All posts in Internet

Gareth Cliff is NOT in jail for speeding!

by Chris M on March 7, 2012 in Cars, Internet with 8 Comments

Gareth Cliff was arrested this evening for speeding in Pretoria. Gareth was driving at 182km/h in a 120km/h zone on the R21 in Lyttelton. He was caught by a police unit, at least that’s what’s being reported at present.

Of course, you can imagine how crazy social media has gone, I’m seeing tweet after tweet about Gareth and there are some ugly ones! That being said, there’s a hashtag that’s been put into place: #freegarethcliff

Gareth has, however tweeted as follows just 15 minutes ago:

Guess he’s not sitting in a cell somewhere and is clearly enjoying the hype, here’s his latest tweet, haha:

Am I ugly? Awful teenage girl video trend!

by Chris M on February 23, 2012 in Internet with 2 Comments

The Internet is a dangerous place, a place that allows us to come out our shells and receive feedback from millions of people around the world. Do you remember Hot or Not? Perhaps you remember Mark Zuckerberg creating the website that allowed people to choose who they found hotter? I’m sure one of those ring a bell, this is similar, but a bit safer.

A new trend has surfaced on the Internet, which features thousands of girls creating short videos on Youtube with the pure want to know if people find them hot or ugly. A simple search in Youtube for “Am I ugly?” will show you video after video after video of girls asking whether they’re, well, Hot or Not.

The saddest part about this is that people on the Internet can be unfair and often get carried away, trends like this will see thousands of teens picking up issues through haters telling them they they’re ugly. Just stop and think about it for a second, a girl posts a video of herself, 1 person leaves a witty horrible comment, the girl responds “incorrectly” and suddenly 100 people are telling her she’s ugly .. combine that with a girl who might have a chemical imbalance and you land up at a big problem, be it suicide, be it drug abuse, so the list goes on.

Here’s an example:

I love the Internet, I’ve committed most of my life to it so when I come across things like this it just breaks my heart to see what it is turning into. Let’s not put the Internet in that power position where it becomes a virus and eats us all up!

Be careful out there folks.

Google Seaview

by Chris M on February 23, 2012 in Internet, World News with No comments

Remember when Google Streetview was announced? It was pretty darn exciting and to this day I still use the service from time to time when I have to go to a place I haven’t been before. Well, imagine that Google Seaview would be like?!

Google has announced that it will, in collaboration with the University of Queensland and the Caitlin Group, be launching Google Seaview, our eye into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef! The project has been code named Catlin Seaview Survey and has a specific aim to study tiger sharks, green turtles, manta rays and other amazing creatures of the sea.

The project involves four 360-degree cameras attached to fancy diving vehicles patrolling the depths of the sea in Australia. This project is set to start in September this year. As media consumers we’ll be able to visit the Youtube Page, choose a location and go on a virtual dive.

google-seaview1
google-seaview-2

I think it’s awesome, can’t wait to see more!

What did South African’s search for in 2011

by Chris M on February 16, 2012 in Internet with No comments

A mate of mine dropped me the link to this video that the company he works at made, take a watch, it’s pretty darn interesting:

Google launching Dropbox killer called Google Drive?

by Chris M on February 11, 2012 in Equipment, Internet with No comments

Google are launching a new cloud storage service called Google Drive, which is said to rival Dropbox. Google are the masters of cloud storage when I think about it – think able Google Docs alone!

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens to Dropbox’s market share when this new service is launched. The Wall Street Journal discusses these matters:

Better way to watch videos in Chrome

by Chris M on January 22, 2012 in Equipment, Internet with No comments

I came across a rather interesting extension for Chrome called Turn Off The Lights. The premise is really straight forward, with just one click on a little lamp icon, the page you’re on will go dark, the point being about focusing on something – for example, when watching a video, the rest of the page will go dark so you can focus on it, like so:

There are a number of other features:

  1. Supports YouTube, HTML5 videos and more.
  2. Supports sites such as Picasa.
  3. There are some easter eggs you can look for.
  4. Shortcut keys.
  5. Flash detection.

Grab it here: click here (make sure you’re using Chrome).

What is SOPA? What is PIPA?

by Chris M on January 20, 2012 in Internet, World News with No comments

I’ve picked up that a lot of people don’t actually understand what SOPA is, and the concept isn’t as complicated as it has been conveyed on a lot of websites. I’ve come across a really excellent video that breaks it down nicely and definitely gets the point across.

If you’re still uncertain, take a watch:

Creating a Google Plus page

by Chris M on January 16, 2012 in Internet, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with 4 Comments

The other day I was reading a blog and went on to read the comments where someone wrote, “What is Google Plus?”. I had a good chuckle and I must admit, I haven’t too active on Google Plus and I’ve hardly explored the platform, well, that was until last week when I started to realise just how important Google Plus was. See, MySpace arrived and everyone had an account, LinkedIn arrived and everyone had an account, Facebook arrived and everyone had an account, Twitter arrived and everyone had an account, About.me arrived and everyone had an account.. so the list goes on, so the management gets more and more involved, so the free time vanishes. Then Google rolled out Google Plus, people jumped on because Google has Klout, but there wasn’t anything really exciting enough to keep people plugged in – I do believe that I don’t speak alone on this.

Well, things are changing and Google Plus might not be for everyone, but if you’ve got a website or sell a service online or anything to that nature the tables are about to turn. Remember when Google started showing Twitter and Facebook stuff in the search results? You might not, but they certainly did, I can’t help but think that this was purely a trial to see what social search was capable of, and this further fueled Google to put together Google Plus, remove Twitter and Facebook (to an extent) and start including Google Plus discussions in the search results – doesn’t take rocket science to really see the plan here.

So, Google’s the search giant and people want current information these days, so what better than for Google to include Google Plus conversations in the results? I mean, Google then starts to dominate the search market even more and takes a big chunk of real-time search with them – brilliant.

But what does that mean for topics like SEO? I’m not going to attempt to answer this in detail purely because it’s been answered here by Rand Fishkin, Joost de Valk, Marcus Taylor, Aaron Wall and Jorg Ruis, who are all industry leaders with excellent insight. Instead, I’m going to tell you that now is a really good time to get yourself a Google Plus Page for your business, just think, if you create that page and get some great content onto it, you’ll have an edge over your competitors for a good while – of course, there’s a strategy for creating good content and you might have to hire an SEO to assist you with aligning your Google goodies – organic SEO stuff, Google Places, Google Plus Page, etc as they can all work so beautifully together and I’d recommend doing that, but you can at least make a start and I’m going to assist you in doing so:

  1. To start creating a Google Plus page you need to navigate to http://plus.google.com/pages/create in your browser.
  2. Select a category which best describes your business: local business or place, product or brand, company, institution or organization, arts entertainment or sports and finally other.
  3. Fill in the information that appears in the form on the right as accurately as possible (remember, Google loves the truth, don’t try cheat the system).
  4. Click the CREATE button
  5. Your page will be created, you can now add a tagline and profile photograph (or logo).
  6. Share your page with your circles if you wish
  7. Click FINISH

7 easy steps and you’ll have a Google Plus Page, fresh and ready for new content that will start being indexed by Google any day now and this is how you’re going to get ahead of your competitors.

This is really the direction in which things are moving at the moment in my opinion, I’d jump on and get going right away :)

R799 for 24GB of data and a modem!

by Chris M on January 16, 2012 in Industry News, Internet with 9 Comments

For a long time I had a friend who worked at Neotel and over the months it was clear that they were gearing up to do some big things and I think this is one of them – NeoGo.

Neotel has launched a new service offering which gives you 24GB of data and a USB modem for just R799 once off – best part, the data’s valid for 12 months! Let me rephrase that for you, you pay R799 and you get a USB modem and 24GB’s of data.

That’s an incredible deal, probably one of the cheapest I’ve ever seen so if you’re a 3G user then this is something you should jump onto.

Click here to access the deal!

Blogger in prison being released, yay Dante!

by Chris M on January 15, 2012 in Blogging, Internet, World News with No comments

I blogged about a guy who was caught with drugs being imprisoned for over 600 days at the beginning of last year. I knew the guy through Reddit and because I am close to those who built the website for him so he could carry on blogging from prison whilst he served his sentence.

I’ve read every single post he’s written whilst he’s been locked up and it’s been like web reality TV to an extent, but obviously far more serious and quite sad to be honest. I’ve found myself sitting at the computer wondering how difficult it would be and as silly as it might sound, I feel that I’m a more honest man thanks to Dante’s eye opening posts.

I’ve got some good news though (I say good because I’ve known him and I never felt he deserved what he got), check this out:

In less than a week, I’ll walk out the door of Sheridan Federal Prison and begin serving the tail end of my time at a halfway house in Los Angeles, California.

My grasp of the English language is not adequate enough to properly describe the range of emotion that comes with the thought of me finally finishing the last leg of this journey I’m on. But it’s like I’ve been lost at sea, and finally see a hairline of land creeping over the horizon.

I’m almost home.

That’s right! He’s being released from prison!

See you on the other side, Dante.

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