So that looks like a funny banner from Comedy Central..

Below there’s a cool one from Cartoon Network.

Have a few more photos to post shortly…

OK a few more here including another view of that Cartoon Network Banner:

and some shots of this big SAW 3D poster…

If that kind of knee-slapping, slap-you-fellow-neanderthal-in-the-butt-after-a-play kind of move says “me”, then AMP has got the right APP for you:

Check out the Zune screen! If my iPhone didnt have so much goodness and apps, I would seriously think about this slick little puppy – 32G for $220!? I’m not sure if it’s worth the embarrassment of admiting you’re sporting a Zune, though…

Recently, Iran was in turmoil amidst allegations that the recent presidential election naming Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was rigged. This led to mass-demonstrations by younger voters and reformists, which in turn was followed by the Iranian Government cracking down on dissidents, with lethal force in some occasions (alleged), jailings, shutting down internet communications to keep people from sending images or posting their views online, and most recently the blocking of the opposition party newspaper.

But the real zinger I just found out about recently is that Nokia Siemens (NSN), sold and installed a monitoring system last year, which would allow the Iranian government to track and monitor dissidents.

According to the Washington Times:

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran’s state-owned telephone company.

A spokesman for NSN said the servers were sold for “lawful intercept functionality,” a technical term used by the cell-phone industry to refer to law enforcement’s ability to tap phones, read e-mails and surveil electronic data on communications networks.

In Iran, a country that frequently jails dissidents and where regime opponents rely heavily on Web-based communication with the outside world, a monitoring center that can archive these intercepts could provide a valuable tool to intensify repression.

This isn’t news, as this has been out in the light for some time before the election took place, but I admit I had only been reading the subject of Iran lightly up until the election situation. It just seems too big in light of everything the Iranian government is doing now to forget HOW part of the recent situation became possible. If we don’t monitor sales of our technologies to other countries, this is exactly the kind of abuse of technology that becomes possible. Other transactions in similar fashion include Cisco’s compliance with China in order to gain their business, and even Google and Yahoo have come under scrutiny with their international dealings.

We’re talking about US involvement now, and whether or not we should “meddle” in the affairs and give backing to dissidents who are hoping for a more free society. But it seems in  retrospect, if we had done a better job at keeping tabs on the technology we let corporations freely deal out to these governments for a profit, we wouldn’t at least be lending a hand to those attempting to restrict their freedoms.

According to Hadi Ghaemi, spokesman for the International Campaign for Human Rights
in Iran:

“This is an absolute threat to the privacy of all Iranian activists. It puts them in danger of being constantly monitored by the intelligence services, something that we know is already happening.”

Here’s a great breakdown from SEOmoz in their Whiteboard Friday series breaking down the basics of how it happens and how to submit to the Google Local Business Center.

Again a big thanks to SEOmoz for putting this great series together.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

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With the new long URL you get the date and the headline of the post. In some instances with a long headline it’s ridiculous. Besides, the second URL is cumbersome, long-winded, and impossible to type by hand. It is supposed to be search-engine friendly and more likely to get the attention of Google. Check out the fact that 90 percent of the blogs and major Web sites all use this supposed trick to get attention.

It does nothing.

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So why is everyone doing it, and why does everyone think it works? I have stat packages on the blog and a million page views per month. I have enough traffic to see a difference when there is one. I had a run rate closing in on 1.2 million page views per month when I turned on this supposed SEO trick. Boom! I dropped to 900,000 instantly. It’s taken my site months to recover.

So basically, he has gone and sitewide, changed the forward facing address to the world, but he didn’t bother to let the post office know that he had changed his address, so now as far as they concerned, the cul-de-sac where he’s lived for some time now is under new occupancy, and he can’t figure out why he’s not getting mail!

What he didn’t do among other things, is 301 old links to pages with their current naming – at least so that any link instead of getting a 404, gets resolved to your home page…

Anyhow, most anyone that has been doing SEO for a while realizes how important URL naming along with the Page Title. Mr Dvorak may think its a stupid thing, but that doesn’t make it true, just proves how he’s quick to bash what he doesnt understand. Maybe that’s just his Shtick, though. Power to him. I can always  close I-tunes when I see he’s on Leo Laporte’s show from now on…

Overall here’s a great primer on what Pagerank is and how it works…

Thanks to SEOmoz on this great post and of course for the option to embed and share their content…

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-What’s PageRank Got to do With It? from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.