Daily Archive for April 20th, 2006

Jenny, a shining star in the MySpace universe

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 in News. 0 Comments

Up until now I had seen only chaos in the design of MySpace pages, thinking that MySpace was a trend setter for several things but also with the distinct impression that I was back in 1994 when quite a few of the first web sites/pages looked like all the myspace pages I have seen so far. Well some of the first pages I designed most probably looked that bad.
However today I came across (sorry a ‘friend‘ pointed me to) Jenny Beck’s myspace page. Well first of all the page looks really nice, very professional and regardless of some weird comments posted by other users, well I’m impressed.
But being impressed doesn’t stop there with Jenny. She not only has a really nice page, she designed herself, she also writes songs and the song called ‘Somebody’ is really nice. You can listen to it as well if you visit her myspace page. So Jenny is like a star that shines out in the myspace universe
And before you leave to check it out have a look at the video a bit further down the page about the 2006 Women In Music Festival in Birmingham, very interesting…
You might find the experience interesting enough to go and vote for Jenny like I did on the Makato web site (didn’t have time to check out what Makato is all about but was convinced that Jenny has talent)…

Vote for Jenny Beck at Makato

Coincidence, unlucky or linkbait ?

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 in Blog and Unusual. 0 Comments

In an article posted on Oilman’s blog there is a story about a guy looking for a girl he met in an airport, I posted a note about it yesterday. I also came across a comment by IrishWonder on the same post :

Am I being too cynical or is it a cool case of linkbait?

This was the first time I had heard about linkbait and so looked it up and found out that it is basically a technique for creating a story/content to wheel in links from interesting sites. Getting interesting sites to willingly do so would depend upon the content being special/interesting. Some people seem to think the term linkbait is not a good term since it isn’t always about tricking people into linking to your site.

Anyway, curious as I am, I did a few searches on the name “Kevin Amoros”, initially I thought that it wasn’t a very French first or last name. Also having done some English teaching, I was surprised at how the structure of the sentences were pretty complex with some simple English mistakes as if they were added afterwards. First of all some school photos come up on a French site called trombi.com. Then I came across an interesting thread on a forum and this part of the thread is why it came up in Google :

domain: pleinphare.com
created: 04-Oct-2002
last-changed: 17-Dec-2003
registration-expiration: 04-Oct-2004
nserver: ns19.schlund.de
nserver: ns20.schlund.de
registrant-firstname: Kevin
registrant-lastname: Amoros
registrant-street1: 112 rue Felix Faure
registrant-pcode: 92700
registrant-city: Colombes
registrant-ccode: FR
registrant-phone: +33.662703455
registrant-email: kevinamoros@wanadoo.fr
admin-c-firstname: Kevin
admin-c-lastname: Amoros
admin-c-street1: 112 rue Felix Faure
admin-c-pcode: 92700
admin-c-city: Colombes
admin-c-ccode: FR
admin-c-phone: +33.662703455
admin-c-email: kevinamoros@wanadoo.fr

It refers to a domain name used in a scam with a special phone number you would call and get charged extra. The idea from this thread and another of the site labelled as “400 Euros in three clicks” in this post was that each time you brought a friend to sign up you would get 1 Euro. They would guarantee you for 20 friends who in turn would bring 20 friends so 20 x 20 = 400 Euros. The small type : you have to ring 3 telephone ‘AlloPass’ numbers that have a high charge rate… The second thread above explains how the site stopped responding after a few weeks with no way to follow up after having being billed on the numbers…

So far no way of knowing whether this guy is the same one !? Well yes, because the email is the same one used on the guys ad page, which I’m not going to link to (kevinamoros@wanadoo.fr) and a ‘whois’ query on the domain name that was used for the scam (404 error on pleinphare.com) reveals that the registrar company (schlund) is the same as the one for the current web site. Kevin seems to have his habits. This doesn’t actually indicate whether he actively participated in this scam though.

So could it be he heard the song by James Blunt called ‘You’re Beautiful’ and thought that’s a nice story I know how I could use that, replace subway with airport, same sad ending…

IrishWonder may well be correct in his first idea that this is a linkbait scam (not as bad a scam as the one described above). Has Kevin just been pretty unlucky and got mixed up with the wrong people ! On face value you wouldn’t think the sub domain which is pretty long is interesting from a search engine perspective and I doubt the aim was to have an impact on the main domain !?

PS : I’ve just been going through my email and today’s Robert Clough searchengine.com newsletter is talking about this, obviously Clough talks about it from a Search Engine Advertising perspective !

A new blog every second !

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 in Blog, Trend and Writing. 0 Comments

A new article at emarketer, based on the latest Technorati report illustrates how the blogosphere is now at over 35 million blogs. The average rate at which new blogs are created each day means that a new blog is created nearly every second of the day ! In August 2003 there were 0.5 million blogs being tracked by Technorati and now there are 35.3 million.
Another interesting fact is that Technorati statistics indicate that nearly 4 million bloggers update their blogs weekly, if not more, at the moment…

Love at first sight in an airport; can be complicated

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 in Travel and Unusual. 0 Comments

A young French man (why young, just a guess actually) called Kevin Amoros, seems to have met the love of his life in an airport. The problem is that he didn’t get her number or her name for that matter, but love “gives you wings” as they say in French. So he placed an advert through Google, hoping that someone could help him find her, or that the love of his life would read the Google ad! Read Oilman’s account of the event !

Une Notte A Napoli, Pink Martini

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 in Music and Video. 0 Comments

If you enjoyed listening to the Pink Martini album below, Hang On Little Tomato, you may well find these links very interesting. Two recordings of Pink Martini in the KCRW studios, taken from the Hang on little tomato album :

There is also an interesting interview with Pink Martini. It’s nice to be able to put a face, or in this case faces to such a fantastic group and they all seem so enthusiastic about their music and the whole creation process, really a great interview here : KCRW Pink Martini interview.

I really enjoyed watching these, I hope you do to !

Pink Martini

Bush explains he has the Beatles on his iPod !

Published on Thursday, April 20, 2006 in Music, News and Video. 0 Comments

Bush explains he listens to the Beatles on his iPod. Now this most probably doesn’t sound much of a sensational piece of information does it ? The problem is that the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) professes that transferring a song from a CD to MP3 file ; ripping a song from a CD as they say, is illegal. The Beatles songs are only legally available in CD format and are not available anywhere on the Internet in digital file format like MP3 yet. So Will the RIAA take Bush to court ??