It's Windsurfing time!

Been a while since I last had a chance to post something on there - but this is a doozy.

Check out this fantastic video from YouTube:



The group is called The Surfers, and I am going to have this playing on my iPod the next time I'm out windsurfing on my board. This is so bad it's awesome!

You can check out some more of their hits at Last.fm

Bit of a break from posting, been pretty busy - but I had to share this. Dan Lyons (of Fake Steve Jobs fame) has hit the nail firmly on the head with his latest post covering a panel at the EmTech conference.

He's nicely summed up what I've been telling investors and boards for the last 18 months - why do these people not get it?

EmTech inanity: "

My first reaction was that in the greater scheme of things (economy in free fall, war in Iraq, global warming, energy crisis, not to mention the old reliables like cancer and poverty and AIDS, etc.)this challenge of finding a good restaurant seems like a fairly trivial and unimportant problem for our big geek brains to be trying to solve. If I were funding these guys I might go home scratching my head about what those kids are doing with all of my millions. Maybe there is a point to what they’re doing,but honestly, what great problem are these companies trying to solve? Sitting there watching this spectacle — watching these guys unable to simply explain what they do and and how they are going to make a business out of it -it was staggering to think that someone has entrusted these people with very large sums of money. But someone has. I weep for those people.

(Via Real Dan Lyons Web Site.)

And why are work shy slackers *still* getting funding for mediocre faff that adds no value to the collective human race, doesn't solve any problems - and, worst of all - will never make any money?

Attack of the Cock Copter

Some protesters wave around banners. Some have some more spine and throw some eggs.

In Russia, they have more balls. They heckle with giant flying dildos.

Yes, chess grandmaster turned dissident politician Gary Kasparov was giving a speech in Moscow when he was harassed by a remote controlled flying dildo.

After the attack was thwarted, Kasparov joked "I think we have to be thankful for the opposition's demonstration of the level of discourse we need to anticipate. Also, apparently most of their arguments are located beneath the belt." An audience member shouts back "Finally the political power shows its face!". Kasparov's reply?

"Well, if that's its face..."

Will we see Secret Service agents taking a cock for the US President? I can only hope so.

Here's the full video of this harrowing thrust against democracy:

Promoting small websites or finding out about large ones

In doing some poking around to research the background behind a domain, I came across three websites which all offer similar tools. Depending on how you choose to use them, they can either be used to carry out some background research on competitors, or to promote your own small website or blog.

AboutUs.com

AboutUs asks you for a domain or website URL, and then wanders off and retrieves information from the site. It analyses the site contain, and pulls back a summary, related domains, other sites linked to, and information about the domain itself.
The interesting thing about this is that AboutUs presents all this information via a Wiki, which can be edited and update by the site owner, or by visitors.

Check out this example page for Finance-Portal.co.uk

DomainTools.com

DomainTools uses a whois lookup to pull back registration information about a domain, as well as the server it's hosted on, and any other relevant sites. On top of that it also retrieves a site's rank from Alexa and Complete.com. Most interesting though is the analysis DomainTools does on the homepage content. As well as counting the number of internal and outbound links on the homepage, it works out the relevancy of the meta description and site title against the homepage content. Create a free account to get access to more tools and goodies.

Compare the Finance-Portal.co.uk page against the one for AboutUs.

BuiltWith.com

BuiltWith works in a similar vein to AboutUs and DomainTools. The difference with BuiltWith is that it's tools are more concerned with the optimisation of a site, and the technology and software used to build it. BuiltWith will report on things like the advertising systems being used, the scripting framework, the analytics and tracking software being used, and so on.

Get a flavour of what's available with this report on Finance-Portal.co.uk

Taken individually, these are all interesting and useful tools. However, when combining their reports together, they can be used to fully map out the web presence for a given domain. Equally, they can produce powerful pages and reports which can be used to promote a small site or blog.

Give them a go and try them for your sites.

Cyanide and Happiness

If you haven't come across their cartoons and animations, your life has a gaping void in it. Luckily for you, it can now be filled!


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Spartacus is probably their best animation yet. Enjoy!

TRON's lightcycle scene - in stop-motion animation

French filmmaker Freres-Hueon has recreated the epic lightcycle battle from Tron in fantastic stopmotion form. Using cardboard cutouts to replace the computer graphics, and the entire scene is re-enacted in all it's glory.

Feast your eyes on this gem:

Tron
by freres-hueon

Utterly fantastic. Head on over to http://www.gltron.org/index.php and relive the fun for yourself. There's an IRIX binary available to, to give your SGI workstation a proper workout.

Ling from LINGsCARS on website promotion

I've known about CARS for a while. Not only is the website pretty awesome, but Ling also has a Zil 131 truck with a fake nuclear warhead strapped to the back. I've been a big fan of Zil and Gaz trucks for ages, so that's how I first came across Ling and her site.

Ling has a fantastic post on her blog at http://www.lingscars.com/blog/?p=2412 where she goes into detail on how she builds awareness of her website. This should be required reading for anyone who's trying to get traffic or raise the profile of their site - it's not all about PPC and Google Adwords.

Well worth a read, and I can highly recommend subscribing to her RSS feed as well.