July 2005 Archives

This message is a public service for women who wonder why men are "unable" to properly "read" price tags. I do not admit to using any of these pricing schemes but here are some examples I've heard about:

Price tag: $4.99 = Men's Price: $4.00
We always round-down to zero all digits following a decimal point and then we add a penny. We just saved you a dollar! Thank us! 

There is a parental vein in America that believes in homeschooling children. I'm not talking about Charter schools. I'm talking about parents who choose to teach their children at home instead of enrolling them in school with lots of other children.

A good friend of mine and I had an interesting discussion years ago that still rings within me today. We were talking about the best way to raise and educate children and my friend, a strong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, told me he believes in the "indoctrination of children" into a religion.

Yesterday I was out for my daily walk along Palisade Avenue in Jersey City when I heard sounds 50 yards ahead of me I had never experienced before: Tires screeching on asphalt; a thump; crushing metal. Ahead of me people leapt out of their cars and from their porches. A cop on his lunch hour bolted from his parked cruiser with a sandwich still in his hand. 

In my post Mr. Grumpy Goes Blogging I set out a few suggestions to help people build better blogs. Today, Mr. Grumpy Returns to share some additional suggestions. A few of these ideas come from readers of the original article who wanted to add their own nuggets of advice for creating great blogs by avoiding common pitfalls. 

As a native Nebraskan I grew up in the Midwest where the accent is to have no accent. Most of the national news anchors come from the Midwest because you can't discern a strong regional accent in their speech pattern and that is effective, the networks claim, because the anchors can easily be understood by a wide viewing population. 

In the August 1, 2005 issue of Newsweek, the rise of Porn Podcasting is investigated:

Aug. 1 issue - Podcasting, that baby medium, is suddenly home to a lot of adult content. Introduced to a mainstream audience just last month, the technology -- radiolike programming for your iPod -- that was once the chaste province of "Geek News Central" and "Knitcast" is now reddening faces that sport those trademark white earbuds. "No matter what the technology is," says Andrew Leyden, founder of podcastdirectory.com, "sex finds a way to get involved."

Am I the only one who doesn't get the Boob Job Craze? I'm not talking about breast cancer reconstruction or fixing a birth deformity. Those breast implant surgeries are wonderful and necessary and healing.

On Tuesday I wrote a review called Yahoo! Search Marketing Foolishness where I recounted my unfortunate experience with that internet advertising program. Yesterday, to my surprise, I was contacted via email by Michael E. from Yahoo! Search Marketing at 3:43pm Eastern. Michael's SIG said he was in the "Executive Services" department and he was writing to tell me my previously turned down Ad for using the keyword "blog" to advertise this blog was being "escalated to our Secondary Review editor for further research." Michael wanted me to wait two business days to hear back from them and I was finally provided with a toll-free number to call if I wanted to get in touch with Yahoo! Executive Services for more information. Hmm... I wonder if Yahoo! read my Tuesday review? :) I replied to Michael that I had cancelled my account and I was no longer interested in Yahoo! Search Marketing. 38 minutes later Timothy J. from Yahoo! Search Marketing Executive Services wrote to tell me how happy they were to approve my "blog" Advertisement for this blog on their service. Ha! I laughed out loud at the continued lack of communication! I replied to Timothy J. and told him I cancelled my Yahoo! Search Marketing account on July 5 with John C. of Yahoo! "Customer Solutions" (it is interesting how all communication from Yahoo! Search Marketing still comes from an Overture.com email address). I asked Timothy J. to guarantee my account was, indeed, cancelled and that my credit card would not be charged. I have a cancellation number. Over 17 hours later I have no response from Yahoo! Search Marketing Executive Services. Why do I have the feeling I'll be in touch with them again soon to dispute a $30 monthly charge on my credit card for services not rendered? This lack of responsiveness, and inability to check basic facts, substantiates my concern about Yahoo! Search Marketing's unwillingness to meet simple consumer needs and accept customer feedback. Oh, well... at least I now have a toll-free number I can use if they charge my card again.

In case you missed them, here are my "Most" Blog Entries in no particular order:

In February, my graduate students in Public Health at a major research university and teaching medical school on the East Coast were discussing a new political cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes I brought to class showing President Bush, as a tailor, holding an empty Supreme Court Justice robe in one hand and an "unraveled" wire coat hanger in the other. 

I grew up watching Walter Cronkite doing the CBS Evening News. He was a class act back then; he retired much too early; he is now a brittle and humorless old man. The Old News Guard of the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's had an integrity that has been missing since the 1980's in current news broadcasts. 

I recently tried out Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) just to see what kind of traffic they could drive to my sites for a minimum buy of $30 dollars a month. The early results were okay. I averaged 5,000 impressions a day to return my self-imposed budget limit of 3 click-throughs per day (spending around a dollar a day) for a .37 cent bid for the "writing" keyword that would take people to my http://davidboles.com website. After a couple of weeks I decided I wanted to add a new Ad for this blog. I chose the keyword "blog" and bid .43 cents to get the first position in the Yahoo! Search Marketing return for my dollar-a-day budget of $30 a month. All Ads must be approved by Yahoo! Search Marketing before they go live and that takes up to four business days. Also, when you set up your Ad, the "computer editor" may disallow blacklisted words you might want to place in your Ad. "Coolest" and "Best" and "Greatest" and "Top" were all rejected by the Yahoo! Search Marketing robot content filter because my Ad suggested that I was trying to set myself apart by appearing to be the only choice in the category. Uh, "Duh!" Isn't that the point of advertising? If I didn't offer the best and the coolest and the greatest stuff that you can't find anywhere else why would I be writing this blog and why would you be reading it now? Since when did Advertising have to be bland and communal and no one can claim a top spot above another? Oh, you can claim the top spot in Yahoo! Search Marketing search returns by paying the highest bid fee, but if you choose words to claim the top spot you are rejected. I finally was able to craft a crafty and effective Ad for this blog that still claimed it was special and unique and I waited for Yahoo! Search Marketing editorial review to clear my Ad for placement. Four days later my Ad was rejected. The reason? The word "blog" as my keyword "did not apply to the content of the site" and would mislead visitors. I'm not going to cut up that idiotic reasoning here because you know exactly how ignorant and awful that decision was and it proves Yahoo! Search Marketing has absolutely no clue how blogs work on and interact with eyes on the internet. My main complaint about Yahoo! Search Marketing is not that they reject excellent Ads out-of-hand -- that goes without saying and I will say it again and again -- the thing that rakes me is the inability to immediately appeal stupid decisions with a human being. There is no option to appeal an editorial rejection. There is no phone number. There is no email address. There is no contact form. You just sit there searching for a way, any single way, to find a human being. Yahoo! Search Marketing offers no human contact and that bad business decision breeds hard feelings, frustration and a desire for revenge against wasted time as evidenced in this review. After four days of searching the Yahoo! Search Marketing site I finally found, hidden at the bottom of the page in really tiny print, a contact link. I decided had enough and I just wanted to entirely sever my rocky relationship. I told them to cancel my account. I heard nothing back for six days. I finally received an email -- from a human being -- who wanted me to call, at my own expense, to discus the issue of my cancellation. After a long and frustrating 20 minute phone call where I expressed the thoughts you are reading here, I think my account was cancelled. We'll see next month if my credit card is charged another $30 or not. Yahoo! Search Marketing is not for me. Google Advertising isn't much better. I think I'll stick with free self-promotion and self-search engine submissions because to pay for advertising search services on the web is to want a prickling experience that only serves to aggravate and advance the idea that human faces, and not computer forms, are absolutely required if you want to do well selling services on the internet.

I have permission to tell this story.

I am sharing this with you because it was a human moment that shocked the core of me with quiet tremors. 

I have no interest in wearing one of those yellow "LiveStrong" wristbands that everyone seems to have on today. I support the idea behind the band but what is the point of wearing the wristband? Is it to publicly prove you're caring and with the "in-crowd" or is there a deeper meaning to it? If there's magic in the band itself why not just put it in your pocket?

Why is Harry Potter so popular? I can't find a newspaper or a news report this morning that isn't glomming on to "Potter Fever." I think it is great kids and parents are staying up late to buy books together but are they actually reading the books or are they just being sucked into a giant advertising machine? I understand this kind of mania for a concert or a play or a sporting event or even a movie in a real theatre because those are one-off events that have a limited life in their original forms: You stand in line for those experiences so you can claim a unique viewing. Harry Potter books have a shelf life of forever! The experience will always be the same and the beauty of a book is it does not change from generation to generation: Your Harry Potter is your children's grandchildren's Harry Potter. Are people standing Potter lines so they can claim a first edition... from a run of 11 million copies? I've read a couple of the Potter books and they're good, but not great. I find the movies of the books marginal. What am I missing?

The task of living is can be difficult as the world in which we spin becomes smaller, time speeds up, and the distance between people and cultures shrink. Now, more than ever, we need to find ways to achieve common ground beyond ideology and narrow value sets.

Sgt. Martha is a former student of mine and I now call her a friend. Martha and I are closer now thousands of miles apart than we ever were when we stood next to each other in the same classroom for a semester. I guess war does that to people: It binds you nearer to those you care about because every day there is the danger you will never see them alive again. Martha is somewhere in Iraq serving their country, and ours, in the effort to help build a Democracy in the Middle East. 

We need to have a blunt conversation. I realize this may not be a popular article if you have children and you celebrate them online by posting their photos for public viewing.

There has been a lot of talk about protecting children when they are interactively online but I suggest parents take an even larger step backward and realize even one-way interaction where your children are being viewed by people you do not know is just as dangerous to the welfare of your child as an unmonitored online chat session. 

Something's happening to this blog: It is Exploding! Twelve days ago I reported the following traffic tallies for this blog via BlogExplosion only:

The secret to good writing is, as Dr. Howard Stein repeatedly told his graduate students at Yale University, the University of Texas-Austin, The University of Iowa, SUNY-Purchase and Columbia University over the course of a continued 60 year teaching career, is simply: "Ass on Chair."

DRM or -- "Digital Rights Management" for the blissfully unbroken -- is a dream stuck in Hell and is also the facockta name Microsoft has branded its media licensing initiative and it means if, like me, you choose to rent your downloaded music, instead of purchasing it or stealing it, your life is currently miserable. 

Has anyone ever applied for, and then received, a job by posting on any of the online job services like Monster or Hot Jobs? I have several friends who are deeply into using those and other online job services but, so far, none of the services have led to a job, let alone even an interview. I wonder if the online job services are just advertising sites that don't really offer the end user anything other than leads to false hope?

After 15 years of service, my stainless steel Rolex Datejust died yesterday. The hands will only move backward instead of forward. Rolex watches have a terrible reputation for being handsome but then dying at an early age. My Rolex never failed me a day in 15 years and I will miss its ugly magnifying bubble for the date and its dull blue face. 

I hope I never hear the name "Carrie Ann Inaba" spoken in a fake British accent, or any other accent for that matter, again for as long as I live. I was going to post my outrage over the sham show, Dancing with the Stars, last week when Joey McIntyre was wrongly thrown off the television program, but I held my fingers until the final decision came down last night. 

For awhile now I have been thinking about the Acquiescence of Values from the personal to the commercial. We'd never sell our souls, but our values... name your price. Values are deeply held beliefs in "doing the right thing" and most of us share those black and white ideals without needing to lower the conversation to a political or religious level.

The sun is not good for you. At one time, maybe twenty or thirty years ago, a tan was stylish and chipper. No longer. Sun on your skin is your enemy and the enemy of your children and your pets. You must fight the sun to the death before the sun kills you first. Several years ago I had a red mark under my left eye. 

If you have an embedded Technorati account set up on your blog and you would like to swap links to support each other, let's do it! If you want to link up, please post a comment here or send me a note in email letting me know you forged a link to "David W. Boles' Urban Semiotic" or -- if you must for design or aesthetic reasons -- just "Urban Semiotic" if that fits better. 

I joined the blog promotion portal Blog Explosion one month ago today. Blog Explosion is a place where you can promote your blog, meet new people, and get some good tips on how to improve your blog. I had no idea how many visitors I would have after a month. I hoped for 1,000 and, as you can see in the image of my account below, my hope was more than doubled with 2,084 visitors and those numbers reflect only Blog Explosion visitors.