Welcome to Smuggle Me

This is a classic video of essentially the Bellagio fountains done with Diet Coke and mentos. I love watching this thing. I can’t imagine the work that was involved in setting it up, but it’s awesome.

If I wasn’t so lazy I would have found it on Youtube and posted the video. Oh well, the video is still fun to watch.

I love when someone finds various charts online that show where someone got paid $80 for a keyword like “DUI lawyers las vegas.” I really think it is great to be able to find a blog that can make $80 a click. I would love to have one myself. However, I think the best lesson for Google Adsense users is to avoid the dumbest adsense mistake.

The basic concept is that an $80 click through that happens once a year is not as good as a $1 click through that happens every day. I’ve personally found that most click throughs are valued down in the 1-10 cent range. So, if you find a popular keyword that pays $1 a click, then see how much traffic you can generate around that keyword. It hasn’t made me rich yet, but it has given me a check every month from Google.

I know I personally cringe every time something I want to read on the web is in PDF format. Although, I must admit that it use to be worse before I knew how to make PDF files open fast on my computer. You can remove the adobe pdf plugins, but I personally prefer to use Foxit on my computers. They make PDF’s tolerable.

At one point I thought that it would be fun to create a virtual video tour of Las Vegas. I still think that it would be possible. Although it would be better if you just found all the videos on YouTube and put them all together.

Anyway, I’ve kind of lost interest and this post has been sitting there forever. So, here’s the links I’ve found. I’m too lazy to make them actual links so sorry you’ll have to copy and paste them.

This also turns out to be a decent list of things to do in Las Vegas (and looking now some of them I never found good videos).

Bellagio Fountains

http://www.bellagio.com/media/bellagio.asx

http://www.bellagio.com/pages/attrac_highfountain_noflash.asp

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=bellagio+fountains

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4255678578802278201&q=bellagio+fountains

RIO - Masquerade Show in the Sky

http://www.harrahs.com/images/RLV/videos/masq_showsky_hispeed.wmv

http://www.harrahs.com/our_casinos/rlv/entertainment/entertainment_detail_08.html

Walk Caesar’s Palace - I love to just see what they created. It’s like a little city in itself.

Light Show at Fremont Experience

http://www.vegasexperience.com/viva.cfm

http://www.vegasexperience.com/viva2.cfm

http://www.vegasexperience.com/viva3.cfm

http://www.vegasexperience.com/video/300k2.asf

Volcano - I forget where this is, but it’s close to Caesars. If you ask anyone they’ll know where it is.
Pirate Ship Show - Treasure Island - I heard this isn’t kid friendly, so since I’m a kid I haven’t seen it

I had been working on this for a while. it was my really neat proof of concept for my idea I called Blog Mashing. I still really like the idea, but unfortunately I didn’t like the way that it looked in people’s sidebars. I may get back to this later, because as you can see in this post, the proof of concept is pretty neat.

I decided to clean out my long list of draft posts. This is definitely going to involve deleting a lot of posts and will probably consist of me writing a whole bunch of content.

The thing is that when I find something interesting that I might want to blog about I just start a post for it. So, I have like 85 posts to go through. We’ll see how many I get through tonight.

A little while back Ted asked the PayPerPost community if their blog sucks? I actually avoided saying much at the time. However, I think that it’s pretty clear what’s happened to the PPP blog. They stopped announcing almost anything!

There has been months and months of marketing hype over Argus which turned out to be Izea and SocialSpark. That’s the best way to kill a corporate blog. Spend months and months and making only superficial changes and not announce anything that significant.

When PayPerPost first launched the blog was hoping with new features and exciting announcements. In fact, I seem to remember someone even sarcastically complaining that it had gone 3 days since a major announcement. It was really exciting to be apart of a dynamic organization that was changing weekly.

It amazes me that this all occurred almost a year and a half ago. Well, times have changed. PayPerPost has an incredibly large community and too many employees to keep track of them all. No more videos of stressed out employees getting vitamin water. No more $10 million funding announcements. However, most significantly very few feature releases in MONTHS!!

The worst part of it all is that the Argus announcement at PostieCon was a big disappointment. Not because the changes weren’t good. The quick information that was given at Postie Con has potential. However, no one would ever know it, because nothing has been released. No one has access to argus Social Spark. The PPP community was left waiting for months for the holy grail they called Argus only to receive a rushed announcement and now over a month of waiting (and no end in sight) for the actual release.

I’m sure that someone will come and say that the release of Social Spark was delayed because of the release of RealRank. This argument misses my point that PayPerPost has released very few interesting features in months.

This isn’t to say that PayPerPost isn’t thriving and that it isn’t going to be huge. I’m just saying that’s why the PayPerPost blog sucks and has definitely affected the community around it. It may have been the best corporate decision for PayPerPost to take these months and rebuild PayPerPost from the ground up. However, I think you could make a good argument about why it would have been better for PayPerPost to release features early and often. Wordpress learned this lesson which they took from Ubuntu.

I think it’s also worth mentioning Christopher Herot’s recent post explaining how he wasted much of his now failed startups time discussing and implementing features that users didn’t care about. Sure makes a compelling argument for an agile development environment with frequent releases of features. I guess we’ll see if the months of rebuilding PayPerPost and adding new features suffers the same unneeded feature fate that Christopher Herot experienced.

I hope this post isn’t seen as complaining. PayPerPost is welcome to do whatever they want with their product. I couldn’t care much either way. Although, I do appreciate them offering me a front row seat as I watch and learn from their experience building their company.