Joe Moody’s Web Adventures

Ok so we’ve seen the promises that we too can “work from home” by setting up affiliate websites and then sit back and start raking in the money.

I’m putting this to the test in my latest online adventure…

By the way affiliate websites are sites where you create links to products from online retailers like Amazon.com, if anyone clicks a link on your site to get to the product and then makes a purchase, you get a commission, usually a percentage of the sale.

I happened to acquire a pet carriers website recently (hey, I’m a webmaster, these things happen — like a mechanic who acquires an old car the owner no longer wants or needs).

This site already receives a decent amount of traffic and is pretty well placed on Google under the search term pet carriers.

The site also used to sell a brand of dog carriers, cat carriers and even bird carriers.

Now that the owner isn’t selling his product and no longer needs the domain, I’m using it as a testing ground.

I first signed up with the mega-affiliate site Goldencan and they connected me to a pet supplier. I setup links to the pet supplier on the pet carriers website.

Stay tuned and I’ll post here how it goes. I have no bias and nothing to gain (I already make a living online) and just want to see if this affiliate stuff actually has any merit to it.

Stay tuned … or subscribe using the links in the upper right corner.

As a big fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the brainchild of Larry David who previously helped write and produce Seinfeld, I was completely let down by the season premier.

It showed signs of what happens when writers run out of new ideas so instead they get more extreme in their plot points.

First, Larry’s fictitious manager Jeff has sex with a mentally impaired person on the drop of a dime (Larry goes to the bathroom and comes back to find Jeff in her bedroom romping away.)

Second, Larry tries to race home to break up with his girlfriend before she’s told she has cancer, reasoning that you “can’t break up with someone who has cancer.” But apparently it’s perfectly OK to break up with someone a few minutes before they are diagnosed.

Not believable and not funny.

I was accustomed to laughing out loud at least several times at Larry’s often mundane but hilarious social faux-pas. But during this first episode of Season 7 I didn’t laugh out loud once. I even tried but it came out more like a forced cough.

Of course we are also getting ready for the Seinfeld reunion episode of Curb, but after seeing this first installment I can only guess it’s just another ploy to keep viewers watching as the true hilarity of Larry David now seems like a parody of itself.

The actors too often were smiling at their own cleverness, another sign of how success can spoil authenticity.

Now for a word about the nature of true comedy, it’s supposed to be uniting and affirming of the goodness of human nature, often by allowing us to laugh at the bad. But if the characters are making decisions that are so inherently wrong that is destroys any possibility of a truly happy ending, then we might as well be dealing with tragedy.

I will watch the next episode and if things improve, I’ll be back here with an update.

Today, it would raise more than a red flag if a flight school student said he didn’t need to learn how to land a plane.

But what we’ve learned goes beyond the added vigilance. Our evolution went something like this:

9-11: Denial
9-12: Anger until the end of 2004
2005 to present: Acceptance

We accept there will always be those who hate us, no matter how much we either bomb or appease.

We accept we can’t convert the world to democratic capitalism, but that America was founded on such principals and should remain that way.

We accept that the Cold War is over unless we behave like it still exists, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We accept that world power isn’t in how many nation-states we have influence, but in how much the nation-states and their people respect us.

We accept that that no matter how much bad America has ever done, the good outweighs it. We’re the most charitable country in the world.

We accept that leading by example is the best way to hinder the propagation of our enemies.

We accept that the founders didn’t want an expanding empire, they wanted a free country protected by safe and secure borders.

We’re still struggling with this acceptance, but at least we’ve reached that stage.

There’s a new etiquette sweeping the land that separates the classy from the crassy.

Even if you always say “Bless you” when someone sneezes and hold the door for the person behind you, you could still end up seeming uncouth, or worse unhip, in the online world.

Let’s start with email.

Have you ever gotten an email from a friend or acquaintance and they include a gigantic business signature at the end of the (usually brief) email?

Then you’ve been “Email Sigged.”

This is when people weigh down a casual business email with a long-winded business signature.

This is like going to your friend’s house dressed in full business garb, with your photo-ID handing around your neck.

Now if the email is for business, then go ahead and heap on your credentials and contacts. Pile on your company position, fax, phone, cell, twitter, facebook, logo, and esig all you want.

But if you’re writing a neighbor, casual acquaintance or friend, finishing with a simple “thanks, Jane” or “best wishes, John” is enough to suffice without making your emails cause an eye-roll to the recipient.

Other rules: No upper-case in emails, on Twitter, anywhere. IT LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING or even worse like you have a problem processing words — as if they bottle up inside so long they finally gush out awkwardly.

Software is cold

Emails, texting and tweeting are a “colder” form of communication in that there is no human handwriting, no human voice, no warm human presence. It’s devoid of many of the aspects we’ve been accustomed to over most our existence. Therefore it’s important to go the extra mile to seem pleasant, respectful, happy.

People cannot hear your tone of voice when you say “Cool” to an invitation, was it a bored “cool,” a deeply satisfied “cool” or an excited “cool.”

To avoid misinterpretation, which has ruined many relationships in the digital age, put in the extra words to reassure your recipient. Like “Cool, that sounds really fun. Looking forward to it.”

It doesn’t hurt to add a few words to make up for the fact that we can now communicate and make plans with anyone whether we’re on a bus, vacationing in another country or on the couch at home.

Use the extra time our technology gives us to enhance communication, not diminish it.

Stay tuned for more tips. There’s no end to the new challenges we face in retaining our human-ness in our metallic, electrically charged existence.

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Twice as many Americans now take anti-depressants than 12 years ago, reported Reuters news agency.

When we really grasp human life with its emotion, absurdity and adrenaline, it’s really not so shocking that amid our technological wonders, we remain unsatisfied.

Just because we command robots, horseless carriages and satellites, doesn’t mean we left behind the reptilian brain buried deep within us.

We are lizards stepping on escalators, elevating to the sky in steel boxes, and pretending that we — like those in the Tower of Babel – can create our own Designer Heaven.

But our gadgets advance faster than our intellect. And our emotions remain firmly rooted in our brain stem, still yearning for “primitive” human contact and an order beyond our own civilization.

So arrive pharmaceutical concoctions, modern potions, to remedy the neuroses of modernity.

Modern society no longer worries much about dying from hunger, infection, or plague. Rather we worry about an elusive void.

In older times, they were closer to death, which kept them closer to God.

Our lack of a real threat gives rise to imagined threats, an obsessive-compulsive spiral keeping psychologists brimming with clients.

And the better our toys get, the harder it is to grasp why we aren’t always happy. We have digitally animated movies telling the tales that used to only come from the lips of the town storyteller.

We have the finest selection of food and drink in the history of humanity, mass-produced tastes filling endless isles.

We have handheld devices that can navigate for us, talk to someone on the other side of the earth, and in many cases see them too.

There’s so much instant gratification, it kills us when we’re not gratified.

So we take pills that tell our brains we feel ok, because we’re supposed to feel ok. It’s the modern age, and everyone’s ok.

It’s been said that luxury once tasted becomes necessity.  The boundless scope of our luxuries – both intellectually and materially – were the visions of futurists and science fiction writer’s merely a century ago. Today they are expectations of everyday life.

That’s a lot for a lizard to grasp.