Tabbyfied

I know this is a little bit off topic, but just wanted to post this because I find it intriguing. I mean, a 2-foot, 6-pound burrito, who would even thought of that?! I thought casino are just plainly for gambling and casino online games, but this, this is different here.

From http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_11795081

LAS VEGAS—A Las Vegas casino cafe is rewarding patrons who can put away a 2-foot, 6-pound burrito with a most logical prize—free unlimited rides on a roller coaster that runs in both forward and reverse.

The offer comes with a caveat, though: Those who accept the challenge but can’t finish “The Bomb” burrito have to take a picture with an extra small, pink T-shirt that says “Weenie.”

The NASCAR Cafe at the Sahara Hotel & Casino began selling the cheese-and-guacamole slathered burrito on Thursday for $19.95.

Those who can finish the monstrous entree get it for free, along with two unlimited coaster passes and a T-shirt proclaiming they “Conquered the Bomb.”

Local Business Ads (LBAs) enable advertisers within specific business locations to target prospects within a defined geographic area. LBAs are geared to drive people directly to your physical business location, rather than just to your website.

Although LBAs can be displayed in Google’s organic search results the same as any AdWords ads, they have the added advantage of being displayed right on a Google Map itself. This is good because, when a user clicks your ad within the map, an info window expands, showing your business listing as seen in the screenshot below:

Google recently added a link to directions. This makes it super-easy for a prospect to learn exactly how to get to your location. They can also see a Street View…

…as well as select the Save to My Maps option.

Google is also working on new reporting features for Local Business Ads designed to report how many people opened your info window and clicked your various links. For more on Local Business Ads, check out Google’s FAQ. To set up your own ads follow these steps from the Google help files.

Web-based email is convenient. Anyone can easily set up an email account in minutes for free. You can access it from anywhere that has an Internet connection. But the drawback of web-based email is that you can’t get to your archived messages when you’re not online. If you’ve ever been on an airplane or in your car, and needed to retrieve directions or other information that was sent to you via email, well, you know you were previously SOL (and the “S” doesn’t stand for smiling).

That’s why Google is now making Gmail available even when you’re not online. You simply access your messages within the normal Gmail interface and then synchronize changes while you’re connected. Messages that you send while offline are now stored in your outbox and automatically sent as soon as you’re connected again.

Take note this feature relies on Google Gears—a set of open-source developer tools Google created to help build more powerful web applications. You must have Gears installed to use Gmail offline. (Another option is to simply use the Google Chrome browser which already has Google Gears pre-installed).

To access offline mode in your Gmail account, start by installing Google Gears. Then go to your settings and look for the Labs tab near the top of your screen. Once there…

1. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
2. Click Save Changes.
3. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new Offline0.1 link in the upper right hand corner of your account, next to your username.

Cool! …thanks Google.

Intriguing huh?..Well I have come across a website that gives away free ebooks for everybody explaining that they can earn BIG online. HOW you say? Well that’s why I gave their system a shot, based on what I read on the ebook, I would be earning by playing an online roulette.

The ebook directed me to go to rushmorecasino.com, an online casino , while on the site I immediately downloaded the software and installed it on my laptop just like what the ebook said. So their system was to defeat the “law of averages” in a game called roulette. The ebooks states that I could earn $300 just one night and would never lose a dime from thereon. Sounds too good to be true? YEAH, that’s what I thought, but I still decided to give it a try. Why? coz I was inspired on what the author of the ebook said, that he was giving away his secret on earning BIG online because he was so sick of all the “earn online fast” schemes that didn’t work and just leech people with their money. He didn’t asked any cash in return, instead a donation if you earn thru his system. So, I am now optimistic and hopeful that his system would surely help me augment my monthly expenses. I would be writing another post here once I’m starting to earn to inform you guys about this secret and would freely share this to you. Watch for it!

They say a picture consists a thousand words. I don’t need to write anything to prove how grateful and happy I am to know that I now have a daughter.

My sweetest baby. I’ll do whatever it takes for you Yzzy. Daddy loves you.

Google Suggest is moving out of Google Labs and into the regular search results at Google.com, potentially providing a new way to get traffic to sites that aren’t currently showing up on the first page of Google’s search results.

Google Suggest is just what is sounds like. It suggests alternative queries for you in real time as you type your searches into Google. Those suggestions are primarily based on the queries that other Google users have searched for…

As you can see in the image above, there’s been a lot of interest in Bigfoot recently (due to claims of Bigfoot being recently captured). That interest has translated into large numbers of searches for queries like searching for bigfoot, causing that query to show up on Google Suggest when you type search.

Mid-tail searches of 3-4 words which are currently getting a lot of traffic are likely to receive even more traffic once this new feature goes live, as users are channeled towards the queries Google suggests for them. Longer-tail searches of 5 words or more that don’t get much traffic to begin with are likely to get even less as many users opt to use the shorter phrases Google displays.

As for your own site, you should be able to get good traffic out of this new feature if you can generate enough publicity and reach that tipping point where your keywords are shown in this suggestion box.

For example, TravelRepublic.co.uk could see significantly increased traffic since, even though they don’t appear on the first page of search results for the query travel. That’s because they do appear in the list of search suggestions that Google provides.

That’s most likely caused by TravelRepublic.co.uk having a good offline marketing campaign that drives a large number of searches for their brand. Google is aware of these searches, and thus includes travel republic in their list of Google Suggestions for the very high traffic keyword travel.

This could mean that your offline branding and advertising efforts could have a very real impact on your search engine traffic, particularly if you brand around a phrase that starts with a keyword that already gets very high search engine traffic.

More from the official Google Blog.

Seth Godin said that. But I personally think that it can easily be a job for anyone.

The problem with search engine optimization

SEO is the purported science of optimizing your webpage so that you rise to the top of the listings in Google and Yahoo!

The theory is that a huge number of people find what they’re looking for via search, that virtually all of these people only look at the first page of the results and that if you don’t tweak your page, you’re doomed.

I just got a note from someone asking me for a recommendation, and when I said I didn’t think that most SEO was worth the money, he asked me why. So here goes:

1. Because it’s a black art, it’s really hard to tell who’s good and who’s not. Andrew Goodman is good, there are people who are less reputable… no matter what, it’s hard to guarantee you’ll get your money’s worth.

2. my real problem, though, starts with an analogy. Imagine your retail store was on a road that no one ever drove down unless they found it on a map. And then imagine that they redid the maps every week and the mapmakers refused to tell you exactly how they went about deciding which roads to draw and in which hierarchy to place them.

Could you imagine finding investors for that sort of store? Could you imagine being confident enough in your ability to grow that business that you’d want to work there?

Lucking into (and it is luck) the top slot of a great word on Google is not a business plan. It’s superstition. It’s blind faith.

If you want to grow your business, you need a reliable and scalable and dependable way to spend time and money and have it turn into traffic and revenue. In the real world, companies do that with real estate and with advertising. Online, it’s about adwords and site design.

If you can figure out how to BUY (not luck into) keyword searches that bring you X number of visitors, and then you can figure out how to design your site so that Y% of those visits turn into customers, you win. And nobody can stop you from growing all you care to grow.

Take a look at The South Beach Diet(TM) > Online. They spend more than a million dollars a year on online promotion (keywords, etc.). They spend a bunch more on optimizing the site. The result? One of the bestselling diet books ever written (4 million copies sold) plus more than 100,000 subscribers. Marketing that pays for itself.

No magic, no superstition. Just planning and measurement and hard work.

SEOs are not a shortcut to success, at least not for 99% of the companies out there. You won’t win by fooling Google into listing you first for a common search term. You will win once you figure out the simple mechanics of turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.