Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

“OK Great,” says my fiance. But what foods can I eat then? “Vegetables and fruits,” I reply.

After explaining about the new volumetrics “diet” that I’m trying to stick with to feel full with less calories, my fiance wanted to know about what foods she could eat and was it just going to be lettuce and apples (both of which she’s not too fond of.) Googling around I couldn’t really find a good source of what foods we could eat so I thought I would make ya’ll a list.

This list is just starting and what I’m trying to do is show there is a variety of foods out there you can eat. All below an energy density of 2. Remeber:

Energy Density = Calories / Weight in Grams per serving

OK, after the last PR update and this blog didn’t even budge off it’s PR4 I’m on the hunt for quality link exchanges from others like me. People who are jumping into this internet web money making wonderness and want to get their blog’s PR up and spread the link love.

If you’d like to exchange links with me in your blogroll, just send over a comment and I’ll be happy to exchange links with you. I’m looking mainly for similar type personal blogs but will consider just about anything.

On a happy Google PR note Blogtown Press did see most of it’s blogs reach PR4 which is great! Now I just gotta get this one back up there again……

I recently read an article in Business 2.0 about a company that is trying to make it’s own market on the internet.. They’ve cleverly hid the fact that all their trading is web pages by modeling them after real life real estate and people. It’s called Weblo.com.

It’s really an interesting concept. They name and group all their pages by countries, states/provinces, cities/towns, streets, and even buildings. Pages are then created, “owners” add content, make money, pay tax to what those groups they fall under as well as weblo and voila, you have a virtual market contained on one site.

If you really look at the idea it’s nothing more than what people are doing over at SitePoint.com, Digital Point, or a plethora of domain name reseller places out there. Except, they organized it under one place, can monitor it (tax it), and have a concept that is unique. Some of the most searched for things are what to do in city X or what celebrity slept with whom. They just built themselves a whole new organized resellers market.

In Business 2.0 they state the company claims to make $2 million in this quarter alone, which I don’t doubt. If you head over to the site you’ll notice that most of the major cities, even the obscure ones are taken and it costs a few dollars to “own” each one.

However, the long term outlook for earnings on the sites might be a little more suspect. Unless they get a killer format and a ton of webmasters that just love creating content (like wikipedia) the pages created will be useless. Many other webmasters will be able to build sites and take most if not all of the traffic away from Weblo.

But if you look at the concept strictly from an entertainment point of view, theres a million ways the site can go and be profitable, they just have to keep the audience there. Good luck with that.

It’s Aloha Friday again and I for one can say thank goodness. The week has been uber busy and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten anywhere!

I’m in the midst of a restructuring of sorts over at Blogtown Press as well as working on building new ventures and revisiting old contacts. During this process, I feel like of course there’s too much to do and thus I’m getting no where.

With all that jumble said here’s some links for you Entrepreneur Types out there.

The first one is just a funky little when will I be a millionaire calculator done nicely in AJAX I assume due to it’s no refresh graph adjustment. Put in some variables and see when you’ll be a millionaire. It’s a basic calculator geared towards savers. If only there was a calculator for entrepreneurs…

Here’s something from the Wall Street Journal called Startup Journal. It’s a WSJ online publication for entrepreneurs. I’ve never been nor knew it existed but in a brief poke around it looked like it could help out in some regards.

Lastly I’d like to say congrats to Josh Buckley who this week announced the formation of his network of sites called 2slice Media. Always great to see more people building networks and discussing their paths openly for all to learn and grow. Good luck Josh, and I’ll be keeping an eye out for the new site design and the network growth.

All for the weekend,
Aloha,
Erik

I don’t follow many conferences that go on. I live out here in Hawaii and getting back to the mainland for work (at my “real job”) and lately, for friends weddings is usually all I see, so following conferences is kinda pointless. But this one got my attention.

I am a regular reader of Jason Calacanis’ blog. i love his controversial writing style. He writes things that spark conversation and ultimately more creative thinking. So when I recently read that he and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch were doing a conference together, I had to check it out.

It’s called the TechCrunch20 and it’s going to bring together the 20 newest and most intriguing (to them I assume) new companies to show their products to the “press, VCs, investors, and bloggers.”

The best part is, it won’t cost these companies squat. It appears the conference is going to be setup so these companies can present their goods and get immediate feedback from these groups of people.

Even if your product gets ripped to shreds by some of the biggest names in the Web2.0 world, you’ll still more than likely get some amazing coverage in some of the biggest blogs and newspapers there are. Plus VCs like to invest, and 20 isn’t a large number. My guess is most of these are pre-picked winners and will likely get some primo funding.

Tickets to the event aren’t cheap…
$1,995 if you register by July 15 and $2,495 up til September 10, 2007.

Yikes. I guess if you gotta go it’s worth it. Maybe Blogtown Press will have the budget available by then?

I was tipped off to an interesting article over at Forbes about the concept of Google and Apple joining forces to form a super power of tech goodness. Talk about monopoly!
It seemed cracked out at first, would the world let this happen? Would Microsoft let this happen? If everyone under the sun has been suing Microsoft due to bad business practices which include bundling software wouldn’t they naturally do the same with Google and Apple?

But then I got to thinking, the nice thing about Google is that most of it’s services are given away for free and are open source or semi-open source. Who the heck would anyone sue?

What if Google actually did team up with Apple? Could they then give away the iPhone infinity, a super powered iPod, iTV, Browser, life organizer phone. It would be in the spirit of Google and with the tech sexiness of Apple, all funded by you and I buying music from GooTunes and spreading the advertising love around the world.

What a utopia!

If the iPhone Infinity were to actually exist I would like to be a bunch of things.

Be Apple Sexy
Have a regular sweet scratch resistant screen
Paper thin fold out screen
Option bluetooth wireless mouse
Solar and Motion rechargeable (Think of those watches)
Phone
iPod
Projector
Browser Based Desktop with all the “office like” capabilities
Automatic 411 with GPS
And just be sexy!

Please?

Picture came from Forbes and a dude named Dave Klug who I think is this guy.

Here are some links to keep you busy this weekend and a sweet video of someone who is a little crazy.

For those of you who are bar goers this link will hit home and amuse the crap out of you. It’s from a site called Modern Drunkard Magazine and list 86 Rules of Boozing. My favorite on the list is number 30 Never complain about the quality or brand of a free drink.

For those of you getting into the wide world of ajax you should really check out this site, Miniajax.com. It has tons of great little gadgets to make your site wonderfully interactive.

Probably the best color scheme generator on the web, better than colorschemer online due to it’s layout. Check it out over at the well-styled color scheme generator. You can drag your mouse over the color wheel and see the outcome in the mock website setup.

And now on to the flying squirrel!

Found this gem about a month ago and decided I needed to share it with everyone cause it’s just that cool.

For those of you that are MTV junkies, like myself, you might remember the sweet TV show, that I hope they bring back for season two, Rob and Big. They had a bull dog that they found out could ride a skateboard pretty well.

This dog is ten times better than the one they saw originally do it, and their dog. Although I do think Rob could produce the best skating dog ever, just give him some time. But here it is, this dog leans to turn, kicks and pushes (lupe would be proud) and coasts around the parking lot.

I have to spread the love for someone who has dugg the idea of the link to a coconut contest and is now running a sweet contest of his own. And the title says it all.

You can win a a nice big juicy Argentinian steak! by joining in the contest Cesar has running over at his (sexy design) Argentina Travel Blog. Although I’m not sure if they’ll send you a steak from Argentina, I would imagine a lot of dry ice would be involved he is sending you the love and a steak, worldwide.

Although this is a contest, I should have linked to this blog a while ago. If you’re a travel blog enthusiast such as myself and dig seeing pictures of people enjoying different parts of the world, then this is the blog for you.

He has several writers posting over there, some who are traveling around Argentina and always giving great info and views. I personally really want to visit Argentina and expect a full country tour when I go Mr. I also really want to spend a Buenos Aires party night until 6 in the Morning which he told me about often while we worked. Sounds like an awesome time.

Besides partying I would really like to go to the Patagonia area and found out that there’s a Patagonia Glacier tour you can go on. Which I didn’t even know there was glaciers down there, but I should have guessed. Where else would they have tried out all those sweet thermal clothes they make.

Also, since my fiance and I are into adventure travel, I would probably end up stopping by the white water rafting in Mendoza. I’ve never gone before but the picture he has posted with it sure does look like fun.

Man, entering this contest and thumbing through more pictures of your Argentina Travel Blog has made me want to head out there. Might have to plan a trip soon….

The rest of you, head over and join the contest!

If only there were enough time in the day to do all the reading I want to do.

Magazines; currently I only get monthly magazines, Wired, Business 2.0, Transworld Surf, and Food and Wine. I’d like to also read Time and Business Week.
Newspapers; currently reading none daily but would love to have time to read, The Wall Street Journal and The Honolulu Advertiser (local paper).
Books; anything business related and books similar to what Jared Diamond and John Stossel write.

Blogs: These are what I’d really would like to spend more time reading and keeping up to date on. Mainly because they’re updated with things I’m trying to get into.

Blog Maverick - Mark Cuban rocks! Plane and simple. I love his opinions and the way he runs his basketball team. He writes a lot which makes it tough to keep up with everything, but he writes things that make you think and not just force opinions on you, and that’s great writing.

TechCrunch - It’s by far the best way to keep up with cutting edge ideas happening in on the Internet and keeping up with all the brand new business ventures.

Problogger.net - How anyone produces that much content is beyond me but I wish I had time to take in and learn from everything he posts. Just reading the titles of all his posts isn’t enough sometimes, you gotta read them.

Lorelle on Wordpress - Because I love wordpress and find this blog to be the most comprehensive up to date blog on wordpress. I’d love to follow everything you can do with the software and then have a team of programmers create greatness from what I can piece together.

Of course there are blogs that I do read, but that’s another blog post altogether.