Twelve Black Code Monkeys

It seems like more and more bloggers are using traffic exchange services. I myself have been using Blog Explosion for a month or two now, but have been seeing more traffic exchange sites pop up, so I thought I’d try them out and report my first impressions (no pun intended, har har).

Before I get into the particulars, I thought I’d write a bit about the phenomenon in general. When I first heard about these services, I was a bit dubious. I thought it was simply a way to artificially get your hit count up. These sites employ a mechanism whereby you are forced to keep a site in your web browser for a certain length of time, after which you can click to go to another one. Each visit is added to your “credits” and these credits can be spent in a number of ways, but the most likely would be to have other members be directed to your site as part of their building of credits.

The cynical view is that it’s easy enough to just hit the advance button, switch to another browser window or tab (or to another application), and then just come back after a little while and go to the next one, thus making it so that you spend a very minimal amount of time yet credits that translate into visits for your site. While this is certainly possible, and I’ll admit to occasionally doing this myself, more than not I often see a site that has something interesting on it and I find myself reading and even commenting on it. These are blogs that I would never come across normally because they aren’t famous and don’t necessarily talk about one of my primary interests. When I do skip over blogs, it’s normally for a few specific reasons. One is that I’ve already read it. Another is that I have absolutely no interest in the content. And a third is that sometimes my attention span isn’t what it should be and the blog entries are long essays.

Another part of these services is a referral system. If you refer someone to one of these services, you get a small fraction of the credits they earn. And if they refer people, sometimes you will get credits from them as well. But I will tell you that of all the people I’ve referred (6 so far) I’ve gotten a total of credits equal to about what I would create on my own in a half a day, so it’s not like you’re going to just sit back and earn lots of hits for free. Even those who have been referring people for a long time will still benefit much more by simply surfing themselves.

So, for the most part, I think it’s a tool that can aid everyone involved not just for hits to one’s site, but for an actual exchange of real viewership. I often come across the same blogs I have before, but this is fine because they often have new content from day to day. Sure there are probably people who abuse the system and don’t really read anything, but from reading about other people’s experience, it seems like many people read a significant amount of the blogs they come across while building their credits.

Ok, so what are the various traffic exchange services?
Blog Explosions: This was the first such service I heard about. I joined a couple of months ago and so have the most experience with this one. I’m not sure if this is the first such site, but it may be the first geared specifically to bloggers. Your site must either be a blog or a service for bloggers. The sites I’ve come across have ranged the gamut politically and in subject matter. Many are simple diaries, but lots are about politics, current events, technology, medicine, you name it.

The site is loaded in a frame on the bottom of the browser window (actually it takes up most of the window), and the top frame includes links to bookmark the site, ban it from your future viewing, rate it, comment about it, report it to Blog Explosion if you feel it violates their guidelines, etc. You can also toggle filters for whether you want to see blogs that may have profanity as well as blogs that contain music backgrounds. Finally, a separate add banner appears that will, if clicked, direct you to another site entirely. Banners allow each member to draw people to their site who have a specific interest in what they are advertising, as opposed to just having people come to your site by random circumstance, so the thought is that the person will have greater interest and be a potentially more “valuable” visitor.

In order to advance to the next blog, you have to click on one of the numbers in an image that contains a bunch of numbers scattered randomly. Once you actually start surfing (and every time you move to a new blog), a counter starts timing down from 30 seconds to 0, after which clicking on one of these numbers will produce a credit (actually half a credit in this case). Each credit you earn will mean that Blog Explosion will direct one person to your site. The mechanism works pretty well, but it also is somewhat easy to look at the number, put your mouse over it, and wait for the timer to go down and click. Most of the other sites use this method, although one, Blog Clicker, uses something a bit better.

Finally, in addition to earning credits by surfing, one can get gifted credits randomly while you surf. Most of the time these are 2 or 3 credits, but they can still add up. Occasionally I’ve gotten these 10 or even 25 of these “mystery credits” and once I got a whopping 50! That would have been 100 sites visited! On average they probably account for 10-20% of the credits I’ve earned, I think, but this is just a very rough estimate based on my all-too-faulty memory! Oh yes, and can also buy credits with actual money, if you so desire.

Because Blog Explosion was probably the first and is still the most popular of these sites, it can sometimes take a while for them to approve your site or banners. Some of the others don’t require approval, but Blog Explosion has decided it wants to make sure everything you are putting in front of its members’ eyes is up to spec.

Blog Clicker: this site is a bit newer than Blog Explosion, but has many of the same features. The main difference that I see is that instead of waiting for a countdown and then clicking on a number, one instead gets no indication of such a countdown, but after presumably 30 seconds, 3 images appear along with a worded instruction to click on the image that corresponds to the word. For example, one will see an image of a car, a bird, and a fish, and the instruction “Click on the bird image.” I think the fact that there’s no way to tell how soon the image will pop up is very helpful in encouraging you to look at the blog. You know the saying, a watched pot never boils, so just waiting with no indication of progress it can often seem way longer than it actually is. The other thing that Blog Clicker does is to actually move the frame that contains the functional buttons or links from the bottom to the top of the page in a random way. This means more work to figure out where it is, which is a downside for people looking for quick hits without much work, but it also, I think, helps encourage people to read more, since they will at least be getting something out of the time that they will undoubtedly be spending with the interface. This Site is no longer available.

In addition to being able to buy credits outright, Blog Clicker actually has subscription plans where you can pay $5-10 per month, and in return you are provided with credits as well as better “surf ratios” (more impressions of your own site per credit), better referral percentages, etc.

Unfortunately, many of the sites I visit on Blog Clicker are ones that I’ve seen before on Blog Explosion. This is somewhat predictable as many Blog Explosion users (like me) have posted about Blog Clicker. I think as time goes on many bloggers will migrate to one of these services primarily based on how much they like the interface, features, etc. While it’s certainly possible to have multiple services up and constantly switch between them, ultimately it’s a bit defeating after an hour of clicking around if all you have to show for it is a bunch of credits. Personally I would at least like to feel like I’ve read something interesting in that hour and not just mindlessly be hitting links, but that’s just me.

WolfSurfer: WolfSurfer is also fairly new, but not as new as Blog Clicker. It contains many of the same features as the others, but its main difference is that it doesn’t just cater to blogs. Unfortunately, this makes the site basically into one big ad. After surfing for just 15 minutes, it seems that 90% of the sites I come across are not blogs, but sites for you to buy something – cheesy stuff like online gambling, how to make money, multi-level marketing stuff, promotional services, etc. The other odd thing is that unlike the other services, I’ve gotten pages repeated after a very short period – maybe 5 minutes. I think the shortest period I had gotten something repeated on Blog Explosion was 6 hours, and that was after viewing a least a hundred other sites. But who knows, maybe WolfSurfer will begin to attract more bloggers and they can eventually drown out the spam-type stuff. One advantage to joining is that for those who are using it for traffic exchange, especially because real content is so underrepresented here, your blog should be noticed and read much more than on a site that has tons of others already. Or at least that’s my hope!

Blogazoo is a very new service that caters to blogs, of course, and has similar features to the others. It’s countdown is only 20 seconds and visible, but the actual link to advance (you have to pick the right color or number), only becomes visible once the countdown is complete. So far, most of the blogs I’ve seen on Blogazoo are ones I haven’t seen on other sites. The downside is that for the moment, Blogazoo isn’t fully operational, but is getting there. It has some features that also distinguish it from others, including a Personality Ranker (a kind of public profile page) which is supposed to help increase the popularity of your blog and a way to tell viewers your RSS feed so they can not only bookmark your blog address as with other services, but also subscribe via newsreader. It’s still a little rough around the edges compared to the other services out there, but being so new it’s really too early to tell what the potential is, and being so new, of course, means that people who sign up now have the potential for building up a decent number of referrals under them. This site is no longer available.

Traffic Troll: This site is similar to WolfSurfer in that it is not geared specifically to blogs, and has more of a concentration on earning actual cash payments (for referrals mainly). The types of sites are by in large similar to those found on WolfSurfer, which is either an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how you look at it. This was the only service amongst the ones I’ve mentioned where the clicking does not involve figuring something out. You just click on the “Click Now!” link once it becomes visible.

Clicking Crazy: This is yet another of the more cheesy/cash-oriented exchanges with no restrictions as far as the type of site is concerned. The interface itself looks very similar to Traffic Troll, so my hunch is that they are owned by the same people or perhaps it is a similar backend application that is being sold to numerous companies? Whatever the case is, I may lose patience with seeing nothing but MLM schemes and similar schlock, but I can at least hope that some more legit stuff like blogs start joining and provide at least some respite…

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Wow, this Salon.com article is perhaps one of the coolest I’ve read in a while, and the most up my alley in terms of combining different interests:

There’s nothing particularly bleeding-edge about eating the hamburger but not the bun, now that low-carb dieting has gone mainstream. But low-carb diets do appear to hold a special attraction for hackers, programmers and other close-to-the-machine dwellers. For some geeks, the low-carb diet is itself a clever hack, a sneaky algorithm for getting the body to do what you want it to do, a way of reprogramming yourself. Programmers, who are used to making their computers serve their will, are now finding that low-carb diets enable the same kind of control over their bodies.

The article is about how hackers have taken to low-carb dieting for a number of reasons. Who knew that people like Cory Doctorow and Doc Searls were big low-carbers? Not me! Personally speaking most of the people I know who low-carb are not programmers, except for myself of course!

Basically, the article contends that hackers see low-carbing as “hacking” their bodies – to burn calories at a different rate. I think Searls is spot on when he is quoted as saying that he doesn’t think it’s a hack at all, but rather a “feature” – something we are supposed to be doing – eating the way our bodies are meant to. This may sound preposterous to those who are only familiar with the common stereotype (repeated in this article) of low-carbing being about eating a diet of only bacon cheeseburgers without the bun, but if you consider modern hunter gatherers and their overall diets being meat-based, you will get more of an idea of what Searls may be referring to.

The article, as most, only meantions one low-carb diet – Atkins. But Atkins never talks about the evolutionary and anthropological clues scientists have dug up regarding how our ancestors ate, which seem to suggest, as I mentioned, a primarily meat-based diet, such as is discussed in the Protein Power Books, Neanderthin, the Paleo Diet, and others. Since most hackers are scientifically minded, I think they would probably find even more interest in these theories than anyone.

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As I’ve written, I’m giving away a few copies of the 4-disk DVD Set of the Live Aid concert. The contest involves writing a bit about how you (or a friend/relative) remembers it. I realized that I actually hadn’t written anything myself about it, so I thought I’d jot down a few recollections.

In 1985 I was a junior in high school in New York City. Friends Seminary (a small Quaker school) to be exact. I had only the previous year started expanding my musical horizons beyond the array of Beatles albums we had at home and the popular videos on MTV. But I hadn’t really started listening to the radio yet.

I don’t think I knew anything about Live Aid before it happened, but the weekend it took place I decided to try out the radio of my combo radio/cassette/turntable unit (probably Fisher or Sanyo or one of those), which while cheap was actually above average because it had a digital tuner!

I think a schoolmate at the time had suggested trying to listen to WLIR, a radio station on Long Island that was one of the pioneering stations to play progressive rock, which I would not really discover until college. WLIR was at 92.7 FM and I was fiddling with the tuner to see if I could get it, but I was getting something else that turned out to be a very strong signal emanating from 92.3 FM. This turned out to be WXRK, or as they were calling themselves, K-Rock. They turned out to be an album-oriented rock station, and at the time there was only one other, the decades old WNEW.

But that day that I tuned in, I wasn’t hearing songs off albums but rather live music. I listened for a while and realized it wasn’t just a live record, but something else. From what I recal, the station was brand new, and they had basically started by broadcasting this Live Aid concert. I think I eventually figured out that I could get it on TV and so eventually made it over to it. But I don’t remember all that much about the live performances themselves. At the time I was pretty new to “classic” rock, and only new a few bands in addition to the big pop personalities of the day (Michael Jackson, Madonna, Cindy Lauper, etc.). Looking at the list of performers at Live Aid, though, I’m familiar with most of them at this point, and perhaps this event was really what spurred me on to really start listening to the radio and in particular album oriented radio rather than the insipid top-40 garbage that was prevalent then as it is today.

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I know that I concentrate on this one phone when there are others out there, but from all I read the Treo 600 and 650 have the most media buzz about them. Is PalmOS the best platform for a smartphone? I don’t know. There are certainly other OS’s out there (Windows Mobile and Symbian) that have larger development communities and phones from major manufacturers who use these. A lot of PocketPC phones also have had Bluetooth and even Wifi (if not built in at least available via expansion card) for quite a while now. Why then am I just concentrating on the Treo 650′s new release? It’s a good question. For one, I’m somewhat biased due to the fact that I have a Treo 600. I’m also biased because I’ve had owned Palm PDA’s, including the Palm V and a Clie model who’s number escapes me. I’ve played with PocketPC devices here and there, but never owned one for an extended period. Aside from this, my inclination is to like Palm because it is not the 1-million ton Gorilla that is Microsoft. In fact until recently it was looking more and more decentralized. Not quite open-source, but the software company PalmSource is separate from the hardware company Pa1mOne, and there were other hardware developers out there like Sony, IBM, Handspring, etc. But more recently there’s seems to be more consolidation. Sony has given up on the PalmOS and is no longer making Clie’s. I’m pretty sure IBM isn’t making their PalmOS PDA’s either. Pa1mOne of course bought Handspring and now they are one company. There are still plenty of third-party developers, but the situation is looking more and more like Microsoft and it’s very tight control over its mobile OS marketplace.

Several events have happened with regards to the Treo 650 have started to erode even more hope in this product. Some have to do with Pa1mOne itself, but others have to do with decisions primarily made by its mobile carrier partners.

1. Pa1mOne decides to have a graduated release of the Treo 650. Sprint gets it in November of 2004, and none other get it until 2005. It’s the end of January and the second mobile carrier to get it, Cingular, has yet to, and it looks like they won’t be for at least a week or two more. T-Mobile will not get until at least May and Verizon will also be late. I’m not sure how much of this is Pa1mOne and how much are the carriers, but I just think it’s ridiculous to have different carriers not be able to have access to basically the same device at the same time. It causes some real resentment and there’s nothing that customers can do because most are locked into contracts that are very costly to walk away from.
2. Sprint disables DUN (Dial-up-Networking) via Bluetooth. Many users, even power users won’t care about this. What this does is allows you to use your mobile phone as a modem. Doing this means that you can basically do data for free (if you are getting unlimited minutes at the time you connect). You don’t get the data from Sprint to your phone, but rather you are just making a phone call and the data travels over that line to the phone, which is then passed to a laptop. Maybe it’s six of one half dozen of another in some ways because with digital phones, everything is really data when you come down to it, although a voice call takes up less bandwidth then Sprint’s higher-speed data network. However, you can still use a cable to connect your phone to your laptop, the only thing you can’t do is to use Bluetooth (wireless) to connect. Not a big deal, but a stupid limitation. Sprint eventually backtracked after a big outcry that propagated over the Internet and promised a “fix” but has yet to come out with one. A user eventually created a hack that did just that, though it is of course unofficial.
3. Memory Deficiency. After the Sprint Treo 650 came out, it was soon discovered that the way it managed memory wasn’t as efficient as the Treo 600. Because it contained the same paltry 32MB of memory (12MB of which were taken up by system files), the effective result was that the 650 was actually a DOWNgrade when it came to memory! The fact that Pa1mOne could not add even a few dollars worth of memory to alleviate this problem and give Treo users more breathing room angered many of its customers including this one. While the 650 is definitely better in some ways, it still lags behind competitors in others, such as memory, ability to handle Wifi (or even have Wifi built in), it’s still somewhat low resolution VGA camera, etc.
4. Now that Cingular is finally coming out with the Treo 650, it seems like they are ignoring the whole debacle with DUN and the Sprint Treo 650 and are planning to disable it as well. Or perhaps they saw how Sprint took a momentary lump for disabling the feature but still hasn’t issued their fix and a lot of people have just forgotten about it. Why they would care enough to disable a feature that only makes DUN a little more convenient (but doesn’t make it impossible by any stretch) is beyond me. I can understand why these carriers might not want you to have DUN if you aren’t paying for a data connection, but just making it a little less convenient doesn’t make sense. I think one big problem is that these carriers have distinct marketing groups. They have power users who are going to take advantage of these things like DUN, and Wifi to circumvent the fees that these carriers normally charge for the equivalent services that their own networks provide. There seems to be an inherent conflict of interest here with these companies battling with some of their customers. But I think they are fighting the inevitable. Eventually we’ll be using very high-speed, high-range wireless networks that blanket the country (the world) and they will use Skype or Voice Over IP technology for voice calls and the same data network for data. I guess until then, these carriers will still be butting heads with the power users who want to push the technology to its limits which also means ostensibly robbing the carriers of money. I would argue, though, that this group of users is very small compared to the overall customer base and also that these users, if they could not take advantage of these loopholes, would mostly not be paying the extra money in order to do the things they are trying to do with the loopholes but via the normal use of the phone.

So, with all this taken into account, I wonder how wise it is to concentrate on this one phone. I would certainly be willing to try out a PocketPC phone, but not having the disposable income to buy a new cell phone every couple of months as some on these mobile phone forums do, I’m probably not going to be looking at one any time soon – unless of course I start getting some sent to me for review purposes, but so far that hasn’t happened. While PocketPC phones have some advantages like those I’ve listed (as well as tighter integration with Windows on your PC, if you happen to use Windows, generally faster processors, etc.), they have disadvantages as well. For one, they generally are a bit bulkier than the Treo, although of course there are exceptions to this. They also tend to be a bit pricier as well. I’m sure there are other pros and cons that I’m missing, and for different users, different platforms will be the right decision. I’m not saying that either is right for everyone. People need to look at their specific needs in a phone/data device and figure this out for themselves. All I’m saying is that the idea of the Treo (or any PalmOS smartphone) being the only phone to look at is being slowly eroded from my mind. Part of this is because I simply can’t buy the phone yet due to what I think is probably a marketing decision or exclusivity deals by Pa1mOne, T-Mobile, or both. I know that PocketPC phones have the same issues and this is why many power users simply skip the branded phones and go for generic unlocked ones (but pay a price for this). Then again, it doesn’t appear that there are such unlocked ones available anywhere for consumers, only branded ones. Perhaps that will eventually turn the tide for some as they get sick of waiting for their own carrier to come out with a model. If I’m waiting months and months for T-Mobile to come out with a Treo 650 and there isn’t even an unlocked one available, maybe I’ll just get fed up and go over to a PocketPC phone. This is the risk that Pa1mOne faces by offering the phone to some but not all who want it. There just seems to be something inherently unfair about that, don’t you think?

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Wholefoods, a chain of natural food supermarkets in the U.S. recently helped set up a foundation called the Animal Compassion Foundation whose purpose is to develop and promote practices in animals used for food that are compassionate and humane. This is, in my opinion, a good thing. Factory farms have made for horrible existences for animals for a century or more. Finally, with the growth of the organic and local farm, we are seeing more attention to naturalistic practices that both provide for better lives as well as better quality food.

The one problem I’ve seen with this foundation is that among others who are animal welfare advocates, one of the organizations participating is People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). PETA has a stance that mimics most extremist vegana and vegetarian and animal rights movements – the complete elimination of animals being used for food, period. This is the dilemma that is faced by most vegetarians and vegans who become so for ethical reasons. In their minds, killing animals for any purpose is wrong, whether done painlessly or not, and whether the quality of their lives was good or not. Also, the eating of “flesh” or even dairy or eggs from animals is repulsive to them. So, any effort among omnivores to make the lives of animals better is seen as disingenuous or simply meaningless in the face of our ultimate sin, that of eating meat.

I’m not sure exactly what to say to those people. I firmly believe that eating meat – naturally raised, not factory-produced – is enormously healthy for you and while one can certainly live on a completely vegetarian or even vegan diet, most people don’t really thrive. Some do, of course, but many don’t. In any case, I’m not willing to sacrifice my health because some people feel its unethical of me to eat meat. These people are of course entitled to their opinion, but as long as they keep it at that, I’m perfectly fine with that.

I do, however, think that despite some of these people’s tunnel vision, that some vegetarians respect other people’s right to eat the way they choose and they are all the more happy that some of us carnivores are thoughtful enough about animals and the environment to want to promote farming and animal-husbandry practices that support better lives for animals and more sustainable land management.

The extremists seem to not even understand what would be most beneficial to their movement. But extremists often cannot see the forest for the trees. They tend to be so subsumed by their ultimate goal that they cannot fathom even steps in that direction. If I were in their shoes, I’d be big supporters of these types of movements because it will make more people familiar with the problem in general without having to be shouted at by people on the corner waving graphic blown-up photos of mangled animals. Extremists don’t understand that this shock treatment only serves to alienate and anger most people. But maybe their stance is not conducive to rational argument? More likely, it is just a lot easier to shout and show graphic stuff that ANYONE would be disgusted by, then to actually defend a position in a rational way.

To repeat, I’m not trying to feather all vegetarians or vegans as extremists. I know some personally who do not look down on me for eating meat (at least that I know), and whose decision is a personal one which they choose not to inflict on others. But these are folks with friends and family who are 98% meat-eaters, and they probably have made a conscious decision that if they were to try to proselytize, many of those people would simply not want to have much to do with them. Of course extremists on the other hand view their cause as more important than anything else, so would basically rather lose all ties to friends and family who eat meat rather than associate with such horrible people. They can, after all, form new relationships within their extremist communities, right?

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I know it’s hard to believe, but my DVD giveaway contest is still open on DVDMON.com. Please, readers, help me out. I’m trying to give these away and it seems like there’s no interest. All you gotta do is write up a small piece about how you remember Live Aid – or even how a friend or relative does if you don’t. Post it here as a comment or just email me. That’s it. I’m looking for just seven more entries so that I can have a total of nine to pick three from. So your chances are winning are a ridiculously high one in three! Come on, it’s a cool DVD and it’ll only cost you a few minutes of writing.

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Hmmm, these free gadget referral sites are a bit addictive. After signing up for a Mac Mini, I thought of the one other gadget that I would a) love to have, and b) is a bit pricier than I can justify just buying it because it looks cool – really just being able to justify spending hundreds of bucks on something that doesn’t have a huge practical benefit. There are gadgets of course that I plan to be getting in the next six months, but a lot of others that I would love to have but just can’t consider because I don’t have that kind of disposable income anymore.

So, in any case, that one product category for me is a Personal Media Player. I’ve talked about these a lot here before and have been keeping my eyes open to see which ones look like they are good bets. The problem is that most of these are in the $400-600 price range and there are just so damn many of them these days. I looked on the web for some free offers and found another site called PVPs4Free, which specializes in Personal Media Players (or I guess as they have termed them “Personal Video Players”). They only offer a few of these, but doing a bit of searching, I found a round up on Cnet which steered me towards one of these, the Archos AV420.

PVPs4Free works basically the way the FreeMacMinis site works. You sign up yourself, complete one offer, than refer 10 friends. Luckily, this site included a decent number more offers than does FreeMacMinis, and a lot of them are different offers as well. While again many look a bit scammy, plenty are for legitimate subscriptions to newspapers, services like Blockbuster, AOL, etc. They even have a link to sign up for Vonage VOIP, so if you were considering doing this anyway, here’s a way to have it count potentially for something else. Sirius Satellite Radio is also here, as is Dish Satellite TV, and a bunch more. It just so happens that my mom needed internet access so I was able to sign her up for a cheapo account at NetZero. The one downside to this site over the FreMacMinis is that it takes up to a week to be credited for this offer. But since I don’t expect to get the Archos for months, it’s no big deal.

So, again, here’s my referral code and others are free to post a comment with their own:

http://www.pvps4free.com/default.aspx?r=179762

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Well, I finally did it. I signed up for one of those free[fill-in-the-blanks].com offers. For a long time I thought this was a very obvious scam, but it apparently really isn’t. For some reason most of these offers – or actually all of them that I’ve heard of – are offers for free gadgets – iPods, iPod Mini’s, digital cameras, etc. But then I heard a spokesman (or maybe it was the CEO) of the company (Gratis Networks) interviewed I think on The Screen Savers a while back, and it did sound a bit more legitimate. Engadget also did a piece about this. There are also reports I’ve seen on the internet of people who’ve gotten

Apple recently announced a new Mac that I thought was just about my size, called the Mac mini. I say my size not really about it’s size, which is truly small – smaller than a laptop but a lot thicker than one. The nicest thing as far as I’m concerned is the price, which starts at only $500. Macs have always come at a premium compared to their PC counterparts and it’s no wonder because you have only one company making them, whereas there are probably thousands of different manufacturers making PC’s and/or the individual components within them.

I’ve been thinking about getting an older low-end Mac to play with for a while. I’ve been a PC guy since 1990 (before then I was all about Atari computers), but Mac is undoubtedly a platform that a lot of influential people use. There are a bunch of programs which are really only available on the Mac. The Mac is of course better designed, but that I could really care less about. Really what would be nice about having a Mac at my disposal is the ability to have the same experience with my websites or other technologies that Mac users (albeit a somewhat small group compared to PC users) do. Lots of people also rave about the latest Mac OS X variants that are built on *nix (maybe even Linux? I can’t recall). So, in affect this is also an opportunity to get into UNIX. I know I could install this on the PC and do a duel boot, and I’ve had a copy of Red Hat Linux for probably a good three or four years, but obviously I’m too lazy to try this out!

So, I’m not expecting this to arrive anytime soon, and heck, I’m not even expecting it to arrive at all, but I figure the relatively painless process of signing up is worth what seems like a relatively decent chance of actually getting this in the next 6 months. While $500 is pretty cheap, the one that they are offering through this site is a little more beefed up, and while I’d love to just go out and buy one of these today, it’s hard for me to justify the purchase when there’s a lot of other gadget stuff I’m hoping to purchase in the coming months which are much more defendable!

So how does it work and are there any catches? Well, basically, there seem to be three steps:

1) You sign up with your email address and a few other pieces of info like your contact info.
2) You sign up for one of these “offers” from various companies. Some are credit cards, some are services like eFax, and others are a bit scammier sounding. I picked one that sounds not very useful, but not at all scammy called Buyers Advantage – which deals with warranty and return insurance type stuff – but also not expensive and you can always call and cancel it within 30 days.
3) The final step is that you need to refer people to sign up under you. I guess that sounds a bit scammy itself, kind of like a pyramid scheme, but I don’t think it is because it’s only two levels. You don’t, I don’t think, get any credit when people sign up under one of your referrals.

So, this is where you, my little blog readers come in. You too, can experience this new and silly phenomenon and help out this blogger in the process without really spending any money! And you too may or may not get one of these cute boxes yourself in coming months. Here is my own referral link, and if you’ve already signed up for this offer or for the various other Free[fill-in-the-blanks].com, feel free to comment and include those. This was the first one I’ve attempted since it was really the first thing that was of that much interest, so I have no qualms with others piggybacking on this entry and adding their own referral links – the more the merrier!

http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=14260603

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I get these Google alerts for anything with “low-carb” in the title. For months and months, I’ve been seeing headlines “low-carb losing steam” or some such. Some of this was based on the erroneous assumption that just because people aren’t buying the processed low-carb imitation products (protein bars, low-carb candy, bread, etc.), that this means that many fewer people are low-carbing. Couldn’t it be perhaps that when the explosion of these products hit in early 2004, people new (and even some old) to low-carb were curious about them, but eventually lost interest because they either tasted bad or tasted so good that people ate too much and sabatoged their diets? Others are based on random polling.

Now there’s this report (no longer available) that suggests that low-carb has had a new surge after New Years. It has been credited to the usual surge of new dieters during this time of year, but it neglects to relate this to the whole story behind dieting trends and continues to use loaded terms like “craze.” Here’s what seems obvious to me:

1. The low-carb movement came to critical mass at the beginning of 2004. Part of this was due to the growing number of studies that were giving more legitimacy to the method of weight loss. Part of it, no doubt, was due to Gary Taubes’ high-profile defense of the low-carb movement and theory in the New York Times the previous year. Part of it was due to the notoriety of Dr. Robert Atkins death and the controversy created around the misinformation and privacy invasions perpetrated by PCRM animal rights activists. Part of it was due to a new low carb book (which the author continually claims is not a low-carb book) called The South Beach Diet. And finally, part of it was based on food companies finally sitting up and taking notice of a new potential product category that they could get in on the ground level now that low-fat products had by and large sunk to unprofitability.
2. There are constant articles in the press about how popular low-carb is becoming and this just snowballs to create more and more interest. People buy primarily only two books about low-carbing, the Atkins book, or the South Beach book, which may not even be particularly about low-carbing. Some of these people make a genuine effort, lose weight and even adopt truly healthy eating patterns – they aschew most of the processed low-carb foods for the bounty of “legal” whole foods like vegetables, meats, fish, poultry, nuts, eggs, dairy products, and even some fruits. Many more people, though, either don’t read the books, or read only the menu sections, and get a very scewed idea about what low-carb is about. They believe that low-carb is, as the press and critics have painted it, about eating all meat, fat, and cheese, no vegetables, no fruit, etc. Likewise they get the impression that all of these new products labeled low-carb are ok to eat in whatever quantity they want. Actually, anything low-carb (like meat, cheese, etc.) is considered to be an all-you-can eat affair. Despite these misconceptions, some of these people succeed in losing a lot anyway. Many others don’t. Of the people who succeed, eventually they get sick of eating the same thing over and over because they mistakenly believe that low-carb is only about eating a few types of food. They also don’t understand why or how low-carb is supposed to work to make them not only thinner but also healthier, and so their motivation to continue goes out the window.
3. By this point it’s probably the summer, and most people are more active anyway, so the weight doesn’t fly back on, and people aren’t eating huge meals in summer heat either. But neither are they buying anymore low-carb products, and so we start to hear rumblings in the press about low-carb being on its way out.
4. A few months later and even more of the bandwagon-jumpers have jumped back off and then people start gearing up for the holidays. And by gearing up I mean they start to give themselves much more leeway in what they eat. Everyone else is getting lax during this time, so it becomes much easier to let yourself go because you aren’t alone in your guilty pleasures! Even many old stalwart dieters are slackening during this period, but of course the polling taking place makes the argument that this slackening indicates a definite trend in relationship only to low-carb dieting and not an overall pattern for all dieting over many, many years.
5. Finally the New Year comes and many of our resolutions are about getting back on that horse at least for the moment and thus, yes of course, the polling now indicates that.

What I think is important to stress here is that low-carb dieting is not any different in terms of dieting trends than other diets out there. It’s the new kid on the block, or at least newly respected (by many but not all) kid on the block, so it’s going to get more attention. However, the issue, I don’t think, is so much about low carb being something that people can only do for 6 months before getting bored, as critics would say, but that the whole tradition of dieting in this country, and many others, is a very seasonal one. We expect every year to be tempted through much of November and December at Holoween, Thanksgiving, Christmass, New Years, and umpteen holiday parties spread throughout. The weather is getting colder and there’s this sense that it’s more forgivable to put on a little more “insulation” for the cold. Then there’s the obligatory concession of guilt and resolution to be good again once the New Year has arrived. Because this is a pattern that so many of us fall into, it becomes easy to ride the wave so to speak. Sharing your life experience with countless others (whether friends or strangers) even if that is not a healthy one, is a lot less lonely than being one of the few different ones.

Another part of this as I’ve mentioned above, is also that many of us are either to busy to feel like we should really learn how and why to go about eating and/or exercising. We want quick summaries and the most basic information to just “do” the diet. “Just tell me what to eat” I’ve heard from countless people itching to start low-carbing. They don’t want to read a book, even if that means they will have a much better idea of what they can eat, why, and whether eating a certain way actually makes sense to them. Nope, in this world of instant gratification, even dieting falls prey to this mentality of just cutting to the chase to get the most dumbed-down directive about how to eat.

So, in other words, I’m really sick of hearing about how trendy low-carb is or isn’t. The fact of the matter is that it shouldn’t matter! The only thing that should matter is whether low-carb works for you. If it doesn’t so be it, but just ask yourself if you really know whether you know what low-carb is about. Read a whole book, or better yet read a couple or a few and get some different information about the theories and facts behind low-carb eating and decide whether it makes sense and whether if you’ve done it in the past, were you doing it in the best way? Any diet can be adhered to technically, but also not optimally. For example, I could eat a low-fat diet full of lean protein, but I could also eat a technically low-carb diet with almost no protein, no vegetables, or fruit. I could eat just spaghetti with low-fat margarine, low-fat candy, etc. I could also eat low-carb based on the misinformed critics’ idea of mountains of fried pork topped with mounds of cheese with a liter of grease thrown in for effect! But, after reading a couple of books, it became very apparent to me that eating reasonable portions of a combination of different foods including meat, poultry, fish, nuts, eggs, vegetables, and even fruits was just as technically a low-carb diet, just not one that low-carb critics want to admit are allowable.

For years, critics have been painting low-carb diets as “fad” diets, but really most diets are fads to one degree or another. Diets come and go and while there is a diet that is officially recommended by nutritionists and the medical community which has changed over the years, that could never be labeled as a “fad,” right? Fads are bad because they are ostensibly about irrational reasons for doing something. It’s fasionable or popular, but may not have any legitimacy. However, just because a diet is popular or becomes very popular and then not so much doesn’t make it good or bad. What really matters is whether it works to help you lose weight healthfully and actually makes you more healthy. As I’m sure you know by now if you didn’t already, I am very much believe in the data that suggests that eating low-carb (in the healthy way I mention) can be very healthy. But if we keep concentrating on what the critics, the media, or pollsters say is or isn’t popular when that shouldn’t be an argument for or against anything, we will continue to maintain this really skewed understanding of eating and also our wacky and unhealthy traditions of seasonal dieting trends.

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I’ve been playing with this program Replay Radio which allows me to audio streams that are playing through my computer. There are a bunch of programs that do similar things. I’m going to be posting a larger piece about this soon enough, but for now I thought I’d talk a little about NPR and how the new technologies are affecting them and will continue to in the future.

NPR is a great source of news, at least as far as I’m concerned. I know some people find it too liberal, too snobby, or whatever, but I think there’s some quality reporting and as long as you keep an ears open for bias, which exists to some extent in all reporting no matter the source (based on the questions that are asked or what is decided as relevant to a given piece), you can glean a lot from the various programming on NPR.

NPR is a special case when it comes to broadcasting of course because it does not get its revenue from advertising, the way all other radio does. It gets its money from a combination of the taxpayer through government funding and through voluntary means. It’s a bit contradictory in that sense because on the one hand you have people who are giving to NPR whether they want to or not simply by their paying taxes, and another group who not only gives through their taxes but gives again through voluntary donations.

NPR then will also charge people again if they want to obtain tapes or transcripts of recordings, or if they want to download digital versions (through Audible.com). I can understand that tapes and the writing of transcripts may mean using extra resources. Even making digital recordings can do this as well. However, one can also listen to various NPR programs via streaming audio for absolutely nothing. True, they are often in somewhat lower-quality audio (I see often 20kbps, or slightly less than what AM radio is rated at), and it is less convenient than a downloadable file, but it’s still a disparity. Then if you consider these new computer applications like Replay Radio that take that stream and convert it into a downloadable file, the disparity becomes even more of an issue.

Podcasting, of course, has made this issue all the more relevant as home-grown (and a few more professional) broadcasters have started putting out audio files that are downloaded. NPR itself is experimenting with this with podcasts of On The Media. On The Media, of course, is ahead of the curve a bit because its raison d’etre is thinking about media, media trends, new technologies, etc. I wonder if NPR is thinking about these various delivery mechanisms and how they make sense?

When Satellite Radio came on the scene a few years ago I was excited about being able to get an all-NPR channel or channels and have access to it no matter where I was roaming. But after talking to someone at XM (Sirius does carry a couple of NPR shows, but none of the bread and butter stuff), I was told that NPR didn’t want to use them because it might deplete revenue of affiliate stations.

This is where things get a little more complicated. NPR isn’t just one monolithic entity, but rather it’s a public broadcasting network and in an of itself does not do any broadcasting except over the Internet, and even with that has only been doing it for a few years. Traditionally, it’s relied on affiliate stations that pay for its content. Some of these stations actually create content themselves which is then syndicated on other affiliates, although I have no idea how this works in terms of revenue – does NPR play the middle man? Do these stations talk directly to themselves and work out compensation plans? In any case, as you can see, it’s not a simple and clear situation. Affiliates need to be able to pay for these programs, for the general NPR programs, for their facilities, for staff, etc. This is what voluntary funds are for. I wonder, though, whether any of those donations go to NPR itself and if so how much? What about government funding? Does that go solely to NPR proper or to any of the affiliates?

In any case, the issue again comes down to content and paying for that content without resorting to advertising. Certainly advertising could be resorted to, but this is what makes NPR listenable in many ways – you aren’t bombarded by ridiculous amounts of offensive ads every time you want to hear the news or some interesting stories. And anyone who listens to NPR will tell you how annoying pledge drives can get.

So, the question basically is how does NPR and all the affiliate stations make money? One answer is more government funding, but there are a lot of people who would balk at this either because they think NPR is biased and biased in a way that contradicts their own political leanings. Alternately some believe simply that people should not be forced to pay for this if they don’t listen to it. These are certainly understandable arguments, so then what’s next? Perhaps NPR really needs to be thinking about setting up a subscription-based service for “premium” listeners or members. So, basically, you would become a member through your local affiliate the way you do now, and that affiliate would get a cut of your donation, but you could apply directly to NPR as well. Instead of getting a tote bag, an umbrella, a coffee mug, or a CD, you would simply get a membership to download content from NPR or any of its affiliates. You could have graduated levels of membership that would give you access to a greater number of these files. They could package the various shows produced by affiliates, charge differently based on the sound quality (and thus file size) of the content, etc.

As a fan of NPR, and member of local affiliates, even I have difficulty sometimes justifying the fact that I’m paying extra for something that I’m already paying for via taxes. I understand why this is, but it’s still doesn’t always sit well with me. Then the fact that I can’t get the content the way I want (via a downloadable file) unless I pay yet more money, and it’s a bit frustrating. However, I’ve paid subscription fees to various other providers of content (Satellite Radio and TV, Internet Radio, etc.) and not felt it to be onerous. Subscription, I feel, is the most fair because it is opt-in. If NPR continues to receive public funding, that’s fine by me, and so taxpayers should still get access to the programming in some form, but let those who are willing to pay extra receive the content exactly the way they want. That means being able to download this content as individual files, but perhaps also as premium channels on both Satellite Radio providers. That’s my idea, anyway. Then again, as it should be clear from this entry, I’m not an expert on the internal revenue workings within NPR and its affiliates, so take this for what its worth, but I think that as radio of all kinds make a transition from the current AM/FM model of local affiliates to a more global internet-based or satellite-based model, that NPR will have to adapt just as many other traditional broadcasters will if they don’t want to be made irrelevant by the scores of independent broadcasters coming out of the woodwork that provide their content for small fees (or absolutely nothing) via podcasts or audio streaming.

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