It seems that the owner of the Nissan XTerra that was used on NBC’s The Office put it up for sale on eBay. The original listing for Dwight’s XTerra got canceled for some reason. The seller apparently works as a stylist for the show and their XTerra was used as a prop. The reason given was that there was an error in the listing. Perhaps NBC got wind of it and insisted on it being pulled. It doesn’t seem to be relisted at this point though.

In The Office episode, Did I Stutter?, Andy Bernard put the XTerra up for sale and Dwight made him a low ball offer, saying that the XTerra was in such bad shape that he would use like a wagon on his farm to haul feed and such. Later, he lists the vehicle on eBay Motors for a profit.

The auction also included various memorabilia from The Office, including an autographed script and a copy of the “For Sale” sign used in the episode. Too bad it didn’t work out for the seller. Perhaps they’ll get everything cleared up and be able to relist it as some point or else they’ll just sell it privately off eBay.

I like the lyrics of this song, “Even if we all fall flat this year we’ll get up and persevere“

You can check out their MySpace Page, Mark Lind & The Unloved, to hear more of their music. It’s your typical ugly MySpace page by a musician who doesn’t know much about website design but the music is good.

How would you like to make fuel for your car for the low, low, price of $9995? Well, someone has come up with a way for you to do just that, the EFuel100, Earth’s First Home Ethanol System.

Home Ethanol Refinery

This device is essentially a still. You know, just like Snuffy Smith and Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies had. Just with an old fashioned still you put in sugar and yeast and in a week or so you have your very own “White Lightening” you can run your vehicle with.  According to their site, the device can manufacture about 35 gallons of ethanol in a week. As you might guess, you don’t want to be taking a swig since the resulting liquid would be too impure and dangerous for human consumption. There are other, safe, ways for you to make your own hooch at home.

In the US, you’ll need to get a permit from the Treasury Department to make your own ethanol (Dang Revinoors!). You may also need state, county or city authorization as well. In other countries you’ll need to find out what local laws apply. Also, so far as the US government goes, you also get an alternative fuels tax break that can be worth nearly $3500.

Cost Effective or Not?

Most cars can run successfully on ethanol. While you may not want to operate a high performance and temperamental sports car with it, it should work fine in the average family vehicle. In fact, it may be more efficient than gasoline in terms of gas mileage and performance.

As for cost of the operation, it would allow you to make your own fuel for roughly $1.25 a gallon according the EFuel’s website. This would give you a full return on investment in about 18 months, provided that gasoline costs remain at $3.50 over that time period and that there are no massive fluctuations in the sugar market.

Green Concerns

These concerns are actually rather minor. One of the main criticisms of biofuels is that it takes food crops and makes fuel out of them, primarily corn. The crop that’s used for the EFuel device is sugar, as in sugar cane. There is almost always a massive surplus of sugar, unlike corn which rarely is a surplus crop. Also, sugar production is much more efficient than corn production which also lowers the ‘footprint’ of this method of fuel production. Lastly, home production eliminates a lot of evaporation waste that occurs during other automotive fuel production.

What do you think? Would you buy one of these devices?

Dan Aykroyd plays the part of the sleazy TV salesman. As you might gather, the skit spoofs Ronco products. Oddly enough Ronco products and their sales methods have more or less survived to this day, just like SNL.

Another little bit of trivia about this skit is that Phil Zimmermann, who invented PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), borrowed the name to describe a cryptographic algorithm he developed for his original version of PGP. He said that it did to data what the BassOmatic did to the fish. He later replaced this algorithm as he improved upon his program.

Are you ancient like me and remember when this skit was first shown on TV? Are you an old geek like me and had heard of it’s connection to cryptography? Or is this your first time seeing this disgustingly funny skit?

Search Engine’s Goal - A Good User Experience.

Why do search engines like Google and Yahoo implement a duplicate content filter? The quick and easy answer is so that they can provide a good user experience.

First of all, they want to screen out obvious duplicate content like 404 pages and other common, useless, pages that almost all websites have internally.  Next, they want to insure that there is only one record in their index for a page, particularly one that is generated by the server as happens with WordPress. Lastly, they want to filter out any duplicates from outside the site as best they can.

All of this happens in multiple stages during the process of crawling and then indexing and scoring a page. This is one reason why you may see a page jump up in rankings then fall as it is scored and re-scored on duplicate content and other factors built into the algorithm.

Of course, one of the biggest parts of their algorithm is designed to remove references to bulk content that is duplicated across the Internet. A good example of this would be Wikipedia scrapper sites. There was a trend a while back where blackhatters would scrape content from Wikipedia based on keywords and then republish it with their ads on their own site. Google has gotten quite good at filtering out these sites.

How Does Google Determine Duplicate Content?

While I don’t know for sure we can make some logical guesses based on published patents and public comments on this topic.

The first step, as mentioned above, is to simply not index easily identified duplicate content like error pages. The earlier in the algorithm they can eliminate them the less cluttered their index will be and the less work their bots will have to do in analyzing the page.

After this, they break up the content into chunks or snippets of about 5 to 8 words apiece. These bits and pieces become the fingerprints of the document, so to speak. They check these fragments against a database of common phrases, common quotations and quips, cliches and a lot of other stuff in order to reduce the impact of common language elements on the algorithm. Some time after this initial check, the data is also classified by type and relationships using LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) and other data clustering and relationship analysis algorithms. As you might guess, this takes time and is an ongoing process that runs across many servers and datacenters over a period of several days, or even weeks, before the page is fully analyzed.

Finally, after the page is fully analyzed, its fingerprint is checked against other pages in the database. If it is a substantial match for an existing document in the database it will probably be flagged as duplicate content. I say ‘probably’ because there seem to be other factors at work that can allow a near-duplicate to keep its place in search results. This could include the relevance to the site as a whole or the reputation or authority of the site with the potential duplicate content.

How To Avoid Duplicate Content

First of all, what doesn’t work is adding in a few sentences at the start and/or end of the duplicate content. Google’s algorithm has been smart enough to handle this for years.

Another thing that doesn’t work is switching out or switching around a few words. For example, simply switching in “attorney” for “lawyer” in an article won’t avoid the filtering. Their algorithm, as indicated by their patents, detects common synonyms.  Other simple forms of modifying content might also be detectible over time. Remember that Google has a lot of time and money to devote to the ongoing process of evaluating web pages so you may not be filtered today but you may be tomorrow or vice versa.

One thing that works to some degree is content of 5 words or more that varies automatically on each page load or even gradually over time. As the content changes on a page with each ‘bot crawl this seems to make portions of Google’s algorithm reset themselves. Widgets like the WordPress Related Posts plugin seem to take advantage of this as does simply adding a comment to a blog post.

Another that seems to work is to build your content around keywords or keyword phrases interlaced with short common phrases. This is what Niche Store Writer helps you do. How much it will help will depend a lot on a number of factors, such as the keyword density and uniqueness, length and how common the template text is across the Internet.

Lastly, writing a bit of text that passes Copyscape or other duplicate checkers should be sufficient to pass Google’s current duplicate filtering algorithms. Of course, doing this in the process of preparing a site can eat up a lot of time.

In Theory

Yes, a lot of this is educated guesses and theories based on personal observations and observations of others. So far as Google’s algorithms go things are always in flux so what works today may not work tomorrow. Do you have any theories or observations to add? If so, leave a comment about them.

I was surprised to find out just how popular collecting neon signs has become. I started looking into this phenomena right after seeing an episode of NBC’s The Office where Michael and Jan bicker about a St. Pauli Girl Neon Beer Sign. It turns out that collecting neon signs, particular beer signs, is a popular hobby.

What Neon Sign Collectors Should Look For?

First of all a neon sign buyer should make sure that the sign is actually a neon sign and not one that’s similar made of Fluorescent bulbs. These signs look neon like but aren’t as durable or as beautiful as the real thing. However they will be cheaper than the real thing.

Remember that photographing neon signs is tricky and sometimes the trickster is behind the camera. Look for photos take in natural light and using close ups.

Another thing to understand is that real neon bulbs are expensive because the process of making them is much higher than it is for fluorescent bulbs. If you’re paying a low price you probably aren’t buying a real neon sign.

Lastly, make sure that the seller of the neon sign knows how to properly ship a neon sign and that they will offer to insure your purchase in case of accidents during shipping.

Where to Get Neon Beer Signs?

Well, it’s obvious isn’t it?

Chinese drivers are using technology to thwart technology by using a James Bond like device to switch their tag numbers and avoid detection. Police sources in Yangjiang say that over half of the cars caught by traffic cameras for speeding and other traffic offenses either cover up their license plates or use a fake plate.

The basic remote control device to do this 007 style flip cost about 800 yuan which is roughly $115 US Dollars. More complex versions are available that flip the numbers faster or provide more advanced options.

The enterprising salespeople who’re offering the devices say that the devices provide drivers an economical option compared to the high cost of traffic offenses in China, which can include license suspension and even confiscation of your vehicle. Police sources in Guangdong said that the chances of the automated traffic enforcement devices successfully ID’ing an offender using such a device were almost nil.

What are your thoughts about such James Bond 007 style devices in ordinary citizen’s cars? Would you use such a device to thwart automated traffic control systems?

A malicious program warning was issued by Mozilla on Wednesday for the Vietnamese Language Pack for Firefox 2. The malware in question was the Xorer Trojan, a malicious program that inserts adware code as the user visits websites.

Anyone who downloaded the Vietnamese Language Pack for Firefox 2 since Feburary 18th of 2008 received an infected copy of the plugin. Unfortunately, the Mozilla virus scan did not detect the problem until recently, several months after the initial upload. Mozilla says that the pack has been downloaded nearly 17,000 times. Of course, if you didn’t install this language pack you’re OK. If you did, you’ll need to disable this plugin and wait for an uninfected replacement pack.

Developers at Mozilla suspect that the developer of the pack had their system or local network infected by this trojan virus. This in turn infected the plugin’s code. According to sources, the malware causes an annoying banner to be displayed but is unable to propagate itself onto other systems or programs’ code. This particular piece of malware works by inserting in a bit of Javascript into HTML files. Mozilla is in the process of adding additional virus scans to their software to prevent something like this in the future.

Problems like this happen from time to time because, yes, even software developers will get a virus or trojan program on their systems. That’s why you should be careful even with commercial software.

Is your virus software up to date? Did you download this language pack? Are you concerned about getting malware from downloading plugins for Firefox or other programs you use? Leave me a comment and let me hear from you on the topic of malware.

If you’re wanting to follow trends in your blog or simply close in on some ideas for a BANS (Build a Niche Store) eBay Affiliate site or a niche marketing blog finding the right keywords is where you want to start. From what I’ve seen, some people need some ideas on how to get started doing this before they delve into more complex keyword research methods so I thought I’d do a little post that might help you along if you’re in this category.

Google Trends

This is the big daddy, where just about everyone starts and many people end when it comes to keyword ideas.

If you want to know the 100 top things the world is searching for on the Internet at any given moment, here’s your ticket. One thing that you’ll notice about these trends is that they aren’t always the most monetizible topics. A lot of people will commonly be searching for information on other people such as  people in the news or popular celebrities. They’ll also be looking for news about important events like wars and disasters. Blogging about these items can bring traffic however conversion can be more difficult than product and service oriented posts.

Also note that these trends can be very transient. You might get a few hundred or even a few thousand hits the first day and no hits afterward as the story dies. Some topics produce consistent trickle traffic while others will suddenly see new search traffic after months of dormancy. You never know what it’s going to do.

Yahoo! Buzz

Yahoo keeps its distance second place in the search engine market with this tool. It shows the top 20 searches and the 20 searches that have increased in volume the most over the past week. One thing that you’ll notice about trends here is that user demographics tend toward a less tech savvy crowd and tend to be either teenage searchers or older (40+) searchers. Bear this in mind if you’re wanting to target visitors in these demographic groups.

eBay Keywords and Pulse

eBay offers two ways you can check into what people are searching for on the world’s largest marketplace.

First, there’s eBay Pulse. This page shows you the top 10 products that are being searched for by visitors. As you might expect you’ll see very popular electronics items like the Apple iPod and the like. Overall, this information isn’t all that useful unless you’re well poised to compete for these keywords on your BANS site. Another interesting piece of information on this page is the most watched auctions. This information can be surprising at times and can be useful.

Secondly, there’s eBay Keywords. These pages offer you a way to see the top eBay search terms in alphabetical order. This list is rather large and is quite useful in finding keywords for BANS and other eBay affiliate marketing sites.

Lycos 50

Lycos is an ‘also ran’ in the world of search engines and switched over to being a portal service and free blog provider. Their Top 50 page shows the top searches done from their portal and in their blogs for the previous week. These searches tend to reflect a younger demographic and thus are weighted toward celebrities, video games and TV Shows.

New York Times Most Searched

If you want to get a grasp on what’s hot in the news, this page at the New York Times will tell you what people want to know more about. The demographics here will reflect a more urbane and older audience who’ll be looking for more political and business news.

Dogpile SearchSpy

Dogpile is a search aggregation site. This page shows a live running feed of searches going through their system. While it won’t show you popular searches it can spark some ideas as you watch live search terms scroll by.

Others

I’ve used all of these at one time or another for a jumping off point for keyword selection. There are other such services available. If you have one you like, feel free to mention it in a comment if you want to share it.

How useful are these kinds of search popularity tools to you?

The HTC Touch Diamond phone got introduced today in London. It’s a pretty device but I have some serious doubts about how well it will do in the marketplace vs. the popular Apple iPhone, particularly in the US market. The press info for it said that here in the US we wouldn’t see this device until late 2008, if by then. Some European and Asian markets will have it available by next month.

It uses the Windows Mobile 6.1 and sports a 2.8 inch VGA screen that can rotate between landscape and portrait modes. The screen also has one touch navigation including dialing and browsing. Of course, they demo’ed all the dazzling options like playing YouTube videos and pulling up web news and weather site videos and animations.

But, here’s the kicker, they aren’t giving out pricing info yet. I think there is a reason for this once you start examining the news reports about it. You’re going to pay through the nose for the privilege of owning one then your wallet will be pounded to death by extra fees.

I don’t know how things like this work in Europe and Asia but here in the US mobile phone providers charge quite a fee for wireless Internet access in most areas. Who wants to pay $5 to watch a 1 minute video on YouTube on their Touch Diamond. Maybe, eventually, as the number of these devices enter the market the price will become roughly even with home broadband service but now it’s too expensive, at least here in the US.

Secondly, I can see that they’re probably going to be limiting users of the Touch Diamond access to putting things like music, games and other applications, wallpapers and ringtones onto their phones. Expect to pay and pay and pay for the simple pleasure of loading a favorite song or picture onto your phone. Great for those marketing those services but not so great for the end user.

Lastly, I don’t think the HTC Touch Diamond Phone will be worth it because it appears that they plan to make a lot of it proprietary. Word has it that the unit doesn’t have a standard headphone jack so if you buy one you’re stuck with whatever they decide to offer. No quality headphones for you.

What do you think? Do you think the Touch Diamond is going to be worth the price or should you just wait and see?