Welcome to Smuggle Me

My wife and kids are out of town this weekend and so a friend from work invited me to go to Borders to listen to a UNLV student play some acoustic guitar. The guy had some pretty amazing stuff. You could tell it came pretty natural to him. I guess he’s the president of the Guitar Society of Las Vegas. Looks like a pretty cool group to be apart of. So, if any of my readers play guitar in Las Vegas, get in touch with them.

I must admit that I think the best part of the night was hearing Katrina Leshan play a bunch of songs that she wrote herself. My friend from work and I guessed how old she was and just couldn’t believe it when we found out she was 17. She’d written something like 3 songs just this week. One of which she just wrote today and played for us. Talk about some amazing talent. You can check her and her music out on Katrina Leshan’s myspace page. One day when she’s a famous singer you can say you heard about her first here.

My favorite song she sang was the first one she sang that I think she called “Chances.” Once she puts it on YouTube I’ll post it on my blog. I wish that I could have heard it again. I think one of the future Guitar Society of Las Vegas gigs I’ll have to get a babysitter and take my wife to enjoy some nice guitar.

Katrina Leshan also sang a modified version of a song she calls “…you and we should totally go bowling and eat some suuuuuuuper cheesy nachos (AKA See You) (AKA The Song I Wrote For Brandon Walsvick)” Here’s a rather poorly recorded video of the song on YouTube. Much better in person, but still amazing to watch this video and think that she’s only 17.

All in all, a nice way to spend a Saturday evening with good company and good music.

In the past years I’ve always been able to find a nice stream of Versus that allowed me to stream the Tour de France online without any problem. This year I have yet to find a nice stream except for the free one that Versus offers for the first 2 stages at a very ungodly hour in the morning.

This year, it looks like Justin.tv is going to save us with the EuroSport Live stream of the Tour de France. I love that it also archives the race so that if you aren’t there live you can watch the race after the fact too. Granted, you have to put up with the english commentary, but essentially that’s what Versus has with Phil Ligget too. I actually prefer the english commentary since it’s a quite refreshing perspective.

I am just a little bummed about even watching this year’s Tour de France since they kicked off Levi Leipheimer and Alberto Contador and their entire team. Just doesn’t seem right. However, I’m sure I won’t worry too much once I see a crazy sprint or a tough mountain stage. I’m just a little sad that there are only 4 Americans participating. That’s really unfortunate that there’s so few.

I love the idea of having all my videos on my computer so that they are easily accessed. I hate getting off my butt. This looks like a pretty simple process to convert DVDs to videos that you can watch on your PC. I’m sure there are more, but this looks very promising.

I’ve always had an interest in streaming video. Probably because I’m too cheap to pay for it myself. That’s why I found the news that CBS will be streaming All the NCAA tournament games online for free to be great news.

I’m pretty sure it will all be easily available from the CBS website. I’ll be looking forward to this. TVU Player worked well for streaming the NCAA tournament last year, but unlimited access to games will be so much better. In fact, now that I think about it, CBS streamed the games last year, but they had some filters applied depending on where you lived. This year should be much better.

This is one of the most hilarious videos I’ve seen. I would never have expected to find a video of John McCain endorsing Mitt Romney after the things he’s sad about Mitt Romney during the campaign. I guess it’s things like this that make my wife not want to have anything to do with politics.

I came across a video on Techcrunch today that had me laughing so hard. It was about Digg and it was spot on. Plus, the singing by Kina Grannis was quite good too.

Of course, I had to see what Kina Grannis is about and I found out that she’s participating in the Crash the Super Bowl contest. You can see Kina’s website to support her in the contest or just go straight to the Crash the Super Bowl site to vote (you’ll have to be already logged into myspace to vote which is quite lame).

Here’s another video from Kina Grannis where she sings a song called Cambridge. I really enjoyed this one. I think it’s her best song. Pretty amazing talent I’d say.

Best of luck Kina in the contest.

Today I decided to re-watch the video that Ted from PayPerPost posted about Argus’s new stats program. I’m sure that all the people who participate in PayPerPost have been watching Argus closely to see what the next iteration of PayPerPost will look like. It has been months since any really major changes to the system have been implemented. I’d say we’re all getting a little antsy, but maybe a lot of people using PayPerPost don’t really care. They’re just enjoying the money they make from blogging. Either way, here’s the unfocused video that Ted posted to the PPP blog recently.

While re-watching this video, I listed off each of the tabs that are shown (and luckily I think I was able to make out). They included: vistors, page views, ppp rank, alexa rank, google pr.

The only one that is really that surprising to me is the PPP Rank. I can’t believe I haven’t heard more people raging about this PPP Rank. I wonder how PPP is going to handle this ranking system. Is it going to be like Alexa ranking where it is updated daily and is easily gamed? Will it become a filter that advertisers use a lot? I think that this is going to drive a lot of people nuts. I can already see the posts on the forum about someone’s PPP rank being low and how PPP is discriminating against small time bloggers. Let me just cut that off now. It’s not PPP that is discriminating against you. It’s advertisers and advertisers dollars that don’t like you. So, start putting the blame where blame is due.

Regardless of all the hooplah that will occur over the PPP rank, I’m interested to see where I rank amongst the approximately 60k bloggers on payperpost. It’s really hard to make a guess since there are a lot of factors that PPP could use to determine rank. If they just do traffic, then my prediction is as follows:

Smuggle Me Blog - 5,267 PPP Rank
Something for Nothing - 4,345 PPP Rank

What’s your prediction on where your blogs will rank amongst the 60k PPP bloggers?

I’m sure that Mike Arrington is going to have another heyday (however you spell that) when Argus comes out. I’m just surprised that Mike doesn’t seem to have a clue what’s already going on at PayPerPost with Argus.

Today I came across a TechCrunch article about a company called Prerollr. They have a really simple way to put advertising on top of video content that is posted on a third party site. I thought it was a really interesting concept around monetizing videos. We’ll have to see how the company evolves. A quick look at their blog shows that they are a very new company. I love being part of new companies and watching them evolve. However, the real key with Prerollr will be how well they can sign up advertisers and therefore monetize blogs. Targeting the ads to the videos will be a challenge and signing up enough advertisers to make it worth a websites time to use Prerollr will be a major challenge they will have to overcome. Should be an interesting ride.

Here’s an example of a YouTube video with the Prerollr ad. By the way, this video is of the dance Benji Schwimmer choreographed for Pasha and Sara on So You Think You Can Dance.

I am a little concerned that it doesn’t say how much the pay will be and whether it will be an impression model or a click through model. Although the terms of use seem to indicate impression. I assume some of these details are because the site is so new. Hopefully they’ll get this information out soon. Also, they really need to have a stats page on their admin panel so we can watch our impressions and know how our sites are doing. Maybe they aren’t ready for that kind of traffic. You know we are stats junkies.

Now if Prerollr only had an affiliate program. Either way, I’ll at least give them a little bit of link love.

I went on a mission for my church and Italy and while there I had a mission President who use to be a mob buster. He had the best stories of tracking members of the mob, getting carried into houses in couches and all sorts of great stories.

Well, I haven’t seen my President in probably 8 years. Imagine my surprise when I see him on an ABC News video. Pretty amazing what a small world it is. I guess he wasn’t exaggerating when he talked about what he did for the FBI.

Here’s looking to you Flosi the Mob Buster!!

I can’t believe that a Jewish Dating site would put out a video like this. I guess I shouldn’t be that amazed, but I guess I would have just expected a more conservative approach to the audience their trying to market to. The video’s pretty funny. I’m mostly surprised that they didn’t post this video on YouTube or some other sharing site where it would become hugely popular.