- a man in drunken idiot mode jumps into a panda cage at the Beijing zoo and is bitten by the surprised panda. The man retaliates by kicking and biting the panda and gets bitten again. Dude, next time stay home and dial up a pandacam instead.
- Google is offering Adsense to a select few publishers to use in newsletters and mass market emails. This is one of the few places where I actually support limited, by invite only testing. Please, please, please do not open this service to the masses, Google.
- And while we’re G talking, Google Analytics now allows up to 50 profiles (domains) instead of 10 [Inside Google via Cristian Mezei)]. I learned recently that a privacy policy is required for each site that uses Google Analytics, and this is a part of the Terms of Service many sites are not following, including this one up until yesterday (see Hmm Privacy Policy). Here’s a handy Privacy Policy generator you can use to stay in compliance. I found it necessary to tweak a few things for this site as some of the statements don’t match what we’re doing here. Overall though, it’s a handy timesaver and better than having nothing at all.
- Wired lists its best and worst Web Pooh Point … Oh sites. Losers: MySpace, Seth Godin’s DOA Squidoo, Browzar, Fo.rtuito.us and Friendster. The winners? Flickr, Writely, Del.icio.us, Odeo and Netvibes.
- 1080p coming soon to Xbox 360. No native 1080p games yet but that will change too.
- Amazon and Del.icio.us Live Writer plugins from Scott Watermasysk
- Willie Nelson is back on the road again after his tour bus was stopped, searched and police found pot and shrooms. Citations were issued.
- New question to ask when buying laptop: was the battery made by Sony? Toshiba the newest in line to recall batteries made by Sony. Some 340,000 of them.
- A 4-year old Bonzo? This kid has mad skills [watch video]. Let’s hope this isn’t some kind of YouTubeFake. Bonus: Mark Cuban likens YoutTube to the early Napster days and Napster looking to sell outright or a “strategic partnership”. Meanwhile, YouTube and Warner cut deal. Cuban updates his post and says it doesn’t change his opintion.
- Apple sells over one million worth of movies the first week
- better than a coin flip, let Tekken decide
- VS Studio 2005 SDK v3 released via vsipmembers.com [thanks Jason]

Of the parody sites I’ve seen, the Church of Google is among the more creative ones, complete with its own charter and description of the holy Google spirit:

Deities are typically described by their unique attributes, such as being all-knowing, all-seeing, ever present, the ability to answer prayers (search in Google’s case), immortality, remembering all (Google cache) and of course Deities must “do no evil”. Google exhibits all of these characteristics perfectly. In the absence of imaginary, supernatural beings, Google is certainly the closest thing humankind has to a true God, as classically defined.

And don’t forget the 10 Commandents of Google which include: “Thou shalt not use reciprocal links nor link farms,” “Thou shalt not use Google as a verb” and my personal favorite: “Thou shalt not manipulate Search Results. Search Engine Optimization is but the work of Microsoft.”

The site can’t resist jabbing Microsoft, referring to the convicted monopolist as Satan in the FAQ. Convinced that this is the religion of the future? You can even learn how to be a minister here.

Fellow GOOG shareholders, sense of humor needed to fully appreciate this one. I didn’t see any mention of the stock on the site, come to think of it. Got to donate to the church.

What do you get when you cross a distaste for McDonald’s and Hummers? Ronald McHummer.com. I’ll admit McDonald’s is a guilty pleasure. Hummers, perhaps the smaller H2 model aside, are too big, expensive and gas guzzling for my liking. They seem more like a good target for people who dislike road hogging vehicles.

I like the creativity of this parody site and the McDonald’s sign generator is a definite bonus (added to the growing Hmm sign generators list). Next time you want to put some text on a McDonald’s sign, now you know where to go.

thatedeguy waxes and wanes on the recent proliferation of job boards:

I just noticed that Om Malik’s new media giant GigaOM announced the release of GigaOM Jobs today. My Lord! How many job boards do we need? Frankly, I’d rather not have to check 30 boards in order to find a job. I certainly don’t want to check jobs.gigaom.com, crunchboard.com, jobs.problogger.net, and performancing.com/exchange just to find a job. Oh, that’s just the boards that have been announced in the last month or so. Several of them in the last week.

Amen, brother.

Here’s an area where mashups could be godsends. Sites like Simply Hired are trying. For our offline business I would first think of a local classifieds either via the paper or craigslist than using a job board. For online business we’ve hired within our sites and advertisers for every job we’ve had. As I mentioned in the comments area discussing the performancing votes function, I see number of votes, digg-style, for promoting job listings to the main site as not very useful to either employers or job seekers.

Since imitation is a form of flattery, I’m thinking Mike Arrington should be smiling. Though I might be wrong, I think Techcrunch was the first to kick off this latest round of we gotta have a job boardism. I can see how people want to branch from their brand but thatedeguy points out the problems for the job seekers. And how many job owners will go the old fashioned way and use the classifieds in their local area or online via craigslist instead? I’ve seen lots of advertisements for Monster and Dice but have never spent any significant time at their sites or placed an ad.

Will be interesting to see if any of these job boards make a splash. My guess is they will get about the same amount of bite as they are getting with advertisers. Is TechCrunch selling all its ad inventory? Is Om selling all of his? If they are and this expansion is enabling them an additional place to sell oversold ad inventory and for other onsite reasons it makes a lot more sense than just adding a job board because the competition is doing it.

From what I saw from the Problogger board where Darren is charging most the ads were for the parent blog network. I find it odd though that they’d use Darren’s blog to do it and not use B5 Media but Darren indicated he has been wanting to do a job board for awhile. Maybe they have a separate B5 Media job board?

Not accusing any of the sites above of this but doing something only or primarily because your compeition is doing it isn’t always a good business decision. I hope that’s not the primary motivating factor in any of these cases. If it is, then the web is going to see a lot of dead job boards in the coming months and years.

Darkmoon ponders germs:

I want to know why people refuse to wash their hands when in public restrooms. Seriously.

See this all the time too and it’s disturbing. I think we should come up with some solutions to shame these germ spreaders. How about a couple of germ sensors that sit by the restroom door so when they exit it scans their hands to see that they’ve washed? If they haven’t washed then it sets off an alarm so everybody on the outside and inside looks at them and points and jeers. Of course this won’t happen any time soon, but we can always dream. Relax, I’m not serious.

But while we are on this one, and I’m glad darkmoon brought this up, let me mention other gripes for those of us who actually want to wash our hands after using the restroom.

Kill the automatic water and towel dispensers already
How many different ways do you wave your hand in front of these things to make them turn on? Most of these machines are crap and do. Not. Work.

Some of them you cup your hand just below the faucet, while others you have to go Jackie Chan on the sensor eye. We’re trying to wash our hands, not get a high score on an Eye Toy powered PS2 game!

And how about when you finally get the thing to spit out paper — and the paper is empty and a red light starts flashing. Doh. Public restroom owners: go back to the air dryers or even better, a traditional towel roll. Yeah, maybe these don’t save a few pennies a roll on wasted paper, but they don’t create bathroom rage either. Lines of people fidgeting with dripping wet hands or hands with soap that they can’t rinse.

Oddly enough casinos are some of the worst at using these technological advances. They are also some of the worst germ spreading environments with machines everywhere that have been victimized by people after picking their noses, smoking and scratching their private areas. These should be the last places on earth using motion activated towel and water dispensers.

No wonder so many seniors flock to Arizona, I thought it was just the weather. A marijuana plant grows in their yard, they help it grow, and all they have to do is plead ignorance when the police investigate.

“The residents just thought it was a pretty weed and so they decided to nurture it,” department spokeswoman Susan Quayle told Reuters by telephone.

Somebody get one of the 9rules bloggers on the case. Rundle, Scrivs, Tyme, what do you say?

I agree with Kent that the discussion about what one person thinks is/not blogging: “who cares?“, but I would be curious to know what Scoble thinks of beach blogging?

C’mon Robert, didn’t you know sand crabs can read RSS? Sterling beach blogs that he is with the program, sand scooper in hand, so help him out. And go ahead and reuse the title: beach blogging. We might give MSN Live Spaces a run for their beach money.

Product Manager for MSN Live Spaces Mike Torres sums it up pretty well with:

Me: I really don’t care what people think the word blog means. I just want people to have tools that allow them to communicate with friends, family, and the rest of the world. Not everyone wants to be “famous”, so it’s important that these tools promote privacy, safety, and control to the meet everyone’s unique needs - and that they aren’t limited to text, but incorporate other types of media as well. Call it a blog or don’t. Whatever.

Real complaints about MSN Live Spaces
What I do want to complain about with MSN Live Spaces — and I hope Mike, Dare and others are reading — is the number of times they’ve changed the freaking location of my blog. By my count we are on Spaces location change #4. At least they could make it so we could use our own domains and be done with this redirect madness. No more location changes please.

Also permalinks that look like this:
tdavid.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8E515242F8EFD787!464.entry

Really, why the need for encoded, meaningless URLs? Dates would be fine with an ID number for the post. What’s the need for the encoding when you already have a subdomain? Shorter is better, folks, otherwise people run to URL shorterning services. That is less juice for you, less juice for the bloggers, capiche?

Lastly, the trackback system. Does it work with Wordpress yet? Every time I’ve tested in the past (and testing again now) the trackbacks never showed up. Yes, I have it checked to “Allow trackbacks from any public website” but it doesn’t work. Checking the admin area again (where oh where is my .NET passport ID …)

In all fairness, the Spaces team has been consistent that Spaces intended audience is for the non-geeks. It’s meant for your aunt and uncle, your grandparents, people who don’t eat, sleep and breath computers. Certainly not peeps like Scoble, myself or most Hmm readers. Nothing wrong with being in either camp. Scoble has already changed his mind and admitted he was wrong about blogging which he credits to Stowe Boyd’s pensive post.

The problem with renaming and redefining things are it creates confusion for non-geeks and geeks. What’s the popular definition of a ‘blog’ this week? I can’t tell you. This reminds me a bit of when Amazon released an author/reader program and a Clickz writer called it a blog system, which even Amazon seemed to dispute.

So what the heck is a blog anyway?
I think most people would agree today that a blog is text prepared and published written in a diary format: dates, times and permalinks and syndicated in XML (RSS). It can or cannot have comments or trackbacks. It can or cannot be publically accessible. It can be hosted by the writer, publisher or some other third party, related or unrelated. It can be updated frequently or infrequently.

It is these discussions — and in most of them people are being serious (I’m mostly not on this topic) — that make me think the whole ‘blog’ thing is going to die someday and be replaced by something else more trendy. It’s like bell bottom pants, disco balls, karaoke, hair metal.

What was so uncool about diary?

In fact, I prefer to call this magic thing we are doing ‘writing’ rather than blogging. I wince when people refer to me as a ‘blogger’ and have to catch myself doing that. I’m not a blogger, I’m a writer who chooses to write in this particular place on the web in a diary format. You and I might call this many things over the years. Right now the term is blogging, fine, I’ll roll with that. In 2016? Who knows.

In the meantime, writing can be done in an email, IM, painted on a canvas or, hey, how about written in the sand? Somebody link in with a picture of an RSS icon beach blogged.

A subject I’ve not written about here in great depth are UFOs and aliens. A Hmm search for “ufo” only yields 4 results. A couple months ago on the weekly live radio show I host, I talked a bit about this. It’s a topic where you can’t spend too much time on or people give you a raised eyebrow stare. A low tolerance topic. It’s one where people either believe, disbelive, or begrudgingly disbelieve or believe.

We just returned from the most alien place in the United States: the desert of Nevada where the one and only (?) Extraterrestrial Highway exists. We didn’t actually travel along the highway which runs north of Las Vegas and to the east of the Nevada Test Site [google map location pictured above]. Apparently there is a place where you can stop and eat an alien burger.

Video Keypoints [see: how to create keypoints]
[3:20] Dude making copious notes on aliens he thinks might be among a UFO convention. Yes, he is serious. And check out that he changes up his outfit on day 2 to avoid detection [18:47]
[8:37] P&T paint a sex toy silver and a woman claims it is alien in nature.
[16:11] Woman displays picture of her extraterrestrial husband. Sort of looks like half-man, half-cheetah. Rarrg!
[21:05] The Bush family come from reptillian alien bloodlines? A UFO author says yes. Hard to type while laughing.

What I believe and don’t believe when it comes to E.T
When it comes to other intelligent life, I’m a skeptical believer. I think it’s foolish to assume we are the only intelligent life out there and that some other planet somewhere doesn’t have beings with equal or superior intelligence.

I do not believe aliens are coming here and conducting secret human research using strange probes. I’m with Penn & Teller on the content and thrust of their video. Most, if not all of those people are there to exploit and earn money from selling UFO-related books and speaking gigs to vulnerable people. The people caught up in it I feel sorry for too, just listen to Penn’s thoughts at the end of the video. Some people need to believe in something. An alien being interested in them is better than nobody being interested. It’s sad, really, not funny, even though I laughed at the video keypoints above.

I do believe there is evidence in a military stronghold (Area 51 or elsewhere) somewhere that extraterrestrials have visited — and or keep visiting — earth and that the government doesn’t want the American people to know about their findings. Do I think people today would panic knowing E.Ts have visited earth? No. Some people might, but then some people panic at the sight of rain in Seattle or rush hour traffic.

The flipside is projects like SETI haven’t been successful yet and they don’t think they will be until 2020. It would seem with the massive combined computers effort that something, anything would have been found by now and yet there’s been nothing. Is it possible the government has squelched results from the SETI project from being echoed back to the participants? I’m not big on conspiracies, but that sounds unlikely even for a conspiracy theorist.

What I’d like to see is some sort of open source community movement for dealing with what’s already been discovered and is being kept secret. For military defense reasons, I doubt that will happen any time soon, but I wish the government would stop playing the finders keepers song. Have a little faith in people and their ability to reason. Sure, there are crazies out there, people who can’t handle the truth, but I believe strongly in the human condition. That man can find a way to live with the knowledge that a more superior creature exists.

Even if that means we are living among them right now.

I suppose in 1995 - 1998 a hotel advertising ‘E Mail’ would have made better sense, but in 2006? Ok, maybe in the town of Ely, Nevada where things might not be completely current with the times, but ‘E Mail’? Advertise WiFi, or just web access, but E mail? Seriously? Maybe that’s all they offered was access to ‘E Mail’? Is this geek elitism rearing its ugly head criticizing this or am I missing something here?

Sort of like motels or hotels these days advertising ‘color TV.’ We didn’t stay in Ely, Nevada on our trip so no chance for me to try out this killer ‘E Mail’ thing. I’m sure it was the best E Mail ever.

Upon seeing ie7.com I instantly recalled the fate of Mike Rowe Soft.

Originally registered March 8, 1999 according to WHOIS. Maybe it was a premonition, Warner?