Dawn of the Geeks

Tom Cruise was the victim of a hoax recently.

Cruise Hit with PR Prank

A few media outlets picked up a bogus press release posted on a British PR site on Sunday that claimed the shrink-hating, L. Ron Hubbard-loving star was set to give four lectures on “the modern science of mental health” at the Scientology Center in L.A. next month.

Among the dubious discourses allegedly planned for the lecture series: “How Psychiatry Invented Schizophrenia, and What Scientologists Can Do About It,” and “Diagnosis and Treatment of So-Called Clinical Depression with the Hubbard Super VII Quantum Electropsychometer.”

“It’s totally phony,” Bert Fields, Cruise’s always-busy lawyer, tells Radar Online. “Tom is not giving any lectures. I’m going to look into it, because, in my view, it’s forgery, wire fraud and apparently committed on an interstate basis. So if I can find out who did this, I certainly intend to pursue every remedy I can find.”

Fields, whose name is misspelled on the counterfeit release, says it should have been obvious from the listed lecture topics that it was all a big fat fake. “You know, ‘Out of the Closet and into the Auditing Room’ is not something Tom is going to put as the name of a lecture,” the fearsome legal eagle explains to the mag. “He’s not, in fact, giving any lectures. If he did, I would sell tickets.”

Here’s some more info on InboxDollars.com. My goal is to have over 200 referals signed up by the end of October. For those who’ve already signed up, thanks!

Signing up through my referal link is an easy way to help support this site without paying anything.

Below the navigation links to the left you will find a few ways to support IcarusIndie.com. For every “Revenge Is a Bitch” bumpersticker sold, IcarusIndie.com gets $1. Signing up for InboxDollars will net you $5 without having to buy anything and when you read the paid advertisement e-mails you get paid and IcarusIndie.com also gets a few cents. Hits4Pay has a $10 sign on bonus and also pays you a few cents for each e-mail you read. IcarusIndie.com gets a referer bonus.

I’ve signed up for both of these services and recommend them. Besides Google AdSense, these are easy ways to help support this site.

Signing up through my referal links would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve added a script to the front page that will allow me to track stock prices. I want to see just how well all those stocks advertised in spams actually do. It’s also an easy way to track the value of stocks I actually own. Eventually I’d like to make an easy to use portfolio script to allow users to track the value of their stock over time as well as the value of their entire portfolio over time. I use TD Waterhouse for my IRA and it can tell me how my portfolio is doing right now, but not how it’s done historically. There’s no way (that I’ve found) to generate a chart telling me my portfolio history.

The script grabs the current stock value (from Yahoo! Fianance) every hour and puts it into the database. I’m going to give it a couple weeks before I start generating charts and whatnot using the data collected.

Can Bloggers Strike It Rich?

Calacanis employs 120 bloggers and publishes 90 blogs — including Engadget (which covers consumer electronics) and Blog Maverick, typed by billionaire entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban — with his writers making anywhere from $200 to $3,000 a month. (One presumes Cuban doesn’t do it for the money.) On average, Weblog salaries are about a quarter to half what a mid-level editorial job would pay, without the daily office commute.

“Not to mention (bloggers) get to write about the topic they are most passionate about,” said Calacanis, who claims to be on track to collect more than $1 million in Google AdSense payments over the next year. “So, for our folks, it is like they are making money off their hobby. Think a scuba diver or video-game player making $500 to $1,500 a month writing about scuba diving or video games.”

So what does it take to get profitable?

Whether you are Calacanis, Denton or Hauslaib, to create a profitable blog requires much more than a keyboard, an internet connection and too much caffeine. You need a talented writer entertaining enough to hold an audience, a consistent publishing schedule, content worth linking to by other bloggers and worthy of press coverage, marketing savvy to sell advertising or enlist third-party networks and, as a culmination of all of this, plenty of traffic.

Says Hauslaib: “If a blog debuted with virtually zero startup costs, then it takes little to earn a profit. One ad will do it. But at the bare minimum, a lone blogger will likely need to attract high four- to five-figure daily visitor figures to even attempt a blog-based livable wage.”

What I’ve found is that the combination of a blog and a wiki is the best tool to drive visitors. The blog is an ordered list while the wiki is unordered. By linking the ordered to the unordered you point Google in the right direction so that wiki entries are quickly indexed by Google. Wiki entries rank higher than blog entries. Often it’s not just being first to report a story but being first to be indexed on Google. When other people start linking they generally link to the first handful of results on Google.

The other big tool is the Wikipedia. The Wikipedia tends to rate very high for any given topic. The trick then is doing extensive research on a story, doing a blog summary pointing to the research in the wiki and then linking to your wiki entry from Wikipedia. My Saaya Irie, Cindy Sheehan and Air America wiki entries are all getting referals from Wikipedia. By being linked to from Wikipedia, your ranking will go higher.

For revenue, I then rely on Google Adsense which gets me enough to cover hosting costs and then some. I’m certainly not one of those webmasters that can quit their day job.

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My fiance wrote Thomas McCarthy of Palmwalk.com expressing her disgust with his pathetic attempt at a web-site. On the plus side, he did write back. But, he argues that his morally bankrupt site is okay because it’s legal and that if she doesn’t like it she should try to get a law passed.

It’s a pathetic mind that bases their sense of right and wrong on what’s legal or not. He’ll do good in marketing though. Maybe he can “innovate” and double other companies’ product lines by giving them an oven to cook their food with.

Fortunatly his site is still down though he said he’s going to bring it back up. We’ll see if he comes to his senses before dumping more money onto his pathetic unoriginal project. He actually claimed it was innovative. Apparently stealing HotOrNot’s idea but taking covert pictures and hiding like a coward so nobody can figure out who did it until the cops come knocking is innovative.

I was able to see Corpse Bride with my fiance yesterday thanks to a free screening she had pointed out to me in The State Press, ASU’s campus paper. The ticket said they were overbooking so show up early. We got there more than an hour ahead of time and there was barely a line. Maybe it’s just not cool enough because there aren’t any explosions and it’s rated PG. At only 76 minutes it’s very short for a feature film.

We both liked the film. It wasn’t particularly deep and it is somewhat predictable but it is entertaining. The only complaint I had was that they should have told the story of the Corpse Bride before she was dead. All you get is a song and dance summary. It would have lengthed the movie to actually play out her story. But, when you’re doing stop motion with as much detail as this movie was done in, it would probably have taken years to complete an additional hour or so of footage. The songs were decent but not as good as in Nightmare Before Christmas.

An interesting trivia is that this is the first movie to use a professional grade digital camera (like you could buy yourself at Best Buy or something) to shoot each frame. Previously film cameras were used for this type of thing.

So yes, I’d recommend seeing this film. The cinematography is incredible and the story is good. Again, my only complaint is the length. I think there was a lot more that could have been done.

palmwalk.com was created by Thomas McCarthy an ASU finance and marketing senior as a means to put on display for public scrutiny, unsuspecting women who attend Arizona State University.

“From a utilitarian[sic] perspective, I believe palmwalk.com is morally just.” - Thomas McCarthy as quoted by the Arizona State Press.

“Palmwalk.com was created to show the world that Tempe Ariz., is the ‘hottest place on earth’” - Thomas McCarthy as quoted by the Arizona State Press.

Utilitarianism: The ethical theory proposed by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

So what this slimeball is saying is that it’s okay to put women in the public eye to be judged without their permission as long as doing so makes more people happy. Specifically he thinks his morally reprehensible web-site is okay because it benefits ASU some how. He’s got quite the ego there.

It turns out that the reason the site was down was because he ran out of bandwidth. He promises that it’ll be back up. Well Mr. McCarthy, this site isn’t going anywhere either. I’m going hunt down all the information I can about this guy and keep this site up to date on all the happenings of palmwalk.com

It’s interesting that this story breaks as I write an essay for an english class on a story about a guy who thinks he’s done something amazing to impress some beautiful girls and finds out the hard way he’s nobody and did nothing that would impress anybody. McCarthy thinks he’s doing something wonderful but he’s one of the few who are this horribly misguided.

Playboy just recently put out an issue with some ASU girls who volunteered to get naked for the camera. Apparently McCarthy feels that if he were to ask, nobody would pose for him even with their clothes on.

The Motley Fool is a web-site for individual investors looking for winning strategies to make it big. After Sept 11th I invested in America West Airlines at a little over $1 per share. 6 months later I sold it at nearly $5 per share.

…the ugly ducklings can have the biggest profit potential. Remember when Martha Stewart first got into hot legal water? Potential business alliances wouldn’t talk with her. Advertisers ran from her. Her stock collapsed. Martha was a pariah, plain and simple.

10 Year Stock History

Her stock has about tripled since then. Lots of people look for solid stocks that have been around for a long time. But, the stocks that tend to pay off big are the stocks for companies that hit a big bump in the road. Of course the risk is that the company won’t bounce back.

Another company mentioned is PACCAR. This is a company with a solid history.

PACCAR is a company that builds trucks. Huge, hulking 18-wheelers. The company has a rock solid foundation, is dominant in its industry and has a management team Tom believes in.

Here’s why this company is still one of his best bet performance stocks today: PACCAR is in a cash generating business that is gaining market share, and is run by very shareholder friendly leadership that is delivering share buybacks and steadily rising dividends.

Provident Energy Trust (PVX) is a company I’m invested in that seems to have that same rock solid foundation. Avanair Pharmaceuticals (AVN) is an up and coming drug company that I think has a lot of potential. Both stocks are currently bringing in a positive return. PVX is one I think I can just sit on for awhile. AVN is awaiting an FDA response to a new drug it has developed. That announcment will make or break the stock.

The thing that is common to all these stocks is the fact that they were bought after considering the products they’re producing. A lot of people just buy a stock based on the name of the company. It’s more important to look at what the company is selling and how the consumer will react to it. If a company is trying to sell something nobody wants, don’t buy. If the company has a novel idea that you think will take off, invest in it.