Here's a link to a controversial "document sharing" site, Scribd.

http://www.scribd.com/

I say controversial because people are using the service to share PDF's that contain copyrighted materials. But there are some really interesting free and open materials up there as well, including the final 9/11 commission report on what really happened on September 11th, and how to beat a lie detector test.

 

Apparently they can. While browsing Google News one night, I ran across a press release written by someone using a free press release service. Hmm, I've always wanted to write a press release and so I kept a note of that site for future reference.

Well, just for fun tonight I wrote a press release. Let's see if it will be picked up by Google News.

http://pressroom.prlog.org/nica-elke/

Take a look at that and let me know what you think in the comments.

 

Aaron Wall wrote a good post (with video) on some tips when naming pages in your site:

http://www.seobook.com/video-google-seo-friendly-page-titles

I'm in the process of doing SEO (optimizing a site for Google and other search engines) for a client, and so I am finding some really neat resources to help. I'll write a future post on some interesting tools I've found helpful along the way.

 

Egosurfing is defined as the practice of searching your own name on the Internet. From time to time I egosurf, popping my name into Google to see what comes up.

For the first time ever, I search my name on The Pirate Bay, the famous software, music and movie pirating web site. I was shocked to discover one of my books up there.

You know you've made it big when people are stealing your work. Life is good.

This is a test of Jiglu. I wonder what it does?

(It does nothing apparently. A week of "tags not yet ready"...)

The last poker game I reviewed on this blog was World Championship Poker. That game was the worst poker game of all time in my estimation.

I'm happy to say the 2008 edition of World Series of Poker is the exact oppostite experience. I'm glad I bought this one.

This game has a lot of cool things going for it. The number of recognizable professional poker players in it is impressive. The poker action is realistic (WCP had a player going all-in every hand in a multi-table tournament.) One of my favourite features is that you can speed up the hand when the computer is playing. So if betting is taking a long time to get to you, you can speed up other players betting. And if you've folded you can make the rest of the hand go a lot faster or just watch it at normal speed.

There is also one feature of WSOP 2008 that lets you observe other players "tells". So if a player plays with their chips or plays with their hair before betting, it may be a sign that they have good cards or that they're bluffing. The game also comes with a number of easy to access calulators so that you can see your pot odds, your outs, the history of other players betting, etc. in seconds.

There are a couple of annoying bits, but nothing too annoying:

1) Some characters in the game seem a bit culturally insensitive. There's one black player who keeps talking about how he likes his cards as much as he likes his "jambalaya" - which is a southern (Louisana) dish. The politest thing to say about that is that is playing into a stereotype.

2)  The game seems to have a small flaw in its hand odds calculator. I'm holding two pairs, Kings and Sevens. And the board reads K, 10, 7, 5, 2 with no more than 2 of any suit. And the Hand Odds Calculator says I have the 12th best possible hand, with the best possible hand being a Royal Flush.

Huh? How can K, 10, 7, 5, 2 yield a Royal Flush? There's not even a regular flush possible. I think I had the 7th best hand, 5 possible trips, and one K-10. Other than those hands I can't be beat. The testers need to go over that one again.

Other than that, I'm liking this game. Best part is being able to skip ahead when things are too slow for me.

 

I have to give credit where credit is due. Sometimes even MFA (Made For Adsense) spammers have smart ideas.

I recently received a trackback (requires approval) for my Marketing Blog. A trackback is an automatic comment that is posted to a blog entry when someone else links to that entry.

So my post was about loyalty programs, and how effective they are in the airline industry. Someone has a MFA site called airefaresrockbottom.info which says:

"scottjduffy wrote a fantastic post today on "Loyalty Programs". Here is only a quick extract:" The rest of the post just quotes a line or two from my blog entry. Nothing wrong with that right? Someone thinks I had a fantastic post? Well, he has hundreds and hundreds of identical comments about other people and their blogs. So he's basically written a program to scour Google or Technorati for any new blog posts that mention the word "Airline" and then automatically posts it to his own blog with a rave review.

A word of advice to my new (robot) fan... Why not improve the program a bit to make the rave more randomized? "wrote a fantastic post", "had an interesting post", "posted on his must-read blog"... You can easily come up with 20 or 30 different strings. Have your program pick them at random.

Also, your own site is covered with ads, at the top, at the right side, in the middle. Why don't you reduce the number of ads a bit to make it less obvious it's MFA? Have you tried that? Maybe you'd get more clicks? And maybe even you'd trick people into subscribing to your blog! Wouldn't that be tricky?