I have no idea how Gary Busey got a reputation as an out-of-control drug addict back in the day. From the way he describes it, he was perfectly reasonable in his approach to intoxicants. According to the National Enquirer:

Wildman Gary Busey had bottomed out big time when he went bow-wow-wowing for coke!
The Buddy Holly Story star who claims he’s been sober for years admits he went cuckoo for canine after his dog rolled in the priceless china white.
“I went in like a crop-duster with my nose flying first and snorted the cocaine off the dog,” Busey said in a recent interview.
But Busey got more than coke up his nose as he snorted dog stuff up as well.

“You get a little bugs, you get little hairs, you get grease and goo from the ground; it’s not at all a healthy thing to do.
“But when you’re an addict, you don’t think of health, you think about destruction of yourself unconsciously.”

That just seems like not being wasteful to me, but then that’s just the way I was raised. Whenever I tried to push the coke mirror away from me at the dinner table my mother would say, “Do you know how many children in Africa who go to bed every night without any blow? Three million, 287 thousand, four hundred and twenty two. And I’m controlling each and every one of them right now with my brain waves.”

*Sniff* That woman was a saint!

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On Monday, like most of the rest of the search world, I was reading the seomoz blog and marvelling at their amazing accomplishment. For those of you who don’t keep up with what’s going on, Rand and the seomoz team have built an database of 30 billion web pages including a link map with information about which links are nofollowed and the anchor text used. All this is available for only $79/month.

An Index for Everyone
On Sphinn MarkeD commented “I can see this being the next trend, private indexes for each SEO agency.” Which got me thinking about the best way to go about collecting a similar sort of data to the seomoz index whilst minimising costs. Crawling the whole web is never going to be cheap; bandwidth and storage requirements are too big, but I think that for most applications a crawl of the whole web is not necessary. Ask uses a “hubs and authorities” model of the web and Google is believed to use something similar to calculate rankings called hilltop so I believe a crawl around the main players in a site’s vertical will give most of the relevant data.

Anyone can Crawl
So how would I accomplish this? The open source search engine Nutch (used by wikipedia) has a web crawler that can gather all the data used by the linkscape tool. Nutch uses the Apache License so, if you know java you can modify the whole thing to suit your needs. Most of the Nutch documentation goes straight over my head, but there is an easier to understand review of the crawler on java.net.

The official Nutch site has a simple tutorial on how to set up a whole web crawl. By using a list of seeds that are appropriate to your vertical and a smaller crawl depth a smaller link map can be made that only considers sites in your target community. You can then apply your own metrics to this data and decide on your strategy.

Sharing the Load
But what if you don’t agree with the hubs and authorities model, or what if you think that hilltop doesn’t have much influence on most rankings? These opinions are justified; pre-hilltop Google massively outperformed Ask so the value of a search model based on web communities is debatable. What is a small SEO company to do? A single small company can’t really do very much, but many small companies can utilise the java distributed computing service hadoop (inspired by Google’s MapReduce and File System) which is well supported by Nutch. This means that as a community, SEO companies could have a comprehensive index of the web, including pretty much any information we’d like with a cost dependent on the number of participants.

$79/month? This could work out cheaper but the initial investment of time would be large; it took seomoz 12 months to set up their database and they were all working for the same company with a clearly defined goal. I don’t think my idea will survive in the wild; Rand, your investment is safe.

Copyright SEOptimise. Original article from our Internet Marketing News - Search Engine Optimisation

SEOmoz Linkscape for Less?

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Filed under: Drama, Casting, RumorMonger, Politics

Well! Here I had my question already written to submit to Parade Magazine — “I love Naomi Watts. Can you tell me what’s coming up next for this talented actress?” — and now I’ve stumbled across the answer myself. Thanks anyway, Walter Scott’s Personality Parade!

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Watts is in negotiations to star in My Name Is Jody Williams, a biopic about the anti-land-mine activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. Williams, a Vermont-born schoolteacher and aid worker, shared the Nobel with the group she worked for, the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines, whose efforts paid off in 1997 with the Ottawa Treaty, which has been signed by more than 150 countries pledging not to make or use anti-personnel land mines.

Williams is apparently a feisty character, famous for calling Pres. Bill Clinton a “weenie” for not signing the treaty (and surely not the only time that word has been used in conjunction with Clinton). What’s more, Princess Diana was a high-profile supporter of the Ottawa Treaty (some believe her death was the final urge the British government needed to sign it), which means there’s a chance she’ll be a character in the movie. Yay!

The film was written by Audrey Wells, who will also direct. Wells’ screenplay credits have tended toward the silly (Disney’s The Kid, Shall We Dance), but her two directorial efforts, Under the Tuscan Sun and Guinevere, were a little more serious and dealt with strong female protagonists. Still, My Name Is Jody Williams sounds like a different animal altogether, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Naomi Watts already has The International finished and is appearing in King Lear next, which is supposed to start shooting in early 2009. Jody Williams will presumably come after that.

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Run kid, run.

 Honestly, it’s not a big surprise that Suri Cruise thinks her Dad is a effing nutcase and has decided to run from him.  But, she does look extremely fashionable in that dress, unlike her disaster fashion sense mother.

Yet, we must feel sorry for children like Suri Cruise who have to be raised by wolves.

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Mary-Kate Olsen left a ”wad of chewed gum” with the tip when she left a restaurant recently.

The 22-year-old actress dined with friends at New York’s Bottino restaurant last week, but waiters were furious to discover someone in the party had left the used confectionery alongside their payment.

A source told the New York Post newspaper: “Mary-Kate was eating and drinking red wine with two guys at a front room table.”

“At the end of the meal she pulled out a wad of cash to pay the bill and left a nice tip. But there also a wad of balled-up, chewed gum on the table. The waiter was annoyed.”

This is not the first time Mary-Kate has been accused of anti-social behavior. Last month, she and her twin Ashley were branded “disruptive, intrusive and totally disrespectful” by their New York neighbors.

The twins - who shot to fame when they starred on US TV show “Full House” in 1987 - angered the West Village residents with their constant partying.

One resident said: “Mary-Kate and Ashley are two spoiled brats who change the character of the neighborhood.”

Another added: “It is a peaceful, quiet street. Plenty of other celebrities around this block - Sarah Jessica Parker, Liv Tyler, Gisele Bundchen and Julianne Moore - are good neighbors and blend in with the neighborhood - but these two are invaders.”

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Prunes? At the Emmy’s? Yeah, someone thought this was a really funny gag to have Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart arguing about how America needs a ‘prune’ to lead us. Shriveled up prunes that Stephen is eating on stage. Yummmmm. High point or low point?

(john, steward, hosting, hannity and colmes)

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Filed under: Hands-on

Capcom’s digital offerings have been largely hit-or-miss. The wide variety of games they’ve made available on the PlayStation Network shows how aggressively they’ve been pursuing digital distribution, and their catalog is easily the most prolific and diverse of any publisher out there. Their upcoming Flock, ready for PSN in December, looks to be their best and most accessible game yet.

Flock may not have the biggest buzz around it, and that’s a shame. It’s a ton of fun, and comes from veteran designers of another quirky video gaming icon: Lemmings. Their upcoming PSN game features the same charm and addictive quality of Lemmings, but adds an incredible amount of current-gen polish. The visuals are surprisingly good, with the character models all lovingly animated, and the texture work incredibly detailed.

The production values go far beyond most of Capcom’s other digital offerings. But beyond the impressive tech lies a heartwarming game that aims to please casual and hardcore gamers alike. The premise of the game is rather cute: you play as a UFO trying to sweep various animals into the mothership, Noah’s Ark style. Levels feature a number of puzzles and hazards that dare to get in your way. For example, there may be piles of feces lying on the ground — should one of your pigs roll into it, he’ll stay there, dancing in and eating the poo. Disgusting? Yes. Cute? Yes. But, it also slows down your completion time.

Continue reading PS3 Fanboy hands-on: Flock

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Check out the first look of the sequel of the superhit horror movie Raaz - Raaz 2. The film starrs Emraan Hasmi, Kangana Ranaut and Adhyayan Suman.
Although the poster doesn’t reveal much about Raaz 2, you can still have a look at it  and leave your precious comments about it.

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Filed under: Computers, MySpace

What do women and recovering drug addicts have in common? Apparently, both should be avoiding Facebook.

According to a report by Priory, a British medical journal, Facebook is leading some folks to develop “friendship addiction.” David Smallwood, an addiction expert, says that social networking sites (and Facebook in particular) are fueling insecurity and creating an unhealthy obsession with building large friend lists among certain vulnerable groups. Smallwood said that women who get self-esteem from relationships and recovering addicts (drug, alcohol, shopping, etc.) are particularly in danger of getting addicted to social-networks.

In addition to fostering an unhealthy competitive spirit about popularity, social networks may augment feelings of rejection when friend requests are denied. Smallwood said that sites like Facebook are unsuitable for those battling with addiction because of its potentially negative psychological effects. Okay, so the addicts getting addicted to something as addictive as Facebook makes sense, but the report doesn’t seem to really offer much that’s scientific on why women in particular get addicted. We know plenty of guys who are just as addicted to social-networks (like us, for example).

On the plus side, a recent report has found that social sites can help older people feel less isolated. Social isolation is a major mental health issue for seniors, and researchers believe that sites like Facebook can help reduce feelings of isolation give our elderly an outlet for social interaction. [From: Daily Mail]

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Filed under: Internet, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), eBay (EBAY), Amazon.com (AMZN), Technology

Famed online auction platform eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), whose Internet colleagues include Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), and Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO), will be reporting earnings for the third quarter on Wednesday after the market closes up shop. What should shareholders expect from the company?

Well, according to data posted by Trey Thoelcke, shareholders shouldn’t expect much. While the top line is expected to rise by double digits (around 13%) to $2.1 billion, nothing is really cooking in terms of the bottom line. The call is for $0.41 per share. eBay booked $0.41 per share in the year earlier period. As you can see, that’s a 0% growth rate, and that’s never good (well, unless you’re a financial company, in which case that’s actually great). However, there is one silver lining to the earnings story for shareholders. If you take a look at past earnings data, you’ll notice that eBay has a snazzy reputation for beating estimates issued by analysts. So, I’d be willing to bet we’ll see an easy beat this week.

As to whether or not this particular stock will rally upon such news, that’s difficult to say. If Monday’s rallying sentiment makes another visit on Wednesday, then I’d say eBay could be an interesting earnings trade, mostly because it isn’t far from its 52-week low. Unfortunately, I think any rally that we get in the market right now is not to be trusted. It just can’t be. Profit-taking is always going to be waiting to sap the power out of any rally, simply because we know the economy isn’t going to be great for many months to come. So, even though I like the technical set-up to some degree vis a vis eBay’s earnings-beating history, I personally wouldn’t be buying. For me to trust any rally, I’d need to see some confirmations and additional up days.

Speaking of the economy, it will be interesting to see what eBay’s numbers tell us about the economy and where the company might be heading in terms of its fundamentals. One would figure that there will be a lot of people looking to sell stuff on eBay to raise some cash, and a lot of buyers scouring the platform looking for bargains to save money.

Another thing to look for will be growth in cash flow. (You can get last quarter’s numbers by clicking the appropriate link at this page, which takes you to a pdf file). Net cash from operations increased 23% for the six-month time period. I would think that the trend will continue (i.e., cash flow will increase, although not necessarily by that high of a percentage, since earnings may be flat) and that there won’t be too much of a surprise. How much stock will management have repurchased? Hopefully, enough to show its confidence in the eBay business model. Last quarter, the company took back 19 million shares. Will it have perceived the low price on its stock as a good value? That’s something to watch. PayPal has also been performing, and I think shareholders will receive more good news on that segment.

I really don’t expect any dire surprises during the quarter, and I think eBay’s stock is cheap. Again, though, I’m not calling for an earnings trade here. The risk/reward just doesn’t feel right to me in this case given the volatility we’ve seen. I have been like a broken record in terms of my reticence for earnings trades, but I just think you’ve got to be very careful. Of course, everyone knows to be careful, that’s obvious, but it never hurts to issue reminders when it comes to money.

Disclosure: I don’t own any company mentioned; positions can change at any time.

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