ACT for America
February 22, 2010
Dead terrorists tell no lies. Shoot them in the knees, throw them in a six-foot deep hole with wild pigs they don’t get to Allah that way. Sucks to be them. Shall we talk about water boarding? As one Jihidast martyr’s mom said to the other, they blow up so quickly don’t they? Rules of engagement, enhanced interrogation hell let them have at least one virgin, throw in Nancy Pelosi, after ObamaCare goes down like the Titanic, she will need some serious action. Sadly our anti-war but can’t do a damn thing about it administration is clueless that war is all about killing people and breaking stuff. Night, going to bed, J.C.
[Excerpt: "On Feb. 18, 2010, ICE special agents along with agents and officers of CBP, FBI, DOC, OFAC, and the Secret Service, executed arrest and search warrants as a result of this criminal investigation. Cedar owner Khaled Safadi and Transamerica owner Ulises Talavera were arrested in Doral, FL, Jumbo owner Emilio Gonzalez-Neira was arrested in Sunny Isles, FL, and Jomana Import Export owner Samer Mehdi is still at large. Safadi, Talavera and Gonzalez-Neira had their initial appearances today. Gonzalez-Neira was held in pre-trial detention, and Safadi and Talavera are being held in pre-trial detention pending their bond hearings, which are scheduled for Monday, March 1, 2010, at 10:00 a.m."]
FBI Miami
February 22, 2010
Department of Justice Press Release
Great job with the masking tape
Jeffrey H. Sloman, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida; Anthony V. Mangione, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Investigations; John V. Gillies, Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Miami Field Office; Harold Woodward, Director of Field Operations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP); Michael Johnson, Special Agent in Charge, Department of Commerce (DOC); Adam J. Szubin, Director, Department of the Treasury’s, Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC); and Michael Fithen, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Secret Service, Miami Field Office, announced the indictment of four individuals and three Miami businesses on charges involving the export of electronics to a U.S. designated terrorist entity in Paraguay. Complete Story
MySpace has launched an activity and content stream, which they are calling simply the “Stream.” Previously they showed a feed of status updates from friends, but the new feature shows a lot more content, including things like music your friends are listening to on MySpace Music, video they’re watching, links they are adding, etc.
The company hasn’t formally announced the product, which sort of makes sense since they’re still playing catch up with similar features on Facebook. But it’s an important beachhead in their go-forward strategy, we’ve learned. More on that in our next post.
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Titled is just one of the many songs I feel a very deep connection to, and, an over-all feeling about the last 24 or so hours. Today, I feel my age, and then some. Yesterday I got up at around 6:30am and got to work at about 10am, which is early, but, I wanted to clean the DJ booth really good as it was a hot mess. I am not even going to go on a rant right now about how much it pisses me off that I even had to do it, though, when I say I “had” to do it, it was not required of me, but, I “HAD” to do it… Damned O.C.D.. Anyway, as I was saying, I got there at 10am and was prepared to work my shift and go home at around 7pm, and I say around because, for whatever reason, night shift DJ’s, with few exceptions, are notoriously late for work, again, no rant. I had probably 10 to 12 beers and a couple of shots throughout the day and had stopped drinking and ate my food that I brought with me at around 5:30pm so that I could drive home without being intoxicated. Well, the combination of alcohol and food and a long day meant that I was ready to go home at 7pm. It was about 6:50 that the DJ that was supposed to work that night called me, not the manager, not the general manager, and said that he was not going to be able to come to work and asked if I could call the other DJ to fill in. First off, I don’t mind doing a favor, after all, I got this guy the job, but, this is not my job to call for him. Plus, the other DJ was on the schedule to work the next morning and that just wasn’t going to work. I, being one of three DJ’s on staff, was going to have to pull a double shift and work until close.
I cannot begin to tell you how long it’s been since I had to do a double shift, and I will say at this point that I understand that I am not doing real manual labor, but, it still kicks your ass to be there for that long. I can attest to that fact because when I woke up this morning I could barely move and my head was pounding and my throat was all scratchy. Before you go and start saying something like, “well, with 10 to 12 beers and a couple of shots, I would be hung over too”, let me be clear in telling you that I was not hung over. I, in my years of drinking, have not been hung over more than, I would say, 5 times. I am not typically one that will feel bad the day after, and this was not one of those times. I really think that my general malaise was brought on by the extended hours, coupled with the atmosphere of cigarette smoke and loud music and people for over 14 hours.
I had planned on attending the 2010 Clearwater Blues Festival today with Kelly, but, as dodgy as I am feeling, I had better stick to getting my two weeks of laundry piles done and general cleaning. I don’t think that I would be very good company today anyway, but, I am going to go tomorrow instead. I am looking forward to have a couple drinks and listening to some good blues. I am usually really good at getting things done in a timely manner, but, for whatever reason, I have really been putting off going to get the laundry done. I actually have a pretty good idea as to why, and that is the fact that I have to go buy more detergent, and this will likely lead to a visit to Wal-Mart, the bane of my existence!
While the night is still young… I gotta get motivated and get it over with… so, on that note… and with one hell of a rant on the way… stay tuned!
Thanks to all of you for your continued love and support.
As always, take care and remember…
How Orwell would have delighted in satirising today’s tech titans’ perpetual war. Remember when Apple v Microsoft was the defining Oceania v Eurasia battle for supremacy? If so you’re experiencing a doubleplusungood false memory: both are now unimpeachable allies, working to replace Google with Bing as the iPhone’s default search provider. Likewise, you would simply be mistaken to recall Google’s chequebook-wielding flirtation with Facebook three years ago.
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Google and Facebook, as every goodthinker knows, are dangerously implacable enemies.
That war entered a venomous new stage last week, when the internet’s biggest search company announced that it had also become a Facebook-style social network. Google Buzz, launched on Tuesday, intends to turn Gmail’s 150 million users into a vast pool of shared personal information, building on similar initiatives such as Google Wave and Google Social Search.
Then it emerged last week that Google had bought the social- networking start-up Aardvark, which lets users “tap the knowledge of people in your network”. In other words, it was advancing its tanks even farther across Facebook’s lawn.
What we are witnessing is the ultimate battle for control of the internet. Google, employing the world’s smartest software engineers, has dominated the desktop-internet era for a decade through its unbeatable algorithm-based computing power. But now we’re into the mobile-internet era, Facebook intends to dominate by knowing what we are thinking, doing and intending to spend — wherever we happen to be. As Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg sees it, this “social graph”, built around our friends, family and colleagues, will determine how hundreds of millions of us decide on everything from holidays to cosmetic surgeons. And with Facebook the proprietary gatekeeper — its mobile-phone applications already attracting extraordinary engagement from members — that’s a potential advertiser proposition that Google can only dream of.
It’s not that Mr Zuckerberg is still only 25 and naively arrogant that annoys Google, nor that his company has enticed swaths of senior Google talent. It’s that Facebook’s fast-growing dominance of the “social” internet threatens its rival’s entire business model. If it can sell advertisers access not just to what you’re thinking, but to where you are, who you’re with and what you plan to do, Facebook’s revenues from individually targeted “behavioural” advertising could increase exponentially. And it knows it.
“Google is not representative of the future of technology in any way,” a Facebook veteran boasted to Wired recently. “Facebook is an advanced communications network enabling myriad communication forms. It almost doesn’t make sense to compare them.”
The mobile internet changes everything — how we behave, spend, declare our intentions, and consume content. That’s why Google is pushing so aggressively its Android smartphone platform and Nexus One handsets. It’s also why Apple has helped software developers to distribute three billion iPhone apps. “That mobile device is never more than a metre or two away from my body, even when I’m asleep,” explains Android’s Eric Tseng. “It knows all my friends through contacts applications; it knows where I am because it’s got a GPS chip; what I’m doing as I’ve got my calendar on it; and it’s got all this contextual knowledge about me. That’s very powerful.”
Already 16 million Britons access the internet through their phones, with five million doing so to visit Facebook — putting it comfortably ahead of Google traffic. And we’re just at the start of this revolution: 3G mobile penetration in Western Europe rose from 17 per cent in 2007 to 29 per cent in 2009, and is forecast to reach 67 per cent next year; in Japan it is already 91 per cent. The lesson from Japan is that, unlike the desktop internet, where people are averse to paying for content, the networked mobile phone is a consumer goldmine. Morgan Stanley estimates that $43 billion was made from the mobile internet in Japan in 2008. Proportionately, Europe today is where Japan was almost a decade ago.
Why is Facebook so well positioned? Because , when all your friends are on Facebook, it makes no sense to go elsewhere.
Mr Zuckerberg’s human-powered view of the internet also taps into our yearning, as social creatures, to climb Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to attain self-actualisation: of the 400 million active Facebook users (up from 200 million last summer), half log on in any given day; they share five billion pieces of content a week and upload more than three billion photos each month. On average, they spend more than 55 minutes a day on Facebook. Those who access it via their mobile devices are “twice as active”. Now do you see why the search gurus in Google’s Mountain View headquarters are so anxious?
So it’s a slam-dunk that Facebook, quickly emerging as the repository of all human intentions, will trounce Google, right? Well, possibly — except for two teeny details. The first is money. Google has $24.5 billion in the bank, after making $6.5 billion profit in the past year. And Facebook — although Mr Zuckerberg predicted a 70 per cent revenue growth this year — only went “cashflow positive” last autumn. There’s a lot you can do with the odd $25 billion: from writing open cheques to YouTube until it can dominate the market in online TV and film distribution, to saturation- advertising its Chrome browser on London buses. Don’t be surprised if Facebook announces a public share offering soon to build a war chest.
Mr Zuckerberg’s second challenge is to convince his customers to surrender their privacy. A business based on giving advertisers access to your personal data must somehow convince you that it’s in your interests to do so: and so far, his repeated clumsy attempts have met a substantial consumer backlash. Early reactions to Buzz have also reminded Google that many of us are unhappy ceding vast amounts of personal information to a private business.
And never forget how quickly fashions change in the online ecosystem. Remember Friendster, Friends Reunited, even MySpace — owned by this newspaper’s parent, and currently struggling in between CEOs? All were the next big social thing once. That’s people for you.
I always had the perception that Americans are the most active social media users because Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are all based in the United States. However, a recent study by Nielsen proved me wrong. Apparently, Australians spend the most amount of time on social media websites as compared to any other people in the world for the month of December. Analysts at Nielsen have concluded that 9.9 million Australians on average spend nearly 7 hours per month on social media sites. This translates to a 13 minutes a day, which constitutes to 0.9% of our time everyday.
Meanwhile, the United States clinched the second placing with Americans spending an average of 6 hours and 9 minutes per month, followed by the United Kingdom (6 hours and 7 minutes), and then Italy (6 hours). To my dismay, Japan, which is one of the most technological-savvy countries in the world, only managed to hit 2 hours and 50 minutes, far behind the Oceania, American and European leaders. On the hand, Brazil, the only developing country in the list, made it to the sixth placing with 31.3 million Brazilians surfing Facebook and Twitter for 4 hours and 33 minutes in December last year.
The study also noted that Americans continue to spend more time on social networking and blog sites as well, with total minutes increasing 210% year-over-year and the average time per person increasing 143% year-over-year in December 2009. The top five most popular social media sites in December are Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Classmates and LinkedIn. Among these sites, Twitter has been touted as “the fastest-growing in December 2009 in terms of unique visitors”, increasing 579% year-over-year, from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009.
Black Prairie, a new collaboration out of Portland, Oregon made up of three members of the indie-rock band The Decemberists and two other Portland-based folk stars, will release a bluegrass album on Sugar Hill Records in April. The new band’s debut, Feast of the Hunter’s Moon, is produced by Tucker Martine (The Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie) and features Decemberists guitarist Chris Funk, bassist Nate Query and Jenny Conlee on accordion.
There are a couple of songs already on the band’s MySpace page. “Red Rocking Chair” has a slow, ominous mountain sound, while “Back Alley” sounds like straight-up traditional bluegrass. Both tracks left me longing for the other 11 songs on this 13 track album that Sugar Hill says will embody “the rich sonic landscape of the Portland music scene while integrating the diverse backgrounds of its members.”
Check out the first two tracks below and stay tuned for more.
Nowadays, Facebook is becoming mainstream. Almost everyone has a Facebook page even my mom has one. And companies are not the exception either. Companies are seeing Facebook as a way to communicate, engage with its audience and ultimatly driving sales.
Last year Razorfish, a digital marketing company, developed its third annual FEED survey of 1,000 “connected consumers”. The survey focused on online consumer behavior. Some of the results: ”40% of respondents “friended brands on Facebook “, while 25% of respondents said they follow brands on Twitter. They also found that consumers follow brands on Twitter and Facebook mainly for deals and promotions. “On Facebook or MySpace, 37% said that access to exclusive deals or offers was their main reason for friending brands.”
Furthermore, 40% of respondents have “friended” a brand on Facebook. Taking into account these statistics it is important that companies realize the role that Facebook is playing nowadays and that Facebook is not only for young people to network it is a way to engage consumers and build communities. According to these results if a company wants brand recognition on the Web, there is a good possibility that Facebook is the right place to be.
I am a fan of a couple of products through my Facebook page. Often I find people being reluctant to become a fan. Either they have to be friends of someone that works for the company or they are extremly loyal to that brand/product. At the end of the day people do not have time to follow lots of brands. Do we?
MySpace has launched an activity and content stream, which they are calling simply the “Stream.” Previously they showed a feed of status updates from friends, but the new feature shows a lot more content, including things like music your friends are listening to on MySpace Music, video they’re watching, links they are adding, etc.
