Sad false start for Firefox viral marketing campaign

I almost laughed my ass off after this!!! A marketing campaign labeled Fight Against Boredom based on a viral video apparently featuring actors playing stereotypes and real Firefox users. This seems to be the video filmed a few weeks ago and Mozilla called fans to participate on.

The video follows the aid video format (think We are the world): lots of people alternating on a microphone in a recording studio, shows several funny real facts like Firefox users are 14% less likely to have sleep disorders or 16% less likely to have fungal infections than Internet Explorer users. The numbers are based on recent Nielsen surveys according to Mozilla Marketing VP, Paul Kim.

At the end, the video prompts to visit fightagainstboredom.org which wasn’t supposed to go live yet but due to an error in the content development process it was accessible today, and technology news site, TechCrunch reported that among other contents some not so funny statistics were published like “38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.” and “24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease”.

Reactions didn’t take long labeling the mishap as offensive and of very bad taste at the very minimum.

In a comment to the post and a blog post later, Paul Kim apologized: “I want to sincerely apologize for this oversight. We hadn’t reviewed the stats before they were accidentally published and some of them are clearly in poor taste and humor. This does not reflect the views of Mozilla and we are working to fix this immediately.”

As of this writing, fightagainstboredom.org is not accessible and requires user authentication.

As for the video, which features Tay Zonday (or a look/voice alike), of Chocolate Rain (a viral video) fame, it has driven a broad range of reactions from “brilliant” to “I love Firefox, but this video sucked on a whole new level”and “OK, this has actually made me switch to IE for the time being. Anyone else embarrassed to use Firefox now ?”

I think a video can become viral because of being too beautiful or too funny not to pass along and I don’t see Rise Up falling on any of those categories. If the unfortunate mishap turns to ruin the viral marketing campaign I am not sure if there’d be much to be sorry about.

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ABC launches viral marketing campaign for Lost

Check out the billboard in Portland, Oregon for the new season of Lost. A friend of mine, Chris, shot this photo recently.

As
you can see, it's a billboard advertising Oceanic Air, which is the
fictional airline in the series. The billboard includes the website FlyOceanicAir.
Of course, I checked out the website and it is for Oceanic, but it
appears to have been hijacked by a possible new character for the next
season. There's a video message from a guy named 'Sam' who says he is
looking for Sonya, a flight attendant who he also calls his "partner".

Sam's video has flashes of another website, Find815,
which is Sam's personal effort to keep searching for flight 815, the
Oceanic flight which crash landed on the island and started this whole
fiasco. That website has a little challenge for fans-- to find the
differences in two pictures of Sonya. It's pretty obvious, but I'll let
you check it out without spoiling things.

While I thoroughly
enjoy wacky marketing like this, I imagine that a lot of drivers in
Portland fully believe there's a new airline that wants them to fly to
Seoul, South Korea.

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Wiki-inspired "transparent" search-engine

Wikia Search is a new, wiki-inspired search-engine project that attempts to create a transparent set of ranking algorithms that fight spam and promote good stuff to the top. This is in contrast to Google, Yahoo, and other search engines, where the ranking algorithms are treated as trade secrets and high-risk tactics that have to be guarded from spammers.

The idea of a ranking algorithm is that it produces "good results" -- returns the best, most relevant results based on the user's search terms. We have a notion that the traditional search engine algorithm is "neutral" -- that it lacks an editorial bias and simply works to fulfill some mathematical destiny, embodying some Platonic ideal of "relevance." Compare this to an "inorganic" paid search result of the sort that Altavista used to sell.

But ranking algorithms are editorial: they embody the biases, hopes, beliefs and hypotheses of the programmers who write and design them. What's more, a tiny handful of search engines effectively control the prominence and viability of the majority of the information in the world.

And those search engines use secret ranking systems to systematically and secretly block enormous swaths of information on the grounds that it is spam, malware, or using deceptive "optimization" techniques. The list of block-ees is never published, nor are the criteria for blocking. This is done in the name of security, on the grounds that spammers and malware hackers are slowed down by the secrecy.

But "security through obscurity" is widely discredited in information security circles. Obscurity stops dumb attackers from getting through, but it lets the smart attackers clobber you because the smart defenders can't see how your system works and point out its flaws.

Seen in this light, it's positively bizarre: a few companies' secret editorial criteria are used to control what information we see, and those companies defend their secrecy in the name of security-through-obscurity? Yikes!

source: www.boingboing.net

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Get yourself a Wordpress Hoodie

Everyone likes to show off and of course there is no harm in it. As a new year gift, Matt gives us this new navy blue Wordpress Hoodies which is just amazing.

Well, if you are too tired of blogging around on Wordpress, just put on your Wordpress Hoodie and start wandering around your town streets. At least someone will figure out that you are a proud user of the Wordpress Blogging System.

The hoodie is just excellent for exclusive branding and some pomp and show.

Basically it is a classic unisex drawstring sport hoody made by American Apparel, screen printed with the WordPress logo.

You can buy this Wordpress Hoodie from the official Wordpress Merchandise Shop.

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MoDazzle : Next generation mobile networking

Technology has become a vital part of our life. It is creeping into our daily activities, and it has become crucial. Can we imagine living without mobile? Gosh…it will be our first expression. And now the new craze is social networking sites, people are just addicted to it. Believe it or not, people check their favorite social networking sites every second, to find who has scraped them and who is online. Imagine accessing these sites through your mobile, how easy it will be.

MoDazzle does the same. www.modazzle.com gives you the opportunity to access social networking sites through mobile via SMS and email without Internet, GPRS or EDGE on your phone. You can access LinkedIn, SalesForce and Facebook. The list doesn’t stop here you can also find out nearest star bucks, weather updates, Stock quotes and directions and many more.

To access all you have to do is, register yourself at www.modazzle.com and specify what you want to access through mobile; LinkedIn, SalesForce or Facebook. You can register for how many ever services you want.

With Linkedin on your mobile,

MoDazzle allows you to search for company details, people search also you can invite your contacts, search for person details and check out for common contacts between you & your friend. Like wise with Facebook you can send messages to you friend, you can read messages from your inbox, post a note on to your profile, poke and lots more.

As we know, SalesForce is the leader in customer relationship management. SalesForce enterprise users with the help of

MoDazzle can attach a document, find account information, can log sales call and get the tear sheet find out the new task, all through their mobile via SMS and email.

MoDazzle-easy to access and free to register. Once you have registered, accessing Facebook, LinkedIn and SalesForce is at your finger tips. Just register and make your life easy.

Splog

This is also called as the spam blogging or a fake blog, just to promote some websites, to get some traffic for their own purpose. Generally these don't have a genuine or original content, publishing a plagiarized content from an genuine source. The splogs have huge number of links, just to pull the crawlers to their site. These also associate their posts with some of the popular keywords, so that their blog turns up in the general search result, which in turn will be associated with other moneymaking ways and they earn quick bucks.

Generally these sites are not for the humans to read it. neither they want them to read. But they just want the money from it, like the ads that they feature along with it, and many spam links that are added along with the other contents. Some one who might be a novice to the internet might just click on them out of curiosity or unknowingly. Once people see that the page has more crap than anything useful or not in order, then they can call abuse it, or not use it.

After this, the Google became aware of the multitude of problems that have arisen, and to fix it, they added a feature of certain tests online, like writing whats written in code, or to add the numbers, just to confirm that the blogger is a human and not a bot. The google noticed that, many people used bots to create a blog rush, inturn increasing the traffic, and clogging the net.

Generally it could the case that a new comer to the blog world could just copy contents from other websites, and also include links, act just like what bots do, and inturn can get banned. These people have to know more on how the blogs function, than do these un ethical things and get rankings, or traffic.

BLOG's Slowing down, Dont worry !

There would be a time that every one would have felt that they have tons of articles to write, and no time for anything else. Will the enthusiasm flow for a seasoned blogger, or after blogging for a considerable long time? I guess that the answer may vary over this, but definitely the answer would be " less interested " or " have little time for it " or "No posts".
This is a general complaint from a single blogger, if he is the sole writer of the blog, and this is rarely seen in a blog where many people write to it.

Why is there this slump to the blogs? Is it self-made or has time bound your hands? I guess every one will have their own reason to quote for the slump in their blog, but if this is made as a regular habit, just like looking up the mail, or messaging over the net this will look very simple and never will the term slump come up.

The blogs just not help us updating our Knowledge Base, but also help others who are desperately looking out for knowledge.

1. Plan the Contents: It is better to start a blog that has juice to a greater extent, and the one that can spell its effect long term. If there are any posts that are incomplete then complete them.

2. Take a break: It is alright to take a break if you feel that you are out of contents or have felt bored about blogging. A small break can revitalize your thoughts and you can come up with new contents. But be very careful in mentioning your readers that you will not be posting for 'Y' number of days. Else they can unsubscribe from your article or think that you have stopped writing. Its important to retain old visitors and more important is to woo new visitors to your site.

3. Broaden the blog base: Initially one might have restricted to a single topic, which is practically difficult to target regularly. SO its better to broaden the base and write more topics in relation to the main topic we have selected. Example, if we are writing on electronic goods, its wise to broaden the base and extending to also write about ROBOTS that are just not electronic products, but is a Mechatronic product. This widens the scope of more posts, and also many people can get attracted to your blog. But be careful of not broadening the topics to a very general platform, which can make the reader feel that the blog has all crap under the sun which may not be very specific.

4. Don't clutter: If there are many sub topics that you feel cant be addressed effectively, then plan a topic for each day of the week, which can make you address many topics over the week, and also that there are a lot more chances that you can find topics to be written over a week's time. This works only if the blog is not in the line of any updating blogs like the News.

5. Friendly blogging: Ask some of the trusted ones among your friends and/ or colleagues to help posting for you as guests. Or you can talk about some of the problems that your visitors might have in the field of interest (what your blogs talk about), and solve them.

6. Revisit the Blogs: If any changes are to be made to the blogs already written, better do it at a regular interval, or that if you are able to add some more stuff to it, then go ahead and do the required changes.