Come on Kobe! you can do it! Do it for all of us, help these girls with their careers: 2007-08 Laker Girls

CHECK THIS OUT!

NY York Times Article - Quote from our team

So today our company (I work at Wpromote Search Marketing Inc. in El Segundo… for all your PPC Management and Search Engine Optimization needs) was Quoted in the NY Times where an article about Google and Yahoo!’s latest deal was printed/posted in the BITS (Business + Innovation + Technology + Society section).

Here is a link to the NY Times Article… please please Digg this if you could.. just takes a second… if you don’t use digg, you may like it… lots of funny things can be found on digg. You can waste a lot of time there. Better than just in Google searches.

Rock out - your friendly neighborhood SEO Rockstar

-KRONiS

Is this you? or do you see this a lot?

Okay so on July 1st LOTS of shit is going down with the California Highway Patrol and your cell phone.

Let’s assume you are over 18.

Here are the rules:

This new law PROHIBITS ALL DRIVERS FROM USING HANDHELD WIRELESS TELEPHONES while operating a motor vehicle.

So how the hell do we get anything done while sitting on the 405? (aka four or five hours).

HANDS FREE PHONES:

- To deal with this new law and still be able to talk while driving, simply get a headset or earphones that have a microphone so you are hands free. Note that although our iPhone’s have awesome headphones(when they are brand new), you can only have one ear in while driving. Otherwise you can still receive a citation.

WHAT IF YOU ARE UNDER 18?

Well you will at some point turn 18, until then NO CELLPHONE FOR YOU WHILE DRIVING PERIOD UNLESS YOU ARE PULLED OVER TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD.

- so, not until you are very experienced in doing all the other million things drivers do while driving will you then graduate to also operating an external communication device - uh, your cell phone.

Are you guilty of it?

I know that if traffic is stopped dead I will often e-mail clients from my iPhone. Sorry but I’m not even moving, why not get some work done? I’ve learned how to dial without looking on my phone and use an earpiece so I can drive with both hands..but my earpiece is the iphone headphones. this isn’t so bad I guess, but I like having both ears in. Now I will have to drop the left one out after July 1st, should get used to it now. I don’t want to talk to the police at the side of the road because I was on a phone call. I feel I have the technical skill to pull this off without letting it distract me. I also feel there are a lot of others who could too…but the general public and some stupid people who will be confused by their cheap cell phone’s interfaces will undoubtedly be puzzled staring at their phones (which they have not read manuals for) and look up to hit the car in front of them who has stopped suddenly due to perhaps being on a phone them selves or maybe an animal ran out in front of them, who knows.

- I kind of agree with this anyways. When I first started driving we didn’t have cell phones so I don’t know how hard it is to learn when less focused on the task, but it wasn’t super easy to learn to drive (Now when I write this I mean drive properly, like understanding rear-end collision avoidance, escape routes, braking distance / out driving your headlights, etc.) so I can understand the reason for not allowing new drivers to use phones at all. They can be extremely distracting which could prove fatal.

^ OUCH ^

SOME FAQS from the California Highway Patrol (CHP)

Q: so when do the new laws take effect?

A: July 1st 2008

Q: What is the difference between the two laws?

A: The first law prohibits all drivers from using a handheld wireless telephone while operating a motor vehicle. Motorists 18+ may use a hands-free device. Drivers under 18 may NOT use a wireless telephone even if it is hands-free while driving.

Q: So what happens if I need to use my telephone during an emergency, and I do not have a hands free device?

A: (Get one!) - Seriously though, the law allows a driver to use a wireless telephone to make emergency calls to a law enforcement agency, a medical provider, the fire department, or other emergency services agency.

Q: What if I get caught?

A: The base fine for the INITIAL offense is $20, then followed by $50 for convictions after that. The Uniform Bail and Penalty Schedule states that with the addition of penalty assessments, a first offense is $76, subsequent convictions are $190.

Q: Do I lose points on my driver’s license for this?

A: NO - The violation is a “Reportable Offense” however the DMV will not assign a violation point.

Q: Does this appear on my driving record?

A: YES, but again, no points are added.

Q: Is there any grace period when only warnings are issued?

A: NO. As of July 1st the law becomes in effect. Everything will be at the discretion of the officer who pulls you over. They CAN TICKET YOU for dialing while driving even if you have one ear in and one out. Be fucking careful.

Q: Are passengers affected?

A: NO. This only applies to the person driving.

Q:Do these laws apply to out-of-state drivers whose home states do NOT have such laws?

A: Hell Yes.

Q: Can I be pulled over by a police officer for using my handheld wireless telephone?

A: YES, you can be pulled over just for this infraction.

Q: What if my phone has a push-to-talk feature, can I use that?

A: If you are one of those annoying people it still doesn’t matter and YES you can be pulled over. EXCEPTIONS: Those operating commercial motor trucks, or truck tractors (excluding pickups obviously), implements of husbandry, farm vehicle or tow trucks can use a push-to-talk featured phone.

Q: What other exceptions are there then?

A: If you drive an authorized emergency vehicle and are working or if you are on private property.

MORE Q & A for Drivers over 18.

- This is more info about the ‘hands-free’ part.

Q: Does the new “hands-free” law prohibit you from dialing a wireless telephone while driving or just talking on it?

A: This is where they can really fuck you. The new law does NOT prohibit dialing, but drivers are strongly urged not to dial while driving. - because it is the ‘Officer’s opinion’ of whether or not you are distracted, they can still give you a ticket if you swerve or something while calling up your ex to get your fish tank back.

Q: Will it be legal to use a stupid looking blue tooth earpiece?

A: That’s fine provided you have one free ear. If you have BOTH ears covered you can get a ticket. Hence for the iPhone - you’ll have to pop out one earphone.

Q: Can I use a speaker phone function instead?

A: YES

Q: Does this law allow drivers 18 and over to text message while driving?

A: The law does not specifically prohibit that, HOWEVER an officer can pull you over and issue a citation if in their OPINION you were distracted and not operating the vehicle safely. I agree with this statement: Text paging while driving is unsafe at any speed and is strongly discourage. But I still do it.

There’s more to the under 18 stuff - such as can I use the phone if I am with someone over 18? - the answer to all those stupid questions is NO. if you are under 18 you can’t use a phone, period. I’m not sure how the hell they are supposed to know how old everyone is. I guess if I look young or if I’m wearing a hat they’ll likely use that excuse ‘you look under 18′ just to harass me. ya. I’m 18! hahaha

Go Lakers

Get this they have auctions that have expensive items going for the LOWEST UNIQUE bid.

I guess you simply have to bid something that no one else bids and you win? sounds tricky what if there were to be too many bidders…? I guess the price would go up!

Very interesting. Check it out, the rules are a bit of a difficult read but you start to understand the concept after a while.

Here is a list of Winners who have won item’s at very low prices.

Happy cinco de mayo everyone…. KRONiS on an iPhone guitar

Singer Kandice Melonakos

decided one morning to just do this.
Maybe if enough people talk about it Hillary Clinton herself will hear it!
Ode to Clinton.

Finally.

I’ve been waiting for a free mailing list application to come along that is compatible with blogging as well as your standard e-mail marketing initiatives. Introducing ZOOKODA from Izea Inc.

To do this right, I figured the best thing was to go through the process of signing up and explain some of the things I went through during this process.

For Example, the registration process is simple and straightforward - this screenshot shows what you are required to fill out during the initial registration.

After registering, you have the option to do what I’ve found to be the most annoying part of e-mail lists, which is figuring out the best way to have people subscribe to your mailing list. What’s nice about Zookoda’s interface is how easily the help areas are available and very informative about what you may need assistance with.

The really important thing to note here is that everything is stored on Zookoda’s servers, so you don’t have to worry about administration at all or possible downtime. At the same time if you decide that you don’t like the service provided by Zookoda, you can simply export your partial or entire lists for use on another system of your choice.

So to create a NEW mailing list it is very simple. Thank you Zookoda!

Here are the instructions they provide:

Creating a new mailing list

1. Click on Mailing Lists
2. Click New Mailing List.
3. Enter the mailing list name and description.
4. Click the Submit button. This will create a new mailing list with one field. The EMAIL ADDRESS field is a mandatory field that must be present in all lists.

The steps are nicely laid out on the page in order of what you need to do, depending on your business strategy, the next steps are to create the subscription forms, then create an actual email to send out to users.

Create a new email - This is what you will see:

Its great that you have the option to use feeds directly into the mailing list. This is one of the benefits of using ‘blog-related mailing list software’. For example, for the field above named “Feed Source” I simply put in http://www.digitalvegetarian.com/feed which is the main RSS feed for my blog.

From an SEO perspective, it is even better to have RSS feeds from your categories as your content grows. This means you could have targeted mailing lists for your categories and users can decide to only recieve updates for the categories they are interested in.

THEMES for your email.

This is probably the coolest part of this blog post.

They have a page (as shown below) where you decide which mailing list theme you want to use for your list.

After you choose from 4 pages of possible themes, you can preview first to see if you like the look:

HMMM so that looks great, but it may not be the most effective ‘look’ for dig-veg readers.

I tried another and this seemed a better fit:

Okay, great so that was really easy.

I simply did all of this while writing this post and I’m excited to use this for my other websites (such as GuitarTechnician.com)

So, the next step is to customize the email with the simple list of all the posts that will be involved. You can edit with simple checkboxes whatever posts you don’t want included in the digest.

If needed the options here are available to change feeds, edit the template, or re-order the posts any way you like or if there is something that you feel should go earlier in the post (some people only read the first part of an email).

Then click ‘Preview’. and you’ll see the message as it is intended.

Now I personally don’t believe anything until I see it work with my own eyes. So I decided to test sending this out to myself at several different domain email addresses (hotmail, yahoo, guitartechnician.com and wpromote.com).

After you get used to the interface you will find that there are areas where you can add or remove recipients to the mailing list. Everything is straightforward, just make sure you actually ‘name’ your mailing list, which I did not do initially and had to do before I could test anything.

This is what I saw before I sent my test messages out:

I also decided, what the hell and tried out creating the form…

If you wish you can edit the email message that will be sent out (I wish Facebook applications let you do that! no they only send out something you can look at but not change - stupid Facebook).

Okay, so now I want to send this out to my test accounts. I go to BROADCAST and I see a warning that reads

“Your Sender Details have not been approved and therefore broadcast permission has not been granted. To assist with spam protection, our support team needs to authenticate your Sender Details before you can schedule a broadcast.”

As seen here…

So the last step before you can broadcast out emails is to get verified.

HOW IT WORKS: this was a little confusing but I really like their interface. What happens is you ‘Create a new email’ which simply gets saved in their database in your account. Initially I wasn’t sure where exactly that went, however now I know that it is available in the ‘email’ dropdown field of the ‘New Broadcast’ page.

Here you choose the Email to send, and the Mailing list to send it to. ****AWESOME**** why?

What this means is that you can send the same messages to different lists very easily, or make minor adjustments as needed. Once you are Verified, you will see that the ‘Sender’ field is available with your name in it. - Just click on Account to see if you are ‘Zookoda Verified’ - as you can see here I wasn’t yet.

You can also send out ‘recurring’ emails if desired. Just remember that too much email will cause folks to quit your mailing list fast, at the same time we all need to be reminded sometimes!

Best of luck with Zookoda, I know I’ll be using this a lot now with my new sites and on this one too!

Aaron - Digital Vegetarian

Event Speakers include: Terry McBride (Nettwerk), Doc McGhee(Kiss, GNR, etc), Ted Cohen, and a lot more.
Met some great artists. Hung with my friend Trey Mills from Toronto, Canada, Anina (www.aninamusic.com) who is the ‘norweigan Madonna’ and very friendly and fun to party with.

AK

More to come… you can sign up with your band at: I WILL REPOST THE LINK as the server is changing today!

haha. no worries back soon. - Aaron

As some of you know I won the ‘Shoeperstar‘ contest put on by IZEA Inc. and Shoemoney which allowed me to participate in SXSW Interactive with those folks and shoot an episode of the reality series, ‘RockStartup‘ that follows the IZEA crew and their efforts. They’ve recently created and launched a new interesting platform and community for bloggers and advertisers to get together for the purpose of helping match up great blogs and content that is relevant with new content that would fit well. The system in place at Social Spark allows for this to be much better managed by all parties.

The bloggers simply browse the current opportunities that are posted by the advertisers. If you decide to accept an opportunity, once approved you will have a ‘timeslot’ within which to create a post on your blog. This is all managed by the social spark system and is relatively straightforward once you get the hang of a few posts.

As shown below, you simply ‘browse’ the opportunities in the ‘Marketplace’ section of SocialSpark.

(Click to Enlarge Image)!

What’s nice about this system is that it was designed by the creators’ of Pay-Per-Post who have learned from their previous work what works and what doesn’t from the valuable feedback they have received from users all along.

Important to note, is that the code of ethics is highly respected and enforced.

• 100% Audit-able ‘In-Post Disclosure’
• 100% Transparency
• 100% Real Opinions
• 100% Search Engine Friendly.

This post was made about Social Spark as an exercise for our readers and to spread the word about this great new ‘manageable’ way for bloggers to find things to blog about and make money at the same time.

Till Next time,

Aaron - Digital Vegetarian

Here is the poster for this event. Being a part of en2go has introduced me to this artist who I will see performing for the first time tomorrow night. Check out Kandice’s myspace page for some free music samples and more information.

I’ll comment later how the show went.

LATER ON:

Kandice sang very naturally and held a solid performance in a small room where it was tough to get close to see the action. Normally when I see gigs like that, people just don’t care, but for this performance (Her SECOND one from what I was told, and her first where she told anyone about it) she was excellent.

I think she will do very well if she just keeps at this.

Aaron - Stamina Records

-KRONiS