Swollen Pickles

Here's an interesting little bit of information I stumbled across while randomly surfing through wikipedia this evening. It relates to World of Warcraft, so nerds can rejoice. For those unfamiliar with the game, your character can pick up diseases and/or curses when battling the enemy. Like in the real world, these things can be a real downer, causing you to perform at less than your best.

A year or two ago, Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, opened the games first 20 player raid dungeon, call Zul'Gurub, as part of patch 1.7. Basically the dungeon saw players taking on tribes of troll who were under the control of the Blood God, Hakkar the Soulflayer. Upon battling Hakkar, the dude with the brutal death metal sounding name, players were tagged with a debuff called "Corrupted Blood", which was a disease that caused the player to have their life sapped over time. The disease could also be passed on to other players that were nearby the infected player. Blizzards intention was that the disease was to only affect players so long as they were inside the dungeon. Unfortunately there appeared to be a bug in the system that allowed the disease to be carried outside of the dungeon, by way of Hunter's pets and Warlock's minions. Before long, corpses littered the World of Warcraft... (more...)

I don't normally post "cute", but seeing as though I'm on holidays I'll have to be honest... I was looking for filler! Don't be offended, it's just that it's hard for me to post when I'm sitting by the beach working on my tan and drinking drinks with little paper umbrellas in them. Plus, I wouldn't want to get sand in my keyboard... which coincidentally leads nicely in this little nugget...

The little guy finally did it!

Merry Christmas y'all.

If you're reading this, I'm sure you've probably stumbled across countless other blog posts by people complaining that Google has slapped their blog with a Page Rank penalty. I'm also sure you've read countless rants on the increasingly irrelevant position Page Rank occupies in the world wide web. I'm not really sure that is actually true. We can write about it, or we can ignore it, but the fact of the matter is that so long as this thing called Page Rank exists, site owners will continue to be slave to the Google machine, in one way or another.

What does PageRank represent?

Let's refer to that fountain of wisdom that Google apparently values quite highly, Wikipedia:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.

Google's own definition of what PageRank represents is a little simpler to follow:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

The most interesting thing I found while searching for the formal PageRank definition was that the Wikipedia explanation (when I ran a Google search for "Google PageRank") was the number 1 search result, while Google's definition on their own corporate site was second. What does this mean? Is Wikipedia a 'more important' source than the organisation in which the information originally came from? You can run a Google search for pretty much anything and there's a good chance that a Wikipedia entry will turn up in the top spot, or at least rank very highly. Take 'quantum physics' as an example. The Wikipedia entry currently appears at the number one spot, does that mean that Wikipedia is the most important, most credible and most reliable source of information on the topic of quantum physics? Wikipedia? A website that anyone can edit content, no matter what their qualifications, is the most trusted source of information on a topic like Quantum Physics? That seems a little dodgy to me, but I've gone way off track...

So basically we are led to believe that PageRank represents the worth of a web page in the eyes of Google. The worth of a web page in the eyes of Google then becomes the worth of a web page in the eyes of other web masters. (more...)

Looking for a way to wring a few more bucks out of your website? Here's an idea worth considering.

LinkBucks is a unique service that allows you to earn money from your out bound links. Let's face it, if a user is clicking on an outbound link on your site, they are leaving, you may as well earn a little from their departure.

Here's the LinkBucks hard sell taken from their website:

Web users: get paid to share your links

Every funny video, file, or web page that you've ever linked to is making money for someone. Linkbucks rewards the people that make the web possible by giving them a share of the advertising dollars that their links generate.

About Us

We aren't a fly-by-night or a startup -- Linkbucks was started in late 2005 and has been going strong ever since. We have never missed a payment, and have been a solid partner for our advertisers.

To be honest, I hadn't heard of them until a week ago, but sign up was quick, easy and free, so I figure they are worth a shot. I'm trialling them on a low traffic site at the moment to see how they go. In my opinion, LinkBucks would be perfect for any site that relies on outbound links for a bulk of its content. For example, imagine a web site that was basically an image gallery with thumbnail images that when users click on, are taken to the high resolution versions stored on Imagevenue or something similar.

Something like this:

...etc, etc... I'm sure you get the idea. Anyhow, LinkBucks allow you create single links (one at a time), multiple links or give you a script you can place prior to the closing body tag on your website that will automatically convert all out bound links to LinkBucks links. You can also specify URLs you want to exclude from converting which is useful if you have other forms of advertising on your site.

LinkBucks is similar to Ucash.in except that I prefer LinkBucks. One of the benefits of LinkBucks is that it features a greater number of options, however on the downside it only offers three levels of referrals as opposed to Ucash.In which goes down to 10 levels of referral.

This post is really nothing more than a miscellaneous collection of stuff, so prepare yourself...

If you're one of the people, like me, that found Alien vs. Predator 2 a joyful romp in the ongoing Alien/Predator love story, then this little clip will give you another opportunity to geek out like there's no tomorrow.

It's in German, and there are no subtitles, so I have absolutely no idea what they are saying, but then, that's part of the appeal.

Continuing the sci-fi geek theme, for some reason, this picture always makes me giggle like a school girl.

Thanks to Lee, the Quit Your Day Job guru, for "interviewing" me. It's a world first.

I also finally got around to opening my guitar effects forum the other day. Only a couple of members so far, but hopefully it builds quickly so I don't talk to myself.

In other news I started watching the new J.J. Abrams show Fringe the other night. I've seen the first three episodes so far. I really enjoyed the first pilot, but the second two episodes didn't quite grab me as much as the first. It still has my interest, but I'm hoping it can get back to the standard that the pilot episode showed that it could reach.

I finished reading Bullseye: Greatest Hits last night and wrote a quick review/summary on the Comicologist.

Day three of the Technorati experiment is here, and it would seem things have taken a nasty turn.

Yesterday I was sitting pretty with a Technorati rank of 88,547. Today, there's been an nose dive, with my current rank ballooning out to 111,362. Edit: An hour and a half after posting this I checked again and the rank is now 76,252.

Good news is that my post "How to improve your Technorati rank" is still sitting at number one in the Google search results for the term "improve your technorati rank".

It's been a while since I last did this, so I feel a little bad for starting up something I haven't managed to maintain. Seeing as though this site wouldn't be half of what it is without visitors, I thought I send some love to the people that referred me the most traffic in June.

1. Comic guru, and guy with good movie taste, Lee, Quit Your Day Job. Check out his Top five signs that your DVD collecting is getting out of hand post. I'm pretty sure I exhibit all five signs.

2. Aussie Blogging Icon, Meg, Dipping into the Blogpond. Meg puts in a huge amount of work maintaining a list of the top 100 Australian blogs, which I'm currently lucky enough to be sitting in at 35.

3. Graphic and Logo Designer, David Airey, DavidAirey.com. His is a great blog, even if you only have a passing interest in design. He's been doing a logo of the month post for a while now, and are worth exploring.

4. Cyber legend, Me, DigitalBurn.org. My neglected music blog still manages to send people over here. Go read some of the artist interviews if you're into that sort of thing.

5. Fellow Aussie Blogger, Andrew Boyd, On Blogging Australia. He keeps on keeping on, so check out his post Injader: An Australian Open Source Blog Platform for all the techo geeks out there.

Honorable mention. Wormbrain, for continuing to entertain me, and send me a few peepz at the same time.

Shameless self promotion... if you're into guitar stuff check out Guitar FX Depot. I've posted a whole heap of guitar rigs, for the guitar geeks out there.

• John 5’s guitar rig
• Matt Bachand (Shadows Fall) guitar rig
• Pete Loeffler (Chevelle) guitar rig
• Stephen Carpenter (Deftones) guitar rig
• Mike McCready (Pearl Jam) guitar rig
• Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) guitar rig

Ahhh... self love...