"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
For Social Networks, 2007 is about MONEY
Topic: Business
1:45 pm EST, Jan 12, 2007
The bottom line of all this for anyone running a social network already, or if you are in the process of building a new one… make sure that everything you do is designed to maximize monetization, as the difference between success and failure will rest on this metric.
Hell yeah! Everything we do at Industrial Memetics is designed to maximize monetization! See that little donation box in the corner. Monetization Baby! Soon, we'll roll out ads. Eventually, key MemeStreams posters will charge a subscription to read their premium posts, and we'll regularly blog about companies that have paid us to blog about them. Why do you think those SEO people keep showing up here? We're the Monitization Kings!
Since the core revolves around people (not products), it is vital that any innovation in brand communication include the active and explicit participation of those people within the process itself.
MemeStreams: Participating in our own manipulation since 2001!
U.S. senators are trying to place federal control over virtually all grassroots lobbying activity. This means that all organizations and groups that encourage people to call their congressmen will be subject to registration and reporting to Congress.
Section 220 of Senate Bill 1 (S. 1), the "Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007," redefines lobbying to include "paid efforts to stimulate grassroots lobbying." Organizations that engage in grassroots lobbying will have to comply with all federal lobbying disclosure laws, including registration with Congress and the filing of quarterly reports to Congress. Failure to comply would result in a fine of up to $100,000.
Currently, organizations do not need to report grassroots lobbying, which is when they contact their membership and the public or engage in some action that encourages people to call their federally elected officials. However, if Section 220 is included in S. 1, federal lobbying laws would apply to all groups that spend money to reach more than 500 people with a message urging them to contact their elected officials. For example, if a church or homeschool support group has a paid employee who emails more than 500 people asking them to call Congress about some issue, or puts an article on the Internet that is likely to reach more than 500 people, the church or homeschool support group would be subject to federal lobbying laws.
Senate Bill 1 is a bipartisan bill and contains much-needed congressional reforms. Section 220, however, is not needed. It is unacceptable for Congress to attempt to require groups that encourage grassroots lobbying to be subject to registration and reporting to Congress.
Senator Robert Bennett has introduced an amendment cosponsored by Senator Mitch McConnell to strike section 220 from S. 1. The amendment could come up for a vote on the floor of the Senate as early as next Tuesday.
If you do not want this type legislation, then consider calling your U.S. senators and urge them to support the Bennett amendment (amendment 20) to S. 1.
We've temporarily disabled image embedding because we discovered that it causes a serious problem with an oddball build of IE6. We'll have it working again shortly. Please bare with us. If we were a real software company and we got paid to do this stuff we'd have a QA lab and set a test cases that discover these things before we ship, but this is a nights and weekends project with a few developers and so sometimes we miss a beat and it can take us a bit of time to catch back up. We'll having everything working shortly.
Isn't doing the same thing and expecting different results the definition of insanity?
Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences: In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents, but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we'll have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter those neighborhoods -- and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated.
If this was a problem before was the Republican Congress preventing you from increasing troop levels? If there has been political and sectarian interference, what does our decision making have to do with that? I have to wonder if the whole point of this is simply to be contrarian so that they can later argue that everything would be OK if they had been listened to. This ignores that fact that things would be much better if they hadn't been listened to in the first damn place.
The above quote was Decius's first comment after seeing Friendster back in 2001 when we were already underway coding the initial version of MemeStreams. I can now say with authority that we qualify as "sexy". MemeStreams now has both image and video display capability.
This comes with several improvements to the way messages are edited and displayed. In addition to inline display of images using the img tag, we have also added the HTML tags u, center, and pre, in addition to the already existing support for b, i, and a. blockquote can be used as blockquote, bq, or quote. When pre is used, any HTML tags within are escaped, so you can now display snippets of code and other previously impossible text without losing formatting. For instance, here is an example of an image tag:
Image tags can be justified left or right using the align attribute so text wraps around them, such as the image in this post. All implemented tags support standard HTML attributes to the degree we support the attributes.
When posting, the interface now displays error messages in realtime about formatting problems above the edit window. Eventually we will have this functionality include better information about to what types of HTML is allowed and how it can be used. In general, the system will display posts better and more uniformly. It is no longer so ridged about spacing after quotes, posts will now display properly regardless of if you have a newline after a quote or not. Characters such as > and < can now be used in posts without being part of an HTML tag as well.
Any Google/YouTube/Revver videos that are primary links will be displayed automatically at the top of the post. Videos can also be displayed inline with a tag like this:
We will add other video services as we become aware of them. Let us know if there is a service you would like us to support.
We would like to single out Acidus for praise. His help made this update happen. We are very excited to have him actively involved with MemeStreams developlment. His work is present in several aspects of this update, such as the on-the-fly picture resizing and the realtime post validity checking. Be sure to tell him how much he kicks ass. We have never worked with anyone better when it comes to web security and javascript.
Be sure to tell terratogen he kicks ass as well. For years now, he has been providing us with with all our graphic design needs. You can see his work in the site's logo and the various graphical icons used throughout the site.
As always, if you encounter any problems, let Rattle or Decius know. More information and site updates are on the way.
Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defence.
Defence contractors had apparently been give certain special-issue Canadian coins, the unfamiliar look of which caused them to be concerned about the money, a source said. That led to an investigation once the contractors returned to the United States.
But a U.S. agency that investigated the complaint found no evidence of any secret transmitters, or of any other tampering.
In other words, they got poppy quarters, decided in their professional paranoia that they were part of some secret plot, and reported them to a security agency which dutifully started an investigation, and apparently a report on the matter presented it as if the suspicions were true. Your tax dollars at work.
Paranoia and suspicion can cause people to jump to stupid conclusions. This is why having a system of checks and balances around law enforcement activities is necessary. You need independent parties that can put a stop to things when people get a little too wrapped up in their own theories...
The first peak in Apple's stock price (approx 1:45 EST, or 10:45 PST) was at the tail end of Steve Job's demoing the phone. He then goes on to talk about the busniess side (the price, exclusive with Cingular, etc) as well as the target 1% market share goal and the share price drops a little.
It's like watching a sing-a-song, only with lots of money!
