Google’s New Browser Chrome Grabs 1% in One Day!

Chrome Grabs 1% in One Day!

According to research conducted by StatCounter, Google’s new browser, Chrome, has taken 1% of the global browser market within a day of launch.

Google’s unusual step of publicizing the Chrome browser on its notoriously clutter-free homepage is an indication of the plans that Google has for this browser…

“This is a phenomenal performance,” commented Aodhan Cullen of StatCounter, “this is war on Microsoft but the big loser could be Firefox.”

While Google may have the Internet Explorer market share in its sights, the fact that many Firefox users are more “mobile” as far as browser use is concerned, may impact on the current Firefox market share.

Note: The StatCounter analysis was conducted today, Wednesday, 03 September 2008, and was based on a sample of 18.5 million page views globally. The analysis identified that Internet Explorer holds 70% of the global browser market followed by Firefox with 22%.

The Really Bad Opening Sentence Winners - 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners

Dept. of English & Comparative Literature
San Jose State University
One Washington Square
San Jose, CA 95192

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
2008 Results

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Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped “Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J.”

Garrison Spik
Washington, D.C.

[Garrison’s other submissions]
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The winner of 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is Garrison Spik (pronounced “speak”), a 41-year-old communications director and writer from Washington, D.C. Hailing from Moon Township, Pennsylvania, he has worked in Tokyo, Bucharest, and Nitro, West Virginia, and cites DEVO, Nathaniel Hawthorne, B horror films, and historiography as major life influences.

Garrison Spik is the 26th grand prize winner of the contest that began at San Jose State University in 1982.

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression “the pen is mightier than the sword,” and phrases like “the great unwashed” and “the almighty dollar,” Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the “Peanuts” beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Most entries are submitted electronically through the Contest’s Web site: http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/. A new collection of previous winners was published in August 2007 by The Friday Project. It is available through Amazon.com
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Runner-Up

“Hmm . . .” thought Abigail as she gazed languidly from the veranda past the bright white patio to the cerulean sea beyond, where dolphins played and seagulls sang, where splashing surf sounded like the tintinnabulation of a thousand tiny bells, where great gray whales bellowed and the sunlight sparkled off the myriad of sequins on the flyfish’s bow ties, “time to get my meds checked.”

Andrew Bowers
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Winner: Adventure

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay — the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

Shannon Wedge
New Hampshire

Runner-Up

“Die, commie pigs!” grunted Sergeant “Rocky” Steele through his cigar stub as he machine-gunned the North Korean farm animals.

Dave Ranson
Calgary, Alberta

Dishonorable Mentions
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Winner: Children’s Literature

Joanne watched her fellow passengers - a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they thought was a witch - there was a story here, she decided.

Tim Ellis
Haslemere, U.K.

Runner-Up

Dorothy had reasons to be nervous: a young girl alone in a strange land, traveling with three weird, insecure males badly in need of psychiatric help; she tucked her feet under her skirt to keep the night’s chill (and lewd stares) away and made sure one more time that the gun was secured in her yet-to-develop bosom.

Domingo Pestano
Alto Prado, Caracas, Venezuela

Dishonorable Mention

I’m convinced that the Doc is dealing drugs to most of the mining crew because they either can’t stay awake, constantly sneeze, grin like maniacs, or won’t look you straight in the eye (not to mention behaving like a moron) and they wonder why a dwarf gets grumpy!

Neil Prowd
Charnwood, ACT, Australia
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Winner: Detective

Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who’d bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy’s trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears.

Robert B. Robeson
Lincoln, Nebraska

Runner-Up

The hardened detective glanced at his rookie partner and mused that who ever had coined the term “white as a sheet” had never envisioned a bed accessorized with a set of Hazelnut, 500-count Egyptian cotton linens from Ralph Lauren complimented by matching shams and a duvet cover nor the dismembered body of its current occupant.

Russ Winter
Janesville, MN
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Winner: Fantasy Fiction

“Toads of glory, slugs of joy,” sang Groin the dwarf as he trotted jovially down the path before a great dragon ate him because the author knew that this story was a train wreck after he typed the first few words.

Alex Hall
Greeley, CO
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Winner: Historical Fiction

As she watched the small form swing backwards and forth from the crystal chandelier - hands on hips, sniffing the air and squeaking inaudibly - it suddenly became clear to Madame de Pompomme that she had done the wrong thing asking Jacques to find and bring back her long-lost sister: for, whilst her coterie would doubtless be enchanted for a short while, the novelty of Janine having been raised by bats since the age of two in caves of the North-west Congo would soon wear off in seventeenth-century France.

Simon Terry
Broadfield, Crawley, West Sussex, U.K.

Runner-Up:

Our tale takes place one century before the reign of Alboin, the Lombard king who would one day conquer most of Italy and who would end up being murdered by his own wife (quite rightfully, I’d say, since Alboin made a drinking cup out of her daddy’s skull and forced her to drink from it), when our little Sonnebert was seven years old.

Edo Steinberg
Beer-Sheva, Israel
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Winner: Purple Prose

The mongrel dog began to lick her cheek voraciously with his sopping wet tongue, so wide and flat and soft, a miniature pink fleshy cape soaked through and oozing with liquid salivary gratitude; after all, she had rescued him from the clutches of Bernard, the curmudgeonly one-eyed dogcatcher, whose own tongue — she remembered vividly the tongues of all her lovers — was coarse and lethargic, like a slug in a sandpaper trenchcoat.

Christopher Wey
Pittsburgh, PA

Runner-Up

The complementary crepuscularities of earth and sky shrank away from one another as the roseate effulgence of a new dawn burst forth, not unlike a reclining pneumatic beauty’s black silk stocking splitting apart at the seam to reveal the glowing radiance of an angrily sun-burned leg.

Graham Thomas
St Albans, Hertfordshire, U.K.

Dishonorable Mention

The pancake batter looked almost perfect, like the morning sun shining on the cream-colored bare shoulder of a gorgeous young blonde driving 30 miles over the speed limit down a rural Nebraska highway with the rental car’s sunroof open, except it had a few lumps.

Jim Thomas
Gilbert, AZ
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Winner: Romance

Bill swore the affair had ended, but Louise knew he was lying, after discovering Tupperware containers under the seat of his car, which were not the off-brand containers that she bought to save money, but authentic, burpable, lidded Tupperware; and she knew he would see that woman again, because unlike the flimsy, fake containers that should always be recycled responsibly, real Tupperware must be returned to its rightful owner.

Jeanne Villa
Novato, CA

Runner-Up

Like a mechanic who forgets to wipe his hands on a shop rag and then goes home, hugs his wife, and gets a grease stain on her favorite sweater - love touches you, and marks you forever.

Beth Fand Incollingo
Haddon Heights, N.J.

Dishonorable Mentions

He was a dark and stormy knight, and this excited Gwendolyn, but admittedly not as much as last night when he was Antonio Banderas in drag, or the night before that when he was a French Legionnaire who blindfolded her and fed her pommes frites from his kepi.

Leslie Muir
Atlanta, GA

Carmen’s romance with Broderick had thus far been like a train ride, not the kind that slowly leaves the station, builds momentum, and then races across the countryside at breathtaking speed, but rather the one that spends all day moving freight cars around at the local steel mill.

Bruce Portzer
Seattle, WA
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Winner: Science Fiction

Timothy Hanson, Commander of the 43rd Space Regiment in the 52nd Battalion on board the USAOPAC (United Space Alliance Of Planets Attack Carrier) and second in command to Admiral L. R. Morris of the USAOP Space Command, awoke early for breakfast.

Joe Schulman
Cartersville, GA

Runner-Up

Lightning flashed from the blue-black sky of this alien world and shattered the engines of the spaceship, destroying Reninger’s last chance of escaping and reminding him of the time his sister returned from New York with the tips of her hair dyed blue, except for the part about the lightning and the spaceship.

Mark Murata
Kirkland, WA

Dishonorable Mention

The dual-headed Zhiltoids from Beta Quadrant in the Crab Nebula, who lived entirely on a diet of steaming hot asphalt, thought they had died and gone to heaven upon landing in the Midtown Mall of Fresno, California on the planet Earth during the month they called ‘July’.

Gregory Homer
Sacramento
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Winner: Spy Fiction

Special agent Mark Park’s strong chin and firm mouth showed that he was a man to be reckoned with, while his twinkling blue eyes revealed surprising depths of kindness and humor, the scar on his cheek a past filled with violence and danger, and his left ear a fondness for M and Ms, but only the red ones.

John R. Cooper
Portland, Oregon

Runner-Up

The KGB agent known only as the Spider, milk solids oozing from his mouth and nose, surveyed the spreading wound in his abdomen caused by the crushing blow of the low but deadly hassock and begged of his attacker to explain why she gone to the trouble of feeding him tainted milk products before effecting his assassination with such an inferior object as this ottoman, only to hear in his dying moments an escaping Miss Muffet of the MI-5 whisper, “it is my whey.”

David Potter
Nagoya, Japan
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Winner: Vile Puns

Vowing revenge on his English teacher for making him memorize Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” Warren decided to pour sugar in her gas tank, but he inadvertently grabbed a sugar substitute so it was actually Splenda in the gas.

Becky Mushko
Penhook, VA

Runner-Up

The Jones family held their annual family reunion on Easter going through over six dozen spiral-cut, hickory-smoked hams and several bottles of a fine Australian shiraz, before Farmer Jones, the head of the family, took the leavings back to Manor Farm to slop Napoleon and his other champion hogs but the seventy-six ham bones fed the pig’s tirade.

Michael L. VanBlaricum
Santa Barbara, CA

Dishonorable Mentions

Jan Svenson, having changed his fortune in the annual “Scandinavian King of the Beach” in Santa Cruz with a bottle of black hair coloring and thus standing out in a sea of fair-haired rivals to win the coveted title, realized the ironic truth of the old adage “That in the kingdom of the blonde, the one dyed man is king.”

Matthew Chambers
Parsons, WV

Dimwitted and flushed, Sgt. John Head was frustrated by his constipated attempts to arrest the so-called “Bathroom Burglar” until, while wiping his brow, he realized that each victim had been robbed in a men’s room, thereby focusing his attention on the janitor, whose cleaning habits clearly established a commodus operandi.

Jay Dardenne
Baton Rouge, LA

Nell Gwynn, a descendant of the famous English actress and friend of King Charles II, decided she would help French aristocrats, who were being decimated by the guillotine during the French Revolution, cross to safety in England by hiding them under her voluminous skirts and putting off French customs inspectors by confronting them with a face and arms covered with angry red pimples, earning for her the sobriquet of Scarlet Pimple Nell.

Alec Kitroeff
Psychico, Greece
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Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award

Upon discovering that Miles Black, the famous phrenologist from Yorkshire was going to take up yodeling to lonely goats in Bali, James White decided to balance four planks of wood on a beer keg and call it an abstract work of art in the style of a famous fourteenth-century architect, just going to prove that people will read any old garbage if they think there will be a good pun at the end of it.

Stefan Croker
Bury, Greater Manchester, UK
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Winner: Western

Nobody knew just who the steely-eyed stranger was, where he came from, where he was headed, or what his intentions were while he was in Dodge City; but he wasn’t an hombre you’d want to stick your tongue out at or flip off, and any man who tried to tickle him would be asking for a long stay in a pine box, if you know what I mean.

David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

Runner-Up

Bryson the Plainsman seldom spoke a discouraging word but he did when he filed for divorce after discovering his dear and an interloper played.

Maree Lubran
Saratoga, CA
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Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions

Behind his pearly white smile lay a Bible black heart, not like the Psalms with its, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” but like Revelations where God just smites people.

Elaine Deans
San Jose, CA

She had the kind of body that made a man want to have sex with her.

Barry J. Drucker
Bentonville, AR

As Kevin thumbed through the thick pages of the ancient manuscript lately found deep in the bowels of the Enzo family library in Castellino, with its depictions and detailed woodcuts of the morbid crimes committed during the Spanish Inquisition, he couldn’t help but marvel at the serene faces of the Florentine martyrs (Italians are so much tougher than they look!) and thought that his own expression would differ slightly if he were being sawn in half using the crack of his butt as a straight-line.

Camille Barigar & Jeff Blick
Twin Falls, ID

There are certain people in the world who emanate an aura of well being — they radiate sunshine, light up a room, bring out the best in others, and fill your half empty glass to overflowing - yes it was these very people thought Karl, as he sharpened his mirror-finished guthook knife, who were top of his list.

Jason Garbett
London, U.K.

Creeping slowly over the hill, the sun seemed to catch the small village nestled in the valley by surprise, which is a bit unusual really, as you’d think that something with a diameter of 865,000 miles and a surface temperature of 5780 degrees Kelvin, and which is more normally seen from 93,000,000 miles away, wouldn’t be able to creep anywhere, let alone catch anything by surprise.

Malcolm Booth
Brinsworth, Rotherham, U.K.

“Let’s see what this baby can do, Virgil,” said Wyatt, as he floored the Charger, brushing a Dart out of the way, sideswiping an oncoming Lancer, rear-ending a Diplomat, and demolishing a row of Rams before catapulting head-on into the sheriff’s Viper — realizing that we’d indeed missed the turn-off to Abilene and ended up instead, in Dodge City.

Paul Curtis
Randburg, South Africa

Though her beloved Roger had departed hours ago, Lila remained in their rumpled bed, daydreaming about his strong arms, soulful eyes, and how, when he first fell asleep, his snoring sounded not unlike two grizzly bears fighting over a picnic basket full of sandwiches, but as he drifted off into deeper slumber, his snoring became softer, perhaps as if the bears decided just to rock-paper-scissors for it instead.

Lili R. Lillie
Alamo, CA

I hadn’t fallen in love with Monique because of her intellectual level–she referred to the 6th grade as her “senior” year–or her habit of eating popcorn off the floor of theaters during movies–okay, so maybe love is a bad archer with a low IQ–but you couldn’t carve a finer or shapelier figure out of a hedge.

Robert B. Robeson
Lincoln, Nebraska

Emerging from the dark and dusty wine cellar of Lord Parker after a year of fattening up on wine, truffles, and caviar, head butler Hastings, sans his servility and his tan, was well larded and ready to slip into the Lord’s slippers after pickling Parker in a punt of port.

Jay Solmonson
Orinda, CA

The day started out as uneventfully as any other, and continued thus to midday and from there it was nothing at all to ease into an evening of numbing, undiluted monotony that survived unmarred by even the least act of momentary peculiarity-in fact, let’s skip that day altogether and start with the day after.

Jon Starr
Rumford, ME

As usual, Mr. Riddle came home from work, and, as usual, took the toy poodle, Fluffy, out for her walk, and, as usual, Fluffy “did her business” at the usual places, first at the bush, second, on the sidewalk, and third, in the grass, so that there, on the pavement, was evidence of Fluffy’s evening sojourn: Mr. Riddle’s little poodle’s middle piddlle puddle.

Dr. Ford Sutherland
Venice, Florida

Watching Felicia walk into the bar was like watching two fat Rottweilers in yellow spandex and spike heels that had treed a scrawny bleach blond cat at the top of a skinny flagpole that for some reason had decided to sprout casaba melons.

Melissa Alliston
Coraopolis, PA

Her name was Mauve, like the color of paint, which was apt: not only was she “pretty as a painting,” she was also “smart as paint,” and certainly as thin (assuming sufficient solvents had been added); she was, however, Arnold discovered when she stepped from the shower, a lot more fun to watch dry.

Steven W Alloway
Granada Hills, CA

When he concentrated, his thick black eyebrows furrowed, looking not unlike a pair of Hypercompe scribonia caterpillars on a collision course over the bridge of his nose, but unlike them, his eyebrows would never evolve into giant leopard moths, and would find better places to hover after nightfall than around her 40-watt backporch light.

Jane Auerbach
Los Angeles CA

Earthy ochre and russet hues in the lifeless leaves which rustle under his feet, and spiral down from the majestic trees above, signal that October has now arrived, but of course he knew this already because he has a calendar above his breakfast bar in the kitchen.

Roz Black
Rhynie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

As she skipped past the giant mushroom Alice was not surprised — because, after all, she had always suspected it was opium and not simply hookah, as many Lewis Carroll defenders had claimed, and tar heroin had since become a much cheaper and more available alternative — to see the track marks up and down the Caterpillar’s abdomen.

Chris Carlos
City of Industry, CA

Ted feared that the line between his jobs as plastic surgeon and butcher was blurring when he found himself injecting Botox into a rump roast he was preparing for his wife and mother-in-law, who was a decent person except for the hideous wart on her nose that begged to be removed — a simple task for his boning knife.

Wayne Carmichael
Tyler, TX

The homicide detective was an aging woman with a crusty and somewhat ill-tempered personality, an individual who reminded me of the kind of woman my mother, a Sunday-school teacher, would have been if she had been a crusty and somewhat ill-tempered homicide detective.

Bill Crumpler
McKinney, TX

Lonely as I might like to feel - the helplessness of loneliness, and its simulation, is so responsibility-relieving it fills me with relief of the sort we feel after using the urinal after a long funeral of an elderly relative we had never met - I write this, dear reader, because a writer talks to a word processor because he does not trust a real person.

Surit Das, BR
New Delhi, India

Her lips were full and wanting in the kind of way that your tongue anticipates the happy burn of Hunan beef followed by the cooling swill of cheap beer, but never a malt liquor, as that would bruise the delicate tang of monosodium glutamate, the kind that only Sue Hong uses, that probably exacerbates her water retention, causing her lips to be unnaturally full and plump and always thirsty.

Larry Davick
San Francisco, California

I heard her husky breathing as she came up the stairs, breathing exactly the way a sled dog breathes after competing in the Iditatrod as she sauntered into the room her hips swiveling from side to side like a Sherman M-4 tank with a 75mm gun forcing its way through the hedgerows of Normandy after D-Day in 1944.

Bruce Hannem
Citrus Heights CA

It was a dark and stormy night, except when the lightning flashed, because then it wasn’t dark; it sort of turned the windows into a giant disco ball for a moment, but eventually the thunder and lightning stopped and it settled down to a steady light rain, so then it really was dark, but it would probably be a stretch to call it stormy.

Laura Loomis
Pittsburg, CA

Tom and Kelly’s relationship had hit a dead end, like that road in your neighborhood when you were little that everyone used to throw their old chairs away at, and then the kids would use them to build forts.

Diana Maloney
Northampton, MA

Fittingly for a butcher, Carl resembled a fresh turkey - pale, knobby, and large through the middle with spindly appendages - and as he was wont to do on slow days, he had nearly finished reassembling the hams, loins, and chops into something approaching a pig when she walked in - long, flat, and lean, like a flank steak, radiating a heat that would cause him to flush, then darken, and, eventually, to crisp up deliciously.

David K. Mullen
Batesville, IN

Vito watched as Robert squirmed in his life vest while the Great White brushed against his chum-soaked and shackled body, but it wasn’t until the terrible fish circled back, finally ending Robert’s evening, that Vito, with the vision of the legless torso undulating up and down in the Farallon current had his epiphany, and uncovered one of life’s truly great mysteries: when you shorten Robert you really do get bob.

Paul Olson
San Jose, CA

Carey, unnerved by an affair that had suffered through weeks of volatility, walked unsteadily, her dress etching complex runes in the fine patina of dust along the antiquated floor, to a rose-scented box of love letters in a vain attempt to find solace, like a security fund struggling to find liquidity in the US sub-prime mortgage market.

Ray Pasimio
Chicago, Illinois

As a cold winter sun was just rising above the lonely French village of Vicres-le-Buffeur, the forlorn figure of a man dressed in rich Arabian silks could be seen crouching in the center of the market square, crying softly and cradling in his arms the limp and lifeless body of what appeared to be a large hamster.

Arndt Pawelczik
Hennef, Germany

The band had stopped almost two hours ago, the musicians had packed up their horns and strings and were halfway to Biloxi, but the lone couple on the dance floor moved to their own silent music as they clung to each other like barnacles on the rusty hull of an old oil tanker with a belly full of sweet crude hoping to drop their hook at the Big Easy before the dancing stopped.

James Macdonald
Vancouver B.C.

Like almost every other post-Hegelian neo-hipster angst monkey at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Rene flatly rejected the labels society placed upon him.

Bob Salsbury
Spokane Valley, WA

It was common knowledge around town that Bill drank like a fish, the kind of fish that consumes large quantities of cheap scotch on a daily basis.

Brent Sheppard
Morganton, NC

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day — though the Little Leaguers themselves, who all attended Mudville’s famed Albert Einstein School for Science and Technology, were certainly very, very smart.

Stephen A. Silver
San Francisco, CA

The penguin stood on the iceberg, cutting a striking black-on-white profile, much like the silhouette produced by a person standing behind a screen in front of a bright light while holding up a Twinkie to represent the penguin and placing it atop a Yorkshire terrier to represent the iceberg.

Sarah Totton
Owen Sound, Ontario

Although the family resemblance was almost palpable, there was no glint of recognition in the eyes of the separated-at-birth-but-nearly-identical quintuplets–Pixie, Trixie, Moxie, Gertie, and Howard–as they reached for the same size-10 champagne-colored lace Teddy in Filene’s basement that fateful Thursday morning.

Julia Tryk
Shaker Heights, OH

Sandy applied a fresh coat of lipstick, snapped her gum and pulled the specially-made thigh-high waders on for one last time before the New Year rang in; Anchorage didn’t hold much for a girl from the Bronx, but Catherine the Great, in a snowdrift, had become her specialty.

Jane Louise Thalken
Shenandoah, IA

The tiny boat got tossed around on the ocean like a pinball in a pinball game played by a player who was really good at hitting all of those bumper things to get a really high score.

Maile Valentine
Lakeland, FL

Rudy’s feline senses tingled as he watched Minerva pour a glass of milk, thrusting his tongue outward involuntarily, urging him to inexplicably lick his hand and smooth his cowlick, but he could not let Minerva know about the vampire kitten that had sucked his neck–attacking him with a feral ferocity that belied its adorable whiskered face–and how the meowing and purring that had become an integral part of their lovemaking was really just an injection of half-dead Calico.

Tara Lazar
Basking Ridge, NJ

Town mayor Alvaredo Sanchez, in defense of Carmelita’s indubitable honor, cracked the very expensive ocean-mist smoky-blue bottle of worm-in-bottom tequila over the badly balding head of his political opponent senior Montaya Gonzales, who runs the Toyota factory in town.

Randy R. Wise
Paradise, TX

Gripping his terrified victim by her sensual slender neck with his foul piercing talons like a lawnspiker, Igor the Terrible bellowed, “How do you want to die? over the coals? with a plastic bag over your head? with your blond hair seeped in red blood? in agony? today? tomorrow? — hurry up, please, my fingers are getting sore.”

Edward Vincent Tennant
Edgemead, Cape Town, South Africa

Surveying his shattered and splintered ship, Baskin pronounced it wrecked, glanced at his first mate, Robbins, and began a careful assessment of his new surroundings: sand as white as whipped cream, lush greenery layered like a cake against the fruit-filled treeline, a vanilla sky blended into an evening as dark as chocolate with a pie-shaped moon, prompting him to wonder aloud, “what’s so unappetizing about being stranded on a desserted island?”

Jay Dardenne
Baton Rouge, LA

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Known Note:

Be sure to include an occasional visit to Opening Paragraphs to read some of those “really good paragraphs” and some of those “not so good” opening paragraphs.

One of my favorite opening paragraphs is from John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill”. I handed the book to a customer the other day with these simple instructions: “Read this.” He bought the book. As a matter of fact, it was this opening paragraph of about 382 words which gave me the idea for the Opening Paragraphs website.

Do you have a favorite opening paragraph? It doesn’t necessarily have to be from a book, it could be from a marketing letter, a movie, a song, an email, or even from a website. Send it along and I’ll include it on OpeningParagraphs.com

It’s All About the Words.

Cheryl C. Cigan
known.com
We are always “known” anywhere in the world

Suttons Bay Fireworks Light the Night Sky over Suttons Bay

The children giggled, laughed, cheered and clapped their hands as they oohed and aahed with every rapidly-launched firework exploding into the night sky over Suttons Bay. The temperature was perfect. The wind was still, and the Big Dipper and other stars in the sky dimmed a bit while the show was in progress. It was a beautiful show like no other show, because it was a show for the children. Just for them.

Multiple boats of varied sizes were anchored in the bay forming a scenic backdrop for those watching from shore. Suttons Bay Marina Park was full and everyone was gathered in their lawn chairs and on their blankets chatting with their friends and neighbors, nibbling on assorted picnic snacks while listening to the excellent music provided by HURSH and other local musical talents taking advantage of an Open Mic Night. Jess Hammersley worked tirelessly to assure a perfect sound was carried to the entire crowd.

As usual the crowd was very generous with their donations when the “hat was passed” in support of this annual Suttons Bay Chamber of Commerce Labor Day Event.

As a Suttons Bay business owner and Chamber of Commerce volunteer, I would like to extend a huge thanks to the wonderful and generous crowd for making the event a success with their attendance, and to everyone who has thrown their dollar bills and loose change into jars located around the village.

Thanks to all the volunteers (I know there were many), Bob Joyce and his crew from the Village, Del Moore and the police department, the Suttons Bay merchants and business owners who made donations to make this special evening happen. Many thanks to Lois Bahle of Bahle’s of Suttons Bay for her leadership and dedication to the event, to Jackie Morrison of the Business Helper for all the great posters and handouts, for arranging the Open Mic night, to Dennis Grant of Camelot Construction and Development for donating the use of their portable stage for the live music performances, to Gary Galusky of Little Finger Auctions for delivering posters and handouts and coordinating the fireworks while working with the local merchants to round out the many donations, to Mike Murray, Superintendent of the Suttons Bay Schools for volunteering time during the Art Fair to help raise funds along with Mary Bush of the Business Helper and Kathy Cooper of Suttons Bay; thanks also to Pure Water Works, and to Piper Goldson of the Suttons Bay JazzFest Foundation for facilitating a fund raising opportunity during the JazzFest and to Jim and Linda Munro, Korner Kottage Bed and Breakfast, for being the driving force to make this event a reality for the children (of all ages) from Suttons Bay and the surrounding communities. (If I have left anybody out please leave a Comment and include their names!)

A sincere and heartfelt thank you, to each and every one of you who volunteered and who contributed and made this a successful and wonderful end-of-summer event for our local community.

I’m glad you came. I’m thrilled you enjoyed the show!

Cheryl C. Cigan
Known Books
known.com

Google Continues to Dominate Search Online Market Share at 61.9%

comScore logoComScore has released its monthly analysis results for search market share in the U.S. showing a wider gap between Google and Yahoo.

Google sites had 61.9% of the market, while Yahoo! followed at a not-so-close second with 20.5%. The gap between the two has grown since June, when Google and Yahoo! controlled 61.5% and 20.9% respectively.

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Known Note:

It will be interesting to watch what happens with the search engine online market share as we head into and go through the upcoming holiday seasons.

Something to watch is consumer versus business search behavior when the need arises to get directions to make the perfect Halloween costume, to find the best homemade Turkey recipes for Thanksgiving, to get information on the best wines to serve with holiday dinners, searches on travel sites and gas prices sites as family members try to get together for the holidays, and not to be overlooked will be all the retail consumer goods searches to the large retail sites. And let’s not overlook all things football and sports related.

Cheryl C. Cigan
known.com
———-

comScore July 2008 search engine online market share report



From Chris Crum of WebProNews:

In research like that of ComScore’s, the information should not be taken as gospel. As PCWorld points out:

ComScore’s reports are not controversy-free. The company was criticized in April for a report on paid search clicks, as ComScore’s measurements rely mainly on online recruitment techniques, usually dismissed by traditional pollsters. The search market share report presented yesterday relies on a similar panel with ComScore’s controversial one from April…

That said, it doesn’t look like Google has any threat to its search market share, and with their current push into the mobile sector, it is doubtful that any such threat will emerge in the foreseeable future.

Online Christmas Shopping - Tips for Holiday Internet Marketing

I just read a post by Jason Lee Miller full of some great tips for holiday marketing. I’m still enjoying the sand gathering on my sandals and he wants me to start thinking about Christmas on the Internet?

Jason wrote, “‘Tis the season already, so get moving.”

Yea, yea, yea, I hear you. I’ll get moving, from one comfortable chair on the deck to another. I read it, so does that mean somewhere in my psyche I’m ninety-percent of the way there (isn’t that the psychological reason why diet books and books on getting organized sell so well?) Well, actually, I did get some instant flashes of some fun things to do with some of my favorite Suttons Bay merchants and some of their products. But Jason, come on, I’m listening to the crickets chirping right now, and you want me to think about landing pages and link building?

Well, come to think of it, he’s right about the time needed to get the pages written, and getting the pages online so they can start to rank. Hmm, and the link building thing, Jason’s got a really good point there too. If I want the other merchants to link to these landing pages I’d better get them built and populated with products so the pages will start to rank because of all those inbound links. Sure, building Christmas shopping pages in August will be easy to implement. Ho-ho-ho!

I guess at this point it is just a matter of deciding on which products, the layout, and the keywords for all that great content. Again, Jason made a great point about how important the content actually is during the holiday shopping season. Jason wrote, “Not only will great content bolster your natural keywords, but it really helps customers make decisions and form trust.”

Adding coupons, free shipping, and an “easy to buy” shopping cart system will also help to increase sales. Another great idea is to ask your customers to tell their friends about their great shopping experience on your site with an easy online form. Oh yea, that’s what that word-of-mouth form of marketing is all about. Not quite viral, but definitely Web 2.0. Isn’t it?

And finally, location. Both online and in your hometown. Very important. Jason stressed the importance of location in this paragraph:

Location, location, location. If you have a physical presence, take advantage of online mapping and other local services. It may be hard to stand out in that big sea of online commerce, but it’s easy to stand out in your hometown. Make sure you target location-specific angles to help people just around the corner find you.

Yes, it is easy to stand out in your hometown. Known Books, the bookstore in Suttons Bay, Michigan certainly does - and has since 1996. Except now we’re down by the water, on the shores of Suttons Bay. That’s why I’ve still got sand gathering on my sandals! And we’re easy to find online as well in that big sea of online Suttons Bay commerce!

To read the entire article written by Jason Lee Miller about getting ready for the Christmas shopping season, and why it really is so important to start now, even with the crickets still chirping, please click on this link which will take you to his article on Christmas Holiday Marketing.

Cheryl C. Cigan
known.com

SEO and Internet Marketing: It’s All About the Words

LaTimes.com Credits SEO As Traffic Winner
By Jason Lee Miller - Thu, 08/07/2008 - 1:07pm.

And takes one more evolutionary step. . .

Tech-pundits have droned on for years that print is dead. It sure started to seem that way this year, with report after report of lost newspaper revenue and subscribers. Cooler heads all along have countered the impending doom theory with the idea that nothing worth anything dies—it only evolves. The LA Times puts itself up an example of the latter idea.

In January, my “How Bloggers Will Save Journalism” piece got some attention, and was part of a series of columns pumped out over time advocating the evolve-or-die mantra. Print will die if print publications rely only on the print side of their business instead of incorporating all the new media at their disposal to boost readership, and therefore ad rates.

In July, thanks to a late push by the Los Angeles earthquake, latimes.com set a new record for pageviews: 127 million. What was the key to their success? Embracing and developing their options, for one, but also some nice search engine optimization.

In a posted memo to staff, executive editor Meredith Artley credits the traffic burst to increased SEO skill: “Latimes.com keeps getting better at SEO (search engine optimization), which means our stories are ranking higher in Google and other search engines. We are also performing better on sites like Digg.com. All that adds up to more exposure and more readership than ever before.”

In addition to posting the most-viewed articles, photos, and videos, Artley also directly credits the staff blogs as being a huge boost to said readership. Namely, Hero Complex, Geoff Boucher’s sci-fi blog led the charge.

But there was also something else new to the journalism world in the list of top ten most-viewed articles: the intrusion of the writer into a journalistic piece. In number ten, for example, an article about a study debunking the liberal media myth, James Rainey recounts his personal experience of readers accusing him of being unpatriotic and even French.

Sacre bleu, to resound the resounding cliché.

No journalism professor or editor 10-15 years ago would allow such personalization in an article. These days it seems understood and appreciated that the Fourth Estate comes down off of its high horse to meet and greet with the people.

Where are the reader comments on that article to plunge the LA Times fully into Journalism 2.0? Well, looks like they still have a little evolving to do in that respect, as do many other outlets—when journalism becomes a network of two-way streets, the evolution is complete.

An SEO tip, then, here is appropriate, since the Times is willing to lend an ear to a concept just three years ago was as esoteric as card-counting. Reader comments help build your keywords and all you have to do is prompt the reader to speak their mind. They’ll likely insult you in the process, which is how you pay for it, but often they add clarity, value, and sometimes even compliments on your work or thoughts.

The Known Source of this article: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/08/07/latimescom-credits-seo-as-traffic-winner

Internet Marketing - Have Content and Ads Ready When Internet Users Want to Learn about Your Products and Services

AlmondNet Likes Taste Of Behavioral Targeting
By David A. Utter - Fri, 08/08/2008 - 1:56pm.

Ad relevance can be better, even with boundaries

Any ad server can drop an advertisement in front of an Internet user, but AlmondNet wants that opportunity to be relevant as well as timely.

The typical Internet user spends 5 percent of their time online expressing purchase intent behavior. Mike Benedek, VP at behavioral targeting tech firm AlmondNet, also told WebProNews in a phone interview how such users spend 90 percent of their time browsing at content related to that intent.
—————–
Known Note:

I’ve been thinking about how Mike Benedek’s comments mirror what is on known.com’s main page. I spent a great deal of time on Sunday thinking about the words each strata of the internet marketing industry has found to say the same thing! And every time I read something which is well written I regret that I didn’t write it first!

Of course if I used Mike’s phrases with some of my clients I think they would look at me and nod their heads and later ask someone, “What did she say?”

Are you familiar with Hubspot? I had the pleasure recently to have a conversation with Buck Flather after I used their WebsiteGrader service. I tried to explain to him that they were the “luxury car” version of what we do. HubSpot is about “Inbound Marketing.”

On the other hand, in my world, in conversations with business owners and merchants I usually make a comment about how more and more people know more about them than they realize because internet users are doing their research on the prospect first. Then I ask them, “Are they finding you?” Because we all know they are looking.

To illustrate, this is the lead content from known.com:

It Used to Be:

Target Your Market
Let Your Market Target You Back.
Not any more.

Today, your market is looking for you first, on the internet. Forty-three percent of internet users are actively searching for product information according to the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.

Are they finding your business?
Are they finding your website?

Does your web presence and the information directing prospects to your website appear in the top search engine results rendered?

Are you providing enough information to prospects about your business, products and services for them to consider becoming a customer of yours? Even more important, do you know the words prospects use to find you?

I think I’m getting my point across about “expressing purchase intent behavior” and “browsing at content related to that intent.”

At least I hope I am!

Cheryl C. Cigan
www.known.com
—————–

They aren’t always being served with what might fit best for them as far as advertising goes when they do. The online ad business suffers as well; although premium ad placements generate substantial CPM rates, Benedek said plenty of ads go on display elsewhere for much less than $1/CPM.

This represents the significant challenge for ad networks, in monetizing all across their reach rather than at a handful or less of peak sites. To do better, behavioral targeting promises better relevance in ad delivery across the Internet.

Some verticals, like auto and travel, experience success now with behavioral targeting, even though Benedek classified the field as being in the first or second inning of a long ball game. The market is evolving toward a profile-based medium, he said.

When it gets there, advertisers will be able to buy faces, after a fashion, rather than spaces for ads. Given last year’s heightened awareness of behavioral targeting, we asked just how much of a face such an approach might get.

Benedex said AlmondNet, like its fellow Network Advertising Initiative members, fully complies with principles and opt-out processes aimed at keeping personally identifiable information out of the mix of details used for behavioral targeting.

In its place comes non-persistent cookies, expiring after a period of time, that help deliver the targeted ad to people across an ad network as they travel from place to place. Time sensitivity matters greatly in complementing relevance, as a more recent site visit may indicate stronger intent to buy.

To avoid the big hammer of federal regulation, AlmondNet and others will adhere to meaningful and enforceable self-regulation, like working only with partners who scrub personally identifiable info out of data used to build behavioral targeting solutions.

Gaining consumer trust will go a long way toward progress in behavioral targeting. People very much want to see content related to their interests, and advertising falls into that space.

The Known Source of this article: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/08/08/almondnet-likes-taste-of-behavioral-targeting

Call Your Friends and Apologize First - Then Let the Spam Rip

Tagged.com: Spam Your Friends
By Jason Lee Miller - Fri, 08/08/2008 - 12:57pm.

Fined Founder Still At It

If apologizing to friends, family, classmates, colleagues, acquaintances, and anybody who’s ever graced your email inbox is your thing, then signing up with “social networking” site Tagged.com is the way to go. Or, you could tell the FTC the site’s founder is still up to his old tricks.

This morning I received an email from someone on staff at the graduate school I attend, inviting me to join Tagged. Emails from this person are generally official program ones. For example, she would likely inform me of changes made on BlackBoard, where the user interface is about as intuitive as Braille at a drive-through ATM. It’s not unlikely, then, after enough complaints, that the program would decide on a different online community.

I hope that’s enough justification for my own stupidity as I ignored the trail of red flags leading me through Tagged’s signup process. I trusted the person sending me the mail enough to give it the benefit of the doubt and some information, and instead of my usual procrastination and skepticism about things like this, I proceeded hastily enough to miss the subsequent email of apology from the same source.

I wasn’t completely duped, though. Even if I did provide my Gmail password (this isn’t too uncommon when merging accounts, signing up for social media services, etc.), I didn’t allow Tagged to email my entire contact list it had imported. My entire contact list, just like everybody’s, is vast and includes not just friends, family, coworkers, and classmates, but also professional acquaintances, and even some people I generally despise (and the feeling’s mutual, I must contend). Instead of having to unselect hundreds of people one by one, Tagged, to its credit, allowed me to unselect the whole batch.

At least I hope that worked, because it’s not so clear if Tagged can be trusted. Still thinking this was for school purposes, I continued on through the sign-up process where I discovered, to my extreme discomfort, there were required information fields demanding personal information like my home address and my phone number. I wasn’t born yesterday, so I cursed my graduate school a little and told Tagged I lived at 1234 Nunyabizness Lane and gave them the number for the local Wal-Mart, if they would like to reach me. (Wouldn’t it be creepy if I were paged next time I went in there?)

Tagged knew that wasn’t a real street, so I changed it to the address of Ashland, the estate of “The Great Compromiser,” Henry Clay, where they could speak with the Congressman’s ghost, if they liked.

But then things got more personal. I didn’t count the pages, but they were numerous, that I had to keep clicking “pass” after viewing. Each page was offering some different promotion or survey, and each page asked for some deeply personal information: cell phone number this time, required, and my mother’s maiden name. Eventually, one can exit the spam labyrinth, but you have to be pretty resolved to believe that this isn’t the same page over and over, and that you won’t exit the loop until you sign up for something. I’m stubborn, so that’s to my credit. Finally, voila, I’m at my Tagged profile page where I can do all the same things I can do at any number of other social networking sites on the Internet. (Yawn.)

But what a weird choice of social networks my grad school had made!

I checked my email, and there was the apology. She hadn’t meant to send an invitation to everybody she’d ever met via email. Doh! I promptly canceled my Tagged account and when they had the nerve to say they were “bummed” and asked me why, I gave them a (very vulgar) piece of my mind.

My email password has also been changed.

It’s surprising Tagged didn’t ring a bell–this is my beat, after all–and a little research showed that I probably had seen the name before among lists of social networking also-rans that weren’t MySpace, Facebook, or Bebo. But Tagged claims to have 70 million members. Why hadn’t I heard more?

It’s not so hard to find other complaints online via numerous blog posts on the web, and Wikipedia’s entry is far from flattering, labeling Tagged.com a phishing scheme. Security firm Symantec has a forum post about them dating back to 2007, and doubts they are phishing for financial information, just personal information they can sell to third parties so Tagged’s valued members and everybody they know can be spammed and telemarketed to oblivion.

I went back to the site to see who was behind it. Usually, these companies have a shady history and I expected to see a company similar to Zango (fined by the feds) or Intermix, the checkered-past (and fed-fined) company behind MySpace. The pedigrees of the site founders and the venture capitalists funding it were actually very impressive and, dare I say, reputable. They hailed from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Oxford. The board of directors were associated with other big-name Internet and tech ventures like LinkedIn, PayPal, Apple and Fujitsu. They were backed by Allen Morgan at Mayfield, who’s backed Jobster, JotSpot, Snap, and Tribe.net.

With these resumes and portfolios, was I (and everybody else steamed about Tagged.com) just overreacting and assuming the worst? The mailing address was still worrisome: a PO box in San Francisco. Founder Greg Tseng’s bio on the management page seemed as benign as it was impressive. He also founded Avivon, which is difficult to find much info about, and a discount textbook seller at Harvard called flyingchickens.com. A PhD physicist, his list of accomplishments at Harvard and Standford is commendable—and hey!, a publication credit at Science.

You would have to find a brief speaker bio at the Authentication and Online Trust Alliance website to see mention of another company he founded, called Jumpstart Technologies. Interesting it wasn’t mentioned on Tagged.com’s management page. That might be because Jumpstart was fined nearly a million dollars in 2006 by the Federal Trade Commission for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

From the FTC’s March 2006 press release about Jumpstart:

“These defendants intentionally used personal messages as a cover-up for commercial messages,” said Lydia Parnes, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Deceptive subject lines and headers not only violate the CAN-SPAM Act, but also consumer trust.”

The FTC’s complaint alleges that Jumpstart offered free movie tickets to consumers in exchange for the names and e-mail addresses of five or more of their friends. Jumpstart then sent them commercial e-mails with the consumer’s e-mail address in the “from” line and a seemingly personal “subject line,” such as, “Hey,” “Happy Valentine’s Day,” “Happy New Year,” “Movie time. Let’s go.,” or “Invite.” Jumpstart also made it look as if the consumer had written the message text. In this way, Jumpstart’s commercial e-mails circumvented certain spam filters and were opened by consumers who thought they contained personal correspondence.

Well, we can see that the regulatory slap on the wrist really meant something to Tseng and persuaded him to change his business model.

In the comments of one blog post complaining about Tagged, someone suggests readers contact the site’s investors to complain. Likely, that won’t do much—spam is lucrative. We suggest consumers concerned about privacy and spam fill out this FTC complaint form instead.

The Known Source of this article: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/08/08/taggedcom-spam-your-friends

Internet Marketing - Email is Now the Most Popular Form of Direct Response Marketing - What Would Robert Collier Say?

Email can provide significant brand impact across each of the key branding metrics, including brand favorability. And when it comes to direct response, email is the most effective and most widely used form of direct response marketing, beating out traditional direct mail.

————–
Known Note:
You have to wonder about Robert Collier. What would he think of this new medium? Would he have excelled as an Email Marketing Authority as well?

Didn’t he begin with a simple two-cent stamp?

Cheryl C. Cigan
known.com
————–

Brandweek recently published the results of an annual marketing survey conducted by Direct Partners, New York. This news should be exciting to the number of brands that are increasingly adopting email and other forms of online advertising to their multi-channel marketing mix.

The survey of large US corporations finds that “email is used primarily by 35% of companies compared to 25% which use traditional direct mail and 21% who use package, statement stuffers or free standing inserts.” The study complements direct agency and brand case studies that detail the impact of email as both an acquisition and branding channel.

Among the findings, the study reveals:
• 68% market to their prospect database
• 82% market to their customer database
• 57% said their direct response budget will remain the same this year compared to last, while 23% reported their budget would increase by 10% or higher
• 47% said that less than 10% of their marketing budget went to direct response media

For more information on Email Marketing visit Datran Media

Internet Marketing - Dynamic Logic Shows Email Increases as Top Branding Tool

The Inbox as a Branding Tool
Research Reveals Email Increases Brand Favorability and Awareness

Marketers know that email can be a great direct response channel, encouraging consumers to take immediate action and help boost sales, but few thought of email as a powerful branding medium.

Until now.

A new study conducted by Dynamic Logic shows inbox advertising can provide significant branding benefits in addition to the acquisition strengths typically attributed to the media channel.

The study, conducted with Datran Media and eHarmony, reveals that inbox advertising made 37.7 percent of people aware of one of the tested campaigns. These people otherwise would not have been aware of it. In addition, unaided brand awareness increased 11.5 percentage points, and brand favorability increased 7.3 percentage points.

The results counter mainstream characterizations of inbox advertising as an acquisition-only vehicle. More than many other channels, inbox advertising gives companies the ability to deliver highly targeted messages to opt-in consumers. Because it significantly increases the chances of delivering the right message to the right consumer at the right time, inbox advertising can have the additional benefit of creating a more favorable impression of the company’s brand.

“Until now, marketers hypothesized that the key role of inbox advertising was an acquisitive one, and there was no formal research to verify the branding benefits,” said Jason Oates, vice president of media services for Datran Media. “This study makes it clear that inbox advertising provides significant brand impact across each of the key branding metrics, including brand favorability. This applies to both contextual ad inclusions and targeted stand-alone branded acquisition-focused email advertising.”

eHarmony’s CEO, Greg Waldorf, echoed Oates’ remarks and added, “These results show that email campaigns are not only an effective customer acquisition vehicle, but also are supporting and enhancing consumer impressions of the eHarmony brand.”

To view more specific results and to read more information about email branding visit Datran Media at http://www.datranmediabrandstudy.com.

Other sites of interest include Internet Marketing
Internet Review Sites