Archive for the 'G.U.N. Updates' Category

Date: December 11th, 2007, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

Zion, IL
By A.B. Dada
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Yahoo News has an article about an event that hasn’t happened in many years: the old media television networks are having to refund advertisers. NBC is refunding their large advertisers to the tune of an average of $500,000 a piece. The article doesn’t dig into how many advertisers are getting some cash back, but it does offer details on why it’s happening:

Fourth-ranked broadcaster NBC has quietly begun reimbursing advertisers an average of $500,000 each for failing to reach guaranteed ratings levels, the first time a network has taken such a step in years, media buyers said.

It seems to be a given reality that the mainstream networks are hurting. There’s a plethora of channels to watch, the advertising is very one-way, with advertisers not really knowing who is watching their ads, or if they’re even watching them at all. My own home media center automatically removes ads before I even watch a show or newscast. There’s software that will do it almost in realtime (just start watching the show 15 minutes after it starts taping, and the ads are gone).

Online advertising is a different story, though. I’ve seen my own numbers grow significantly in the past 12 months, even with the traffic way down from the lack of updates. I know quite a few people who are earing $20 cpm numbers, meaning they’re taking in $20 for every 1000 visitors to their site. Considering some medium sized sites generate 50,000+ visitors a day, this could mean that a strong blogger could be taking in almost $1000 a day in income. It’s relatively unheard of today, but I’ve seen the checks to prove the value.

Even Google News is now syndicating links to new media sites, such as Slashdot and LewRockwell.com, as news instead of a blog. It amazes me that many of these organizations can exist, with a healthy infrastructure and staff, and compete head-on with the bloated, inefficient, and dying old media structure.

Some people point to the writer’s strike as the reason that the old media is refunding these big figures, but I disagree. It is evident that their model is failing, just as the radio and CD models are failing. We stopped using the Yellow Pages years ago (thanks to Google Mobile being much faster and current). We stopped listening to the radio years ago, thanks to Podcasts and the iPod for music. We’re even leaving the newscasts and catching the updates on YouTube.

The good news is the growth in variety of opinions that are out there. Personally, I love the blogosphere, but I’ve made steps to modify my reading experience: if a blog doesn’t allow comments, they’re gone from my RSS feedreader. If they censor comments, they’re also gone. I’m even taking steps here to try to reduce my ratio of old media links to new media links, as I’m finding individuals who report on the news with a more accurate angle, even if they may be more biased. At least I know who is paying them, and it’s generally Yahoo or Google advertisers.

2008 will be a wonderful year for the web-focused writers. The Kindle may increase the readership of the popular blogs and new media sites. I’ve made this site compatible with some phone browsers, and I’m seeing more people with iPhones browsing the web for news and opinions. Too bad for the old media, though. They held on to spending millions a year lobbying Congress for more control, when in reality the People have decided against them.

If you haven’t started your own personal blog, I highly recommend doing so today. I’ll be starting a short series of rules, definitions, and directions on getting involved in getting your opinion, views and thoughts out into the rest of the world — and maybe making a few bucks a day to offset the time spent.

Comments: 1

Date: December 6th, 2007, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

Sorry for the ugly Wordpress Theme, we are actually reskinning all the sites and are playing with some new code from this theme on our test site. Hopefully this ugly one will be gone, but we are using some of the code on our new site. The new site will be easier to navigate, have a similar “Recent Comments” list on a sidebar (as it is below in this ugly theme), and be better designed to work over mobile phones and PDAs.

We have launched two new sites which we are updating daily: Full Reserve Banking, and Taser News. Both sites are no longer subdomains on the unanimocracy.com website, since we will be working to expand our “empire” with easier to remember domain names. For $8 a year, it’s a worthwhile investment.

Please note that we are now looking for people who would like to contribute articles and opinions to the site, including what we call “live bloggers.” Live bloggers will have the ability to just email a blog entry for late breaking news, which will automatically post to the site. That means you can provide fast news from your PDA, phone, or anywhere you have email, without having to use the clunky Wordpress system. If you’re interested in adding your comments, opinions and interesting news, please drop us an email or a comment below.

We are also changing some of the subdomains into full domains, and will be renaming some of them. The “Gold Investment” site will become a Financial News and Opinion site, with gold and commodities being a subcategory. The “Anarcho-capitalism” site will be split into “Government News and OpEd” and “Religious News and OpEd,” also two separate full domains. Lastly, the Entrepreneurship site will be restarted again, as will the Be A Man site, again as separate full domains. We’ll be working harder to provide an easier to navigate empire of sites, and hope to have all our work done.

We will be liveblogging, vlogging, and photoblogging on our trip to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia that we’re leaving for on Christmas Eve. It should be an interesting trip as this trip is solely for pleasure and travel, not for shopping or much business. The trip is relatively open ended, but we plan on at least 4 days in Europe, 2-4 days in the Middle East, and around 10-15 days in Asia.

Lastly, we are working on integrating the old forums into the comments section. We found some decent code which should help us integrate it, but we’re not the greatest at PHP and SQL, so it is a process. Please inform us if you see rendering errors, or any code errors that pop-up. We’re hoping to cover IE6, IE7, FireFox, Opera, and a variety of mobile web browsers. If you use a different browser, let us know if you see problems (Safari, etc).

We’re going to speedlink to a few sites that we like each day, and if your blog falls under any of our topics, let me know if you’d like to be speedlinked daily.

Comments: none

Date: September 25th, 2007, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

Thanks to J. David for reminding me of a missing feed — the comments feed.

For now, use this feed for an aggregate of all comments across most G.U.N. sites:

http://www.rssmixer.com/main/mix/gun_comments.rss

This is a temporary “mix” of all the feeds, but we’ll have a FeedBurner feed up soon once I get some things hammered out that are erroring out the FeedBurner system (ugh).

Comments: none

Date: February 26th, 2007, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

A few weeks ago I motivated my Luddite-father to buy a Mac laptop. He is hard of sight, but he’s been using Windows PCs for the 3 years he’s been using a PC (he’s 65 and just started using a PC at 62). I was so tired of reinstalling his OS and trying to help him remotely that I figured a Mac is the right way to go.

I’ve always loved Apple’s interface and hardware, but it never ran all the software I needed to. Now that my business life is more about management than production, I’ve been considering a Mac laptop to replace my variety of PC desktops and laptops (I use able 6 different PCs for all my tasks). I’m considering their highest end laptop (about $2800 if I am correct) to replace everything.

For those power-users who have made the transition to the Mac world, what was your biggest frustration? I’d love to know.

Feel free to discuss this at the Unanimocracy General Discussion forum, or e-mail me directly.

Comments: none

Date: February 20th, 2007, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

Over the past 14 months, the Global Unanimocracy Network forums have gone through ups and downs, but it has grown in enough spurts to attract the attention of spammers from all over the world. You know you’ve succeeded when you delete more spammers and spam comments that actual users and comments, it seems.

Since returning to writing a few days ago, I actually had to delete over 1200 users from the forums (they were invisible), over 99% of them were probably fake. I have now made all new users immediately “banned.”

If you have registered here and have not been approved, you MUST send me an e-mail to adam.dada@gmail.com with your username. I will then manually give you access to the forums. I don’t need anything more than an e-mail saying hello.

Comments: none

Date: October 12th, 2006, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

I’m back. August and September bit me in the back — my beard is greyer, my brain is leaking out both ears, and I feel about 10 years older. That’s what you get when you try to force 11 months of income into a 40 day period (plus 25 days of travel). Lots of great news, plus I get to start working on paying off the gargantuan debt from losing my stores last year (only about $15,000 at this point, down from $150,000 just 10 months ago). Good things all around.

The minuses:
* Spam in the forums is TERRIBLE.
* We lost Mike Bryson — his family, friends, a few customers, and most of his church found his posts and basically told him to get out. So he left me a voice mail and apologized (see below for good news)
* I missed a TON of movement in the gold market, I missed the popping of the property bubble, and I missed some other hilarities. Plus I missed a lot of Slashdot fun that is in the archives.

The pluses:
* Bryson returned my financial support, so there’s money to pay someone to take over. Real funny money (Paypal) instead of “fake” hard money (gold and silver as I paid it out).
* The market is crazy, but that means more posts.
* Someone released a great phpBB2 spam filter. I’m downloading it now!
* Tons of fun with the upcoming election.
* I’ll be in town, more or less, for the next 4 weeks, then out for 5 days each month, until next August when the bigger projects hit (for 2 months, again).
* The sites made more money when I was away than when I left. I guess that means that sites with fewer updates make more money. Ridiculous. Time to send out some real money to people — paypal now if you prefer. That’s for those who stuck around. Idiotic, yes, but the cash is there, and it surprised the heck out of me.

Sorry for being away. The only forum I actually hit was the HP forums, only because it connected with my work. I actually did not pop in ONCE because I knew if I did, I’d have no ability to work. It wasn’t fun, sort of like quitting crack (never did it), but I had to do it. Ever had to work, finish a thesis, or get married, and realize you can’t break free from the keyboard? That’s about how it was.

I’ve had a week now of rest, trimmed the long beard (forgot to take a picture, but think Theodore Kaczynski), got some new clothes, and am ready to catch up on e-mails, PMs, voice mails, text messages, snail mails, and whatever else is out there.

Expect new posts Monday, and in great quantity. Too much to talk about, I’m so excited!

Love you all, missed you all, thanks for sticking around and wondering.

Comments: none