Monetizing the Cabbage

Regular readers of the Cosmological Cabbage may notice a new thing -- ads on my blog.  I got sick and tired of looking at the button that said "Monetize" so I clicked it.  Free money right?  As Sarah Palin would say "You Betchya!".

So I signed up for Google and Amazon.  Within the first 15 page impressions, I had made one cent. Wooo Hoooo !!!!

I still haven't figured out the formula for them paying me when I don't have clicks, but I will watch it and report back to you on how this thing works.

And before you leave, please do me a favor and click on the Google ad below this post.  It will add a few pennies to my retirement account.  Thank you.

The Next Big Thing for Google

I was reading my online news source yesterday, and an article about Google said that it was still basically a one man show, and that was a search engine. The article idly mused on what next for Google.

Ignoring the fact that Google owns the internet, has become a verb, noun, adverb and adjective, and also ignoring that there is a Google phone, and blogs and marketplace and forums et cetera et ceteri, there is one aspect where Google can be the most helpful digital application for now and for ever and ever Amen. And I have the idea. The idea is GOOGLE OPINION.

Google's basic premise is that the crowd is always right. However, sometimes there is not enough facts, or facts don't exist to definitively answer a question. Everyone has an opinion, however some people's opinions are righter and smarter and better than other people's opinion. So Google should get an opinion.

They should develop a context engine with inference powers. Then they would troll their page records and draw inferences by popular vote. Then Google would have an opinion.

For example, questions like "Are tattoos tasteful?" could be answered. Other questions on which I would like to hear a Google opinion are:

• Is the death penalty useful?
• Can psychopaths be rehabilitated?
• Are most religions a bunch of bunk?
• What if there were no rhetorical questions?
• Is there justification for Justin Beiber and his ilk in an enlightened society?
• If there is a resurrection of the body, can I get my money back from the undertaker?
• How does a real estate company sell its office building without causing confusion?

As you can see, Google Opinion would be a boon to society. And as for Google, when your bot comes trolling tonight, and you think that this is a good idea, you know where to send money. You have my email address, and my blogs, and all of my info. I know that your corporate motto is "Don't be evil", so I trust that you will send me money for my idea, but you did cozy up to the Chinese for a while and did some censoring.

So I am not quite sure about Google's intention with them having all of my info and not stealing my idea. However, I did a test, and in spite of 165,000 references, Google still doesn't know Satan's last name, so I guess that my information is safe for now. I think that I will ask Google for an opinion on that as well.

On Blogstitution, weird searches and other stuff

My life as a blogger has some travail to it. It is tough to coin new words these days. The Lovely One spent many hours doing her first blog and website, and I casually said that if she wanted to drive traffic to it, all she had to do, was put Michael Jackson or Karla Homolka as key words. She said that she wasn't a prostitute (in the bloggery sense). Immediately I wondered if blogstitute was a unique word, and if I would have the dubious honour of coining it. I checked with Google, and unfortunately, someone else has already thought of it.

Then I wondered if bloggery was a unique word. It wasn't. Well that sent me on a quest to invent a unique word. Shmizzle seemed like a good bet. It wasn't unique. I finally came up with a unique word -- crinshull. Unfortunately its not a very useful word, but if it ever becomes one, remember that you read it here first.

In the photo world, below is what the weather was like outside my window the day before yesterday. The beach on Paradise Island is particularly inviting as I type this.

In other word news, I got a hit from Indonesia last night. The key word was "otopsi". I was surprised that Google would find me with that word. The searcher was looking for autopsy pictures (and of course there is a Michael Jackson autopsy picture on this blog -- ok, ok, I am being a blogstitute by mentioning this).

I also got an email from a friend in China. He says that my blog is blocked there. Quelle surprise.

So, today I am back at it, watching the snow melt. Apparently a local golf course it open, but it is hard to play with mitts on. I will be back in the tropics shortly and should be able to resume my Tourist Scene pics. In the meantime, I leave you with a Rolling Stones country music song. Mick Jagger is doing a parody of Gram Parsons, from thirty years ago.

Google Not Censoring In China

Well, Google has finally done it. They have stopped censoring searches in China. It is about time. Regular reader of this blog will know that my own servers have been hacked from a government institution in China. You can read about that entry here:

http://cosmologicalcabbage.blogspot.com/2009/03/chinese-cyber-spying.html

CNN actually mentioned the above blog post when the Chinese were caught in state-sponsored hacking.

What bothers me most about China and other Communist countries, is their perversion of the literal truth. The Chinese will do dirty deeds, and when they are caught out, they say in diplomatic and other circles, that there is a slur against the peace-loving people of China.

TheChinese shoot kneeling people in the back of the head at the slightest excuse, and then put on a veneer of civility for occasions like the Olympics. Once they are off the world stage, it is back to beating dissidents, cooking up Rover with some soy sauce, and stealing technology and secrets from the West.

I am in the middle of re-reading Raissa Berg's book from the 1980's called Acquired Traits. She was a geneticist in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist times when an uneducated brute called Lysenko came into power with the ruling elite who were also a bunch of uneducated thugs. It was illegal to teach that chromosomes and genes existed. Lysenkoists preached that if you fed a starling the food of a nightingale, the eggs from those parents will have nightingale chicks in them. There was a total subversion of the truth. This is what the Chinese are doing today.

The Chinese government is two-faced. There is nothing noble about it or its constituent persons. There is nothing altruistic about the Chinese people at the levers of power. They actually live a tissue of lies that involves the most brutal repression of their own people all in the name of other motives. And that makes them something less than what noble men can be when they aspire to transcend animal selves and act on a higher moral plane. Unfortunately these ideas are Chinese to the Chinese.

Kudos to Google. There motto is "Do No Evil". It is about time that Google stopped playing the dirty Chinese games and living the lie that the Chinese tell.

As an interesting aside, this blog is hosted by Google, and Google is my search engine of choice. As I was preparing this blog entry, I got the above screen shot several times. Google appears to be under cyber attack this morning. The screen above says:

We're sorry, but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request.

Guess who? One of the traits of any evil empire, is that they are afraid of the free dissemination of information and news. They are afraid of the truth. And with the Chinese, the truth is always their first victim. Then come the human victims. There are a lot of them.