Some Light Humour!

A very shy guy goes into a pub on Valentine's Day night and sees a beautiful young woman sitting alone at the bar. After an hour of gathering up his courage he finally goes over to her and asks tentatively"Um, would you mind if I brought you a drink?"

She responds by yelling, at the top of her lungs; "NO, I WONT SLEEP WITH YOU TONIGHT”Everyone in the pub started staring at them.

Naturally, the guy was terribly and completely embarrassed and he slinks back to his table totally red faced.

After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologizes.

She smiles at him and says; "I'm really sorry if I embarrassed you just then. You see, I'm a graduate student in psychology and I'm studying how people respond to embarrassing situations."

At this the guy responds, at the top of his lungs, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN? $300!!!"

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking has become more and more popular with internet users over the past couple of years and Webmasters are capitalising on the growing trend by submitting their sites to the social bookmark sites.

I've found this nice Social Bookmarking list of 100 sites that allow users and Webmasters to participate in. It's an excellent resource and definately one for the savvy Webmasters favourites list.

Personally I use Social Bookmarking in a fairly small way but always submit my sites to the larger sites in the hope of more traffic and therefore also more backlinks if my content is deemed worthy. It's a great way to obtain natural backlinks, which is what we all need for our websites to be successful.

Try out the Social Bookmarking list and submit to a few, if you haven't already tried it and see if the effects are worthwhile for your website.

Pachinko

Every heard of Pachinko? No, thought not, well unless you're reading this blog from Japan where pachinko is one of the most commonest games around with a huge following of players.

However, pachinko is also popular in other countries too and many people collect pachinko machines or have one in their house to play. Have a look on eBay and you'll see many pachinko machines for sale.

So, what is it? Well, pachinko is like a cross between a pinball and a slot machine. Balls are fired into the upright pinball machine at the top, at a player controlled rate, and if they land in the catcher at the bottom, the slot machine element of the game is triggered. The slot machine generally sits in the middle of the game screen and winning combinations pay out more of the small balls. The idea of pachinko is to get as many small balls as possible, obviously to end up with more than you started with.

Anyway, pachinko is facinating and the history and setup in Japan is well worth a read, even if you'll never actually sit and play the games. I've devised a small site to highlight the game of pachinko, the history of pachinko and online pachinko. You'll also find other information about the game at Wikipedias Pachinko page.

Have a read of Pachinko8.com, it's facinating stuff.

HubPages and Harry Potter

What is it with everyone and the huge amount of hype that is Harry Potter. Sure they're a great read and a thrilling set of stories, but the amount of people queuing up to read the latest Harry Potter book in J K Rowlings series is astounding.

Anyway, not to be one to miss out on the fun, I used a new site I've found to produce my very own piece of Harry Potter magic!

For the uninitiated, the page was created using HubPages and it's great, easy to use and if you want to try it, you'll be producing pages in no time at all.

It really is the easiest way to produce a page on a topic that I've found and to give some idea of the time-scales involved to produce a decent enough page on your chosen subject, see my new Harry Potter Books page.

It took 10 minutes maximum to put together and is a great way to show off subjects that interest you quickly and easily. I've long been a fan of Squidoo, you can see my lenses here : Doolally but I must admit Hubpages is quicker, easier and more user friendly to use.

Stumble Upon

Internet users will love Stumble Upon. I've just started using it to browse the internet at random whilst making sure that the pages presented to me are related to things I like. I'd advise anyone to try it out.

You can even suggest other sites, not already in Stumble Upon, so that other users can experience the best sites.

Great Idea But Too Late

I had a fantasic idea today that I thought could revolutionise the online world!!

What you do is set up an automated system that lets you upload an SMS message or video from your mobile phone to your blog. Think of the numbers of people that would be interested with all the new video and photo capturing gadgets that you get these days.

Excited, I was.

Then I came home and did some research. It seems that this has been available for years but I've never heard of a Moblog, have I. Head stuck in the sand again! :) Never mind. It's a great idea though and I might mess around with it a little and see if I can get something setup on my websites. It would be great to upload the latest snippet of information to one of my sites while on the move and away from the desk.

I can't get wi-fi or any of that other good stuff where I live and to be honest it's not a problem because I can't be bothered carrying a laptop around all day anyway.

Oh well, another great idea 2 years too late. I'll maybe put the thinking cap back on tomorrow - I'll get this internet sorted out yet. Ha ha.

Google PR and Linking

I notice that the Google toolbar has been updated and most of my sites have taken a hit, including this blog that has gone from a PR4 to PR2. Not that I'm a toolbar watcher but I do like to at least be seeing some kind of improvement once in a while.

The annoying thing for me though is I've been really concentrating on providing good quality content on my sites and I've never been one for link swapping. I generally don't bother although I will swap one or two if I like the sites.

Maybe this is where I'm going wrong. Rather than posting unique content and writing hard, I should maybe have been linking like crazy but it seems a bit pointless to me. This whole link popularity thing, in my mind, isn't the way to rank sites but I guess it's not an easy thing to measure, is it?

I have however, added a couple of links to the right hand side of this blog to a couple of new sites that I've been working on, check them out if you like. One is a bingo community site and the other is a Texas Holdem site that I've just started working on. Both are based on Drupal, a nice CMS system that has some excellent features.