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Why protest Vancouver's 2010 Olympics?

Published on - Feb 13, 2010

I've often wondered why people protest the Winter Olympics, I found it quite odd. Here's why they do.

There are many reasons to protest the Olympic Games. It is a multi-billion dollar industry run by an elite clique who sell the five rings to the highest bidder, using sports as a commodity and a platform for corporate advertising. Their main goal is profit, in collaboration with their partners: government, local organizing committees, and corporations (construction, real estate, tourism, TV, and media, as well as sponsors).

The Olympics have a long history of association with fascists, colonialists, and authoritarian regimes (i.e., the 1936 Hitler Olympics, the 1968 Mexico City Olympic massacre, and the 2008 Beijing Summer Games). Since the 1980s, they have displaced over three million people and contributed to massive increases in homelessness (as we’ve seen in Vancouver).

Due to massive construction projects associated with the Olympics, from venues to infrastructure, there is both widespread environmental destruction, as well as huge public debts. As part of security operations, police, military, and intelligence agencies receive millions of dollars for new personnel, equipment, weapons, et cetera—strengthening the creeping police states we see around the world (and south of the border) and further eroding our alleged “freedoms” and civil liberties.

Some naysayers ask: Why protest since protests don’t change anything, and the Games are gonna happen anyway? Their question is based on the apparent futility of protest.

To begin with, protests are but one tactic used by social movements. They help raise awareness and mobilize people. The U.S. black civil-rights movement started out as small protests and grew into a mass campaign of civil disobedience. This forced the government to enact reforms and to desegregate the South. Protests weren’t the only activities carried out by the civil-rights movement. They also organized forums, held workshops on legal rights, registered black voters, printed newsletters, et cetera.

Protests and civil disobedience were what made change both possible and necessary, because not only did they draw international attention to racism in the U.S., they also made it impossible for the apartheid system in the South to go on as it had before. By the 1970s and ’80s there were black mayors, chiefs of police, et cetera. Today, there is a black president.

People who say protests don’t change anything don’t know history. And those who say ...

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5 easy steps to quick SEO ranking

Published on - Jan 18, 2010

Despite how easy it is to get ranked fast some simple things are overlooked. I tested this theory I had about the importance of targeting long tail keywords first for an SEO campaign as apposed to last. To get ranking quickly do the following:

1. Obviously the first step is to do your keyword research on your niche. I prefer Google Keyword Analyzer

2. Select a few long tail keywords from your research

3. Go to google and put those keywords in google wrapped in quotes (this will show results matching exactly that term). Make note of how many times the exact term shows up in title. Note: If there are no top 10 results with this term keep special track on those.

4. Take all of the terms you had researched that had no or very few title results and either create a web page with the terms in the meta tag titles or do a blog post with the keywords being in the post title. I suggest a blog entry. Do one post per term (you can maybe do two keyword terms in one post if it makes sense).

5. Ping your blog post or web page. My favorite is Feedping

Now go find something fun to do for a few hours. In most cases, you’ll see your post or webpage being ranked within a few hours tops - sometimes it might take a couple days, but 80% to 90% of the keywords that you picked (if you did your research right) should be showing up with your site on page 1 of Google.

Keep in mind that you might not get a ton of traffic from most of those terms but to make this really effective you need to take this a step further and structure some of those links over to your main sections of your main web site. I was able to put link weight on a heavy page for a specific keyword just by doing this for one term for my own testing purposes. When you do dozens to even hundreds of these, you can get some massive traffic.

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Google Chrome bumps Safari to become third-placed browser

Published on - Jan 5, 2010

Chrome’s steadily improving user base has seen the browsing platform gain a further 0.7 percent of the market in December, pushing its total share for 2009 to 4.63 percent and outperforming the 4.46 percent logged by Safari.

This really caught my eye, I enjoy seeing this: Internet Explorer’s gradual month-on-month decline continued in December, with the platform falling from 63.62 percent to 62.69 percent.

Read more: http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201001/5030/Chrome-bumps-Safari-to-become-third-placed-browser#ixzz0bl35Zsbt

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Great quote - No user servicable parts inside

Published on - Dec 29, 2009

That's what it says on countless electronic and mechanical devices. "Don't touch this," it says, "you're way too dumb to open it... you'll get hurt"

The problem, of course, is that pretty soon you start looking at the entire world that way. Whether it's web design or Google analytics or backing up your hard drive or just talking to the guys in the plant about your new ideas, it's really easy to see the world as a black box.

Here's a simple secret of success: ignore the sticker.

Figure out how to use the tools that the most successful people in your field understand innately.

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/02/no-user-servica.html

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