And the winner of the Googlebot competition is…

Congratulations to Miles from Thinkin Lincoln for winning the Googlebot competition. Since thinkin-lincoln.com also sent the most traffic, I am sending the 2nd prize to Paul from SEOidiot who was (a very close second) runner up – both for his drawing and for sending the most traffic to the page right behind TL.

Thanks to everyone who participated!

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We had 8 very creative entries in the “What does Googlebot look like” contest. I’m having a hard time picking the winner since I am amused by all of them.

Here are the entries:

What’s your favorite one?

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Tomorrow I will be choosing the winner of the “what does Googlebot look like” contest.

You still have until midnight tonight to submit your entry for the contest. It’s easy to win – you can win by either submitting a drawing, photo, or other rendition – or – by linking to the contest page and sending the most visitors to it. Your chances of winning are actually really good.

Each prize is a genuine USB humping dog:

Just imagine how much your husband/wife/friend/coworker/boss will laugh/cry/sue/fire/promote you when you have one of these puppies hooked up to your laptop.

For full details check out the contest page.

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Add this to the list of “signs you’ve an internet celebrity”. If somebody takes the time and effort to create an entire website lampooning yours just to linkbait you and attract some attention, you know you’ve made it.

Cases in point:

Shoemoney and Bootmoney

John Chow and John Cow

I hope my linking to John Chow doesn’t constitute linking to a “bad neighborhood” in the eyes of the almighty Google (ha).

Are there any other internet-celebrity parody sites out there?

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Everyone always talks about the mythical googlebot, Google’s little spider that crawls into your site at night and steals your children, errr… pages and hoards them for its index… (Or something such). So what does this mythical “googlebot” look like?

I’m announcing the “What Does Googlebot Look Like?” competition. Submit your rendition of what Googlebot looks like and win some very cool prizes (more on that below).

I’ve always enjoyed SEOmoz’s cartoon rendition of Googlebot, so I thought I’d hold a competition to see what Googlebot looks like through other people’s eyes.

It can be a cartoon (even crudely drawn), a 3d rendering, a real live photo – pretty much anything your imagination can conjure up.

And now for the best part… the prizes! You can win by entering, and you can also win by helping spread the word about this competition.

The winner of the “What does Googlebot look like?” competition will receive a USB humping dog, which is possibly the coolest non-functioning USB accessory on the planet. They are only sold in Japan so we will have to swim over there to get one for you – which we will do.

Can’t draw or don’t want to enter, but have a blog or website? Link to this post from any of your websites and you’ll be automatically entered to win your own USB dog. The owner of the website that sends the most (legitimate) traffic to this post will receive their very own USB humping dog.

So what are you waiting for? Send us a rendition of what you think Googlebot looks like by emailing googlebot{at}auinteractive{dot}com or blog about this contest (by midnight August 7th). You just might have a plastic dog humping your USB drive in the near future!

The official rules: All submissions must be original, no copied work. By sumbitting your entry, you will grant us the right to use the drawing or picture on this website for ever and ever. (Muahaha) On August 8th one entry will be chosen by our expert googlebot judge (me). The site that sends the most traffic (no clickbots or fake traffic) to this post as determined by referrer count in Google Analytics will be contacted and the owner of said site will receive the prize. Each prize is a USB humping dog (which is not a functioning flash drive by the way).

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This happens to me all the time. I meet someone at a conference or party and 15 seconds later I can’t remember his or her name. The more time goes on, the more awkward it gets, especially if they keep saying my name as I talk to them.

So here are my surefire tips to get yourself out of this sticky situation:

1. Ask for a business card. (Not well suited for college parties).
2. Ask for the email address. This doesn’t work if their email address is bigboy79@hotmail.com. But if that’s really their email address, are you sure you still want to talk to them?
3. Introduce them to a friend. Use the friend ploy where you introduce them to someone you know by saying, “Hey, have you met my friend Walter? This is Walter Solbcheck … (spacey pause)… This is where they start saying their name, a split second after which you repeat the name like you were going to say it all along.
4. Be upfront. “I’m sorry I forgot your name”. You can also follow this up with “I can never remember names.” Often the other person will say the same thing.
5. Ask them to spell their name. “How do you spell your name.” This one works well when you’re trying to enter their phone number into your blackberry or cellphone.
6. Ask “Is there an I in your name?” If it turns out to be something like “Bob”, spontaneously develop an accent and follow up with “Aye, ye Americans and yer whacky spellin.”
7. Pickpocket him or her and look at the drivers license. Slip the wallet back (optional).
8. Call them by an obviously wrong name like “Jesus”, “Gingerbob”, or “Flo”. They will inevitably have to correct you at some point. If they don’t, congratulations – you’re talking to someone who’s really cool.
9. Denigrate yourself the Chris Farley way, keep calling yourself an idiot until they feel so bad about your self-loathing that they ignore the fact that you forgot their name.

REMEMBER:

If you end up on the flip side of this and you remember their name, but they can’t remember yours (and especially if they’re obviously trying any of the tricks above) mentally torture the hell out of them for as long as possible. Also, be sure to use their name every few sentences.

Check out MOO cards. 100 personalized minicards that are hard to forget.

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Over the weekend I watched a PBS special on Andy Warhol. It’s one of those awesome documentaries that makes you re-evaluate existence itself and reassess the value of everything around you.

One of the central themes of Warhol’s work was the concept of celebrity, which made me think about last week’s Digg meltdown and how a single number was the source of all the noise. This single number became a celebrity overnight (kind of like the girl from Heroes).

If a hotel heiress can be a celebrity, why not a number? So here is my list of celebrity numbers – numerals that are famous, notorious, or world-changing, and in no particular order:

3.14

Pi, formerly known as 3.14 (like Prince, but of numbers). This might be the most famous number of this millennium. It’s a little older than Abe Vigoda and is interwoven into the fabric of everything around us. Pi has an infinite number of definitions, all depending on how far you want to take it or how dorky you want to sound.

2.718

e, not as famous, yet just as cool as pi – it is a transcendental number meaning its digits never end, nor does it have an orderly pattern – it goes to infinity and beyond! (Ok, ok, just to infinity). I’m not sure I “get it” or know why this number is so important, but I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have invented lasercats if it wasn’t for e.

1325627888 79894576510188 6590140 1704640

This is the less legally-liable (I hope) way to express the number that set off a tumultuous dork storm (most notably on Digg) last week. This is the hottest celebrity number at the moment. To put it another way, this number is the Vanilla Ice of May 2007 and holds the key to all the world’s riches. And by world’s riches I mean hd-dvd decoding in your own basement.

420

More accurately described as 4:20 this number will make every pothead giggle, whether it appears on a clock, a license plate, or on the take-a-number counter at the local deli.

666

Damien’s favorite pick-3 lottery number. If you’re a math nerd, it’s 3 perfect numbers in sequence, if you’re a goth you need to have at least 3 mentions of this on your myspace page. This number is even more sinister than its sister #13. If your house number is either of these, there’s a 99.9% chance that it’s haunted.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The inspiration for the largest data gathering service known to mankind. This number is also referred to as “googol”, which is what Google is actually named after. So 10¹⁰⁰ is sort of like Cyberdyne’s endoskeleton arm – in that it inspires the thing that takes over and enslaves humanity. If you don’t understand the reference, you haven’t been paying attention to Google recently. This number puts the “sex” back into “ten thousand sexdecillion.” Carl Sagan’s favorite pickup line has been said to be “”A googol is precisely as far from infinity as is the number one. How you doin?”

365

Exactly the number of Garfield cartoons you will get in the desk calendar your aunt gave you. It is also the fifth 38-gonal number (rock-on!) and the number of days in any given year that the Buffalo Bills suck.

10

The basis for the metric system and the most popular number of things you will find on Digg, supermarket tabloids, and Letterman’s show. Surprisingly enough there are only 10 ways to please your man in bed, 10 things that will make or break your website, and 10 ways to lose 10 lbs in 10 days.

555

If the girl at the bar gives you her phone number, and she starts with these digits, you, my friend, are going to be be mighty disappointed when you try to call her. This number has been seen in hundreds if not thousands of movies over the past few decades, some great, some not so great. It’s sort of like the Samuel Jackson of the number world.

69

Since this is a PG-13 blog (mostly) I won’t go into what this means – if you are unsure, consult your local amateur graffiti artist. It’s also the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop (just in case you never made it without biting).

0

Also known as “zilch” or “nada”. If you try to divide something by zero, your calculator will explode. Zero has appeared in many movies, car spec sheets, and basketball jerseys of kids who can’t play ball. Humanity didn’t get the concept of zero until a little while ago, which might help explain why we don’t yet have flying space cars.

8675309

Rumor has it that a promiscuous girl named Jenny will answer you if you dial this number. If you had this phone number in 1982 your life was hell.

300

This is exactly how many Spartans you need to fend off a few million Persians and a giant fat guy with blade-arms. It is also coincidentally the population of America in millions as of late last year. We’re catching up, China!

That’s 13.

…

Ok I’ll throw 1 more in, as an added bonus. So this will be 13 + 1:

1

Often preceded by the pound sign and often rapped about to indicate superiority to others (as in “I’m the # 1 stunna. Wh-what, wh-what, what.”) This number is so simple and basic that it’s profound. Like a can of Cambell’s soup. Seriously, you need to watch this DVD. Thu number 1 is probably the most popular number in existence. Wrap your brain around that!

I’m sure I missed about a googol of other numbers that could be considered “celebrity”, so feel free to comment and let me know what you consider to be some other famous numbers.

—

Also check out: Netflix v. Blockbuster – where should you rent movies online?

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While a lot of people in the tech blog circles have a tendency to scoff at interwebs practices like forwarding funny emails, adding animated gifs to email signatures, and spiffy-fying their own blogs with graphical counters, they are (for some inexplicable reason) falling pray to something just as useless and diabolic – the blog tag meme.

I think it started with the “5 things you didn’t know about me” blog tag. Even I succumbed to that one – as did countless others – it seemed like everyone else was doing it – it was all in good fun. But after seeing the success of “5 things” others decided to launch new ones like “5 books I read”, “5 magazines I read“, “5 reasons I blog” and the list seems to just keep growing.

But today I’m taking a stand. No more blog tag posts. Won’t post them and I won’t read them. I am chaining myself to the high-horse I rode in on and boycotting all blog tag memes.

This glorified email forward concept is sullying even the most useful and respected blogs. I say this practice should be confined to the likes of MySpace, Friendster (if that still exists), and Facebook. The only difference between these tag posts and ‘ye-olde-chain-letter-craparoo is that the ending has changed from “If you break the chain and don’t forward this email, your privates will fall off and you will die a horrible death” to “now tag 5 more of your friends and make them blog about their favorite [insert something useless here]“.

For the sake of everything that’s holy – stop this blog tag insanity. The practice is becoming as useless as John Chow’s “blog reviews” (sorry Chowie, no backlink for you).

Oh, and one last thing – please email this post to your 5 closest friends and link to me from 5 of your own blog posts. If you don’t your privies will fall off and you will die a horrible death.

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DomainTools recently added a new feature allowing anyone to change the text of any domain name in their database (with a little bit of ajax). So when the computers can’t tell what the domain is “supposed” to mean, you’re supposed to give them a hand.

Well for a bit of end-of-the-week fun, here’s the concept of user contributed content gone awry, straight from Domain Tools itself…

1. Who Represents?
Get your wife something nice.

2. Mole Station Nursery
They have nurseries for moles now?

3. Therapist Finder
But how does this juvenile prank make you feel? (SNL reference omitted)

4. Pen Island
For those who were too cool for the Pen 15 club in middle school.

5. Experts Exchange
For when amateurs just won’t do

6. Power Gen Italia
Oh those Italians and their reputations

7. Optics Express
Get it in under an hour

8. A Child’s Haven
A safe place for wolfman’s offspring

9. Go Tahoe!
You’re lucky! All I got was this Tahoe t-shirt

And yes, this is a rehash of the original “what were they thinking” post, but cooler since it’s all Web 2.0′ed and stuff (just because I defaced a system that uses ajax).

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Basketball 2006, Football 2007, Basketball 2007 Champions – The Florida Gators are now a dynasty. 3 Straight blowouts for 3 straight championship titles.

This all fares well for our friends at the Gatorshop, who already have the 2007 Gator Basketball Championship gear online (way to be on the ball). The Gatorshop is a family run shop that only sells Gator merchandise (unlike the big companies who’ll sell you any team as long as they’re winning) – they’ve always been great to us.

Go Gator Nation and Go Gators. I apologize for any Ohio State fans reading this blog, anyone outside the United States, or anyone who never went to a Florida University – It’s just something that gets in your blood.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging…

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