and certainly not any alcohol to special events in the US. Most venues don’t want the drinking and those who want the drinking want to sell it to their guests. Because of drunk driving, drunken rowdiness and other antisocial behavior there are many more limits on alcohol these days compared to the 70s and 80s. I’ve wondered what other countries do. I know that in germany there is a 0 tolerance for alcohol, those people who drive don’t have a single drink, period.

Well now in Australia, police are finally cracking down on drunken rowdiness by limiting the amount of alcohol event goers can bring with them to the Bathhurst V8 race. Starting this years adults ticket holders are limited to bringing in 24 full strength beers or drinks or 36 light or mid strength beers. New South Wales, Assistant Commissioner Alan Clarke said police will not tolerate alcohol-fuelled violence.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,26171391-5005521,00.html

I think if you let that much beer into an NFL/college football games all you would get was violence and vomit. I think only in Australia would the concept of “a 24 Beer Limit” not be considered an oxymoron.

Which leads me to wonder why something sells in the US because it’s called Outback, Aussie, or sports a Kangaroo in the logo. I think the whole 24 Beer Limit, is why… It’s a mythical land, with mythical people, who drink mythical amounts of booze and have a faster growing economy than the UK, Canada and these days the US. Things Australian have appeal because we want to catch on to some of the “mythic mojo”.

Whether we can or not is open to debate, but 24 Beer limit?

OK, the headline caught your attention, so you’re here. First note that i say “Hated” in the past tense, not “Hate” in the now.

I used to hate steve jobs, because he always seemed to promise much more than he delivered. I remember back in 1984 when my house mate bought a Mac that could display a full width page of text on screen and required him to swap out floppies everytime he tried to use any sort of function. It seemed to me it was an over priced and underpowered prototype, that wasn’t ready for prime time. Jobs continued to disappoint with the Lisa, Newton (though mr Pepsi - john sculley may be to blame on that). When Jobs left apple and formed Next, he once again promised a piece of hardware that he never delivered, specifically the lack of a rewritable CD. The Next venture was a financial failure, despite the fact that the OS, called nextstep was considered by many at the time, the best graphical software development platform, ever.

Nextstep was the first time i started feeling that mr. jobs was able to deliver what was promise, at least when it was software which didn’t depend on outside manufacturers. The point where Pixar released clips of disney’s Toy Story, was the moment that my steve jobs switch went from “doesn’t deliver” to “wow”. Since then he’s returned to apple to turn the MP3 player into the brand of iPod, the iphone and of course that mac that i laughed at 25 years ago.

Well when the mac moves to Intel, then os X, i was ready to consider the switchover. Everytime i ended up ready to buy, i ended up choosing a PC for 50-60% of the price of the mac. Well in june, my windows XP machine lost it’s mind and wasn’t usable and my hp laptop was running a broken install of Vista, which i hate. So after talking to a friend about how to use a Macbook with external keyboard and monitor, i took the leap. I paid the $2300 CAD, even settled for 250gb hard drive to get one in my hands immediately.

It’s now about two months on the Mac and it’s such a stable operating system that i rarely need to deal with a crash. The software updates seem to be smoother and take seconds, not the minutes that windows often does. I never thought i’d ever say I love my Mac, but i love my mac.

Did microsoft’s crappy OS drive to the Mac? Did John Hodgman’s “PC” character in the mac ads reminding me of all the BS over the years make me switch? Beats me, but Once You Go Mac, You’ll Never Go Bac!

That’s why I hated steve jobs, but now i’m over it. :>)

So i’m building a site that will be designed to help people find the most popular tweeters in a variety of categories and help rank any tweeter relative to the twitter universe. It’s great for small users like:

Lottery Tweets

or just to check out which hollywood or sports celebrities are the top ranking Tweeters.

Here are a few examples of folks i find funny:
John Hodgman, AKA PC
NBC Latenight host Jimmy Fallon

and my favorite
The Rightest of the Right Wing - Stephen Colbert

So who’s the most followed? Jimmy Fallon. Who’s your most followed celebrity.

This man has such a way with words, facts and science generally:

I posted the following in an SEO forum that i participate in, my experiences testing Bing vs Google yesterday:

I’ve seen the tv ads, looked at the video, then go use bing and it’s the same crappy search engine as before. the links on the left, link me to new SERPs, where is the chart telling me when to fly to budapest or vegas? i’ve search for a few travel locations and never do i see their fancy graphs showing me when to buy.

When i search “NYC Chinese food manhattan’ i get normal looking SERP, with 3 ads on top, ads on right and “alternate searches” on left. The same search in google, removes the ads on top, shows a map of manhattan with list of 10 restaraunts then the same sort of results that bing did: sections from menupages.com, chowhound, etc.
Google Wins

For “chinese food central park west,
bing shows 1) site from china, 2) restaurant in seattle 3) restaurant near columbus Circle BING(correct) 4) something about tshirts in central park 5) another columbus circle restuarant BING 6) a restaurant in Regina Saskatchewan
2 of 6 correct

Google 1) shows a link to page about florida at BOTW, but shows address for a place on 79th and Central park west, bing? 2) local business group with link to local restauratn BING 3) New York site with upper west site/columbus square restaurants BING 4) yellow book page for phoenix 5) NY mag restaurant reviews, upper west side BING 6) VirtualTourist, cheap chinese central park west BING

5 of 6 right, or 4.5 if you discount BOTW because it says Florida in title, but shows a NYC restaurant in my search area.

so, to me it’s the same crap in a new wrapper. which is disappointing because i’d like to see google (or anyone’s share) stay closer to 50% than 75%. it would be nice to have 3 or 4 good/commercially successful SEs

I’ve been running advertising for Web By Fred, my consulting business since early July on WCSX 94.7 Detroit. Today i’ve received 4 emails from bicyclists angry over a comment made on by the morning show DJs on August 5th. Well the comment was about throwing things at the heads of bicyclists, ala Grand Theft Auto and in my opinion is pretty stupid and offensive. Anyone inciting violence, whether Glenn Beck on Fox or Deminksi and Doyle on WCSX shouldn’t be placed on the air by responsible broadcasters.

Having said that, remember these DJs are charged with filling about 2 hours of air time, each day,with entertaining conversation. D & D work with a single producer, 3 people to fill 2 hours a day. Letterman, Conan, Jon Stewart all do it with a dozen or more writers/producers to fill 1 hour, of which 30 minutes are interviews and not scripted. My point is that they have a lot of time to fill and a live microphone, i’m sure every day they say things they wish they hadn’t, mostly because it wasn’t funny and sometimes because it was offensive.

So before everyone starts boycotting me, the radio station and the morning show, let’s see what these guys do in the next few days. let’s give them chance to see how they deal with the backlash before we call for their heads. Are there other incidents from that past that shows a pattern of irresponsible or offensive statements? If not, let’s give them a warning, see if they do the right thing and hope that they do.

The great Pitch Man, Billy Mays, has died at age 50. He is the latest in a string of celebrities to die in the last week. He had become extremely well known, loved and sometimes hated by television viewers across the US and Canada. His trademark was to loudly pitch his product on TV, just as he did on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City where he got his start. He strongly branded himself with is loud voice, royal blue polo shirt and his pitch black hair.

This is the first Billy Mays tribute site i’ve found www.ThePitchKing.com

So a friend of mine needs to contact Homeland Security to check the status of his application. He called and was told to email the inquiry, but the email bounced. He was worried he might have messed it up, so he asked me to email them in his behalf.

this is the email i sent:

Subject: Friend can’t get thru to dhs emails

hi
my friend attempted to email this address, for assistance, but his email bounced. I’m writing to see if this email bounces and if not, whether i can submit my friends information and question from my email account, without confusing everyone? Is there a fax number where he could fax his information as an alternative to email?

thanks
fred

Well, it was good to hear back from this address in less than 24 hours. The answer was a bit terse:

Pursuant to the Privacy Act, this office can only give out information on an application to the applicant or his legal representative on file with the application.

Admissibility review Office