Facebook is usually praised and very seldom criticized. I've seen already on a couple of occasions on the TV channel news on earthquake occasions or some kind of other calamities, where facebook was said to help the rescuing teams etc. We constantly hear how facebook has helped people point their location in disastrous situations or just helping people organize a protest against a harmful company activity. Whilst this might be true, the harms it does are quite big as well. A primary harm it does is to economy as we know it. As people are engaged in filling in Mark Zuckerberg and facebook investors pockets, they rarely think about how actually facebook gets their money?
Let me explain:
Basicly facebook makes money out of its constantly increased social network data content. This could have not been possible without the 800 000 000+ million of people who constantly post updates on facebook, create groups, post pictures, add likes, comment and post links to other facebook pages. If people had not all this volunteers (facebook users) to post all this bunch of mostly junky information, facebook inc. would not have a penny. Therefore what makes facebook grow is the people itself who willingly choose to be part of this money making machine. One would think with regular company the investors are the owners of the company shares. This classical business model is not facebook model, there it is rather different as the real investors in facebook are not the capital shareholders but the regular social network user base – this means (you and me)!.
For all those who still don't get what I'm talking about I will shortly explain. Everyone who has a basic idea on how internet advertising works is aware that the primary origin for facebook todays profit is the left pane sky scraper field with ever changing advertisements.
Various advertisers pays facebook all the time big money for displaying those stupid advertisement. As many peole are viewing and clicking the advertisements, facebook makes billions out if its advertisers.
So far so good, facebook generates its profits out of peoples free time and delibarately information sharing you would say and you might argue me that facebook steals people (time / money). This would have been true if you don't put in the picture for a contrast, a regular blogger, who makes its daily living out of blogging. What a regular blogger does is frequent blogging on various kind of topics of his interest. Various bloggers blog at various titles, but most of them has a few major topics which they're following.
The more articles a blogger collects and the higher the uniqueness of this information is the bigger the probability this blog to have a good users base and the more interesting content it will have for search engine robots like Google Bot Crawlers or Yahoo Bot etc. etc. With all priod said, the higher the probability this blog to have more traffic drawn from web searches to the blog. As the blogger content increases with time when it gets 10000 or more unique articles (pages), consequently it can be used as an advertising place. A 10000 pages blog could earn a person a few hundred of euros (200, 300 EUR) per month.
Well the business scheme behind facebook is exactly the same, except they store and physically own the data of the facebook registered persons. The user posts content on his facebook wall, makes pages or does various activities which generate pages, the content gets indexed in Google and with time the overall facebook website content grows. As new users joins facebook with the increased popularity of website. The website is growing exponentially like in a atoms chain reaction.
Because of this steady content growth, it becomes an interesting place not only for advertisers but for all kind of people that use the internet. And there you have the monetarization facebook makes billions of dollars every second because of you. This is the shocking truth, they get their money because people click or view advertisement on each others profile, so there you're YOU make the little people who develop facebook and the original investors richer and richer with every day, where you make yourself poorer and poorer by investing your personal time in facebook instead of using it to work on something that will potentially generate you some dividents in short or long future.
Actually social network is nothing more than just a multiple blogging platform, but some marketing person come with this marketing hype work "social network". The social network buzz word is in my view just another big marketing "white lie"!. Correct me if i'm wrong but what in fact is a "Social network?". I don't see facebook neither as social, network as network. I don't know about you but I have never made a long lasting friend or relationship using facebook so far. I think the poor Facebook creator Zuckerberg made facebook with a viral mindset. He intended it to be like a social virus and so far he succeed pretty much. I just wait and eager to see who will start the anti-virus for Zuckerberg's (facebook) – people time eating virus.
I and Alex Drunk Asenovgrad’s Mavrut in the central park it was very cold, but at least an experience. Right now I’m a little hot (cause of the wine). I’m urinating too often recently and it drives me mad. Also I’m a kind of lost I told Sasho about Torsion fields and stuff but he make a fun of that no matter I think that’s a serious matter here is an interview with Nikolay Palushev that may be of an interest to the reader http://www.spiralata.net/kratko/articles.php?lng=bg&pg=128 .
Today I had English in the college pretty boring haven’t had a lot of work I had to fix few binary permissions part of a postfix also delete some old backups and create a new samba share some mail server problems for few minutes I think that’s all … I hate this world so much everything is so useless and awful. I hope to meet God soon …
I hate facebook, from the deepness of my guts! However, unfortunately in one of the companies I'm employed, occasionally I have to use it as an advertisement media to improve the Search Engine visibility for their websites (gather them some more likes). As a not big lover of facebook, I'm also not a facebook-pro, anyways with this circumstances, I'm starting to learn basic tips on, making a facebook page / profile more user friendly and hence more attracting to facebook users.
From what, i"ve read there are plenty of factors that can affect on how attractive a facebook page / company profile , anyways some of the factors are more important to tamper than others. Such two factors of top importance are:
Let me evaluate a bit on each of the three aforementioned fb marketing weight factors.
1. Using Page likes for popularization.
– Lets say that you would like to make marketing to a company websites which is involved in Financial or Investment market. Enter with the company created page or profile and facebook and think for and search for as many keywords related to the company business as possible. Check each of the results if the Page / Group is liked by hundred thousands of other people, then just give it a like too. By doing so for a couple of seconds all this (hundred thousands or millions) of people who has also liked it will see for a second (or less), what hangs on your Facebook profile 😉 The chance someone gets interested into what is your profile saying here is high especially if this pops up to a some 100 000+ of logged people who previously liked a fb page 🙂
2. Joining groups as a way to drive more visitors to a facebook profile
Joining big groups consisting ot thousands or millions's logic is the same like with the page likes. The only difference is some groups are kept private the so called (Closed Group). Finding a number of similar (Open Groups) to your company activities and joining them will possibly display your company facebook profile to as many profiles as the group has. Most of the groups are not too active therefore joing groups as a way to drive attention of facebook users to a desired profile is not so efficient as with Page Likes Adjusting a profile picture logo dimensions to a wide skyscraper.
It might seem strange but actually the size of profile picture set to pages or profiles in facebook matters, different profiles dimensions could have impact on Page Likes 🙂 The reason for the fb picture profile having influence on the marketing is very simple. If you have a wider picture you can graphically include more data visible for the user that is always stuck to the page and hence seen by the user.
I've realized this after, I've red few articles online on the same topic along with that I've noticed many big brand pages on Facebook like for instance BMW (Cars) with over 8 000 000 of likes, Adidas and Nike – with over 6 000 000 likes, have set up this wide skyscraper dimensions logos.
Here is a crop taken displaying the wide skyscraper profile picture set by BMW cars.The profile picture used by BWM (cars) has an image dimensions of: 180×500 heigh x widthAdidas's profile logo has a size of 180×489.
Nike uses a bit of unstandard 390×720 (but while uploaded facebook website automatically crops the image to a size which is fittable for a wide skyscraper) with dimensions like (200×400)Another franchising company with big likes base, I've seen is McDonald's with 19 900 000+ likes! again with a banner logo consisting of wide scraper with picture dimenions (180×439 – height / width )There are some comparatively big user base facebook pages, like Ubuntu's non-profit organization with 555 000+ thousands of likes, and their logo has dimensions of 180×181 pixels.
Not all of the highly liked (visited) facebook pages however use a wide skyscraper as a profile logo and still has enormous number of likes. One contra-example showing that there is no clear relation between facebook profile picture dimensions and page popularity (number of likes) is Metallica (Musician/Band) fan page – (http://www.facebook.com/Metallica), which as of the time of writting this article has the UNIQUE HIGH NUMBER of 23,725,897 LIKES! 🙂
As far as, I've further red on many blogs, there are two general facebook standard banner profile picture recommendations:
1. One is facebook square like profile picture
– (this is the classics), if you just place a picture that is not too wide automatically facebook upload scripts will tailer the picture to have dimensions like: 180×180 pixels
The other recommended facebook pictures size is the wide wide-scraper and it should possess an image dimensions size similar to: width x height -180×500 pixels
This is pretty much the few basics I so far, know of can help to easily gather a custom fb company Page Likes. As facebook is really HUGE nowdays fb marketing has advanced tremendously.
I'll be glad to hear some cool tips & tricks you know?which can help a facebook page / profile popularity rise up. Looking forward to hear for your good or bad facebook experiences 🙂
Likes of pages, which are liked by thousands of hundreds or millions of people
Belongings to groups / Membering to big groups (consisting of thousands) which hold similar interest or business activity
Many people are using ThePiratebay to get all kind of data and share Movies, Games, Programs etc.)
ThePirateBay has become like a standard media for file sharing and still not many people are aware of who is behind ThePirateBay. This is why I thought, by posting this article I can "rant" on the existence of the Swedish Pirate Party The Pirate Party – Is a party fighting on behalf of information sharing freedom (or in other words a party fighting for our freedom as individuals in the digital era).
Pirate Party (Sweden) party official mascot
The Pirate party are swedish political party established in 2006, its members are activists lobbying on freedom of information as well as pointing at threats to our human freedoms imposed by new legislations and anti-freedom agreements like the recent ACTA treaty.
Since there creation in 2006, they have grown from a local Swedish party to an international party, locally existing in 33 countries arount the world.The ideology behind the Swedish PirateParty as well as the rest of existing Pirate Parties international is as I prior said Freedom of Information on the internet. PP is a party phenomenon, as they are neither a left or a right oriented party (on the traditional left-right scale). PP are independent bloc pursuing their political agenda colabborating with all mainstream parties, which stand behind the ideologies the party fights for.
After last European Parliament elections, PP received 7% of all Swedish votes for a country EU representative. As of today according to Wikipedia , the party holds 2 EU deputee seats in EU parliament.
I've a friend who is taking membership in the Pirate Party and from him I know the PP party are big supporters of Free Software.
One major key figure part of Pirate Party is the swedish Peter Sunde. He is a front person who is behind ThePirateBay project as well as holds a very interesting revolutionary ideas. Many of his ideas are close to "the father of all free software" – Richard Mathew Stallman (RMS). Therefore the PP would be probably of interest to anyone who is interested in Free Software. Here is an interview with Peter Sunde's taken in Cebit 2011:
As long as I know the Pirate Party are along the only few organizations in the whole world, who are trying to fight on behalf of human freedom.I'll be glad to hear if someone know about other ornigazations apart from Pirate Party the Free Software Foundation – (FSF) lobbying on present worsening conditions of invidual human freedom.
Here is few curious facts proving how BIG and important thepiratebay.org is, the text below is again quote from Wikipedia
Currently ThePirateBay.org is ranked as the 80th most visited website in the world and 20th in Sweden by Alexa Internet, has over 5.5 million registered users and, as of February 2012, hosts more than 4 million torrent files.
According to the Los Angeles Times, The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading" and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright or pro-piracy movement"
I've hit an interesting article in Wikipedia called Comparison of BSD operating systems The article explains basic difference between different BSD (Berkley Software Distributions) and what is the primary accent of each of the BSD (free software OS) distributions. It also reveals basic details about the history and how each of the BSD's came to existence. I recommend to anyone interested in free software as it is just a great reading for everybody interested in FOSS.
The most interesting part of the wiki thread is a bar chart, provided by BSD Certification Group research conducted in September 2005.
The above diagram is showing the proportion of users of each BSD variant from the BSD usage survey prior conducted
The research is already 6 years old, and unfortunately as of time of writting seems to be the only publicly available. Though being outdated, I believe generally the bar charts distributions along different BSD variants would be mostly true. The only big difference will be probably in PC-BSD which is not even on the diagram should have outbeaten DragonflyBSD's use. Since there is no public data available for 2012 and the years 2005 – 2012 for the use percantage of each of the BSD distributions, I've thought about a pseudo way to get some general statistics on each of the BSD distributions popularity. The methodology to gather the required statistics comes to simply, type in Google each of the BSD variant "code names" (e.g. freebsd, netbsd, openbsd etc.) and look at the number of results returned. It seems logical the more results distribution keyword searched returns, the bigger the probability of more users to be involved in developing or using the respective BSD variant.
Below you see the results, I've gathered in my quick "google research":
As you can see in the above dataFreeBSD is still probably leading the BSD use, the public interest to OpenBSD – BSD focused on security has significantly grow since the last 6 years. Next it is seen the PC-BSD users base has probably tremendously increased and according to the Google results returned it is probably on a 3rd place by users interest (use?) followed by NetBSD with only 1.47% of all the BSD users. Lastly with only 0.99%, orders Dragonfly BSD which no longer is so popular as a Desktop BSD based OS as it used to be back in 2005. Again the presented diagram results are based on only on the factor of Google BSD variant popularity and hence shouldn't be consired too trustworthy, still I'm sure it gives a general idea on how used is each of the BSD variants as of Jan 2012.
Yesteday with Baky (my dear Orthodox Coptic Christian friend) and Kliment (a good friend from the old rock’n’roll years), we went to the Dobrich Cinema (sadly just one cinema for the city is available). The cinema in Dobrich is called Cinema Club Icarus (Ikar). For all foreigners who wants to enjoy some movie, the Dobrich Cinema does offer a plenty of English speaking movies (with Bulgarian subtitles).
Pitily the Dobrich Cinema website http://www.kinoikar.com/bg/info/2 is not existing in English, though anyone wanting to check the current projected movies in the cinema can use the movie trailers and the movie pictures to get the necessery info.
Anyways I haven’t been to a cinema for some almost two months, so going for a movie was really relaxing enjoyable experience. Besides that, we were lucky to see a movie which fitted quite well to my movie genre preferences –
Midnight in Paris
. Midnight in Paris is a Romantic Comedy for intellectuals and people who have a glipmse on art. Its a Bohemian movie so to say and I believe it wouldn’t hold a big interest for the avarage man who doesn’t keep interest in Arts, History or Philosophy.
The movie plot revives around a young engaged American couple who went to Paris for a business trip, just to find out there whole life is gonna be changed by this. The main actor Gil a just grown man is writting a Novel book, trying to make a shift of his profession from being a movie directory to a novel publicist. Gil (Owen Wilson) is an odd Bohemian kind of man, who quickly fells in love with Paris rich culture architecture and old fame. Next to that Gil is a dreamer who (just like me dreams about the old glorious times), when people were more respectable better moral and more idealistic than in the current age. After one night of heavy wine drinking, Gil’s fiancee wents for some dancing and leaves him on his own. Gil makes a round in Paris and losts himself and decides to stay for a while in front of sold old Roman Catholic Cathedral, a mysterious very old car crosses by the street and suddenly some “party” gang asks Gil to join. He has no idea where he is going and suddeny finds himself in the epoch of the world famous 1920 of great book publicists like the Fidgeralds family. Night by night Gil is being transferred to a different epoch back in time to meet a world famous artists and authors, people like Ernest Hemingway, Picaso, Salvador Dali etc. etc. 😉
The movie shows many personages of odd world famous people with some of their strangeties known by the current age. It appears all of them are dreaming for all and the same thing, to live in a earlier age to live in the Golden Age of Arts and Poetry 😉
The movie is real fun in Gil’s personage I’ve seen a lot of “me”, also I’ve seen a lot of me in many of the other famous people as of course presented in the movie. I hardly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to take a break, have a good mindful laugh time. Here is Midnight in Paris movie trailer as well to get an idea what to expect:
I’m watching iGenius – How Steve Jobs changed the World movie. I heard about a movie from Alex a friend of mine who said this movie sheds some light on history of Apple Computers Inc, Macintosh and the great significance of Steve Jobs work as a manager and visionary to change the world for good. The world has suddenly been astonished by Steve Jobs sudden death so surely the interest about him is tremendously up.
I do respect Jobs as under his leading the computer industry has received some innovations, still I don’t agree with many of the movie aspects which turn Apple and the consequent company products IPhone, Ipad, Ipod etc. into a mega hype products. I’m being honest to myself and I should say many of the innovations they did are not something too much, but just a product which popularized or minituarized some older invented technology.
The product quality of Apple in the past is a fact so one cannot argue with this however with recent years I wouldn’t say the company quality is so much supreme as presented in the movie. What I don’t understand why is Jobs receiving so much praise and recognition but rarely somebody could show his bad sides as well. We’ve been again manipulatively mislead that he is a mega genius or like an angel on earth. However the achievements of Apple and the mass production and involvement of the field of marketing which lies basicly and makes profits based on great deceptions of Jobs doesn’t make Jobs to a super hero. As an enterpreneur and businessman his achievements are unquestionable but for many years now the reality of business is sad and a honest man could rarely be found to be dealing with business. Usually the people who like dirt, lies and fame are into business. Most of the times these are people who are ready to kill in the name of Public Recognition and Success. Jobs has been said to be a Buddhist according to what I’ve red in Wikipedia. If that is true its rather strange to me on fruits his buddhist faith produced. I don’t believe that any rational man who observes nowdays technology and how it is used doesn’t see the great harm technology did us and is continuously pushing us down. Buddhist teachings in my view teach on helping the neighbor educating and giving up things for free. Apple products however are not giving anything for free, yes some of them do education. Therefore in my view the philosophy of apple and its application is not really fitting up to helping the neigbor as they don’t come free of charge like the free software does. Apple products actually enslaved their users, all of apple products are nowdays connected to Apple’s Inc. Mega Corporation IStore or they report somehow to apple during updates or purchases more or less about users likings or behaviours. This obviously doesn’t respect users freedom and makes Apple an example of a company that doesn’t respect completely the user natural right of freedom and privacy.
To sum it up iGenius – Or How Steve Jobs changed the World is a highly manipulative movie just like most of the movies or books dedicated to super heroes are. Steve Jobs was lucky to get this recognition and status in life, however this doesn’t make him too much different from all of us. He just used to be in the right time in the right place and achieved what he did explicitly by God’s mercy. As a known fact Jobs was an Orphan and as we can see from many life examples God helps and has helped many orphans to have a good lives eventually.
Also I’m quite curious if Steve Jobs success was just a fruit of his good fortune or there were just too many circles of people behind him (Jewish or Masonry) possessing big fortunes who found it practical to sponsor his (??) products and ideas seeing a lot of potential to keep the world under siege through technology. Nomatter what the complete true behind Jobs and his achievements are, he is still an inspirational person and an “icon” in the field of IT. Even I’m a bit Jealous on his overall achievements. Anyways for people who want to loose some approximately 42:00 minutes on a hype Jobs praise movie and see some of apple’s products and pictures of Jobs and Apple / Macintosh products the movie is a good choice 😉
It’s 9th and it’s the 3rd day of the Russian and Serbian Christmas as well as Christmas for all those Orthodox Churches and monasteries, who still observe the old orthodox calendar / (star stil)
I’m just coming back from the Orthodox Church service in Nijmegen . The Church service was great, the Father there Father Sergius is a priest for almost 30 years and is a really gracious and gentle priest!
After the Church service it is common that the Church community gathers together in the kitchen room (a small room in the church), where we had a dinner, tea and coffee together. I should say the Church community is really tight, mainly constituted of Russians and Ukrainians but there are also quite of Dutch people who by God’s grace found the true church of Christ and thus converted to Orthodox Christians. It’s really amazing to see a western people with a profound interest and dedication in Orthodoxy and in Eastern Church life! This is definitely a miracle of God!
After the Church service, one of the choire members lady had organized a Russian like Children festival to celebrate Christmas and the Russian New Year.
There was some children games organized for the children. After some of the games in which children had to do some kid games. Snegurochka and Det Moroz had entered the Church as a great delight for the children.
It’s interesting to say that in Bulgaria we also have Snegurochka that we call Snezhanka and Det Moroz which in Bulgarian is Dqdo Mraz
This kind of children feast and a way to complete the 3 days Christmas festival in which we celebrate the unexplainable mystery of our Saviour Jesus’s Christ incarnation had added up to the great joy of the Church service as well as bring back some old memories of my youth where in the Kinder Garden when I was a kid we used to also await and receive the two dear guests, the old man Dqdo Mraz and his assistans Snehznka 🙂
After the children performed some singing dancing and children exercises as well as had some songs and dances together with Det Moroz and Snezhanka it was time for the end part of the feast which is the recital of children rhymes and christmas songs. Since there were mostly Russian kids there, most of the children performances was in Russian, however there were few Dutch kids so there was some recitals and singing in Dutch and even in English! 🙂
As Det Moroz was very pleased with the great acting of the youngsters he brought in the two sacks packed up with kid presents and after each children performance, he gave a present to the kid. The kids were completely shining as a result since they were rewarded for their parcipation in the feast and had some photos with Det Moroz and Snezhanka 🙂
After the whole celebrations were over, we the people who left in the Church went in the church kitchen and had a wonderful table full of delicious foods and drinks, some of which were traditional Christmas Russian meals including my favourite’s Russian Salad / Ruska Salata
I had some very nice chats with some of the church members in the mean time and after the great meal together we cleaned up the Church, asked Father Sergii for a blessing and each one of the church brothers and sisters headed back home.
As a matter of fact since I’ve started talking about the Russian Orthodox Church in Nijmegen, maybe it will be nice to mention that the Church Bulding is actually an Byzantine Chapel taken from Roman Catholics, so the Church didn’t really have a classical Orthodox Church architecture, however this is not a problem at all since everything within the Church icons, iconostasis, alter wall , icons etc. are Russian and serbian Orthodox icons. The alter was also reconstructed in order to be suitable with the Church requirements for an Orthodox Church alter, it’s interesting fact that the man who sells candles and does a lot of the Russian Church minor maintenance is a Bulgarian just like me 🙂
Currently the Orthodox Russian Church in Nijmegen had church services every two weeks (9th January, 23 January, 6th February etc.)
Although I should say that in the Church building the Serbians had their Orthodox Church service every two weeks also, which means that the Serbs has their Orthodox Church services in the same Church in Nijmegen on (16,30 ,13 of January etc.)
Therefore there is an Orthodox Church service every week in Nijmegen by God’s mercy where services alternate with each other, one week is Russian Orthodox Church and one week is the Serbian Orthodox Church.
Hope this info is helpful to somebody! Again Merry Russian and Serbian Christmas! Cheers!
