People love virtual Yes Men.

Time after time and time, I found forums that were dedicated to certain niches and which made little to no effort to bring in people with opposing views. I fully understand seeking out people with similar viewpoints and interests. But making it a closed group of only like-minded individuals sitting around in a virtual circle jerk kind of seems counterintuitive to me.

Or how about this. The nation of Georgia is in the midst of an invasion by Russia and has three medals in the Olympics.

Canada has zero. There’s really no correlation between a war and Olympic medals, but it’s still funny as hell.

I don’t mean to make light of the situation in Georgia though. I’ve been absolutely glued to a million different news outlets in an attempt to absorb as much info as possible. I’ll spare the lecture, but I do want to share this amazing Slate article about the cyber warfare that’s going on now.

At first glance most people think of cyber warfare as some futuristic War Games type of fantasy. But it’s not only real, it’s here and it’s effective.

Long story short, pretty much all of Georgia’s main websites are down. Some of the news agencies have moved to Blogger (it says something when Google is the most secure option a company has) and nobody knows if the attack is being coordinated by the Russian government / military, a collection of “hired guns” by the former, or an outright loose coalition of random hackers who saw this war as a perfect opportunity for a little fun.

Needless to say, the latter is the scariest scenario. It’s only a few steps away from a handful of people being able to shut down a country’s entire Internet infrastructure. Think of it like Die Hard 4, but without the crappy acting and shitty plot.

Lucky for you, free viewing is now available through Hulu (of course, that happens THE DAY AFTER I buy the season pass on iTunes, but whatever). There’s no telling how much longer it’ll be offered for free, so get in on it while you still can.

Act 1
Act 2
Act 3

They’ve just announced plans to do a 4th act, so hell to the yes for that! I never thought I’d enjoy a musical as much as this.

Now let’s break this down. In the span of 25 messages or so, we get the following headlines:

Cindy McCain Talks About Her Boobs
Brett Favre Signs With Vikings
Mandela Found Dead on Birthday
California Serial Killer on the Loose

Who are they targeting with these?! On my list of people I want to hear and/or see talk about their boobs, Cindy McCain is at number Eleventy Billion, right between my mom and Barbara Walters.

Favre signing with the Vikings is obviously tailored towards me, but why in the world would I want to read something about that? My first reaction to such a headline would be to vomit in the nearest trash can, not open the damn e-mail. And what do they expect me to do upon realizing it’s just spam for a Viagra knockoff? Feel so relieved that I want to rewards myself with a prolonged erection?

Mandela dead on his birthday? What the hell? Why drag the name of one of the world’s most respected men into this debacle? Although I’d be willing to bet most people think he’s already dead, so what percentage of the public would this be effective on? 10%? Lower?

And finally, the serial killer running amok is a nice page out of the major media playbook. “Tonight at 11, tune in to find out what will likely kill you and your entire family before dawn. Also, Skip brings you the latest sports highlights and Phil has the weather!” Lucky for me, I don’t live anywhere near California. So unless he gets a wild hair up his ass and decides to go on a roadtrip, I think I’m safe.

EDIT: I just checked my spam folder again and found these two nuggets of awesome: “Bodyguards Positioned Outside Jolies Vagina” and “Senator John McCain Wishes To Have Sex With Model Heidi Klum; Others” – HAHA. The mental image of the first one totally makes it and the second one only turns awesome with the addition of “others.” Oh come on, tell me! I feel like it’s that news tease all over again!

Anyway, I used iTunes for the first few dozen songs I bought. What did I get? A ton of 128kpbs music ensnared by DRM. Nightmare, let me introduce you to Goob and his six computers running three different operating systems all synced with various iPods. You two are going to be great friends.

Then I found Amazon MP3. Better quality (256kbps), DRM-free, and cheaper to boot! I love my Mac, iPods, Apple tech support (I was sent a brand new Macbook battery last week, which is a whole other post altogether), and pretty much the entire efficiency package of everything Mac-related.

Yet Apple needs to realize that sleekness and ease of use are no substitute for superior product and cheaper prices. Just ask Wal-Mart.

Boo iTunes, Hooray Amazon MP3 (even more so if you drink Pepsi and save those codes under the bottle caps).

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.

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.

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………

—

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’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?

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.

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.*

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.

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!

You know you want to…

You might have seen some of his other work without even knowing it (much can be found on his main site), but for the past 11~ months, Frank has been writing, editing, and staring in his own three to five minute videos which he creates and uploads every weekday. Each episode is tight, fast paced, up close, and personal as he covers anything that tickles his fancy at the moment – news, politics, culture, sports, whatever. But he does so in a Jon Stewart/The Daily Show-esque manner with a dash of raunchiness, a heaping of absurdity and cooked at the speed of a TV lawyer announcing all rules and regulations to a contest.

Every week he seems to come up with a new idea or theme and from there, he lets his audience run with it and shape it into it’s future form. This isn’t some giant community we’re talking about here, but instead a relatively close (and fairly large) group of fans with similar viewpoints and even more similar absurd thinking. Besides the aforementioned recurring themes in the first paragraph, one great example is where a college student from his forums had nothing to do over Christmas holidays, so long story short he became a human baton, driven cross country from New England to California by follow Sports Racers (translation: fans of Frank’s show) before returning all the way home the via the exact same method.

It might sound stupid, but trust me, after you watch a few episodes, you realize Frank is not only capable, but is fully pulling it off.

It allows anybody to sign up for a brand spankin’ new phone number complete with voicemail that you can access on-line or via telephone. So let’s say somebody asks for your phone number, but you’re not comfortable giving out your home or cell number. Well, just give them your Private Phone number! Then, when they leave a message for you, you’ll be alerted via e-mail or text message telling you that you’ve got a new voicemail. You can then either call your Private Phone number and enter your pin or go to your on-line account and listen to it! It even comes with caller ID, so that if you decide you want to call the person back, their number is right there for you to see.

You can pick virtually any area code you want, which is nice in that you won’t look suspicious when giving out the number since you can pick your own area code. You can also record a custom message, so it sounds like your actual personal voicemail. Plus another cool little feature is that all of your voicemails are automatically recorded and uploaded to your on-line account, where you then can share them with your friends via e-mail or your blog or something! Stan used to have something similar called JerkMail, for those that remember. It sure would have been a lot easier had this service been around back then!

But this all leads me to this! I created a phone number (864-641-3866) just for my websites. I’m posting this on my other sites as well and asking people to call it and leave something funny! Heck, just call it if you’re bored and have nothing else better to do! If I get anything interesting or cool, I’ll post the audio recordings* of them up here on Shyzer to share with everybody else! In fact, leave your Private Phone number in the comments and I might even give ya a buzz

*None of your private info is said in the audio records, it’s just the voice message you leave. So you can trust that I won’t be posting your actual phone number on here for everybody to see!

Look, I’m not one to champion copyright laws. Those four 180-capacity CD holder cases shoved under my bed aren’t full of thousands of movies, programs, and complete seasons of every TV show I’ve ever watched. Honestly. You know, there’s no reason to look, just take my word on that. HEY, GET AWAY FROM THE BED!

Ahem, sorry. Like I was saying, I’m not the best person to preach the evils of filesharing. In fact, I can’t help but think it’s a good thing. As services like Napster and bittorrent and sites like Myspace and YouTube continue to grow, more and more stories such as Okay Go‘s develop. Every time downloading and sharing files gets easier, whether it be through a new service or through new technology, more and more deserving people get their shot at “making it,” whatever the hell that is. Bands/comedians/authors/DJs/stupid pet trainers who would have gone unnoticed 50, 20, hell, 5 years ago now have a shot. They don’t have to play “the game” and can mass market themselves directly to the people. Call me crazy, but I’ve always been a fan of eliminating the Middle Man whenever possible.

But having also been raised as a child on the wages of concert tickets and record sales (and also eating way too many M&Ms on tour buses – I blame the music industry for my massive sweet tooth), I can’t help but see where the other side is coming from as well. There’s no way around it – downloading is stealing. No ifs, ands, or buts. You are obtaining something illegally that you didn’t pay for. You are getting something without giving anything in return as payment or compensation. The original artist is getting Jack and Squat for their work, effort, and time. You. Are. Stealing.

Well, in the conventional sense.

See, they might not be getting money, but they are getting fans (I just typed that as “fangs” which would be almost as cool if they could get those too). Back in the day, guys like Dave Matthews and John Mayer got their name out amongst college students by playing free concerts around the country. They understood the power of a rabid fanbase, which they parlayed into huge record sales. Well file sharing is no different, in fact, it’s easier. Now Mayer only has to do a live radio broadcast of his new CD, like he did back in September, and he can let the power of the internet and piracy take it from there. The smart artists figure this stuff out and don’t try to fight new changes. There’s a reason groups like Aerosmith have stuck around for so long while ones like Metallica have crapped out. If you attack your fans for trying to share your music, suddenly you’ll have no fans left to share anything.

And thus despite my upbringing (thanks Dad!) and clear understanding of the unethicalness of downloaded…I can’t help but think that downloading isn’t just here to stay, but a force that’s more good than evil. I have yet to see any concrete proof that downloading, and only downloading, is hurting any of the major industries. Yes, CD sales are down, but so are the number of quality CDs. Yes, less people are going to the movies, but DVD sales are higher than previous VHS sales a decade ago. And I’ve yet to hear of a major artist go bankrupt due to pirating. So don’t try and stop piracy simply because it’s something we haven’t had to deal with before. Imagine if radio executives had said that about television.

But admit it for what it is. Running to some island and acting as if your God given right is to share a copy of Adobe Photoshop worth $399 won’t help a damn thing. Downloading is stealing – that is, until we change the minds of the people.

No thanks, CNN

Looks like CNN isn’t having a very good night.

The hilarious ad in question was displayed on a page linking to a map of racist hate groups categorized by states. It’s one of those maps you’d expect to see used by a politician or somebody who wanted to push a specific agenda at the sake of accurate facts or valid arguements. I’ll be the first to admit that South Carolina has its share of problems, but if you go by this map, the only states containing more hate groups are Florida and California. And I for one find that hard to believe, even without touching the fact that far too many states are listed as having zero.

It’s these kinds of graphics that are used to sway or invoke some emotion in people without putting all the relevant facts on the table. What defines a hate group? How large does it have to be to be categorized? Do they have to be active? If so, what defines “active?” Even the basic facts of population aren’t factored into the map. For instance, a quick glance shows Georgia with 40 hate groups and Alabama with 21. Yet in 2000, Georgia had a population of 8,186,453 while Alabama only had 4,447,100. Now all of a sudden both states are looking to be on equal footing in terms of hate levels per citizen. Yet I assure you that any number of political candidates could have used this map to further their cause, regardless of its accuracy or reliability.

During the past 6 months, most of us here in America have been bombarded with negative ads through every media outlet and have been greeted with “facts” every time we turn around. Politicians have somehow mastered the art of telling a truthful lie and anybody who wants to know why the majority of people are turned off by or carry an apathetic attitude towards politics should start looking for answers there.

In other news, I’d like to thank the Tigers for completely crapping out in the World Series and letting the obvious inferior team walk all over you. Way to keep up that AL winning tradition and showing the world just how pitiful the National League has been this year!…

And finally, thanks to anybody who is still here reading this site. I’d type more, but I’m busy editing a video that is due in just under 12 hours. A worthwhile post will be coming quite soon, however.

You have my word.

I’m also proud to announce the Grand Opening of the Learn To Cheat, the latest website to join the Shyzer Network. Well, I actually wrote that sentence about a week ago before I created Facebook Talk, so I guess Learn To Cheat now gets the honor of being the “website with the shortest lived latest addition to the Shyzer Network stamp.” LTC was something I threw together a while back and then never really worked on. But with the school year being young and fresh, I thought it’d be cool to get it up and running. It basically has ways to cheat in school, as well as a new segment about what NOT to do while cheating. (I hope that have that part up by this weekend). Some people have asked how I sleep at night knowing that I’m teaching kids to cheat in school and I respond that I hope teachers are reading this site as well. In fact, I tell fellow teachers about it every time I substitute and on teaching message boards. That way, it can go both ways. Sure, somebody may cheat using the knowledge I put on there, but then again, the teacher might have read the site too and can be on the lookout for methods they previously didn’t know existed.

The fun thing is that these both should hopefully be the first of a few websites launched in the near future. Add to that some of my travel plans and new life changes and this fall should certainly be an exciting time.

It would have been nice had they covered the positive side of the story though, such as how the information was already readily available. Or maybe they could have taken it a step further and explained more in depth WHY people are against it and the (false?) beliefs they have compared against the facts.

And the latest e-mail I sent him was no different.

Somewhere along the line we started talking about Stephen Colbert and his comedy bit about Wikipedia and how susceptible it is. In fact, here’s what I said:

But Colbert was proving a good point. In this day and age, some people are starting to see information as being TOO readily available for our own good, leading to more false truths than before. Here’s what I mean. In 1990, if I were given an assignment of writing an essay on ancient mummies, I would most likely go to the library and use various books / encyclopedias. I trusted the sources because they were edited, read over by many people, and hopefully the bad ones were weeded out through the process of not even being printed. But now, not so… We don’t teach kids (or adults for that matter) how to verify information. We simply jump on Google, hit search (and believe me, most people don’t even know how to properly search for info. I mock Clay almost daily for being a Bad Googler) and then we just click the first few links that pop up. But who wrote what’s on those links? Who fact checked them? Who proofread them? And who deemed them the most reliable? Google? Please, they can’t possibly verify everything they index. So now, we are left simply assuming the info we find on the Internet is real.

Anybody can make a page that looks real and legit and then pump it full of false info. I could make a page about all the wars America has fought in, buy a legit domain like AmericanWars.com and then fill it with propaganda or false info. It happens all the time and yet John and Jane Doe who come in from Google don’t know it’s false.

Bottom line: I love the Internet, but it’s time we start teaching people how to use it. It’s become such a staple in our life, yet problems like this and countless others out there are jeopardizing its true potential.

So where am I going with this? What does people not knowing how to use the Internet tie into this post? Well, with Facebook.

Yesterday, they introduced a new mini-feed system that updates you on everything you’re friends have done, from relationship status to when they comment on other people’s profiles to just about every change they make to their account.

And people are absolutely livid.

Anti mini-feed groups are popping up every minute. In fact, the biggest one is gaining thousands of new members by the hour. Last night they were at 70,000 members, now they are already over 100K. People are screaming that it’s an invasion of their privacy, that they don’t want other people to know when they’ve updated such and such, and many are threatening to quit and delete their profiles if the new features aren’t removed. Some are even saying this is going to create stalkers and creepy activities now.

But all I can is laugh. This is far from an invasion of privacy. The only people who can see the mini-feed are people who you are friends with, which means they could see all the changes you made anyways. Sure, they wouldn’t have all the information aggregated into one nice little area for them, but if somebody was hell-bent on stalking you before, they could have easily done so by going around and checking people’s profiles manually to see what activity you’d done. Creepy? Sure. But the conditions for it existed long before these new changes, so don’t act like this is anything new.

It’s funny to me how people ignore the threats of the Internet until they are staring it down the barrel. All it took was Facebook implementing this little feature to get people riled up and have attention focused on the fact that people tend to put too much information about themselves out there on the Internet. It would be great if the Facebook team came out in a few days and said “Gotcha! We simply wanted to prove to y’all that you’re putting too much information out there on the net. Maybe in the future you’ll be a little more careful.” But I don’t give them that much credit for trying to pull off an educational prank.

Yes, Facebook does need to have this feature as optional. They need to make it so that if I want to turn it off, I can. But they aren’t doing anything wrong, much less illegal. You are leaving those comments. You are uploading those pictures. You are changing your profile and inserting too much information. And hopefully Facebook has just made you realize it.

Now if I could just get you to realize how much of the crap on Google and Wikipedia isn’t true…

Eh, screw it. I’m going to mess around on Facebook some more. For, you see, I’ve decided to have fun with the new features. I’ve now changed my profile to the picture below and am going around Facebook asking people in creepy messages if they want to be friends. Some of the responses so far have been hilarious.

Revver allows users to upload their homemade movies to their site, just like somebody can on YouTube. However, Revver sticks a short ad to the end of the video. Any time a visitor clicks the ad, Revver splits the profits 50/50 between themselves and the video’s creator. Sounds like a decent plan, right? Not really. My main problem with the whole self-made and viral video craze sweeping the net is that the content producers are getting hosed in the end result. They create the content, star in it, produce it, and publish it. Yet they don’t see a dime simply because YouTube or some other website hosts the video and puts their ads up, which is a problem in two ways. First, the little man isn’t seeing his fair share of the cut, which both my plan and Revver’s tries to address. However, Revver’s idea is simply to rely on traditional methods of earning money on the Internet – click through advertisements. And this only sets them up for failure.

It’s time companies start realizing that PPC (pay per click) is going the way of the banner ads. They just aren’t effective in some of the major website settings anymore. Sure, there are some cases where they can be effective (hello there, Hey, It’s Free!) but there are also times where it’s as effective as trying to put out a forest fire by spitting on it. (I’m looking at you, Shyzer!)

Think of it this way. In order to induce your visitors into clicking an advertisement, you need to have something relevant to your content. Take my previous examples for instance. With HIF, the site revolves around getting stuff from the Internet for free. That means that in order for me to use PPC ads effectively, there needs to be other freebie related sites on the Internet who want to advertise on sites that have a strong demographic in people who are looking for free stuff. Luckily for me, there are, and thus I can make a few extra dollars by people clicking on the relevant links on my site. But what if I were to put up ads for used cars? Or injury lawyers. Or anything else you can think of that has nothing to do with other sites where you could get free stuff? Well then nobody would click the ads and I wouldn’t make a dime.

So what if I wanted to put ads here on Shyzer? Who would advertise here? Other blogs? Yeah right – who is going to pay money to advertise their blog? And as I proved over the course of last year when I had them up, Google Adsense certainly doesn’t know how to match relevant ads with a blog. They were all over the place, from the best places to buy tires in Columbia to Thai restaurant reviews in Seattle. In fact, I just checked out the predicted Google Ads for this very post (which can be seen if you click the comments link and scroll down.) You know what my results were? The True Iraq (an anti-Iraq war website), Philippines Dating, Stay at Hampton Inn Hotel, and Top Trade Schools. I shit you not. Now how do ANY of those have ANYTHING to do wiht this post? Well, the reason Google has such trouble is simple. There’s no clear demographic here on Shyzer, nor is there any clear topic to match the ads with. Thus, Google just goes crazy and slaps some random ads up, meaning that putting PPC ads here on Shyzer would make as much sense as slapping a flashing banner from 1998 up there next to the logo and expecting it to convert well.

Which is why Revver’s idea is completely in the wrong direction. How are these ads at the end of the videos even relevant to the videos that are being displayed? What if I upload a video every week of my brother and I doing crazy and wacky things around our house? Or of me lip synching a Britney Spears song? Or any other number of random things that people record and then upload to the Internet? What company out there is going to have a appropriate ad? These types of videos being uploaded to media sites are just like blogs – few have any clear and consistent topic and those that do are still within a small window of similar pertinent ads.

And even if you do manage to match up a weekly video about, say, shoe fashion with an ad for NIKE, what are you going to do the next week? Most of these semi-regular videos have fairly high visitor retention numbers, which means the 2nd week and each week thereafter, you are faced with people who have already seen this NIKE ad during the first week. Are they going to click it a 2nd time? A 3rd? How about three months later? So now you have to keep finding not only relevant ads, but NEW relevant ads every time a new video is released! Talk about fun!….

With the way the PPC market is right now, I’m surprised Revver would even build a site around it. Heck, Google just settled a lawsuit regarding fraudulent clicks with their Adsense PPC program and one against Yahoo isn’t far behind. It just seems absurd to me that instead of setting up a system like I proposed, they’d go with PPC and stupid, non-relevant, big corporation ads at the end of viral media. That’s the whole point of viral media!! People creating what they want instead of relying on TV and movies to provide it. So then why would you assume the viewers would want to watch a freaking commercial at the end of the video, even if it’s short? If I’m watching something and once it’s finished, an ad start, I simply turn it off. It’s not rocket science we’re dealing with here.

I’ll give Revver props for realizing content creators would be attracted to a system where they get a piece of the pie. I’ll even go so far as to say that unless some other website starts where they implement an idea similar to mine, Revver will last. But trust me, as soon as that Shyzicorp website launches and people see how much more money they can make simply by ditching the ads at the end of their video and charging a mere penny per video, they’ll flock to that site and Revver will die a quick and painful death.

For those of you who don’t quite understand what’s at stake here, it boils down to this. Let’s say I’m a huge fan of Swedish fishing shows or African cooking articles. Without the Internet, I’m stuck with only cable TV and my local print media and I doubt either of them would have much material on Swedish fishing or African cooking. But thanks to the Internet, I can watch Oleg’s homemade podcast on Swedish fishing and read Kimbabwesaquanda’s blog on African cooking. Hooray for hobbies!

But if Net Neutrality is defeated, my ISP suddenly has a say. Verizon, Time Warner, Adelphia, Comcast, or whoever else might provide you with Internet might decide that they don’t make enough money from Oleg’s or Kimbabwesaquanda’s websites and as such, restrict the amount of bandwidth they’ll allow to flow to those sites. Now all of a sudden when I try to go to their websites, they load painfully slow or in some cases, not at all. In essence, the Internet would cease to be a forum where any and every user, regardless of money, could sell or offer their services. Instead, with no Net Neutrality, ISP’s could auction off the Internet to the highest bidder.

And don’t be fooled into thinking only small blogs would be effected by this. Time Warner owns CNN. Well, what’s to stop them from blocking all their users from going to msnbc.com and foxnews.com so that now all their users are forced to use their news service? How about this: TW also owns Sports Illustrated, so what’s to stop them from blocking ESPN.com? Or what if TW, who owns AOL and thus AIM, blocked customers from using MSN or Yahoo Messenger, forcing people to use AIM. And the examples don’t stop with just TW. Verizon could block any cell phone competitor’s website. Comcast could block VH1 or MTV’s websites and force me to go to E! Entertainment’s. The list of possibilities is endless thanks to the number of assets these giant corporations own. I simply picked on TW because not only are they the biggest, but this past April, their AOL asset blocked all emails that mentioned www.dearaol.com – an advocacy campaign opposing the company’s pay-to-send e-mail scheme.

Most supporters of Net Neutrality claim that if my ISP starting throttling websites, then I should switch to an ISP who doesn’t. That’s fine and dandy in theory, but in reality, how many ISP’s can I pick from? In 99% of the country, there is only one or two ISP to choose from and if I don’t like either of them, tough luck. In fact, website throttling is already happening in Canada, where the situation is actually much worse than here in the states. Most major Canadian ISP’s pinch off bittorrent traffic so that their users can’t download anything and one such ISP, Telus, blocked customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to the Telecommunications Workers Union during a labor dispute. China isn’t the only country with banned websites people; it’s slowly but surely coming to our shores. Sites like Save The Internet are trying to spread the word, but I find that not enough people realize what’s actually at stake here for the longterm development of the Internet.

To put it to you another way, if the current bill in Congress passes and your ISP decides that I don’t pay enough money to them (which I can assure you I won’t), then they will throttle your bandwidth to Shyzer so that you can’t access it from your home. And I don’t know about y’all, but a world without Shyzer simply isn’t a world I want to live in.

Oh, and comments are on for this post. I wish I could have it automatically let y’all know whether they are on or not without having to click the comments button, but until I figure out how, this is how I’ll let y’all know.

Thankfully, that mood has passed and I’m back to my normal self. Unfortunately for you, however, I honestly don’t have much to type about since I’m busy working on a post that will be go live come March 15th. So, for now, I leave you with a few cool links that I’ve stumbled upon lately.

The Olympics are now over and while most people thought they were boring or whatever since American supposedly did horrible, I found them captivating as always. I still don’t understand how people can’t enjoy the Olympics, but I’ll try and not go off on that tangent right now. Instead, have a look at two of my favorite Olympic commercials, since we all know I’m a huge fan of awesome commercials and even a bigger fan of well used instrumental music in commercials. And for an interesting side note, as of now, Shyzer is the only place on the Internet where you can download both of them, but I’m sure that will change soon.

Exxon Mobile Dreams Commercial

Nike Jumpman Let Your Game Speak Commercial

Moving on, think about all the trash you’ll soon talk in your newly formed Fantasy Bass Fishing League. I think it’s safe to say ESPN is running out of new ideas.

I’ve already ordered a Phone Spoofing Card and can’t wait to have some fun with it. Who knows, maybe I’ll even record the prank phone calls I made and never put them on Shyzer like I did a year ago. (Waynus and Clay, I don’t want to hear a word from either of you!)

As I was going through my bookmarks in an effort to organize them, I found one sending me to the World Beard Championships. I have no idea when I bookmarked that page, but upon looking at some of the contestants, I swear one of them is just a photoshopped image of me. I’ll see if anybody else can figure out who I’m referencing to in order to see if other people can see the resemblance or if it’s just me.

And finally, as part of Shyzer’s ongoing, let’s say “Award Winning,” Public Service Links, I give you Get Human. It’s a giant, continuously growing database of how to quickly get a human operator on the phone when you call certain companies. Most of the time simply pressing zero won’t work, so this site shows you the exact buttons to press so that you can quickly get in touch with a human who can actually help you with your problem.

I’ve been reading the blog of one of the guys who was involved in the whole Facebook Cake Party I posted on last month and he recently came up with a pretty nifty script for all you Facebook lovers out there. If you are currently logged in (and admit it, you know you are), then click the button below to send me a poke.

If you have a site of your own, you can snag the code yourself from Legatissimo and join in the giant Pokefest.

With it now restored, I feel complete again. Don’t ever do that to me again, Internet.

One day I might tell you about the time I became a Facebook God and had unlimited powers on the site, but that’s not what this post is about (Although I’m sure Fellner can tell you all about how depressed I was when I was suddenly stripped of my new found powers). No, this post is to share a little story about a group of kids one upping the local police.

Not every college is on Facebook, but all the important and big ones are. On most campuses, statistics place the Facebook saturation rate somewhere between 50-90% and recently, college officials have caught on to this. Since registration only requires a college e-mail address, they too can create accounts and make fake student pages with the real intention of spying on students. There have been a few reports of people being busted for drug and alcohol use thanks to pictures they’ve posted on their Facebook profile. A student at Fisher College in Boston was expelled last year for his online criticism of a campus security officer. Officials at the University of California Santa Barbara, said they would discipline students living on campus who posted information or photographs on their profiles that involved illegal activity like under-age drinking. At North Carolina State, RAs wrote up 15 students seen consuming alcohol in photos on Facebook. The list goes on and on.

And then there are the students at George Washington University who decided to fight back and launch a “Facebook Attack.”

It all started last year when a party was shut down by campus police. Students found it odd that the cops had known about it and then began to realize that the only place they’d heavily talked about it was on Facebook. So, a few months ago, they decided to strike back. They planned another party and talked about it only on Facebook, therefore ensuring that if the cops came this time, the students were being spied upon. They created a group, left tags on each other’s boards, and talked non-stop for weeks about how awesome their “Beer Bash” was going to be.

So imagine the look on the police officer’s faces when they burst through the doors only to find a group of kids standing around eating cake and cookies with the word “Beer” painted on them in icing. Luckily for you, though, you don’t have to imagine. Pictures of the party surfaced on the net soon after and I’ve stuck them in the newly reformatted (although not yet finished) Shyzer Gallery. Have a look here., so Google around for them. My absolute favorite is the last one, which contains the stunned look of one of the cops. I just wish I could have been there.

This whole topic raises an interesting issue, though. I used to tell Fellner I couldn’t wait until the Presidential elections of 2024 or beyond. I always thought it was interesting to imagine how sites like Myspace, Livejournal, and the such could come back and bite a politician in the ass. Bush and Kerry and Dean might be a little too old to have run a website while they were growing up, but my generation isn’t. When it comes time for my fellow peers to start running for office, people are going to dig up what they wrote in their blogs, what they posted on message boards, what they said in chat rooms. Everything, and I mean everything, put on the Internet is archived somewhere. Whether it be in Google’s cache or archive.org or a server’s backup in downtown Atlanta, chances are if you want to find an Angelfire site from 1999, you can, especially if you have the resources most powerful news agencies have. We make such a big fuss over what our politicians have maybe said in an interview or possibly said in a speech. Now think about having daily writings from an angst-ridden teenager who went on to clean up his act and run for political office. Imagine the worst thing you’ve ever typed and posted on the Internet. Now imagine seeing that run as a headline in the New York Times or USA Today. I’ve kissed any possible political career away with Shyzer, but that’s fine with me. For other people my age, they might not be ready to write off a certain career choice already and yet they might have already done so without even knowing it.

But Facebook is bringing this scenario to us in the present day, even if it’s only in a smaller scale. Reports are now surfacing that big-time companies and possible employers are getting into Facebook to check out prospective employees. Like I said, all it takes is a college e-mail and any bigwig in a Fortune 500 company surely can call up his alumni rep and get a college address to his old school. Ten minutes later, he’s pulling up Brad Johnson’s profile on Facebook and finding pictures of Johnson’s Johnson on there, right next to another one of him drunk and passed out in his dorm and reading about his “appreciation of the festive greens.” And just like that, there goes Bard’s chances of landing that internship.

On-line privacy debates are nothing new. From the recording industry suing Internet Providers for ISP records, to the Bush Administration’s attack on pornography, to employers being able to read their employees e-mails – It’s all ongoing. But the recent rash of Facebook incidents shine light on the new question involved. Where does the privacy line lie with minors and those releasing their pent up, youthful expressions and indiscretions?

Looks like we’re lumped together with the porn peddlers, the illegal downloaders, and those who are lazy on the job. Good company.

Now I just can’t wait for those 2024 Presidential Debates.

[EDIT]This post is amazingly outdated at this point. Most of the info below is no longer valid, but the gist of the post is still the same. If you have a few bucks and a few friends, you can get a free iPod. If you’re still interested after reading this post, click one of the image above and get started![/EDIT]

I’ve never liked scams. In fact, I have yet to find anybody who genuinely thought being scammed out of money or time could be called an enjoyable experience. Which is why I tend to take almost everything I read on the net with not just a grain of salt, but a whole damn truckload of salt.

So as you can imagine, when I saw a site offering free iPods, I laughed and moved on. Maybe I should have done a little more research back then.

My sudden shift in attitude came earlier this week while I was talking to some fellow clan members. I’m sure many of you don’t know, but there is an on-line video game based on the Matrix coming out this fall. As you can imagine, people began making clans and websites in preparation for the game once it finally came out. One such clan even went so far as to make an extremely difficult test and application process to weed out the idiots, which means that those of us in the clan are pretty tight-knit and don’t try to screw with each other. Therefore, when I saw one of them posting that his friend had actually gotten a free iPod from some website, I decided to listen to him and do some research of my own.

Well I’ve done my research can say with a straight face that this looks to be a legit operation here. The site is located over at www.freeipods.com and is run by a company called Gratis Internet. They specialize in online pay-for-performance acquisitions and are even a member of the Better Business Bureau. I’ve been able to go back and trace many of their older offers they ran and frankly, there are tons of satisfied customers and only a few people that talk of being disappointed.

But enough about all of that. I’m sure you are sitting there saying to yourself, “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DAMN IPOD?! HOW DO I GET IT?!” Quite easily. In fact, it only takes three simple steps.

First, create an account at freeipods. (But don’t do it yet you idiot! Wait until you’ve read of all this before you run off all half-cocked thinking you’ve got everything under control!)

Second, you choose one of the links on freeipod’s site, click it, and sign up with THAT company. (Calm down you idiots! No, you don’t need a credit card or have to pay a dime if you do the E-Bay offer!)

Third, you get 5 other people to do it.

So why would I be making this long-ass post if that was all you had to do? I mean, couldn’t you have just found that information on freeipod’s site? Of course you could have. But could you have found this easy ass guide I’m about to give you on their site? No, I didn’t think so.

Being the cheap poor person that I am, I quickly realized that there might be some hidden charges here. I mean, you never know what a company will just start charging you when you sign up for a new account with them and as I scrolled down the list of links you could click, I marked them off. AOL will give you a thousand free months but of course they want your credit card. Columbia House will dump mounds of CDs in your lap, just as long as you buy five for $35.00 a year later. E-Bay will….wait a minute.

E-BAY! See, I’ve been selling and buying things on E-Bay for years and if there is one thing that I learned early on, it was that you need not a single credit card to make an account and start buying things on E-Bay. And what’s this I see? All you have to do is make an account and “bid” on something? You don’t have to actually “win” the item? Oh this is gonna be sweet…

That’s right. Freeipods gets a referral bonus from E-Bay for every basic account created! All you have to do is give them your name, e-mail, and address and you are in! Once through with that, you just have to become the highest bidder on an item. Notice I didn’t say win. For instance, I did a quick search on E-Bay for digital cameras and found hundreds of them starting off at 0.01 cents. I made a bid of 0.25 cents, became the highest bidder, and was done. Of course, somebody came behind me and bid $50.00, meaning I didn’t win the digital camera for a quarter, but that’s the beauty of it all. That’s what is supposed to happen!

“But Goob,” you might be saying, “E-Bay won’t let you use a free e-mail account like Yahoo of Hotmail. What should I do?” Well that’s easy. Go to Yoggin.com or Big Puns. Or heck, if you own your own website, just make up a new e-mail account and use that!

That’s it! You’re done! Now all you have to do is get five friends to do it! Without much effort, I got a fellow clan member to sign up and do the E-Bay offer within minutes of asking him. In fact, I planned on just going down my buddy list and getting four friends to do it for me as well before I realized that I should share the wealth. Why get my friends to help me when I could easily help them get their own iPod as well.

Which is where this whole post comes into play. I want to help everybody get an iPod so this is what we are gonna do. I still need four more referrals since I decided to wait and ask people here in my post. My referral link is right here [link has since been removed], so click it and THEN make your account. I’ll get credited with a referral, you’ll have your account, and everybody wins. But like I said, I want to help my friends get five referrals as well.

So, if you click my link and sign up, say something in the comments of this post! Let me know you signed up using my link and then go ahead and post YOUR referral link. I’ll post those here on Shyzer and send them to all my friends until YOU have your five referrals. I’ve got plenty of clan members who are waiting for the rest of us to sign up before they sign up so that they don’t lose people a referral and honestly, if you think about it, how hard is it to get five people to do this for you? I’m looking at my buddy list right now and see 10 or 15 people who I know would take five minutes out of their lives to do me a favor, even if they didn’t want an iPod or not. So do me the favor, click my link, do the E-Bay thing, and then leave a comment with your referral link so that I can help you!

Here’s a few tips you might want to consider when making your accounts: Make sure YOU USE THE SAME HOME ADDRESS for signing up for E-Bay as you used for signing up at freeipods.com. This makes the verification process quicker and you will get credited sooner. If you are waiting to be credited on the e-Bay offer, you may or may not get credit for it until after the auction you bid on is over. So if the auction you bid on lasts for a week, don’t expect the e-Bay offer to be credited to you right away after bidding, give it awhile. And finally, it’s best not to have your referrals signed up using the same IP address as you. So getting someone in your house, using the same internet connection as you, signed up as your referral is a BAD IDEA. They will check to make sure they are indeed unique referrals and if they suspect that you’re cheating, then no IPOD for you. And it goes without saying, don’t try to sign up 5 extra times pretending to be your referrals. At least, not from your own home. =)

A great site for tons of information and links (including multiple sites where people photoed the iPod as it arrived at their house) is over at Forever Geeks. I suggest anybody who wants further proof to go check it out.