Blurblog

Background
Not so long ago, a friend an I visited the mall in Douglasville, GA to pick up a tux for his wedding. Right across the way was an arcade with a new game I had never played before called stacker. It took several minutes to figure out how the game worked and at $2 per play I was in no rush to send in my wallet in to the stacker shredder, that was until I watched some other play and give me the general idea. It’s very simple, stack the boxes to the top, and win a prize.

So after watching two others toss nearly $20 in plays into the machine, I decided to try my hand at it. First time, I managed to get to the minor prize and then accidentally hit the accept minor prize button. Well I wasn’t going to settle with that… So I tried again, got to the top, and won myself an XBOX 360 (Two $2 tries). Not a bad return.

So, I moved to Montgomery, AL and visited the mall yesterday and won a 30 GB Ipod Video after seven $1 tries (over 3 days). It was then that I realized that there are some Stacker tips you should notice next time you run into an arcade and are about to spend your entire allowance on a Stacker. I can’t guaruntee that it will get you that prize, but it will certainly help if you want to learn how to win the Stacker Arcade Game. Read the rest of this entry »

Well apparently MySpace isn’t completely dead and trying to hold on to it’s still ever growing population of ((spam)) users by throwing a block party! That’s right, MySpace’s Tom is throwing a block party in LA as described in his bulletin:

party with me tomorrow in los angeles
Jul 14, 2007 1:23 AM EST
“well, van nuys.. haha we’re having a MYSPACE BLOCK PARTY, YO!It all starts tomorrow at 10am in Van Nuys; we’ve got the entire block to ourselves for this huge event. Check out the celebs, the models, and all the pimped out rides, plus the vendors showcasing their latest and greatest in the automotive industry.
–
Performances: DJ Skribble, Mims, Sean Kingston, Spider Loc, Lil Fizz and DJ Eque
Hosted by: Aubrey from Danity Kane , Vida Guerra
When: Saturday, July 14th @ 10am-6pm
Location: Van Nuys (near the airport)
16152 Saticoy St.
Van Nuys, CA 91406
(818) 997-9013
–
For more info go to myspace.com/fdmotoring
woooo!
THIS EVENT IS ABSOLUTELY FREE, BUT PLEASE BRING A CANNED FOOD ITEM TO DONATE!”

So if you happen to be in the LA area or nearby consider stopping by and coming back here to tell me all about it you might find and meet up with some interesting people. But on a side note, what caught my eye was that the profile Tom promoted was hosted by the advertising client themselves and soon fdmotoring.com found themselves completely flooded and quickly denying requests left and right giving visitors a VERY slow response times much less any image content.

Ah the power of the masses. Send every emotional, jock, joe, jane, sam on myspace in the middle of the summer on a friday night to one page at the same moment and there’s bound to be something interesting to come out of it. Imagine also sending a single bulletin to over 190,082,914 people too. Well now at least it has settled out.

haha, good stuff.

You may have tried out YouTube’s new beta version of video displays and have noticed that they have removed the usual banner advertisement on various parts of the page. If you haven’t seen the new page, be sure to check it out. You may also be aware of the projected boom that online video advertising is projected to have in the near future and it seems that YouTube is going all in by cutting their banners and focusing primarily on embedded and video advertising.

I happened to stuble across a peek of this while watching Best Saves of the Stanley Cup Finals from NHLVideo displaying what YouTube may have in store for our viewing pleasure in the near future. You’ll notice that two things are different with this new player.

One is the flash banner that scrolls across the video at the bottom when it first starts. You’ll also notice that this advertisement is not deployed site wide and only appears on specific videos which I believe will lead to embedded flash (or even text) advertisements relevant to the video’s content itself based on user comments, titles, and descriptions.

The second advertisement change you’ll notice doesn’t appear until the end of the video where a simple adwords styled, text ad will appear inside of the player itself. The advertisement used in this example is the same advertisement that is mentioned above, however this slot could easily be used with adwords just as easily. Below that are the same buttons we are now familar with only a tad smaller so you still have the same interface, just a little smaller and a little more sqished.

Of course with this new style still in beta one can only wonder what Google has in mind for YouTube’s new interface and ad placements. We’ll just have to wait and see.

One of the interesting topics that came up during our discussion was the take down of a security related website (seclists) that contains thousands of email list archives (Story). The reason was because a list of approximately 56,000 myspace usernames and passwords was published by a user of the website (Remember afterall it is an email list archive). From that, we wondered- How did these hackers get ahold of these usernames and passwords?

Read the rest of this entry »