Stay tuned as we install a new theme, import all the last 3 years of archived blogs, and then crank things up!

To see the Blogger platform version of this blog, go to bbmirror

Simon Waldman has a quiet little British blog he calls Word of Waldman. Recently, as he was going through some old magazines from the 1930’s, he ran across an article in Homes and Gardens about Hitler and what a nice chap he was. It occurred to Simon that this would be a good blog subject. That is, how public perceptions are created by media perceptions. So, he scanned the article and made it part of his post.

In response, Homes and Gardens demanded that he take the post down. “This piece, text and photographs is still in copyright and any unauthorized reproduction is an infringement of copyright. In the circumstances I must request you to remove this article from your website. Sorry that I had to take this stance, but am sure you will appreciate the legal situation.”

Simon did take it down, but sent Homes and Gardens an email: “These are interesting and important historical documents. As you are clearly aware. They should be widely available for as many people as possible to learn from them. That they can be, instantly, is one of the great beauties of the internet. I’m afraid as well, that simply getting them taken off my site is unlikely to be the end of it. These are digital files. They have been seen by thousands of people. It is incredibly easy for people to copy them and put them up on their site anywhere in the world. As of now, I have no idea how many versions there might be on the web.”

Well, Simon knew how the Internet works. The corporate world apparently does not. In trying to apply a very weak and nonsensical copyright claim, Homes and Gardens insured that their embarrassing article would be seen a thousand-fold more times than if they had kept quiet. As for Simon, he is a bit bewildered by all the attention this has brought his blog. “I don’t know…for a couple of years I blog away in a quiet little backwater of the blogsphere, barely registering among the Technorati, writing my all matter of things to a daily audience barely big enough to fill a minibus. Then all I do is scan in a few old magazine pages and put them up…and before you know it…global media exposure.” You gotta love blogging. It can turn any of us into a journalist with something important to say. By the way, here is one of Home and Gardens “copyrighted” photos from the article. Notice how enforcing their copyright magically made everything disappear?

Spider Simulators.

There are several simulators available that will do the hard work for you. They visit your URL, strip out the HTML code, and serve up the meat of your blog site the way a spider sees your site. Here are the best sites to use:

• WebConfs Spider Simulator
• SEOChat Spider Simulator
• Webmaster Toolkit Spider Simulator

Fix Your Theme

Now that you have looked at your site using one of the simulators, you may notice that there are no meta names or descriptions listed. You may even find that the top lines are spam for your theme designer. The first thing you need to do is realize that most themes are designed for looks, not for search engines. You need to add some “meat” to your theme by way of meta descriptions and keywords. In WordPress, you will probably need to open your theme editor and use the header.php which is where most theme writers put meta information. Examine what you see closely. With Blogger, you will need to use Blogger’s theme editor for the main page. For starters, try adding a line in the section of your theme for keywords. Although Google does not put much emphasis on keywords, some search engines do. A meta keyword listing would be something like [meta content=”term1, term2, phrase one and two, another phrase, term3″ name=”keywords” /] (we used square brackets so this code will display. Replace with angle brackets).

The terms and phrases, obviously, should be something relevant to your site that you would like the search engines to pick up. Try running a simulator again and see whether the keywords are now being picked up. With the WebConfs spider simlulator you not only get the meta listing, you also get links from each of your keywords to other suggested keywords. Experiment, learn about meta and how spiders looks at your site. Fine-tune your site. You may have information in a sidebar that is being wasted. Notice where the spiders put sidebar information. Keep in mind that most spiders consider text at the top of a page to be more important than text near the bottom.

Actually, if you watch a few episodes you’ll notice that Cesar Millan doesn’t work so much on the dogs.  He “fixes” the humans who own the dogs.  He has an intense gaze, and he starts by asking a lot of probing questions.  Then he begins to work on changing the pet owner’s unwholesome state of mind. 

“Oh, the dog was rescued from a horrible life?  And that’s why you indulge him and let him control you?”  “Well,” he says matter of factly, “this dog doesn’t live in the past.  It lives in the here and now.”

The Dog Whisperer teaches people that animals understand elemental communication best of all.  They will allow themselves to be ‘managed’ only by someone who first establishes dominance.   A leader establishes dominance and is firm, without being rough or abusive.  To have maximum influence a Leader has to know how to work from the present moment. 

If you haven’t watched ‘The Dog Whisperer’ I highly recommend it.  The basic message is enticing and yet also elusive; in other words, it’s easy to see it applied to other people.   The question is how do you apply that lesson to your own life?

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Ernie the Attorney You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

But I describe a lift as so:

Function: evil A platform dangling over the void of darkness or a claustrophobic enclosure of terror raised and lowered in a vertical shaft of doom and death to transport and create fear in people or freight.

It all started one Saturday about two years ago. I was working the weekend due to deadline time (and surfing the net) and I was the last person in the building. Around 10pm I finally decided it was time to go home, shut off my computer and got in the lift to go from the fourth floor to the ground floor… if only I had taken the stairs.

As the lift moved down the shaft it suddenly jerked to a stop. At first I thought nothing of it. I thought I had arrived at my destination. Only the doors did not open. I tried hitting a few buttons, nothing happened. It only took a few seconds to realize I was trapped between the first and second floor. It was a Saturday. Monday was a bank holiday. I realized there was a good chance I would not be getting out any time soon and I might have to eat my own arm to survive.

I don’t mind telling you that for the first couple of minuets I was scared like a little girly man. Visions of the lift falling down the shaft danced through my mind. Shouting and using the emergency buzzer did no good. There was no one else in the building. No one was coming to my rescue. In my panic I tried to open the doors with my bear hands. They opened easily but what was behind them was another horror like something out of the “Twilight Zone.” An old red brick wall up to waist height and then the outer lift doors. I tried to force open the outer lift doors but they would only open an inch and no more. For a while I let the panic in, pacing up and down the small space of the lift (but being careful not to shake it too much).

Then, as I started to calm down, came the moment that every man who grew up watching 80s TV dreams of… MacGyver time. Also known as “The bit at the end of the A-Team where they made something cool”. So I found myself thinking, “What would MacGyver do?” I took stock of my inventory.

1. A laptop with only a little battery power remaining
2. A mobile phone with a dead battery
3. Some paper
4. A technical drawing pencil
5. A can of coke
6. And my back pack itself

I started thinking things like, “Maybe I could somehow wire up my laptop battery to my mobile phone and charge it up. No.. wait… the lift is a dead spot for mobile phones.”

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Invading Holland You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

“Maybe I could use the technical drawing pencil to chip away at the mortar around the bricks and tunnel my way out. No… no good either, I might bring the whole building down.”

“I could open up my laptop, find a long wire and tie it to the Coke can. Then I could shake the Coke can really hard, open it and use it as a rudimentary grappling gun to climb up and out of the shaft. Dam… that won’t work…here is no hatch in the lift to open.”

“Ah screw it… I’ll use my backpack as a pillow to sleep on till someone comes and rescues me.”

I used the paper and technical drawing pencil to write a note and push it through the small gap in the lift doors in case anyone came along while I tried to sleep. I wrote my SOS on both sides of the paper since I did not know how it would fall when I pushed it through the gap. Luckily I only ended up with spelling errors on one side.

Then insanity started to set in. The creaking and groaning noises the lift was making started to get to me. It sounded like evil mocking laughter telling me no one was coming. The only thing I could do to keep my spirits up and block out the sound was to sing to myself. No songs came to mind so I started making up my own. I came up with great hits like:

1. I’m stuck in a mother %$#@! lift.
2. I hate lift.
3. Why does this %$#@! have to happen to me.
4. I should have asked that girl out. Now I’m going to die in a lift.

After a while I tried to sleep. In a strange way I had come to accept what was happening to me. There was nothing more to do but wait. Panicking served no purpose and if the lift was going to drop me to my death if would have done so by now. Still I could not sleep. The mocking laughter of the lift kept me awake.

How did I escape my fate you might ask. The simple answer is… I didn’t. I’m still here, using the wireless connection on my lap top to send this blog entry in the hope that someone will see it and come to my rescue.

Ok… maybe not. Here is what really happened. The sounds from the lift and thoughts of what I would have to do if I needed to go to the toilet kept me awake. Around 2am I heard something… not the lift… something else… movement… from down stairs. I jumped up and started shouting. I was found by a very surprised Dutchman in a suit from one of the other companies in our building. I don’t know what he was doing showing up at 2am. I did not care. All I cared about was I was saved.

One thing I feel really bad about was I never remembered his name. It went in one ear and out the other because of all I had been through (If you are reading this I am sorry about that). He phoned the fire brigade and sat and chatted with me while we waited. He even tried to hand me a bottle of Bacardi between the small opening in the lift doors but it would not fit and we did not have any long straws.

Eventually the fireman arrived, opened the lift doors with a crowbar and pulled me out. I could have hugged them… in a manly way of course. I thanked everyone, signed some forms that the firemen gave me, walked out of the building and took in a lungful of the air of freedom. In total I had been trapped for a little over four hours. I never saw the man who found me again. Maybe he was an angle… or a smartly dressed cat burglar, I don’t know. I’ve also never set foot in that lift alone again and never ever late at night. I still swear when ever I hear the lift creek it is saying, “I’ll get you next time Stuart and you’ll never escape.”

Think this story sounds to crazy to be true? Then let me leave you with a scan of the actual note I wrote that fateful night:

A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country’s borders.These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes.

According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task.

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Boing Boing You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

Drew posted earlier today about Microsoft announcing a price drop on the HD-DVD drive for the Xbox 360. Which is good for HD-DVD. Today Target announced that they will only be stocking Blu-Ray players in their stores. Which is good for Blu-Ray. It’s not a HUGE win for Blu-Ray, though, with Target still selling HD-DVD players online. Plus they’ll still be selling HD-DVD disks, and the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on. Target even went on record to say that they haven’t chosen a side. “We are not proclaiming one format vs. the other as the preferred consumer technology.”

My money is still on HD-DVD because of Wal-mart and Porn. We’ll see what happens.

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Forever Geek You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

Everyone says that you’ll go through this thing called, “senior-itis” after you graduate. Seems to me it’s just that transition in your mind and heart from having each year set with a certain schedule, a certain this, a certain that. Now, we’re told to break the mold. Be free. The world is ours. I don’t ever think that really goes away. I mean, there’ll always be some obstacle in life, something to overcome, something to face, some hardship, some type of something… and that’s okay. One day at a time, just one day at a time. Everything is gonna be alright :] It’s a beautiful world we live in and I’m blessed to know (and continue to get to know) the God who created it all.

I think we’re all just trying to find balance. Balance between the crazy radical and the one who lives in neutral faith. I’m in the balance right now. I’m seeing the whole “art world” that I’m diving into soon that I’ve been wading in awhile now and where I need to stand in all of it. It’s a continual process. That’s all I can say. I most definitely do not have all the answers, but I would love to find out those answers with those around me.

Love and be free.
-lauren

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Elle Effect You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

Everybody has a freak-flag. We’re just cautious about waving it around too many people for fear of criticism. One of the ways I fly my freak-flag is by playing a word game with my oldest niece. I made it up when she was small and we’ve been playing it ever since. We’ll drive by a Taco Bell and call it Burrito Flute. Or we’ll see a Hardees and call it Soft-C’s. Over the years, I came up with dozens of these.

Applebees = Orange-C’s.

Hy-Vee = Low-W

Walgreens = Ceiling Blues

Burger King = Steak Queen

Outback = In Front

Buffalo Wild Wings = Chicken Tame Legs

Wendys = Breezies

Village Inn = City Out

On and on it goes. We have so many of these that my niece and I have our own lingo now. We’ll use this lingo around our friends or family sometimes and they think we’re crazy. Maybe we are. But we have a blast doing it. And we’re always trying to come up with more.

I can’t help but think about a time far into the future when I’m no longer here. Maybe my niece will be driving down the street one day with the burdens of life troubling her, and she’ll drive by an Outback Steakhouse and smile to herself as she whispers “In Front.”

Nobody else will understand it, but it won’t matter because she will have made a connection to the past and drawn a slight bit of comfort in remembering a time when her crazy uncle let his freak flag fly.

  

This Best Blog post was excerpted from Little Nuances You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.

“Iraq beat Saudi Arabia 1-0. Celebratory gunfire was heard in Baghdad, where authorities had banned vehicles and urged fans not to gather.

It was feared crowds could be targets for bombers. Some 50 people died in attacks after Wednesday’s semi-final.

Correspondents say Iraq’s progress has temporarily united the divided country.

The team includes Sunni and Shia Muslims, as well as Kurds.

The crowds in Baghdad included members of the security forces. Guns were fired into the air despite an earlier warning by the authorities that any such displays would be punished.

“It’s a huge success for Iraq and it’s a very, very good news for Iraq,” Iraq’s national security adviser Mouwaffaq al-Rubaie told the BBC.

“You should come to see the jubilation and the joy which is spreading all over Baghdad’s streets now. People are pouring in, hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into the streets.”

Want to know what the closest thing to world peace looks like? Well, here it is…

This Best Blog post was excerpted from matthewgood.org You can submit a blog post for inclusion in Blogger Blog. Just go HERE for more information.