Best TV/Web Cross Promotion Ever

Have you ever been watching a TV show and heard a song that you wanted to know what it was or who sang it? Even worse, it wasn’t on the CW so they didn’t tell you at the end and you had to go digging around the Internet hoping that someone else who watched the show knew the songs and put it out there somewhere that Google could find it?

Last week saw the premiere of Swingtown. Its set in the 70’s and is about a couple that moves a few blocks from a cozy middle class neighborhood to a more upscale rich neighborhood across the street from a couple who swings. If the use of ‘swing’ there confuses you, it means to have an open marriage, sleep with other people as well as engage in group sex. The show was okay… nothing really ground breaking, and I didn’t even find their allusions to sex all that graphic or shocking. I’ll probably keep watching it through the summer because there isn’t much else on.

However, the best thing during the broadcast was a little blurb saying “if you want to hear the music from Swingtown again, go to Last.FM” and they gave out this link.

Pure genius. Every single show that has music in it needs to hook up with Last.FM and do this. Simply awesome. I mean, I’ve used that site before, during dinner parties or regular parties or just while I’m working… normally, you pick a band you like and you get to hear them and other bands similar to them. But this, putting together a streaming soundtrack from a TV show… this is truly inspired use of the medium. No more guessing what the song was, just go to the show’s Last.FM page and hear it again.

I repeat… every single show that has music in it needs to hook up with Last.FM and do this.

10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and griefers

Last week, while writing up my initial GameTap post, I wanted to end it with “Ready.  Set.  Game!” and I was sure I was plagiarizing it from someone, so I hit up Google for the 4-1-1.  It turns out lots of people have used it, and I was unable to determine who said it first, so I went ahead and used it.  But what really interested me was the first link that showed up.  It was for “10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and griefers” and it was published by Microsoft back in November of 2004.  Five links down the Google results, I learned I wasn’t the first person to find this list.

Now, I might get in trouble for this, but I really hate when I link to a website to discuss the content and the content changes or gets removed.  So, for the sake of my own posting continuing to make sense through the years, I’m going to quote the Microsoft page in its entirety:

Ready, set, game: Learn how to keep video gaming safe and fun
10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and griefers
Published: November 4, 2004

Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies, chances are that one of these ne’er-do-wells has bothered a kid near you at least once while playing online multiplayer video games such as Halo 2, EverQuest, The Sims Online, SOCOM, and Star Wars Galaxies. Griefers are the Internet equivalent of playground bullies, who find it fun to embarrass and push around others.

What griefers do

Typical griefers: taunt others, especially beginners (also known as newbies); thwart fellow teammates in the game; use inappropriate language; cheat; form itinerant gangs with other griefers; block entryways; lure monsters toward unwary players; or otherwise use the game merely to annoy a convenient target or to harass a particular player who has reacted to their ill will.

Although they are only a small percentage of the video-game community, griefers have some game companies concerned they’ll lose subscribers. As a result, many game sites and providers are less tolerant of griefers and employ new methods to police for them and otherwise limit their impact.

The best way to deal with griefers is to educate yourself and prepare your kids to deal with them on their own terms. Here are ten tips to help you handle griefers.

10 tips to deal with griefers

  1. Ignore them. If your child doesn’t react to them, most griefers will eventually get bored and go away.
  2. Change game options. Have your kids play games with changeable rules or options that prevent certain griefer tactics, such as eliminating teammates.
  3. Create a private game. Most newer, multiplayer video games and related sites allow players to form their own exclusive games that permit only their friends to play.
  4. Play on sites with strict rules. Play on game sites with enforceable codes of conduct or terms of service and live game administrators who can ban serial griefers.
  5. Do something else. If a griefer continues to bother your child, have your child try a different game, or take a break and come back later.
  6. Report game glitches. Work with your child to identify exploitable glitches in the game or new methods to cheat. Report these to the game site administrator.
  7. Play games that limit griefers. Suggest to your child that he or she play newer games that provide specific resources to deal with griefers. Kids can use these resources to report offenders to game administrators, block or mute messages, and to vote griefers off.
  8. Don’t fight fire with fire. Make sure your child doesn’t use griefers’ tactics against a griefer, as this will likely encourage more bad behavior, or worse, label your child as a griefer.
  9. Avoid provocative names. Your child can preempt any problems if he or she avoids screen names or nicknames (often referred to as gamertags) that could encourage griefer behavior.
  10. Don’t give out personal information. Griefers (or anyone else) can use real names, phone numbers, and home or e-mail addresses, to further harass your child or cause other problems.

First off… snert?  Seeing as I have never heard that term in over twenty years of gaming, I had to go look it up.  I found it at the Urban Dictionary, and even my favorite site to look stuff up, Dictionary.com.  And while I was familiar with the word twink, I decided to look it up too and discovered that I really hope the author intended the meaning more closely related to video games.

But enough about passing fads in the English language, lets look at the actual advice.  It is, in and of itself, not bad advice, and actually is pretty much the same advice you give to kids about dealing with bullies in real life.  However, the problem, as discussed in this article on Wired.com, is that especially in these virtual worlds the “griefers” are just playing a different game.  The clearest example of this comes in the article through the discussion of how members of the Something Awful community approach the game EVE Online:

“The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don’t come back.”

and

“You may be playing EVE Online, but be warned: We are playing Something Awful.”

Overall, you, the player who does not want to be griefed, are at the mercy of them, the player who wants to grief you, because the whole point of most MMOs is the social interaction, which is exactly the tools they need to grief you and actually removes the tools you need to prevent them… well, unless you want to ignore rule number 8.  “Back in the day” some of the Anti-PK guilds of Ultima Online were actually more vicious than the PK guilds they hunted.

About the best you can hope for is that two griefers lock horns trying to out grief each other, which allows everyone else to ignore them and continue on with their game.

Part of the Problem

The other day I happened to notice that the main probablynot.com page had gotten a couple of new incoming links. Its odd because, honestly, no one really reads that site, they come here to the blog. But I suppose if you were Googling, since the most recent posts are RSS fed to the probablynot.com root site a person might get directed there.

As always, I like to know why people are linking to me, and what they have to say.

The first link was actually from back in July, so I’m not sure why it took so long to show itself, or perhaps I haven’t looked at my own root site since July 23rd. The site appears to be a collection of book reviews. I’ve seen these kinds of aggregation sites before, and I actually think its kind of neat to be scraped for it. Cool.

The second link looked funny. While the first site was a blog called “Crime Always Pays” and the post with my link was “The Monday Review”, the second site was called “Crime Review: The Monday Critical review”. It had nearly the same information. I say “nearly” because it was the same info, but it had been passed through two filters: the first changed some words to synonyms, and the second inserted some ad keywords. In fact, the entire site is just rife with Google Ads, and looking at the profile of the blogger, he has a bunch of similar sites all designed to draw traffic, collect clicks, and (he hopes) generate money.

Looking deeper, the second site copies nearly every post from the first site, up until August 1st at least… which lead me to examining the first site a little closer and noticing the review of mine wasn’t the only review of that same book to be tapped. In fact, page by page digging through the archives shows that it really is just repeating the same books over and over, slightly randomized. The site is chaotic enough to suggest it is hand made, but repetitious enough to belie that and show its true colors of most likely being a bot generated site.

I hate these kinds of sites. An aggregation post or site doesn’t bother me too much, but these automated Google Ad factories piss me off. And now I’m on one. Worse, in their quotes of me, they quoted my link to the book I reviewed with my Amazon Associates ID, so I may actually make money from this abomination.

The thing that irks me most however is that their link uses one quoted line of my book review and the link back to me does not go to the full review, but to the root site. Even now, that post has already scrolled off the RSS and doesn’t show there. Searching the root site you’ll never find that review, its on the weblog subdomain. My ill gotten traffic is being directed to the wrong place.

*sigh*

Oh well… its the Internet. There isn’t much I can do about it.

Product Placement

I was watching Flash Gordon the other night. No, not the movie (which is awesome), but the new Sci-Fi Channel TV show (which made dozens of needless changes to the Flash Gordon mythos but has potential if they can avoid more silly crap like the “IMEX”). In one scene, Flash goes to Google some information… no, wait, he doesn’t Google it, he “Snifferbot.com”s it, or something like that.

Seriously, does Google (or Yahoo or MSN or whoever) really charge a ton to be able to use their site in a TV show? This kind of little junk is usually what ruins TV shows for me. How can I ever suspend disbelief when they completely detach from reality like that? I thought companies paid money to get product placement… why are no TV producers taking advantage of having their actors actually drink Coke on screen instead of “Cola”?

Wake up guys. People are not watching commercials anymore. Except maybe during the Superbowl. If you want people to see your products, you need to get people in these fantasy worlds to be using your products.

On the flip side, last week when the esurance animated superspy chick showed up on Who Wants to be a Superhero? I threw up in my mouth a little bit. It was like someone hit the show with an esurance bomb and it got esurance goo on everything. There is a line… please don’t cross it.

The July Stats

Not much going on here… still fixing up the house so I can move in. With the lack of interesting stuff, I decided to go ahead and do one of those posts where I talk about my site stats.

Let’s begin with the fact that my website is about 4500 times more pornographic than I thought it was. 4599 people found my website in July while searching the internet for “free porno”. 30 people got here looking for “sexualintercourse”. Overwhelmingly, more people found my blog while looking for porn than anything else.

16 people did get here looking for information on Puzzle Pirates. Poker, PoE, Doubloons, how to cheat, how to uninstall it. I hope they enjoyed my writing.

12 people came here looking for Scooby Doo, all of which were lead to The Duality of Doo, my review of the two Scooby Doo movies. One of those people was specifically looking for “pictures of Scrappy peeing on Daphne”. I’m sorry I couldn’t help.

10 people came here seeing answers to why the alliance sucks at pvp in World of Warcraft. Only one person came here asking why the horde was better. Next week I will publish a paper using my extensive research that will conclusively prove that people who play WoW are very “glass half empty” sorts of folks.

6 people came here looking for solutions to problems with their Jeep Cherokee. Hopefully they got the answer… take it to the shop, don’t drive it when its overheating. I do these things to educate you at my own expense.

4 people came here looking for my City of Mist raid guide. I guess the new EQ progression servers drummed up some interest, its just a shame I don’t have the guides anymore. But check the Google cache…

1 guy came here seeking the meaning to the Seven Mary Three song “Oven”. As much as I love the song, I don’t get it either.

There were tons of other searches, mostly just getting here once, and far too many of them I expected. I didn’t seem to get any of the crazy search phrases other sites post about. Well, except the porn stuff.

On the other hand, how do people actually get here? By looking at the referrers I can see that, obviously, most people got here from Google or Yahoo while looking for porn. Beyond that I appearantly appear on the Portal Network MMO bloglist. Neat. I also got 4 people who got here from Nerfbat. Most of the other referrers, however, indicate that I am my own best promoter… Many people come here as a result of my posting on message boards (link in signature) and making comments on other people’s blogs (link on name).

So, to all you people who manage to find my site somehow… welcome. Enjoy your stay. Come back often and feel free to comment.

Spam Report

Other blog sites will occasionally do a post about their traffic stats… what google phrases turn up their site, where readers are coming from, etc… Not me, I don’t have those stats. But what I do have is Akismet comment spam blocker. So instead of talking about who is coming here for the content, I’m going to talk about the people that come here to spam…

Quite possibly the most abundant spam is for phentermine. But only if you are interested. (So the spam claims.) Of course, they post that comment probably 300 times a day. And I’m not interested in phentermine, especially since I don’t know what it is.

Second is Xanax. Almost as often as phentermine. Then comes Xenical, ambien, tramadol, and a horde of other drugs. Does this spam actually generate them sales?

Then comes the online casinos.

Most of the spam is very polite. They apologize for what they are about to do, or say its only if I’m interested. Some tell me I have a great time. Some thank me for the bookmark. Some even exclaim that my site is very cognitive.

The irony is… before I installed a spam blocking plug-in for WordPress, I got about 10, maybe 15, spams a day that I manually deleted. Since installing Akismet 3 weeks ago it has blocked 3,500 spams. Its almost as if blocking spam actually attracts more spam. But I’m not about to remove the plug-in. I’m not that crazy.

Eye in the Sky

How freakin’ cool is this?

Google Maps.

I’ve been a long time user of MapQuest for getting directions. But in Google’s attempt to control the universe, they’ve put up this mapping tool. Its neat. Even more so, because over on the right side, near the top, there is a link labeled “Satellite” which switches you from boring cartoon like maps to actual satellite photos. Now, there is nothing to be afraid of, the pictures are 6 months to a year old, so its not like people can spy on you, and they can’t zoom in and peek in your windows. But, it does give you an actual picture of the place you are driving, so you can see parking, buildings, etc.

Awesome.

Searching for me.

Every now and then, ever since I’ve run a webpage or owned a domain, I go to search engines (Google in this case) and throw in my domain name to see how long it takes to get a link either directly to my site or a link to someone’s page that directly mentions my site. Normally its the third or fourth page, however, because of my writings I’ve done for City of Heroes my subdomain the Front Page shows up on the first page.

Out of curiosity, I decided to keep looking through the search results and see when I came up the second time. On page 4, one of my email addresses shows up in link to a post on the City of Heroes message boards, a place I do frequent. On page 8, a link shows up for a guy’s blog site, where he refers to the Front Page as “At first glance, this appears to be slightly odd City of Heroes fanfic. Look closer. It’s very odd, and it’s not quite City of Heroes or fanfic…”. I’m not sure how to take that, but I guess if someone is reading its better than no one reading at all. Around pages 12 and 13, a few links to posts on some programming boards come up, again because of my email address. Then we get a weird one: http://www.webknowhow.net/dir/Hosting/Free/ where they say to check out Probablynot.com to see examples Free Banners and Hosting, as well as “tab, music, whats cool, hot links, files” … hmmm, its not really a link to my site, but when you click it, you do go to my site. Page 25 gives us a link to an old EQ forum where someone references my old City of Mist raid guide as being good… of course, that link doesn’t work to get to my raid guide, and neither does the forum its posted on, but its in the Google cache. Some more links to email addresses show up, and then… we run out of results. The root site of Probablynot.com doesn’t show up on Google directly… *sigh*

But then… I remember seeing something odd, so I go back to Page 2 and see http://www.probablynot.net. It seems that there is a big problem with kids and gambling, and probablynot.net is a website devoted to helping recognize signs of gambling addiction in kids and ways to put them on the road to recovery. I’m a little scared of the site though, and not just because of the goofy pictures and colors, but that there is a sentance: “The most popular games of chance for youth are betting on games of skill, such as pool, card games and instant scratch-off lottery tickets.” See, either they have something grammatically incorrect with that sentance or scratch-off lotteries are based on skill and not blind stupid luck… and here I thought I never won because I was unlucky, but it turns out it might just be because I don’t have a good enough poker face to pull off the bluff, or perhaps I’m not using my penny properly to scratch off the card. (Note: I do not play scratch off lottery, my stupidity only goes as far as buying a $1 ticket every time the MegaMillions goes over $100 Million, because, well, shit, who couldn’t use $100 Million?)

I decided to check out probablynot.org, because someone does own that, but its just a holder page… no content. I also wanted to check out my old domains to see if anyone was doing anything with them… loadfix.com isn’t owned anymore… squadleader.com is, but like probablynot.org its a dead site with a holder page. Once, a long time ago, I wrote for a TeamFortress gaming site called lockandload.com… another dead site. Then there was my last gaming clan, nobodysheroes.org.. dead. ClanDoS.com… it belongs to a Battlefield: Vietnam clan called the Deadly 2 Dozen who have disbanded.

More curiosity began to creep in… There are way too many Jason Pace‘s in the world for me to sort through, besides I think I did it once before and I wasn’t there. But of Jason G. Pace‘s, there are three links, one to my resume and two to pages that link to my resume.

Well, largely an exercise in futility, but it interested me for a while, so I thought I would share.