USWeb would like to welcome our newest team member, Dale Duyan.  Dale will be joining our sales team to help prospects learn about all USWeb services and products.  Dale will be working out of Las Vegas, Nevada with local clients, as well as select clients across the country.

More on Google’s new SearchWiki soon… I want to test it out for awhile and see how it works rather than repeat what others are saying about. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has what I would call the authoritative article about it that I’ve ready today.

I other Google news, they have shut down their virtual worlds site, Lively. Yes, the Second Life-like platform started strong and then flatlined to only a few thousand daily unique hits after an initial surge of 150,000 per day.
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Just a quick update here on the experience from Movers.com.

I received a call from an employee at Alleviate Van Lines (one of the dozen or so calls I received), and in spite of a couple of online reports stating that they were rude, I decided to go with them. After all, who goes online to say nice things about movers?

While my original quote was for Sunday, I asked to move it to Saturday morning and they said it would be no problem, and that I would get a confirmation call some time on Friday.

Nothing went right with them, but thankfully, I hooked up with Northstar Movers later on.
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The odds of getting struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 700,000.

A spammers response to those odds would be to throw a party and buy a gold plated Rolls Royce.

How many spam emails have you ever bought something from? My guess is zero. A new study from the University of California showed that the spam emails they sent out converted an average of once every 12.5 million emails. For ever spam email that converted this year, 17.8 people got struck by lightning.

And yet spamming keeps going on, and can be quite profitable. The spam company hijacked by the UC, Storm, generates an estimated $7,000 a day from millions of spam emails, which works out to $3.5 million a year.
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I never thought in 2008 I’d be talking about Weird Al Yankovic and MTV at the center of a controversy, but these are strange times.

Weird Al’s 2006 parody of the RIAA, “Don’t Download This Song,” which features authorities shooting down a young boy who downloads a song off of “Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA,” is the subject of the controversy. On MTV’s new video site, which features just about every music video that has ever been made, actually bleeps out the names of “Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA” (don’t worry, it’s early in the song if you want to hear it).
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Okay, I’m sure everybody wishes the election could go on for another two years, but unfortunately, it’s soon to come to a close.

There’s an article by Adam Ostrow in Mashable today that pointed me to what has to be the funnest (in Applespeak) website I’ve run into in a long time.

It’s called Attack Ad Generator, and it gives users the ability to utilize images and words to create your own nasty attack ad.

I made one myself that I personally believe could tilt the election in favor of Barack Obama (though I am still undecided, really. Honest.)
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A little off the beaten path, but for novelty purposes only (I am, of course, going to turn it off before the fight starts), I did a little Googling for the Kelly Pavlik - Bernard Hopkins fight on October 18th.

Of course, I ran across Justin.tv. Many of us have heard about Justin.tv, which started out as an EDtv-like venture by Justin Kan. He attached a camera to his head so everybody could watch what he was doing from day to day.
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One positive aspect of the extended Democratic presidential campaign was that we were able to learn a lot about some of the poorest regions of the country, namely the many states that contain the Appalachian Mountains.

But it may surprise people to learn that the state with most counties in the bottom ten nationwide for income are in South Dakota. In fact, half of them are in the state, and in those counties, there are very high populations of Native Americans.
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There’s an interesting article on TechDirt by Mike Masnick about the controversy surrounding the a blogpost written about a journalism class at NYU. Apparently, it has started a firestorm about what is appropriate when it comes to social media and college classes.

The student in question wrote a guest column on MediaShift a few weeks ago about how little the students were learning about social media in a class called “Reporting Gen Y.” The professor teaching the class has banned any blogging or Twittering about the class and asking that students refrain from quoting the instructor. Basically, the professor is claiming the class as intellectual property.
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Spore, the new evolution game from Sims creator Will Wright, has been widely anticipated, critically acclaimed, and utterly panned by users for its DRM that only allows for a total of three installations for each game purchased. Spore buyers know that after that first install, there are only two left.

So what are gamers resorting too? BitTorrent, of course. As of Thursday, Spore had been downloaded 170,000 times. While that is not unusual for a big time game, this has been in the space of about ten days. No game has ever been shared more quickly to more people than Spore.
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