Some Knowledge

I’m just relaxing today and having a good time reading about stuff.  I bought a book on web design that I will probably start reading in a little while.  I looked up information on making money with a blog and found just tons of nonsense.  Here, I’ll tell you the secret of making money with a blog.  Choose a topic and get yourself really popular by posting things that people want to look at.  There really is no other way.  Someday I will take my own advice and get popular, but that day is not today.  Today I’m just taking it easy.

I just stopped by tonight to look in on how this blog is doing.  Traffic seems to be back to normal, about a hundred page views a day.  It’s been at that level for months since I stopped posting articles that are likely to get read.  Who the heck is going to read an article about a pleasant day?  People want to read about things in the news, not somebody’s observations of how well things are going.

Anyway, I’m going back to reading websites for a while before I break out the new book.  Maybe I will study up and learn how to design websites that attract traffic and sell products.  Perhaps someday I will set up my own useful site that everybody wants to visit.  Right now I am just recording my thoughts and leaving a record that I had a nice day and that’s just fine.  Hope everything is going well for anyone who reads this.  I should be back tomorrow to post more random thoughts.

It’s cold again outside.  A tiny bit of snow fell overnight.  The weather is like a broken record, playing the same line over and over again.  There is nothing you can do about the weather.  I have my computer to keep me occupied.  I may take the day off from blogging and reading and play games for a while.  There are better things to do than let the weather get you down.

I am having a good day.  I might go out later and do some shopping.  I have a 15% off coupon for a health food store.  They send these things out in the mail every couple weeks.  I think right now I am going to go do some reading online for a while.  There is always something to read on the Internet.  I mainly stopped by here this morning to moderate some comments.  I haven’t got a real subject for thie post, so I’m just rambling on about this and that.

One of these days somebody is going to make a computer game where you can explore a virtual world and learn all kinds of interesting things that doesn’t involve pretending to kill things all the time.  I used to play games that had a lot of combat, but I got sick of them.  Why would anyone spend all their time pretending to kill things?  Yet, that’s what most video games are all about.  I never got interested in sports games.  I am just not into sports.  Maybe I should become a sportscaster and get a job on national TV.  That would probably drive me insane.  Anyway, why don’t they have adventure games where you learn and explore?  It’s probably something that’s too hard to design.  Maybe I will go into video game design.  I have thought of this before.

So, it’s cold outside and there is snow everywhere.  At least they took the annoying snow off WordPress here.  That stuff was making my browser jiggle annoyingly as it scrolled off screen.  It looked like a computer virus or something.  Anyway, a couple more months and it will start to get warm again.  Winter makes me appreciate summer that much more.  The only good thing about winter is that you don’t have to mow the lawn.  Anyway, that’s all for this morning.  I may be back later to write something interesting.

I did some reading online this morning.  I read a couple blogs about how to capitalize on the Internet.  It seems there is no end to useless information.  I deleted a bunch of emails this morning that were just sales pitches for things I want nothing to do with.  Where do all these hucksters come from?

I got nothing against people trying to make a buck.  I know the world runs on capitalism.  I object to people trying to sell me stuff all the time.  I can hardly stand to watch TV these days because of all the annoying commercials.  I can’t follow the plot of a movie if you are always interrupting the action to try and sell me stuff I don’t want.  What is the world coming to?

If I want to buy something, I will get in the car and drive to the place that sells those things.  I buy books, magazines, and vitamins.  I sometimes buy herbal supplements.  I buy clothes every once in a while.  I buy food.  In the past I have bought cars, computers, video games, a lot of things.  Right now I don’t have a lot of extra money sitting around to spend on entertainment products.  It’s sad, but I can’t afford a luxury ocean liner right now.  I am not in the market for any trips to Disneyland.  I don’t need or want an AK-47, thank you very much Russian industrial-military complex.  There are way more things I don’t want or need than there are things I would ever buy.  Why would anyone think I would go out and buy some useless piece of merchandise just because I saw a picture of it on TV?

That being said, there are some uses for advertising.  It would be nice to get paid for posting advertisements on the net.  I would need a lot more traffic to my blogs for that to happen.  I would need to become popular.  My writing would have to become a commodity.  I would have to write words that make people want to buy stuff from the advertisements they see on the pages of my writing.  I would have to become the enemy, a salesman.

So, right now I am looking for something but I am not finding it.  I am not finding any books on how to create incredible wealth.  Perhaps this is because there are no such books.  People who go out and get rich do not write books on how they got what they wanted out of life.  Sure, some people try to cash in on the greed factor people have by writing books that are supposed to be teaching ways to make money.  I’ve bought a few of these books.  They were interesting to read.  But the bottom line is you will not find any useful information in these books.  You can not go out and duplicate somebody else’s success.  You have to find your own way in this world, and there is a lot of competition.

The economy these days is in a sad state.  It’s not that people are gathering up money and burning it to decrease the supply.  Rich people collect money, and money is taken out of circulation because some people hoard it.  Look at all the failed financial institutions who passed out billions of dollars of bonuses to their CEOs.  This was money borrowed from the people to prop up their failed businesses.  What did they do with this money?  They gave it to a few people who don’t even need it.  This is why the economy is in a shambles.  A few people are able to build up a fortune, and most people get poor.

So how do you become one of the lucky ones with enough money if you have no job and no way to make any cash?  That’s a good question.  You could start your own business.  You would need to convince somebody who already has a lot of money to give you some of their cash so you could set up your factory or your mail order operation or your pizza restaurant.  Then of course you have to pay them back out of the profits more than they gave you, because that’s how the game works.  You need to harvest money from the masses to build up your own fortune, and you need to dish out a good chunk of this change to your investors and to the government in the form of taxes.  There are so many leeches in the system that it’s no wonder the whole thing is crashing down around us.

So, what I am going to do is to just keep writing for now.  I may end up becoming more commercial.  Hey everybody, go out and get yourself a Coke.  You know you want some of that sugary sweet pop.  You really should be thinking Ford first.  You know what, those shoes are ugly.  Go get yourself a nice pair of Keds.  I can see it now, my own advertising empire.  I will set up a system of websites that sell anything and everything on earth.  Soon everyone will be coming to my site to find the best deals on anything that can be marketed.  It’s a cinch that the system they have now of trying to brainwash people to buy goods isn’t working.  You do not need the latest iPhone if the one you got already works fine.  There are already websites where you can comparison shop.  What they should have is a big international searchable database where suppliers compete to give the best prices and service, all the while paying me cash for the priveledge of posting their sales pitches on my site.  What a plan.

Of course, I haven’t the slightest idea how to do any of this.  I don’t have the cash to set up a website.  I don’t know how to promote such a service.  All I know right now is how to brainstorm on my blog.  Maybe somebody else will set up a system like this and get rich.  Who knows?  Who cares?  Right now I am going to go back to reading random websites until I discover the secret that will allow me to take over the world.  Nothing like the net to feed a streak of megalomania.  Have fun blog surfers.

Page views are up for this blog today.  Well over two hundred people have found these pages today and the numbers keep climbing.  A lot of this traffic is for one post about movies and advertising.  There must be something in the media about this that is driving people to search for this term.  In any case, there have been quite a few page views today for this blog.

I got a rather cryptic comment on a short article I wrote about quantum teleportation.  I don’t mind strange comments, as long as they aren’t abusive.  Annoying comments get deleted or spammed.  It’s nice to know that some of my posts actually get read.  Now, I need to do something about moving into the bigtime.

I read an interesting article in Inc. this afternoon about Markus Frind and his plentyoffish.com dating website.  It seems he started off as a one man operation and set his site up to run off his home computer as a server at first.  I find it interesting that he now gets over a billion page views a month and is raking in five million dollars a year for his efforts.  I need to come up with an idea like that.  There is a lot of potential on the net if you get a good idea.

It’s nice to see that traffic to this blog is still pretty consistant.  Maybe if I want more traffic I should post more controversial things.  Controversy seems to be a formula for popularity.  I should look into the idea a little more closely.  Maybe page views would go up more if I said radical things.  Who knows.  For now, I am just going to see how things go and start thinking up more ideas for how to do something profitable online.  Maybe someday I will be a billionaire and look back on these days as the best time of my life, back when I was poor.

I just read a fairly ridiculous article on a physics website about a quantum teleportation experiment.  These researchers claim that they have observed teleportation between two atoms in vacuum chambers seperated by a meter in distance.

The experiment was like this:  They had two vacuum chambers with various electrodes in them.  In the center of each chamber they suspended a single atom.  There were two windows in the chambers.  Through the side window they shot two short laser pulses.  The pulses ionized the atoms, causing them to emit light when the electrons dropped back into the ground state.  Somehow, the photons from this excitation were emitted upwards and were collected by a lens and optical fiber arrangement.  They then passed the two photons through a beam splitter and into photomultiplier tubes.

On the rare occasion that two photons were detected of the same energy in both detector tubes, they knew that the two atoms were in a state of quantum entaglement.  In other words, the two atoms were in the same quantum state.  They then used a single laser pulse to measure the quantum state of one of the atoms.  Once they knew whether the one atom was in a spin up or spin down state, they used a microwave pulse to measure the quantum spin state of the other atom.  Amazingly, they found that the atoms were in the same quantum spin state.  Somehow, the spin state was teleported from the first atom to the second.

Let me illustrate the import of this discovery with a thought experiment.  Suppose we have two tables, seperated by a meter in distance.  We take two pennies and flip them simultaneously onto each table.  A xenon flash unit is activated, illuminating each table.  Above each table is a video camera focussed on the area where the coins land from the toss.  Each camera is connected to a computer and an image processing program so that the state of each coin can be determined automatically.  In the case where both coins are in the same state of heads or tails, the computer sends a pulse to a green LED to indicate a state of entanglement between the two coins.  Now, we take a flashlight and illuminate only one coin.  We read its state as being either heads or tails.  Then we take a kerosene lamp and illuminate the second coin.  Amazingly, it will be found to be in the same state as the first coin.  The heads or tails state of the first coin has been teleported across the one meter distance from the first coin to the second coin.

Interestingly, the researchers who set up this experiment claim that its results suggest that great, fast quantum computers can be constructed based on the principles of this observation.  Also, faster network communications will become possible because of the instantaneous communication of information from one atom to the next by the phenomenon of teleportation.  For some reason, I don’t believe any of this.  Scientists have discovered yet another way to waste time and money.  Perhaps I can use coins, tables, flash units and cameras to create a supercomputer.  I doubt it though.

We were right on the edge of the massive snowstorm and ice storm that dumped a lot of frozen water on the eastern US.  I think we got a couple inches out of this latest mess.  It’s nothing to bother with cleaning up, aside from brushing it off the trucks.  Winter is annoying.

This is turning into yet another personal blog.  That was not my original intent, but I have just lost interest in posting stories derived from things I find online.  There are billions of pages of stuff on the web already.  I may as well post stuff that is of interest to me.  If anyone else finds this stuff worth reading, that’s cool.  For me, I just want to keep a record of where my mind wanders these days.

I get a bit of traffic to this blog, but nothing that would be worth trying to cash in on.  It takes a lot of people to make money off a blog.  You have to have people interested in buying stuff.  I suppose I could just post product reviews.  Of course, they would be fictional because I can’t afford to buy every product I might want to sell.  I suppose I could arrange to get free samples of stuff in return for a review.  What would I do with all that stuff?  Sell it on Ebay?

A while ago I read on Yaro Starak’s blog about some guy who makes a lot of cash writing about cars.  That’s all his blog is about, cars.  He gets companies sending him cars to test drive in return for a review.  What a deal.  Drive our new car and write about how you liked it.  Sounds like a job.  I like writing random stuff that may or may not be interesting.  Maybe somebody will even read this.  People read my blog on Myspace.  Stranger things have happened.

I have been trying to become a blog star for almost a year now.  I think I started this blog back in March.  So far my most popular articles are ones I wrote about stuff I found on Google Trends.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.  My page rank was up to 5 for a while there, now it’s back to a 4.  The page rank on my Blogger blog is up from 0 to 2, so overall, my efforts are progressing.  I don’t really know if any of this matters.  I know that days go by when my poetry blog gets absolutely no traffic.  I haven’t even posted anything there in over a month.  I have given up on writing poetry for a while.  It just seems pointless.

Today would be just a fine day if I was into skiing.  There are a couple inches of fine powdery snow on the ground.  All this means is that it has to be cleaned up.  Still, I can sit inside in a warm house and read and write without having to care what the weather does, as long as the power lines don’t go down I don’t really care much about snow.

I did some research this morning about web programming.  I guess in a way that’s what I am doing here.  I am not just writing.  I am using an editor to generate html code for a web page that will go up as soon as I check the spelling and click the “publish” button.  That’s the cool thing about blogs, no arcane knowledge required.  I suppose I could add some pictures or some links or something, but this is not something I feel like doing today.  For now, text is all I feel like adding.  Maybe some time in the future I will figure out how to post audio mp3 files.  Then this will become a podcast.  On the other hand, if I wanted to save my fingers and just podcast, there are free services where I can do that.

I read an interesting article last night about how Google works.  I know the Googlebot will eventually crawl this post and crunch down all my words and try to figure out what the hell I’m talking about.  That’s the problem with writing random stuff about no real subject.  People and robots can’t figure out what you’re talking about.  I don’t really care.  Someday I will read through all this and try to figure out what I meant by posting all this random stuff online.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to make money on the net for ages now.  Most of the stuff that is posted online about this is nothing but nonsense and sales pitches for some useless information products.  Google knows how to make money online.  They sort through all the stuff that is posted online and direct people to what they are looking for.  Along the way they try to sell them stuff.  Good old capitalism.  Capitalism is how you make money.  It is a simple thing.  One of these days I should set up a blog and try to sell some of my art.  Stranger things have happened.  Then again, there are thousands of people trying to sell art online.  I could buy thousands of paintings off Ebay for less than a dollar.  Maybe I should open up an online art gallery and sell paintings I buy online.  Maybe I should stop trying to be a capitalist and have some fun.  I’m not starving to death or out in the cold.

This is a long post.  It’s pushing a thousand words.  It doesn’t matter.  I could sit here for a hundred lifetimes typing and still not run out of space on this service.  Text takes up very little space on a server.  You can fit whole long Russian novels on small chunks of memory.  Text can convey pictures or emotions or any other human experience.  Someday this blog will have a theme.  Until then I’ll just write whatever crosses my mind, like this long, random post.

It’s too bad I don’t get a dollar a word for what I write here, like some magazines pay.  I’d be making over a thousand dollars an hour for poking keys.  Still, it’s good practice spitting out thoughts into cyberspace.  It never hurts to do something until you learn how to do it well.  Once you have language skills there’s no limit to what you can do.  Language is a growth product.  Language is what seperates humans from animals.  There is so much stuff in this world, we would never understand it without the use of language.  Someday everyone on earth will be able to communicate with anyone else.  It is already possible with the Internet.  I noticed that somebody accessed a page of this blog through a Google trnaslate link.  Google translated a post into French, and a person who did not know English was able to read what I wrote.  Let’s see a paper book do that.  I love the net.

Words are commodities these days.  People buy and sell words all the time.  Look at any magazine.  They sell all these words to you for the price of the publication.  Some of the words in there were sold to the magazine, as in the authors of the articles were paid.  Some of the words in there, the magazine sold to advertisers, so in effect they get paid twice for those words.  I suppose I could learn how to write advertisements.  I suppose I could look into being a copywriter.  How dull.  Buy our product.  Who wants to read that kind of annoying text?  Only a person looking for shoes wants to read a shoe advertisement.

I have a lot of work to do before I make it as a writer.  It takes a lot of effort to write something that’s actually interesting.  You have to dig up facts and get people’s opinions and all kinds of things to write a good article.  In this blog I pretty much just sit down and type.  I watched Arianna Huffington on the Jon Stweart show a while ago.  She was trying to explain blogging to Stewart.  She said something like you just sit down and write off the cuff on a blog.  You don’t go editing and rewriting.  I mean, I check through what I write for typos and errors and weed out anything that is too repetitious or is wrong so I can be sure I have something that I intended to write, but I don’t do a lot of editing.  What I need is something more interesting than my life.  I might look into getting a political opinion someday, or writing stuff about celebrities, but right now those subjects don’t interest me.  I am not interested in sports either.  TV programming failed at making me a normal person.

It stopped snowing a few hours ago and the sun is shining.  I heard on the news this morning that they are expecting ten to twenty inches of snow some places in the northeast.  I am glad that mess did not come here.  I hope winter is over for this year, but I know there will be more snow.  Today I am just hanging out in the house reading and writing.  One of these days I am going to hit the bigtime and leave all this wintery mess far behind.  I like boats.  Maybe a nice big yacht in the South Pacific is where I should be next winter.  A person without dreams may as well stop trying.

I bought a copy of Inc. today.  It had a lot of interesting stories about business and technology.  I spent a couple hours reading it this afternoon.  There are not a lot of advertisements and the articles are short and to the point.  I think the magazine was probably worth the $4.99 I paid for it.

I waste a lot of time online searching for information on how to make money on the Internet.  Most of what I find are sales pitches for information products on how to make money online.  I think that has to be the fastest growing online business, at least in terms of the number of websites devoted to this subject.  There was none of this in the magazine I bought.  I guess you still get a higher class of information in the print medium.

I looked around at a lot of books at the store today.  I think I wasted an hour in there just browsing through the books on computers and business.  I think I am going to start learning more about computers.  I have always been interested in programming since I got my first computer, an old VIC 20.  I used to write programs for that thing in BASIC and later in machine code.  Now I have this fast, powerful computer and I don’t even write code any more.  I should look into doing some web programming.  That’s how Google got so huge, web programming.  There is a lot of potential in writing computer apps.  Go ask Bill Gates.

So I just stopped by here to write a blurb about a magazine and leave a few comments on what is going through my head.  There has been a big spike in page views here today.  People are reading a post I wrote about advertising and movies.  For some reason, every once in a while, one of the articles I have posted here becomes popular for some reason.  I guess I should expect this, since I have over 500 posts on this blog and it hasn’t even been up a year.  In any case, I am off to check the Inc. website and see what they have posted there.  Maybe tomorrow I will learn how to write useful web code.  Maybe I will make my own search engine.  That should get me my billions.

I’ve spent the last day reading books and websites about various rocks and minerals.  For some reason I find this very interesting.  There are a lot of different kinds of rocks on this planet.  There are many very beautiful stones.  For some reason, people pay a lot of money for certain shiny objects.

I have been trying to read about the mineral business, but there is not a lot of material on it posted online.  There are some sites that sell various rocks.  There are a lot of places where you can grovel through buckets of dirt looking for shiny pebbles.  There is not a lot of information on how to go into business selling shiny rocks.  The scammers have not latched onto this idea yet.

So, I have spent all day researching the various types of valuable rocks.  I guess there must be a lot of people who collect rocks.  I think I will look and see if there are any blogs here on wordpress on the subject.  I imagine that with the millions of blogs here there must be a few about collecting rocks.  What a business.  Dig some rocks out of the earth and sell them to people.  Could it get any easier than that?  I suppose you need a source of interesting rocks.  People sell them on ebay all the time.

Anyway, that’s about all I feel like typing today.  I am going back to looking for ways to go into the rock business.  I may stop by tomorrow to write more.

I’m just doing some thinking today about the future.  I seem to enjoy writing.  I need to get a theme to write about.  I need some subjects that hold my interest.  I need to get interested in things again.  I need to get a subject for my blogs that I can write about every day.  Right now I am just drifting through life.  I need to get a direction and a plan and make everything work out for the better.

I know what’s going to happen.  I will continue to write random stuff about nothing in particular.  I have been losing interest in writing.  I haven’t written a poem in over a month now.  Most people are just not interested in poetry.  If nobody is interested in what you do, why bother?

It is a cold morning, and the sun is trying to shine through my curtains.  It is the perfect day to make some plans and figure out what to do with all these blogs I have been writing for.  I need to look around and read what other regular people are writing.  Reading is a good way to get ideas for what to write about.  Even watching TV gives you some ideas.  Interacting with other people is a good way to get material for your blog.

I have never been a person who makes plans for the future.  I like to take things as they come along.  Perhaps this is why I’ve gotten nowhere in life.  Maybe I will look up material online today about how to make these great plans.  Perhaps I will find something I enjoy doing and just get into it to the point where it becomes my life.  Perhaps is a loaded word.  Right now I am off to explore the web and see what people have been writing about.  Maybe later I will be back to post something interesting.

So, you want to become popular.  You want millions of people to buy your products.  You want to get elected president.  All it takes is a little publicity.  Even a total unknown can make it big with the right PR.

How do you get this publicity for yourself?  Well, first you have to arrange to do something that would warrant a news report.  You might come up with a new way to look at global warming.  You might invent a more fuel efficient car.  You might go into business selling time shares.  Some things are more newsworthy than others.  Whatever you do should be something people will enjoy reading about.  Maybe you built a house out of popsickle sticks.  Maybe you cooked up the world’s largest loaf of bread.  Think of something that people would be interested in and do it.

Next, you have to get the word out about your great skill.  You will need to write a press release.  A press release is just a story about this great thing you did.  It tells the news media about why what you do is so worthy of the news.  Once you have your press release, you will need to distribute it to the news media.  Don’t forget about radio and TV.  TV can drive a lot of traffic to your website if you get in the news.  Now, get ready for reporters and film crews to interview you.

All this is a rather strange way to get famous, but it’s how the game is played.  You might want to read some material on this topic.  Check in the business section of any book store and you will find lots of books about PR.  They are right next to the books on salesmanship.  In many ways, the subjects are similar.  You will need to sell yourself to the news media to get the publicity you seek.  Look at anyone who is famous these days.  They will usually have a PR firm promoting the hell out of them.  This is how the fame game works.  You invent the news and the reporters do the work to get the word out to the public.

Of course, you might be poor and have to do everything for yourself.  Few things are as cheap as a free blog to post your thoughts on the web.  If you publish enough information, a few people will find your work.  Make sure your name is highly visible on your blog if you want to become famous.  Now just write a lot of controversial opinions on famous people.  Be sure to use inflamatory language.  Don’t get slanderous or libelous, or you might get sued.  Now, since you write about popular topics and people find your blog through the search engines, you are on your way to becoming famous.  All it takes is a bit of work and some personality, and anyone can become as famous as they want.