Olestra, eh?

I wonder if this has anything to do with the extreme “stomech virus” that hit me awhile back.  I didn’t know about Olestra so had no idea to look for it, but apparently this product causes stomech irritation in some people.

That night was hell.  Simultaneously experiencing bad diarrhea while throwing up, this behavior was brought on by eating healthy chips (I think it was Sun chips) and washing it down with some orange juice.  What seemed to be a healthy little snack turned out to be a poisonus combination.

The next time that I see those bags of chips I’m going to have to see if they mention anything about Olestra or Olean.

~Mysk

Las Vegas SUN: Group Threatens Frito-Lay With Lawsuit

Google AdSense Just Doesn’t Work

The subject says it all. No matter what I do, Google AdSense absolutely can not get their so-called targetted ads on target to what is in the blog post. I’ve tried being selective and I’ve tried to put as many keywords into a post as I can. It doesn’t work.

AdSense is primarily influenced by the links in your menu, your domain name, and, it appears, a few buzz words. Certain “buzz words” will pull up ads for those words no matter what the post (aka, the actual content) is about. I see this time, after time, after time on Shadows In Motion. “Blog” is one of those buzz words. For awhile there I went out of my way to avoid mentioning the word “blog” because the AdSense ad would trigger on that word every time.

Ultimately, I found avoiding that word to be fruitless. Once Google’s AdSense gets something stuck in its head then that’s what you get, content be damned. This behavior is becoming very old. You may have noticed that on Shadows In Motion I have seriously pulled back on my use of AdSense. I’ve tried using it again in some places but it feels futile.

It’s dead, Jim…. and I need an alternative.
~Mysk
/frustrated

Pondering Over Blogging

So I’ve been thinking over what to do with my blog. I enjoy technology and computers and all of that, but there’s a couple of pretty big got’chas.

First, to have a “successful” blog you’re going to have to have unique content. This means writing something of your own, not just finding interesting news and then putting your own spin on it. I do that from time to time and I wouldn’t be surprised if I continue to do it every now and then, but as a rule, commenting on news is a distant focus of Shadows In Motion.

There’s more to this, though. It’s an understatement to say that blogs related to technology and/or computers are common. As such, there are a whole lot of blogs out there that are ultimately just commenting on the same news. This, I suppose, is an unavoidable aspect of blogs.

Or so a lot of folks seem to think, anyway. Who am I to argue the point?

I got lucky with SIM when I wrote the review for Writely. It was kind of popular, getting links from various sources from around the ‘net. As a result, other groups of “web 2.0″ services began to contact me. It’s been few and far between, but it’s been kind of cool to get an email from a dev team asking if I’ll test and then write a little review about something.

Unfortunately I totally forgot about the last service that contacted me. I feel terrible about that, I really wanted to give it a once over and told them that I would. This, I think, is my first serious dropping of the ball. If you want to check the service out for yourself, please go visit this address: http://pmtracker.siteburg.com/live/pmtracker/loginpage.php.

Back to blogging, though. I got lucky with the reviews, but I probably shouldn’t count on being so lucky as to always have a new service to review. It would be kind of cool as I really like to see how technology is unfolding, but that’s really not a practical focus… hm, or is it? Well, I don’t think so. Not for my small blog anyway.

So this leaves me with a very serious question, and, ironically, it places me in a very familiar situation: What do I want to do with my blog? How do I want to do it?

To remain focused on technology feels to me as though it would make SIM become stagnant. As I mentioned, truly original content is needed to make for an interesting blog and rehashing the news isn’t original content. It’s the easiest thing to do, but it’s not original content no matter how it’s spun.

Yet, SIM is very focused on technology now. Then again, I’ve never been terribly shy about shaking up what people expect. At any rate, I believe that I would find myself in this very situation no matter which subject I decided to focus on.

You see, this is one of the reasons why I call it Shadows In Motion, but that’s already been explained elsewhere..

You know something else? This is actually important. I think that sites such as Digg.com is showing everyone how unpopular “news blogs” are. No one wants to just read the news anymore, they want to be a part of it. To guide it and to have their opinions actually affect what’s in the news. After all, it’s our news, it should darn well be about whatever is important to us.

As such, I feel that a news blog is out, anyway. This obviously goes hand-in-hand with my thoughts on original content and solidifies what I think. Truly original content, or bust.

I feel like Winnie The Pooh right now. Pondering and muttering, “bother, bother, bother…”

I have to do something different with Shadows In Motion. Advertisement systems of old don’t work. Blogging as some think of it doesn’t work and/or is fading. To do something other than “just exist” as a blog I’m going to have to do something different.

…but what? Sigh, unfortunately, all I know at the moment is that I have to do something different. I have some thoughts, but they should probably remain as thoughts for now.

~Mysk