Can these electrical cords be salvaged or are they toast?

Ok, I chuckled and clicked through on this obviously photoshopped blogad from simplydumb.com:

Former king of pop Michael Jackson’s ex-wife Debbie Rowe has revealed to an Irish newspaper that he is not the father of their children Prince Michael Jr and Paris.

Jacko with boobs, spooky!

Once at Simply Dumb, I looked around a bit and found it to be one of the B5media network blogs about weird and unusual stories where primarily snipped news articles are classified as “simply dumb” or “simply simply dumb” or various other categories. Duncan Riley is credited as the writer on the sidebar although most bylines I saw were using “admin.” I already subscribe to a couple weird, unusual, bizarre RSS feeds so I decided to dig deeper on this one.

As far as frequency of updates, it looks to be updated about once per day on average, by going back over the last month’s worth of blog posts (although the last set of updates were on the 8th and here it is the 12th). Partial text RSS feed. I didn’t care for the design, which is a black background with tiny slice of yellow across the top (what for?) and JavaScript errors in IE. Loaded fine in Firefox and Opera. Love or hate IE, you still have to make sure your blog works without errors in it unless it’s a competing browser only blog maybe. Numerous ads being deployed: Adsense, Adbrite, Chitika, etc, not a real clean reader experience when the content is primarily not original.

End result? Their advertisement on another blog through blogads sucked me in (good job), site content lacked much in the way of editorial and seemed more like simply splog (check the permalink above and see that it was entirely pulled from Webindia), left after a couple minutes, didn’t subscribe.

Wasted time, wasted opportunity, wasted ad, wasted money. The best part was the photoshopped pic which is thumbed above, and even that was a quick PS hack job if you clickthru and see the full-sized original.

Blogs like Simply Dumb continue to reinforce my belief that most of these blog network owners are more concerned about generating a sheer number of blogs — even when they suck like this spam weblog from a competing blog network that recently sold in the network package to AOL for millions of dollars — to bolster their numbers and attract advertisers ($$ ad revenue $$) as opposed to actually creating worthwhile content.

Wanna start a good blog network? Then don’t add new blogs just to increase the numbers, add new blogs with dedicated, passionate bloggers on the topic. Splogs primarily consist of content from other places.

I really have to wonder how search engines like Google will treat networks using obvious tactics like these over time? Will they penalize the good sites on the network? This is another reason I’m about as likely to join a network as urinate on an electric fence.

Hopefully worthwhile content won’t be subverted by these type blogs but it’s already happening. It seems to have worked against CNET’s editors who spotlighted the above mentioned WIN spam weblog as one of the top 100 tech blogs on the web and skipped other blogs that deal regularly with spam like Aunty-spam (no affiliation).

VS.

Maybe it’s just some blurry high school burnout crowd memory but every time I see one of those 9rules logos I think it’s some kind of pot leaf. And if for some odd reason it is/was chronic inspired, subliminally conjuring up the sweet leaf, does that make every member of their loosely defined network part of some virtual ganja cake? Cannabis blog extremitis?

Tonight, for some bizarre reason, I just had to take a hit of Google images, hold it, and slowly exhale:

Cheech, Chong and 9leaves? You tell me. Dude! The reefer resemblance is, is, is like scary. Somebody dial the chronic cops, or at least a half dozen pizzas. Munchies alert.

Check out the 9rules logo and their motto: “Quality loves company.” That could easily be a cigarette slogan, or wacky tobacky ad, where the weed is legalized of course. Holy bong toking, Batman.

Once upon a time, Scrivs, the 9rules ringmaster stopped by here to give some props and then went up in smoke, never to comment again. Maybe the not so odious smell of this High Times inspired blog entry will lure him back …

Wonder no more if 9rules ever holds a party, budding readers, at least the spirit of Mary Jane will be there!

Never thought a tag for my name could be so … messy.

I’ve been inking every day now for 23 days straight in a scary attempt to improve my artistic skill. Wonder how long this streak can go on? Will I become the Iron Man of inking? Maybe I’ll create a mini inkroll that has thumbnail versions of the various daily ink drawings and people can put on their blog? Title it something like: crink (CRappy INK). Possible motto: scaring the crap out of real artists!

Here is how something like this — the crinkstrip — might look (without links and colorful borders):

And another:

And finally:

One thing I’m learning from this experiment is to try and let the ink speak for itself. Primarily my crinks (or would it be crinkings?) so far have been about daily events, primarily web/tech-related.

For other artistically challenged tableteers, here is a collection of links for practicing and improving your artistic skills, feel free to share some more for in the comments/trackback section (just be sure to add a few lines of text about why the resource is good, if it’s free/pay, etc):

Uncle Fred walks through several basic cartoons, step-by-step
you draw in black and white via a java program, thin or thick pencil.
various drawing lessons - cityscape, book, road, letters and more

Simpsons (scare the hell out of Matt Groening)
draw Homer Simpson - doh!
draw Lisa Simpson
draw Bart Simpson

Help stave off Christmas With The Crinks: share more drawing resources.

Recently AOL decided to add two bots to AIM — Moviefone and ShoppingBuddy — irritating some users. AOL’s attitude seems to be that they can easily be deleted, but some netizens viewed this as intrusion.

EveryTomorrow describes a humorous exchange with the bots.
Joshua Stilwell writes: “AOL claims that the feedback on the bots have been mixed… I can just imagine 90% say its stupid, 8% say its not a bad idea, and 2% like it… I think AOL would call that mixed…” ilia Alshanetsky wonders what’s next?

I didn’t see even one person the past few days say they actually appreciated or liked these two bots being auto-added, but I’m sure there is some AIM fans out there who were digging the convenience.

Somebody please buy AOL and fire whoever is making stupid moves like this over there.

Haunted captcha at the IMDB?

Phillip Lenssen who hails from Germany and runs Google Blogoscoped is sharing a dynamic list of blogger mug headshots that rotates from a pool of 138 bloggers (and growing) based upon the 40 most recent posts displayed. He calls this mini-pictorial construction: fortyfaces.

I call it a clever way to reach out and get in touch with bloggers you may/may not know directly. If he had wanted to make this at least semi-automated he could have thrown up a form and put a little GD or ImageMagick voodoo on the backend, but perhaps wisely, he went the 1995 route: email.

Forty Faces started with the same cliched list of 50 or so popular bloggers that Lenssing cropped their photos by hand from various sources. I feel like it’s high school all over again when I see some of these sites/programs start with the same 50 or so bloggers all the time. Why doesn’t somebody do something really creative and start their new program with the list of 50 bloggers that are good and not overexposed?

I’m not sure if he got permission to use any of these pictures from any of these original sources or used pictures that were Creative Commons Licensed but his about page sort of indicates he got permission. Doubtful anybody would object either way as his site will drive traffic just like Google does — if enough people find it useful to watch for their favorite (or least favorite) faces, anyway … IMO, some of these blogger mugshots look downright scary. That green shading with each picture adds a sense of madness to the montage.

To get listed you have to actually email Phillip, which I did otherwise you wouldn’t see me in the screenshot above, and after several slices of my ugly mug, I finally made the cut and became one of the initiated Snow Lenssen and 40 Dwarfs (see picture). I noticed his count of bloggers yesterday was less than 100, so he’s busy in Photoshop.

Email can still be effective.

Lenssen indicates that Forty Faces updates once every 30 minutes (though it seems to me that it is updating more frequently than that), but at that rate, sooner or later posts will be missed (if that’s not already happening), especially when up to three successive posts from the same blogger are allowed. If only 1/3rd of the 138 bloggers wrote and published something right now, then a few would already not show. However, I’ve made posts and refreshed his page and see my own hmmsical photo staring up at … god knows what.

To combat this scaling issue Lenssen indicates he may (soon?) make different categories like fortfaces.com/writing or fortyfaces.com/sports. This is a cool idea for a minute, but I’m not sure how many people will actually sit and refresh this. Staying power could definitely be an issue here.

Could be cool for a game of memory though, or perhaps some other game. Now if only I could remember what site I saw that did something like this already … anybody else remember? I recall the thumbnails being very small. Might have been in Flash.

Anybody?

I chuckled over this short Kiss video cartoon which pokes fun at them being sellouts. The Yahoo site is moving painfully slow for me right now, so you might want to give that link a little time, or hit smash.yahoo.com and try to get in from there.

Sure, I’ll admit it: I like several Kiss songs. I was never much for their whole makeup scene, didn’t care that they were unmasked, hated most of their disco crap, didn’t groove on the Kiss Army, but I definitely dug their live material. Saw them live a couple times — they are a great live band — and liked the era with Vinny Vincent (Creatures of the Night is a good album). I thought Gene Simmons was a pretty funny critic next Simon Cowell on American Idol.

At the end of the day, love them or hate them, they are rock icons.

She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me! My wife bought me Darth Tater ($8.99, affiliate, ages 2+) and scored a pretty good deal at Amazon. I told her to let me know when these good deals come along so I can share them somewhere. 9 bones for Darth Tater, evil ruler of the Potato Head farm? Are you kidding me?! I’m so there.

Darth Tater doesn’t come with much in the way of accessories beyond what is shown in the picture above, so you’ll probably want to pick up something like the Mr. Potato Head silly 40-pieces suitcase ($16.99, affiliate).