Finally. Thank. Fucking. God.
That means I won't get to keep my shiny "tav@unimelb.edu.au" email address, but you can take that mailbox...and reassign it.
In actual news: Got my ticket to LAX finally. Holla at all my American (seppo) peeps on the 13th of July!
I also got my hell of awesome Facebook vanity name. Guess what it is?
There's about fifty billion websites and twenty hundred trillion people on Twitter that "tweet" about internet marketing, branding, social media and whatever. Some of these arseholes expect you to pay for their "expertise" in generating leads, followers and whatever. Of course most of it appears to be spam, but a curious experiment I conducted today yielded some intriguing and disturbing results.
First off, it was supposed to be a parody of said "social media" marketers who think they can make exorbitant amounts of money from their tweeting. Who knows; bloggers with plenty of traffic probably can live off their advertising revenue once they hit a certain level of clout and credibility. Chris Onstad, creator of the hell of incisive and darkly funny Achewood comics says his advertising and merchandise sales allow him and his young family to live "comfortably" as a full-time comic writer.
Once I posted this:After about two weeks on twitter, I think my two most hated words are currently "network" and "marketing."
I got 2 followers. After getting some tips from other friends:
@lindsayevans Oh yeah! Good call! Welcome to Crushtor: social media affiliate marketing entrepreneur and SEO guru for hire and pizza parties
What High Priestess @goatlady says about #hailsatan: "Before #hailsatan my brand marketing ROI was 2%. Now it's like 66.6%!"
I was up to about 17. Within 4 hours I got 73 new followers. At the start of the day I was on about 220, now I'm up to 310 as I write this. Completely ludicrous. Most websites scamming you out of your cash promise you that amount of rapid "growth" - I just threw up some buzzwords and got the same effect. Its hard to tell if its marketers looking for genuine signal amongst torrents of noise or if they're trying to validate their own scam; "Hey boys, looks like someone's bought into the program, better make it look nice!" so I can invariably sign up more chumps. Because seriously; these people are just repeating one another without even pointing to anything that actually exists.
Sure; advertising products or services with empty abstractions isn't anything we haven't seen before. But they have to refer back to something at the end of the day. If someone re-tweets "Top 5 tips for Brand Marketing on Social Media" and can't point to a real world, extensional definition they might as well be saying "Top 5 tips for blab blab on blab blab." (With apologies to Stuart Chase.)
I love the Australian Parliament. No really. I mean, how great is it when the entire future of environmental political economy in Australia comes down to one man who hates pubs and lesbians - I mean, what would Jesus do when the fundament of the Australian economy is put into his sweaty hands? Say G'day to Obama and co., of course! From The Australian:
[Fielding] told The Australian he came to Washington to hear both sides of the climate change debate -- today's conference was just one in a series of meetings he was holding with advocates on both sides of the issue. "I've paid for this out of my own money," Senator Fielding said. "This issue is too important to Australians not to look at the debate first-hand in Washington. In the end I will draw my own conclusions."Umm, OK, cool. I guess being there makes it extra-scientific for him. I mean, a copy of the Skeptical Environmentalist and An Inconvenient Truth and some half-decent reasoning skills wouldn't have been good enough to improve/fuck up the entire Australian nation. Hey, neither one of them are right! You just have to choose who you think is more wrong. But hey, what would Jesus do? Probably block my website at an ISP level.Senator Fielding says tomorrow he is scheduled to meet Obama administration environmental specialists in the White House. President Barack Obama campaigned on green jobs and greenhouse gas emission cuts.
"To get to the bottom of it I have to talk to both sides," Senator Fielding said.
“The universe is change, life is what our thoughts make it.”
