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For anybody who has never made an Earth Sandwich, been a member of the League of Awesomeness, or had a fixation with small duckies, you have until March 17th to check out The Show with Ze Frank.

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.

A while back, I bookmarked a page called Private Phone and promptly forgot all about it, but today I checked it out a bit more in detail and it’s pretty darn nifty!

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!

As much as I love the idea of a bunch of nerds actually standing up for what they believe in and taking action in a form other than creating a message board or forming a dinky on-line petition, you’ve got to be kidding me.

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.

[via Saddam is Dead]

Trust me, I understand that Google Adsense sometimes has trouble matching up a relevant ad to certain pages, but this one takes the cake.

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.

For finally realizing that the best way to get high quality user created videos is to pay the creators! Although, I think the bigger implication here is that sometimes I actually do know what the hell I’m talking about.

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.

Well, since there’s so much talk and uproar about the new Facebook changes (see post below), I went out and created Facebook Talk in a matter of hours. I’m skilled like that. I kind of invision it as a site where people can not only get together to talk about the changes on Facebook, but anything else related to it. Privacy concerns, hacks, funny groups, whatever.

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 teching 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 mehtods 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. But make sure you check out (AND INTERACT WITH! Post some comments! Join the message board! Send in cheating tips! INTERACT!!!) Facebook Talk and Learn To Cheat.

When TIME Magazine writes up a story within a matter of hours about something that happened on Facebook yesterday, you know a lot of people are talking about it.

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.

When I was in Australia last year, my main source of communication and news was through weekly 4,000 word e-mails between myself and Fellner. In fact, we had so much fun with them, that we kept it going when he went to Ecuador and even now while he’s in Austria. Now, when you’re writing thousands and thousands of words each week back and forth, it’s not hard to imagine that we cover a lot of ground. And sometimes, I feel as if we’re always one step ahead of everybody, talking about things that only we seem to care about that suddenly a few weeks or months later become big news.

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.

Remember the post I made a month ago about viral videos and making money? Of course you do, seeing as how it’s just a few scrolls below this post since I haven’t written much lately. Anyways, it turns out there’s a website called Revver that is offering a service similar to what I proposed. Yet they’re still screwing things up.

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.