Shyzer.com

When I first heard about Color Wars, it seemed like one of those collaborative projects that sounds cool on paper, but doesn’t quite pan out in the real world. Oops. Looks like I should have learned by now never to doubt Ze.

I thought about starting my own team and trying to recruit people from Shyzer and HIF to play, but then I said to hell with that and joined some random team (Team Sweater Vest) that I felt bad for since they didn’t have many players. If anybody else has a Twitter account and loves interacting with goofy and creative people, come on out and play.

One of the cool things about running a site as big as Hey, It’s Free! is that whenever I need a break from working on it, I can spend some time looking through all the different ways people got to the site through Google. I won’t lie, Google is awesome when it comes to driving traffic to HIF. Without it, I very well might have given up on the site long ago. But, as things played out, the Google Gods apparently liked what they saw and started rewarding us with traffic.

The only thing is people have no idea what they’re doing once they go to Google.

I think I’ve written about this before on Shyzer, I’m not sure. I distinctly remember mentioning once how God-awful Clay is at Googling something. I’m mentioning it again simply because I still find it hilarious. If he’s looking for the phone number of a local pizza joint, I’d fully expect him to go to Google and type “pizza call ring ring hello” and then wonder why he’s getting crappy results. But I’ve come to realize that he’s not alone. There are plenty of other people out there who don’t know how to converse with a search engine.

Take for instance the pizza scenario. If I wanted to ask you the number of the local Papa John’s, I’d say something like “hey, what’s Papa John’s number?” and you’d know instantly what I was talking about. Yet try asking Google that very question and you’ll get anything but the local phone number. For some reason, people in 2008 still don’t grasp the differences between asking a human and asking a computer the same question.

For those of you scoring at home, the correct way to ask Google that question is to type your zip code then the business name, so this would be “12345 Papa John”

In other awesome Google news, Shyzer is #3 for “Somebody please punch the free credit report guy.” I love that.

Is it wrong that the only things I can think of after watching the video below is who made the music and what program were the animations made in?

I completely agree with the video, though. As opposed to some of the far out videos I’ve posted on here before, this one takes a pretty fair assessment of the future to come. Just as I’ve ranted and raved against businesses that have yet to figure out how to harness the Internet, I think it’s pretty clear that any individual at this point who doesn’t know the difference between a wiki and a widget is a step behind the pack.

At the same time, it’d be nice if they referenced their facts at the end of the video………

Update 1: As much as I loath linking to a Fox News story, they’re thankfully reporting that the Marines are not only aware of the video, but are investigating. In years past, reaching this step alone would have taken days, if not weeks, of organized letter and phone protests. Now? The Internet plows it’s way to justice in a mere 24 hours. Rock on.

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While drinking my daily dose of one barrel of coffee this morning, I was perusing digg for some interesting reading material when I came across a link that read “US Soldier throws puppy off cliff (video).” I clicked it thinking it would be some humorous play on words or satirical video and…oh, oh…no. It’s a clip of some scumbag, named David Motari, launching a puppy off a cliff.

I’m not even going to link to the video from here, just trust me that you don’t want to see it. I sure wish I hadn’t. However, the video’s not why the Internet still rocks. What I love about this global mess of nothingness we’ve created is how everybody has reacted to said indefensible video! Within 12 hours, people on digg have found the guy’s myspace page, his wife’s page, their home phone number & address, his bebo page, copies of his marriage license, and more. They’ve started letter campaigns to his Senator and Representative, have secured copies of the video and stashed them all across the web for proof, (since he is now franctically trying to take it down), and contacted just about anybody with a higher rank than his.

It would suck if the video was instead some horribly twisted joke with computer animation and whatnot. But let this be a lesson - if you piss off nerds on the Internet, they not only won’t care if the infractions were legitimate or not, but they’ll make your life a bitch and a half. Vigilante justice for the win!

I just managed to watch last night’s episode of The Daily Show since I wasn’t able to 24 hours ago. There’s something about enjoying a few too many margaritas that prohibits me from being able to comprehend and absorb an episode of my favorite television show, much less remember how to operate a TV remote. The guy Jon Stewart interviewed had recently written a book about how the Internet and computers have invaded a bit too much of our lives (not in a 1984-esque sense but more of a “it’s taking the place of daily interaction with the people we love”). Jon started to defend the Internet, blah blah blah, but it got me thinking.

I’ve gotten to the point where I first look for certain things and activities off the Internet before succumbing to find them on the internet. Let me explain.

If I need the address of a local pizza joint or the date and location of James Monroe’s birth, I turn to Google (actually, Blingo as I’ve won $75 from them in the past few months alone). If I need directions to Tulsa, I turn to Mapquest. If the Mariners played a home game the previous night, I know ESPN.com will be there to back me up as soon as I want the score.

These are all pointless and small obscurities that in years past would have taken far too long to locate or find out. I would have had to find my copy of the Yellow Pages or drive to the library to use their encyclopedia Britannica or rely on a friend to not give me false info. For the information I was gleaning, the action of obtaining it was too time-consuming or difficult. These are situations where the Internet is a freaking Godsend.

But the Internet isn’t usually applauded for these types of actions. When people speak fondly of it, they reference examples such as how it’s now easier to find a marriage partner or stay in touch with family or discuss a specific topic with other like-minded individuals, like politics or quantum physics. And frankly, these are areas of my life where I don’t want the Internet invading.

Well not quite invading. I’ve met friends on the Internet whom I’d never give up. I’ve become members (and created one!) of tight-knit communities that are downright awesome. And while Fellner hates me for never calling him, at least we have some fun on each other’s Facebook walls. The point is I just don’t want to rely on the Internet for said actions and events.

Take LOST, for instance (and believe you me after the stuff I read today, this very topic is going to get it’s own post in the near future). I love the show. I love talking about it with Clay and Juls right as the episode ends. I love dissecting it and trying to find the hidden meanings surgically planted throughout the episodes. But if I want to get into some real mind blowing debates and conversations about the philosophical oddities of our Lostie’s names or the dark matter theory, I have to turn to the Internet. No offense to Clay and Juls, of course.

Some people would point out that without the Internet, I wouldn’t be able to have these debates and discussions in the first place. They’re absolutely correct. The Internet didn’t make smart people vanish from real life. I should be grateful, therefore, that I’m able to even have these debates in the first place. So let’s take it back a notch. How about political debates? Well, not many of my friends are into politics, so onto the Internet I go. How about baseball? Eh, again, most fans you run into in real life can hardly tell you the starting lineup of their favorite team, much less talk intelligently about WAR or OBP. You name it and, sadly, you’re going to get better results turning to the Internet than you are turning to real life people. But somewhere along the line, people have stopped even trying to find the good results offline and have instead come to believe they can only be found online.

Let’s be clear here. If my choices are lose touch with old friends or stay vaguely in touch via infrequent e-mails, I’ll of course take the latter. I don’t give a shit that I’ve forgotten how to quickly locate something in a library just by looking at the numbers. I looked at a map the other day and it took me a minute to see the clearest route to where I was going. These are skills that, while nice to have, are quickly growing obsolete due to the Internet. And they’re skills I won’t miss.

But I don’t want to forget how to read the body language of a person I’m meeting for the first time. I don’t want to lose my game for picking up hot chicks (insert joke about me having no game here). I don’t want to never go to family functions or out to the bar with the guys simply because I talked to them on Facebook already this week. There’s something about human interaction that we don’t think much about. WebMD will never be able to fully diagnose you. I can download all the music I want, but it’ll never be as good as going to the local hole in the wall and catching a live show every once in a while. And no matter how much porn is available within five keystrokes of any site you’re on, I promise you the real thing is much more entertaining.

The Internet is great for a lot of things, but I think people these day not only use it, but rely on it for a little too much. Let’s just all try and keep this in mind, okay?

I recently started the process of overhauling the freebie forums on HIF, which basically took 48 hours of work over the past three days. People have been asking me why it’s such a pain to upgrade a piece of simple software and the same people are ones who ask why I never upgrade Shyzer or other websites of mine. I’ve never really taken the time to explain, so I thought I’d do my best now.

Imagine buying a car from Ford that does 90% of what you want it to do. It takes you from point A to B, it gets good gas milage, and people love it. Well, that’s like installing the basic forums or wordpress, which is the software I use here on Shyzer. I install them, people can post, reply, make friendships, etc. But there’s still a few things you wish the car had. You’d love a GPS navigation guide and a cool stereo system wouldn’t hurt either. But you don’t want to buy Ford’s version of these since there are companies out there who specialize in and make better version of them. So you buy a GPS guide from Company X and a stereo system from Company Y and have them custom fitted and installed in your car. These are the equivalent to forum modifications or wordpress plugins. Basically, they’re made by hobbyist coders and tech enthusiasts worldwide and while they’re usually nice and cool, since it’s a one-man job there’s no quality control or tech support on them. You have to download them, install them, and then just hope they do what they’re supposed to.

Now a few years pass. Your car is doing great, you’ve found some custom mods that are working fine, everybody’s happy. But you notice that Ford’s come out with a newer model of the original car you bought. You’re not sure if you should really upgrade or not, but then you see this awesome new autopilot system that Company Z is selling! Sweet! Just install it in your car and presto - you can let the car drive for you. You mast have it! But wait a minute…aw crap, they don’t make a version compatible with your old car. They only made them for the newer models. Doh! And you start to notice that more and more companies are only making add-ons for the newer cars. This is the allure of upgrading.

But upgrading isn’t that easy. You and you’re members have made thousands of posts and comments. You don’t just want to throw them all away. You want to bring them over with you to the newer upgrade. It’s like wanting to upgrade cars, but still wanting to keep the same seats that you’ve spent years molding to your own physique. And you really love the way the steering wheel grips in your hands and you hate the sound of the newer horn, so you want to bring those along too.

So in this horribly long analogy, instead of just buying a newer model car, Ford sends you all the pieces that have changed and you have to upgrade your car, piece by piece, bit by bit. And once you’ve finally done so, you realize that the old GPS guide you had doesn’t quite fit in the new dashboard anymore. So you need to go out and find a newer model of that. And a newer model of the stereo system. And…

See how much a pain upgrading software can be?

On the freebie forums, I had 14 mods installed - including two custom mods that I paid to have created just for us - and luckily managed to find upgrades for all 14 of them. There are still a ton of tweaks and fine tuning to be done on the forums, but the hard part is thankfully over. The same can be said for that crappy analogy

Anyways, that’s why sometimes you’ll see sites using older versions of software. It’s not because they’re lazy or don’t care about security, it’s because they’re not convinced that everything won’t break after they upgrade! But luckily for all involved, keeping Shyzer up-to-date is quite an easy task.

One benefit to listening to NPR and surfing Digg throughout the day is that you stumble across all sorts of cool little sites and applications. From desktop sticky notes to live updates on where the cheapest drinks in town are to websites that will call you and remind you to pick up milk on the way home.

A lot of the sites are dependent on social interaction though. People sign up for the accounts, share their info, location, actions, or whatever else the service curtails to, and in return the benefits are that they are able to interact with all their friends who are also using the service, making it easy to communicate and coordinate. But that raises one small question.

Who the hell is using this stuff? Because I sure as hell know it’s none of my friends.

For instance, you’ve got Twitter. It’s basically a glorified AIM Away Message, making it one of the less helpful of all the Web 2.0 startups you’ve got out there. But nonetheless, you’ve got millions of people who can either IM or text message Twitter to change their away message and at the same time, you can just surf around looking at other people’s away messages. So every few minutes, you get text messages letting you know that Paul just ordered another rounds at O’Rileys or Sally just put some muffins in the oven.

Riveting, huh?

I guess I just don’t get the point of this. Even with sites like Dodgeball, I don’t see why people use them so much. Basically, you text your location to the website simply so that the website can update your map and tell other people where you are. When I was living in Columbia or Spartanburg or Newcastle, I had heaps of friends in the areas and even still, there were only a few local joints we all hung out at. If I needed to get in touch with somebody or meet up with them, I could either A) Walk to the pub we usually frequented or B) call them to see where they were. Why get a third party involved in the interaction?

I see that a lot of people using these services live in big cities, like New York or San Fran or the likes. Do people really have that many friends they keep up with that they need real time practical GPS accurate tracking of them? Or is this just yet another fad where people can stalk others for no reason other…well, ok, stalking is kind of fun. But still, why bother updating your own profile then?

Of course, my favorite new startup site is Going.com, which allows you to update your current bar location via text messages. Why? So that your friends can buy you a beer while they’re sitting at home.

Now that’s my kind of friend. *winks towards the giant, frosty mug on the sidebar.*

One of the few message boards where I nerd it up is full of nothing but webmasters who basically make their living from running some of the most popular websites on the net. Of course, I just surf around and soak up whatever bits of information I can gather from them, but one of the cool things is sometimes you run across a new site that one of them is starting.

KO Hit.net is such a site.

Basically, some guy in Europe decided he could make money just by hosting an ass load of music that people could download for free. I know there are a lot of sites like that out there, but far too many of them are in Russian (which I guess isn’t a problem for Fellner anymore), or contain tons of porn advertisements or even spyware and viruses. But KO Hit doesn’t have any of that and it’s a heck of a lot easier to use compared to booting up Limewire when you just want to download one song.

The search feature is a little wacky, but it works best if you just type in the artist’s name and then find the song from there. You can even listen to the songs first before downloading them, which helps when you have no idea what the name is of the song you want.

So check out KO Hit if you feel your iPod’s been a little bland lately. Of course…uh….you know, you should only download songs that you already legally own and whatnot. Because if there’s one thing we here at Shyzer Industries won’t stand for, it’s stealing. Well that and allowing Bob Costas on TV.

Man, he’s such a douche.

A while back I wrote how I thought some of the new TV shows of the season were shaping up. What I didn’t mention was how Heroes first episode of sucktitude screwed me over.

This past August I was looking to start a new website and I wasn’t quite sure where I wanted to take it. I already had a pointless, no-monetary-goal-whatsoever site in Shyzer and a “up-and-comer” that required a bit of work day in a day out in Hey, It’s Free! So I was looking for something in the middle, something that could one day make some coin but at the same time didn’t require much work. I looked into buying a turnkey website, something like an arcade site or a Myspace resource site, but I decided against it since there are around 28 thousand of each of those already.

In the end, I settled on making a blog that would focus on a niche topic, like with HIF. But since I didn’t want to be putting in as much work on this new venture as I did on HIF, I tried to think of something topical that didn’t have breaking news that I’d need to be posting every day. And that’s about the time I remembered about LOST.

You see, back when LOST first hit the net, two or three guys each started their own fansites centered around the show. They’d post a recap of the week’s episode every Thursday morning and then just post links to any related news articles they found during the week. When the show exploded, they were the only sites dedicated specifically to it and they freaking took off. Thousands of people joined the forums, pretty soon the readers were making their own crazy thoughts and ideas that the owners could just copy and paste on the site and when the DVD box sets came out, they made for perfect little advertisements on the sidebar of the site right snug between some Google Ads.

Long story short, they were making a fair bit of spare change for not much work. And that’s always a winning strategy in my book.

So I took a look at the upcoming Fall lineup last August and I tried to envision A) What might take off and be a smash hit while B) having a type of plot line that would highly interest nerds. You see, it’s kinda hard to run a blog dedicated to Grey’s Anatomy or Desperate Housewives because their main demographic audience isn’t the type to jump on-line and start blogging about it after the episode ends. Thus, I had to eliminate any dramas, sitcoms, comedies, or reality shows (the latter being ruled out because I think I might have stabbed myself in the eyes by Thanksgiving if I had been forced to actually watch such show.)

It didn’t take long to realize that Heroes was going to be the best shot at what I wanted to do. It was on at a prime time, it had the type of story that would get computer nerds and college kids interested, and it seemed like something that I would actually throughly enjoy watching. I looked at what fansites were already created for it, they were pretty shit, and so I thought I’d go for it.

Then I saw the first episode.

And it sucked.

We’re talking suuuuuuucked. Seriously, go back and watch that first episode and marvel in the craptacularness that it is. If you’re anything like me, you probably saw that first episode and stopped watching. And if you’re still anything else like me, you probably gave it another shot later on after hearing about how awesome it was, realized that the show had finally gotten good, and then tried kicking yourself in the nuts when you realized that everybody and their cousin had already started a fansite for the show.

In the end I created Facebook Talk, which I can’t say turned out poorly for me. And I probably won’t bother trying to create a fansite for a show this upcoming season, because it’s gotten to the point now where large companies are creating fansites for every show on the major network lineups and then just sticking with the ones that are good.

But it really would have been helpful had that first episode not sucked.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, MOTHER FUCKING YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Starcraft II is soon to become a reality.

I’m sorry, that sound you just heard was me collapsing onto the floor after hyperventilating from excitement. This has been, what, almost 10 years in the making? By this point, I actually thought Blizzard had given up on the series due to their massive hard on for the Warcraft franchise (which blows, but whatever). So when I woke up this morning to this news…well, let’s just say it was a pleasant little surprise.

From the videos of the gameplay that you can watch here (hint hint Tommy and Clay, that means go watch it so that we can all talk about it like the massive nerds we are), it looks like they’ve rehauled the entire gameplay to look a lot like Warcraft III. I’m not too sure I’m happy about that, but then again, this is a FREAKING SEQUEL TO STARCRAFT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT HERE! They could introduce a new race of magical ponies and faeries that run around sprinkling pixie dust and rainbows on fallen soldiers in the middle of a battle and I still probably wouldn’t raise any gruff.

Early estimates put the release date around my birthday in 2008, so that gives me just under nine months to buy a brand new desktop computer that I can use solely to play this game on. Until then, I’ll just watch this video over and over until YouTube realizes I uploaded it.

Good Christ, I can’t freaking wait!