First let me introduce myself. My name is Joe and I am 32yrs old. I have been searching for a way to make a living with an online business. This is what I wish to talk about here. Where is the money? I know it is out there (probably in a pot being guarded by a leprechaun), I KNOW people are making money online. How are they doing it? Is it a better program? A better product? These are just a few of the questions I scour the web (clicking on hundreds of "promising" links), reading e-books, newsletters, and of course watching both intro and training videos by the dozen. It can be exhausting. Not to mention costly if you tried to join them all. That is why I try to stick to free programs that pay you for customers, that way if its a flop then your only out your time and energy.
The biggest problem for me is that the actual and real information on how to be successful online is scattered thoughout the web. I find a piece of the puzzle here, then find a piece over here…. It gets frustrating at times, chasing ones own tail. Then I guess thats is how some of that money is made (probsbly s great deal of it), selling pieces of information but never giving the customer everything. You buy into a program only to find that you also have to buy all their extra "services" to promote their program. Of course, they aren’t all like that, but a bunch are.
There are many hazards and pitfalls on this search of mine. Bad investments (both time, and money), outright scams, good companies with bad products, bad companies with good products (very sad when a product you really believe in goes under because of bad management), and lets not forget the ever present hackers and viruses. I wade through endless links, sift threw untold amounts of text, and watch videos till my eyes water. Finding those nuggets of great information, and bringing them together. Then maybe I will be able to really start making money online.
I will be exploring affiliate programs/online programs (the cheaper/free the better). Giving my thoughts on everything from their "capture" page to the "back-office". I will provide links for all reviewed sites, so that you can check them out for yourself.
Reviews to come in the near future.
Joe
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
What's Inside a Slim Jim?
Beef
It's real meat, all right. But it ain't Kobe. The US Department of Agriculture categorizes beef into eight grades of quality. The bottom three—utility, cutter, and canner—are typically used in processed foods and come from older steers with partially ossified vertebrae, tougher tissue, and generally less reason to live. ConAgra wasn't exactly forthcoming on what's inside Slim Jim.
Mechanically separated chicken
Did you imagine a conveyor belt carrying live chickens into a giant machine, set to the classic cartoon theme "Powerhouse"? You're right! Well, maybe not about the music. Poultry scraps are pressed mechanically through a sieve that extrudes the meat as a bright pink paste and leaves the bones behind (most of the time).
Corn and wheat proteins
Slim Jim is made by ConAgra, and if there are two things ConAgra has a lot of, it's corn and wheat.
Lactic acid starter culture
Although ConAgra refers to Slim Jim as a meat stick (yum), it has a lot in common with old-fashioned fermented sausages like salami and pepperoni. They all use bacteria and sugar to produce lactic acid, which lowers the pH of the sausage to around 5.0, firming up the meat and hopefully killing all harmful bacteria.
Dextrose
Serves as food for the lactic acid starter culture. Slim Jim: It's alive!
Salt
Salt binds the water molecules in meat, leaving little H2O available for microbial activity—and thereby preventing spoilage. One Slim Jim gives you more than one-sixth of the sodium your body needs in a day.
Sodium nitrite
Cosmetically, this is added to sausage because it combines with myoglobin in animal muscle to keep it from turning gray. Antibiotically, it inhibits botulism. Toxicologically, 6 grams of the stuff—roughly the equivalent of 1,400 Slim Jims—can kill you. So go easy there, champ.
Hydrolyzed soy
Hydrolysis, in this instance, breaks larger soy protein molecules into their constituent amino acids, such as glutamic acid. Typically, the process also results in glutamic acid salt—also known as monosodium glutamate, a familiar flavor enhancer.
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Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Incoming CEO's Manifesto for New Pirate Bay
Hans Pandeya, whose Swedish software company is expected to assume control of The Pirate Bay perhaps as early as Thursday, writes in a manifesto that file sharers of unauthorized copyrighted works are not morally weak. They need the new Pirate Bay to show them "how to pay," he says.
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Defiant Pirate Bay Crew Evokes Churchill
After a day of internet cat and mouse with Swedish censors, The Pirate Bay is back online. In a victory speech of sorts, the crew evokes one of Winston Churchill's most famous speeches, delivered during the darkest days of World War II. The Bay will transform from a free BitTorrent tracker/index to a paid media site.
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Extreme Makeover: Craigslist Edition
The craigslist team isn't interested in updating the site, so Wired asked leading designers to give it a user-interface lift.
Craigslist Today
Visitors arriving at craigslist are confronted by a confusing homepage cluttered with links most people will never click on. Overall, the user interface is in dire need of an organizing principle that guides you to the details you seek while filtering out extraneous information.
It's hard to know even where to begin: Should you start your career search under Jobs or Gigs? The right side of the screen is devoted to an exhaustive list of cities and countries, although most users care about only the one they live in. Once you dive into a section, navigation requires more backtracking than a hedgerow maze. Locations aren't sorted in sufficient detail, images aren't available until you click through to a listing, and items can't be flagged for side-by-side comparison. And that's just the desktop version. On a mobile browser, craigslist is an interminable roll of links rendered in eye-crossingly minuscule text.
Make It a Web App
Khoi Vinh,
NYTimes.com
The NYTimes.com team retained craigslist's basic look and feel while making the site work more like an app. Since search is the most important feature, design director Khoi Vinh and his colleagues gave this function more real estate and placed it at the top of the page. They moved the all-important Post to Classifieds link to the right side of the page and increased its visibility by bumping up the type size. They made room for white space and eliminated the gray backgrounds, which they thought weighed down the site. "It feels more open, more nimble," Vinh says.
Information architecture Anh Dang,
Design Paul Lau
In the design created by Vinh and his team, the listings themselves don't stand alone but are framed by navigational aids that let you jump immediately to other parts of the site. Buttons up top lead to the major sections (the current one always appears front and center in light gray). On the right side, the My Craigslist sidebar shows the ads you've viewed most recently and the sections you browse most often, transforming Craig's list into your list. The calendar, fixed at the bottom right, is available on every page.
Make It Simple
SimpleScott
"Craigslist is working," says SimpleScott, former design director of BarackObama.com—why fix what isn't broken? Instead, he focused on making the site easier on the eyes. On the front page, he aligned rows and columns in a uniform grid so they're clearer at a glance. Links you've already visited leap out in blue so you can retrace your steps easily. Displaying the site on a mobile browser, however, presents bigger challenges. SimpleScott met them by dividing the pages into a series of screens. A hierarchical menu makes it easy to navigate without accidentally clicking the wrong link. A map page lets you browse listings by location. Ads and photos each get their own screens. Buttons along the bottom make common functions available at all times.
Make It Beautiful
Matt Willey,
Studio8 Design
"Craigslist is frustrating and claustrophobic," Matt Willey says. His layout has a contemporary look, a Web 2.0 feel, and plenty of breathing room. He eliminated long lists in favor of two pulldown menus: one that lets you jump to various sections and another that sorts listings by price or date. His design displays images in the category pages, so you don't have to click through to the individual listings to see them. Thumbnails load rapidly and blow up to full size with a mouseclick. A button called Add to Watchlist marks favorites, while the Share button emails listings to friends or posts them to social networks.
Make It Personal
Luke Hayman and Lisa Strausfeld,
Pentagram
Think the current homepage lacks personality? "We decided to do something about the cult of Craig," Lisa Strausfeld says. She and Luke Hayman highlighted the contradiction between Newmark's interest in grassroots democracy and the reality that the site is, well, his list. The arrangement of words is essentially random; this design won't win awards for ease of use. Numbers from the calendar outline Newmark's head and glasses; longer text strings form facial features. Newmark is always in the background—this version brings him to the forefront.
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Calling All Amateur Astronomers: Help Solve a Mystery
This fall, the super-bright star epsilon Aurigae is starting to dim, and astronomers are asking citizen scientists to help them find out why. Because the star is visible to the naked eye even in the most light-polluted cities, scientists say all it takes to help is a good pair of eyes.
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Monday, August 24, 2009
Five Things Not To Let The Kids Bring In The Car
Generally speaking, I agree with the TSA when it comes to sharp objects and I’ll also stick with their decision to ban firearms, drills, blasting caps, hand grenades, plastic explosives, pepper spray and tear gas. The last thing I need ten hours into a twelve hour drive is a cattle prod duel breaking out between the occupants of rows two and three.
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Sunday, August 23, 2009
Network Threats Evolving, Danger Growing
The 2008 Russia/Georgia conflict has become a defining event in network warfare, with a new report released this week revealing even more details.
For example, altered Microsoft Corp. software was fashioned into cyberweaponry and hackers collaborated on U.S.-based Twitter, Facebook, and other social-networking sites to coordinate the attack on Georgian digital-based targets, according to the report by the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (USCCU).
The new paper -- only parts of which are available to the public -- was put together by John Bumgarner, research director for security technology and Scott Borg, director and chief economist for the USCCU. Analyses of the attack began simultaneously with the war’s start in the late summer of 2008.
The researchers were able to monitor attack activity over the Internet as it was taking place. They also collected data after the conflict from Web caches, companies hosting Web sites and the forums used by attackers. Information included extensive network traffic and security logs.
While the attack itself is interesting because of its scale and military impact, Bumgarner (a former CIA and FBI employee) cautions readers to look at the larger implications.
"It’s the sort of cyber campaign that we can now expect to accompany most future international conflicts," he says in an interview with Aviation Week. "This is what makes some of the details about the way the Georgia campaign was managed pretty interesting. Russia is likely to run this playbook again with minor adjustments."
A striking revelation for the researchers was "how quickly a common citizen can be transformed into a foot soldier in a cyber conflict," Bumgarner says. The cyber attacks were carried out by civilians with little or no direct involvement by the Russian government or military, the researchers found. Most of those launching the attacks were Russians, but sympathizers from the Ukraine and Latvia also participated.
Bumgarner tracked the attacks to 10 Web sites registered in Russia and Turkey. Nine were registered using identification and credit card information stolen from Americans; one site was registered with information stolen from a person in France. They were used to coordinate "botnet" attacks, which co-opted thousands of computers around the world to disable the Georgian government, banks and media outlets. Computer servers used in the attacks had been previously used by cybercriminal organizations, according to the USCCU.
Read the rest of this story, see whether ISF can keep Iraq from blowing up, ponder Russia's sale of high-tech SAMs to Iran and see why the Dutch need more Bushmasters from our friends at Aviation Week, exclusively on Military.com.
-- Christian
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7 Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fine than File-Sharing
In response to the recent sentences against illegal downloaders for millions of dollars, here are seven crimes that will cost you less than downloading songs off BitTorrent.
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