Do you ever see a movie because you just liked the name of it, and saw a little bit of a teaser trailer? That's why I went to see I Am Legend. And honestly, I didn't know much about the story except Will Smith was the last person alive in Manhattan for some reason. I didn't know or couldn't remember the reason, but it sounded cool.

And the other reason I went to see it I suppose was that I was watching an episode of Diggnation, and Kevin and Alex both said it was an amazing movie. So I knew I had to see it.

First of all, props to the filmmakers for making such a highly believable movie. When Will Smith is driving his Mustang down broadway, and the camera pulls back, you see that Manhattan has been overrun by nature. The streets are full of weeds, not a soul is stirring, he truly has the city to himself. And the various wildlife that now inhabit it as well.

I'm not sure what I was expecting. I suppose I was looking for a bit of an action movie - guns, explosions, and in the end our hero would be victorious. What I got, was more suspense than I was expecting, and more drama. This just in: Will Smith can act! For a large portion of the movie, Will Smith is the only actor on the screen. He carries this movie on his shoulders. And he does it well.

I won't ruin the movie for you. I do recommend people to see it. Be prepared to be on the edge of your seat through a good portion of it. And be prepared to jump a few times - I did several times. It's also a movie that sticks in your brain a few days after you go and see it.

 

I know I'm late in discovering this, but this is really good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr3qPRAAnOg

 

First, let me get all the swearing out of the way up front. @&%^ #$%#^&!

Someone has started sending out mass spammings using one of my domain names as the return address. I don't know how many emails have been sent out using that domain, but it has to be in the million range I am sure. 

It all started when over the Christmas holidays, I started receiving email bounce backs from people I've never sent an email to. Several were of the "I am not in the office this week" variety, but now tons are in the "access denied" variety. All told, I bet I've received around 1000 email bounce backs.

Lucklily my junk email filter caught most of them, but its still a pain to log into Gmail and see 400+ emails in your spam folder. I usually receive 50 per day, but 400 was a new record.

SPAM is such an ugly and useless thing. It's unbelievable to me that in 2008, there is not an easy technical solution to fix it. The world has closed off most of the open email relay servers, why not go after all of them? And why not implement a protocol that provides and absolute and unhackable trace to the actual source of the email. Once an email server has been identified that sends out thousands of spam messages a day, shut it down. The ISP can turn off the switch. Unplug it. Find and fix these holes in our email infrastructure.

On my Marketing Weblog, I say personal email is dead. This is one big reason email is dead.

 

It's Christmas. And every year at this time, as families get together to sit down and eat a traditional meal together, there's one ritual that also happens in millions of homes across North America as well.

I'm talking about removing viruses from your relative's computer.

I knew my nephews machine was due for some cleaning, as a few days ago I started receiving strange MSN messages from him, inviting me to download a ZIP file. I knew it was bogus, and there's no way I'm accepting a file like that under those circumstances. He's got a virus. Again.

It occured to me tonight, as I was applying the latest Microsoft patches (which strangely never get applied even though I set it to automatic install), that I actually enjoyed cleaning viruses off the machine. Maybe that's the geek in me. But I have a standard set of tools I use to get rid of the nasty stuff, and I get a certain level of satisfaction when the AVG anti-virus program reports 55 threats found, and is able to remove all of them.

Now I do wish that there was some, sure-fire way, to keep that machine clean no matter what the kids did to it. The problem I guess is that they do need to install software from time-to-time and I live to far to take away their "admin" access and be able to come by to install things as they need. That's not a reliable solution.

But in the meantime, I sit there for hours running anti-virus scans, and anti-malware scans, uninstalling bad programs, removing odd registry entries. And feeling geek superiority over the virus writers for now.

 

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post on how CNN.com was delivering ads for life insurance (and pretty tasteless ads at that) next to a super sad story about soldiers killed in Iraq.

Today they're delivering ads for steroids ("Legal steroids buy now!") next to the news about how many baseball players have been caught using the banned substances.

Aye yai yai.

Sometimes Google surprises me. Not how good a search engine it is, but how not good it can be. Basically how poorly it can deliver what it is you want, even if you know somewhat specifically what you're looking for. Tonight was one of those times.

So I read an interesting article the other day about how Facebook has "jumped the shark." Basically, the author claimed Facebook was on its way down, and never before in the history of the Internet has any company so screwed itself so quickly.

Those were quite bold claims, and so I decided to write a blog post about it on my Marketing and New Media Blog.

So I know this, the article was posted on a high profile magazine web site. I thought it was Forbes. Those magazines get indexed by Google News right? So off I went to Google News to search for this article.

I searched for Facebook in Google News. Nothing relevant. I searched Facebook Death. Stories talking about people who were killed, who also had Facebook accounts. That's not relevant either. Facebook Forbes. Nada. I went to Forbes.com - searching Facebook was useless.

I went to Digg, because that's probably where I found the story to begin with. Search Facebook among Frontpage Stories. Nada.

I went to Wired. How many freaking blogs does Wired have? Too many. There were hundreds of hits for the word Facebook in the last 24 hours. Sheesh.

It wasn't that long ago - a news article posted yesterday. And I can't find it! Went to Technorati. Went to IceRocket. Back to Google.

Finally, on CNN.com, I saw something that caught my eye in an article on Fortune. That article on Fortune linked to another one, which linked to the one I read yesterday. After 20 minutes of searching, across 5 web sites. I found it.

I wonder why none of the search engines I checked considered Fortune Magazine a good enough source to rank it highly for "Facebook Death" in a news search?

 

I'm switching DNS providers tonight. I've had it with my current provider, which has let me down again.

If this site goes offline for a bit, that's what happened. Sorry about the interruption... Be back soon!

 

When starting a new business, entrepreneurs have a dream. That dream is that there is this great untapped demand out there, who are looking for something and not finding it. There are people out there looking for green widgets, and no supplier currently makes green widgets, and you're going to come along and sweep up this customer base who are waiting, just waiting, for a product like theirs to come along.

In modern Search Engine Marketing, that's impossible.

Internet marketers are watching the major search engines like hawks. They are looking at their analytics tools, their adwords tools, and their estimated traffic tools. They see what ordinary people are typing into search engines. They know before anyone what is becoming more popular.

And they're waiting. They're catching them early. A search marketer finds a term that estimates 50,000 search a month. He sees that the top results for that term are somewhat irrelevant or old. The top result is Wikipedia, or the top result is some news article from 2003.

And they register the domain name for it. Buy it cheaply off someone if necessary. And they build an ad site. They capture that 50,000 right away. They're fast and nimble, they know all the SEO tricks. Pretty soon they're the number 1 result. And it's going to be hard to knock them off that perch.

This is the efficiency of search engine marketing today. There is no known keywords that are easy to rank well for. And they know faster than anyone when a set of keywords gains or loses popularity. And they move with it.

And forget just "ad sites" any more. That was so 2006. Search engine marketers are moving beyond just Google Adsense and advertising based revenue. The company that owns "Phone.com", primarily known as just an advertising site, is building an actual VOIP product. They think they can make more money selling phone service than the $10,000s a month they're making in ads. And they're doing the same thing with "Software.com" becoming a software download store. The same company owns Chocolate.com, Jeans.com, Relationship.com, and a host of other good names.

The internet marketers have arrived. They're not just selling advertising. They're building businesses around the best keywords. And they're going to be hard to beat.

By the way, I searched "Phone" in Google. Phone.com is #3. Software.com is #3 for software too.