This video is pretty shocking. After seeing this, I will never get my car serviced at a Jiffy Lube. And you wonder why people hate taking their cars to mechanics.
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Related posts: The rise and fall of the electric car, Video of the day: Seinfeld, the lost episode, The politics of ‘24′
One would think that an atheist would view all illogical and unproven religious philosophies with equal disdain, but this isn’t the case. I find Mormonism to be sillier than Christianity, for instance, because its believers must reach a new level of intellectual dishonesty in order to believe the things they do. And I think “The Secret,” a new philosophy that is being endorsed by Oprah, to be especially harmful and ridiculous. In a recent Salon article, Peter Birkenhead tears Oprah a new one:
Books like “The Secret” have created, and are feeding, an enormously diverse market of disciples, and they’re thriving in every corner of the culture, in megachurches and movies, politics and pop music, in sports arenas and state boards of education. Oprah has far more in common with George Bush than either would like to admit, and so do the psychics of Marin County, Calif., and the creationists of Kansas. The believers come from all walks of life, but they work the same way — mostly by bastardizing and warping source materials, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, to make them fit their worldview. On Page 23 of “The Secret” you’ll find this revealing doozy: “Meditation quiets the mind, helps you control your thoughts.” Of course, the goal of meditation is precisely the opposite — it is to be conscious, to observe your thoughts honestly and clearly. But that’s the last thing the believers want to encourage. The authors of “The Secret” sell “control” in the form of “empowerment” and “quiet” in the form of belief, not consciousness.
The writer argues that this particular brand of snake oil is more harmful than its predecessors because it has such a powerful and influential figure behind it. Hell, even my brother has purchased the book and read it.
In early 2005, over 20 book bloggers banded together to use their combined forces to promote good books that weren’t widely known. This group, called the Litblog Co-op, chooses four books a year — one for each season — and then writes extensively about them on their group blog located at http://lbc.typepad.com/blog/. Since they first started, they’ve managed to get over 1,300 links from bloggers and have a Google Page Rank of 6:
Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to go research the Co-op for an article I was going to write, only to find out that they’ve for some reason been blacklisted from Google and other major search engines.
Anyone who has even a basic understanding of Page Rank and Web Rank would know that with over 1,000 incoming links, many of them with the anchor text of the words “Litblog Co-op,” Googling those words should easily bring you directly to the site. However, when you type “Litblog Co-op” into Google, not only is it not the first result, it doesn’t even show up on the first page.
Confused, I dug deeper into this to try and find out why the correct results weren’t showing up. First, I searched for “Litblog Co-op” on MSN and Yahoo, and as you can see, I got the correct results. Next I searched for it at AOL and Ask.com — both of which use Google software — only to find that they, too, weren’t giving up the correct results.
After this startling discovery, I dug even deeper, only to find out that Google isn’t even indexing the site at all. I unearthed this by searching for specific phrases within quotation marks to filter out all other websites. As you can see, the only thing indexed in Google is the LBC atom feed.
Given the above information, it’s my recommendation that the LBC move their website to a different URL that isn’t blacklisted from Google. If their true goal is to promote these books, then they’ll want the valuable search engine traffic that comes from the three search engines that combine together to make up over 90% of all internet searches. If I were the LBC, I would take this very seriously. Search engine traffic is very valuable.
UPDATE: It appears that the Litblog Co-Op is looking into the issue and they’re possibly going to move to Wordpress.
ANOTHER UPDATE: As I initially suspected, there was a no-follow link in their source code which was deflecting Google bots. I emailed one of the Co-op bloggers and they’ve located the no-follow link and got rid of it.
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Related posts: The Writing Life as dictated by Stephen King: Summed up with obscure metaphor, The text-advertising wars, Dear Instapundit, An area of Search Engine Optimization often overlooked: Google News, Interview with POD-dy Mouth, Only days after the whole Facebook “face-lift” controversy, Livejournal introduces a similar feature
I, like many peope, am addicted to the show 24. But unlike some, I enjoy it for its entertainment value, not for any political messages it conveys. A New Yorker article this week –Whatever It Takes– confirms that several of the creators of the show are indeed very conservative. Not only that, but they have strong connections with conservative political figures and meet with them regularly. Also, right-leaning journalists are using examples from the show to give credence to their arguments that torture can produce good.
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Gee, I just love it when obvious-pedophiles find their way to Bloggasm through google searches in which they try to find out how to hook up with kids.
From a man with an IP address located in Murray, Kentucky: “chat room for older people trying to hook up with kids”
He arrived at Bloggasm at 9:53:44 pm and didn’t even stay for a full 1 second. I guess this post (the one he entered in) didn’t have what he was looking for.
Scary, huh? I get stuff like this semi-regularly.
Related posts: Truck Carrying Radioactive Material Stolen
Garland police are searching for a truck carrying radioactive material that was stolen from a gas station Wednesday morning.
Police said the truck is a white 2001 Ford F-350 with Texas license plate 5YL-T51. The truck has flames painted on the hood and front panels and has the name Bonded Inspections, Inc. on the side.
By now, most of you have already heard about the Facebook controversy, the one where Facebook released all these news feeds that caused several privacy concerns. Well, so soon after Facebook enraged thousands of users, Livejournal is taking a similar step. They’re beta-testing a notification system with their paid users that allows you to click an icon that looks like a thumb-tack and lets you receive update messages whenever someone does something new on livejournal. They explain it thusly:
The new system works like this:
1. See something you want to track. (post, thread, journal, etc…)
2. Click this guy: Track this
3. Choose how you want to get notified:
* Message Center (always enabled)
* IM (future)
* …–… (future)
* For total dorks: web service ping to arbitrary URL (future)
4. Enjoy. Cancel or change notifications any time.
They’re being a little cautious in their wording, obviously because of the Facebook thing:
Doesn’t this let people stalk me?
It would’ve been really easy for us to build a system to enable stalking but we took a lot of effort to remove all potentially creepy features out of it:* You can’t track things you can’t see, of course. (private, friends-only, etc)
* Even though it’s public, you can’t track “all comments anywhere by user bob”. Because that’s a little weird. Maybe bob wants that, but for now we’re focusing on things you can already add to your friends page, get RSS for, etc..
This strikes me as very similar to Mark’s argument that nothing is available that wasn’t already public, which really wasn’t the point of the whole controversy. Still, I haven’t been able to test it yet through my livejournal since I’m not a paid user, so I’ll try to keep track of what others are saying about it.
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.
simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
