Oracles take-over lead to a few developers from the OOo-project to leave and found a new project. They took what source they could and created a free office-package that isn’t tied to Java the way OOo was under Suns reign of virtual machine terror.

On Linux at the moment, I figured I might as well just delete OOo and install Libre immediately and have it out of the way.

So, I downloaded the correct build for me here (i take the stable builds, i’m not as adventorous as some others out there): http://www.libreoffice.org/download . I picked deb-packages, x64 since I’l on Linux Mint 9 64bit. I also picked a langpack and a helppack seeing as how I’m Swedish and all that.

Next step was to uninstall OpenOffice, i issued this in the terminal:

sudo apt-get remove openoffice*.*

Which promptly removed all OOo-packages (I hope).

Next, I unpacked the .tar-balls I downloaded from libreoffice.org under the downloads-library, and went on to install it:

sudo dpkg -i LibO_3.3.0rc4_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/DEBS/*.deb

After that I installed the desktop integration like so:

sudo dpkg -i LibO_3.3.0rc4_Linux_x86-64_install-deb_en-US/DEBS/desktop-integration/libreoffice3.3-debian-menus_3.3-6_all.deb

And finally install the swedish langpack …

sudo dpkg -i LibO_3.3.0rc4_Linux_x86-64_langpack-deb_sv/DEBS/*.deb

I found an old, retired harddrive the other day. It’s not broken or anything, it’s just old. I retired the drive in 2006, and I’ve scribbled “IM stuff” on it. There’s 120gb or something worth of IM material (books, courses, software, scripts, you name it) purchased and collected between 2000 and 2006 on it. If I were to connect it and go through the stuff on it, how much would you be willing to bet that a lot of the things I bought back then that was considered good practice in IM, would be frowned upon today and in some cases might even be considered illegal in some countries?

Would you bet against me if I said that some of the stuff from back then is being re-used (if somewhat reworded) in products released over the last 1-2 years?

Forcing people to sign up for a mailing list before allowing them to download a product they’ve just purchased and paid in full, stuffing their browsers with 3rd part cookies on the sales page, putting up popups that are virtually unclosable if a signup form is not filled in, hidden continuity, forced continuity, content scrapers and spinners, hiding adsense behind menus to get the click, ads that are placed on top of content … We all know that all of the things I mentioned are not just shady, they’re down right unethical. Yet it is what was being taught as solid IM tactics. And in some cases, still is.

How long do you think a brick and mortar company would stay open if they employed these tactics in the offline world? How long do you think some reputable online companies such as Amazon, eBay, Buy.com would stay in business if they employed these same tactics?

But in the IM business, since everybody’s a marketer selling to other marketers, these were and in some cases still are, acceptable methods of doing business.

Now, back to Mikes post … Mike lists among others, the following points as the important internet business trends for 2011 (I’m only listing the bullets I wish to add my own thoughts to):

1. The live seminar trend has seen its peak, and they are becoming increasingly unprofitable. 2011 will see this trend die.

Thankfully. I’m not saying seminars are bullshit, seminars can be kick-ass too, but I don’t see how they are relevant in the IM business. I’ve been to seminars on various different subjects that have interested me, on everything from advertising, new technology and programming, to “talking to cats”, “the spirit world” and horticulture. Some have been free (when it’s free, you know you’re going to be pitched) and some I’ve had to pay for (everything from $10 to $250).

IM seminars, however, are a completely different beast. You pay $2000 (sometimes more, seldom less) to listen to some jack-off pitching his new $5000 membership, and afterwards you get to mingle with 200 IM-nerds all trying to pitch their own stuff.

No, thank you. I will not go. Happy to see this trend go, I hope Mike is right.

2. People are finding out that a large follower list on Twitter and thousands of friends on facebook isn’t pulling in the cash on autopilot as previously promised.

I agree. The first facebook-related product I purchased promised a fortune if following the steps. All it really showed you was how to set up an account, and then vaguely explaining that you could advertise your crap with facebook social ads. Oh. Really?

During 2010 I’ve seen a lot of products pushing really unethical methods of making money on Facebook with CPA advertising programs, forcing people to complete various surveys, downloading spyware, sending obtrusive facebook mail and invites, to see what you have on the fanpage. Some products actually recommended that you did not put up any content, but instead put your energy on making more of these scam fan-pages.

All of the twitter-products I’ve seen have been total bullcrap as well. “Build a large follower-list and push your affiliate offers or products to your followers”. Oh yeah? Really? How do I build the list then? “Buy this software that automatically adds 10000 followers per day, on autopilot!”. What you end up with, is an account you never log in to, that sends out automatic messages to 10’000 other marketers, who never log in and see what you’re tweeting. So basically, you don’t see their promotions, they don’t see your promotions. In the off-chance that you actually have a real person following you, by the 4th promo-tweet in 1 hour, that real person is no longer following you.

Get real, people. Get social. Stop pushing the magic button, all it does is flush.

4. Governments crack down on unethical, immoral and illegal practices

Mike argues that US government agencies will get increasingly active during 2011 and start cracking down on businesses acting questionable. I friggin hope so! Have you noticed how over the last few months a couple of gurus who not only used unethical methods and practices but also encouraged others to do so, suddenly did a complete 180 and started preaching ethics? Some one who once promoted a course teaching how to fraud people by using hidden, forced continuity with low price front end offers, suddenly tells everyone that it’s unethical and bad business practice … Hmmm .. Did the FTC knock on your door, you-know-who-I-mean?

Mike mentions that a couple of people who are currently under investigation might lose their businesses in 2011. I hope so.

I also hope that all marketers affiliated with the disgusting boiler rooms get a pitchfork up their asses! (this links to the Salty Droid, if you are not a fan, please don’t click it, otherwise you will learn who uses these thieves)

While Internet Marketing (not “marketing on the internet”, but the “make money online”-niche) has always been somewhat shady, over the last 2-3 years it has become down right filthy. Let’s hope 2011 will mark a new beginning!

Demo: check the bottom of the posts on this blog

Here’s the code:

<?php

/*

Plugin Name: myQuotesWP

Version: 0.5

Plugin URI: http://www.scripttricks.com

Description: Adds a famous quote to the end of all blog posts

Author: Bjorn

Author URI:

*/

function file_get_contents_curl($url) {

$ch = curl_init();

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);

$data = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);

return $data;

}

function fetch_quote($content) {

if(! is_feed() && ! is_page()) { // dont want it showing on anything but posts

$content .= file_get_contents_curl(“http://www.scripttricks.com/qu1/getquote.php”);

}

return $content;

}

add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘fetch_quote’);

?>

Save the code as “myQuotesWP.php”, copy it into your plugins-folder, activate and you’re ready to go. If you make any improvements on it or tweak, don’t hesitate to let me know, I enjoy seeing what others do with my code

download: myQuotesWP (532B) added: 03/12/2010 description: Grabs a famous quote from scripttricks.com and adds it to the end of your posts. Unzip into your wp-content/plugins-folder, activate and you're set.

I’ve myself used jEdit (http://www.jedit.org) for years and years and years, because not only does it do everything i want it to, there’s also an almost perverse number of plugins that does everything, from chatting on irc, playing tic-tac-toe and everything else you can think of. Plus it’s free and multi-platform.

Last few months it’s felt like jEdit has gotten a bit slow on my machine, so i figured I would try out some other applications. I’ve tried about 9 or 10 or perhaps even eleven, but I only have two editors left on the system (besides jEdit).

First up is intype. Intype is ridiculously fast on my machine not to mention the fact that it looks real good. It also has an awesome feature called “Bundles” which basically means you start typing the first part of your block, hit the tab and intype finishes the block and you fill in the details. I haven’t gotten used to it yet, but in the long run I think it’s going to save a lot of time … intype is free for the time being, but the developers have been open about it having a price when it leaves the beta stage.

After intype, i found an awesome little program called “Bend”. There has been ridiculous rumors floating around that this is a product from Microsoft, but that’s not true. Below is an image of the settings screen, which animates into view when invoked.

The editor itself is quite minimalistic, loads decently fast and is a total pleasure to work with. The system for keeping track of open tabs could be better, but in the grand general scheme of everything, it rocks.

Bend has sadly disappeared of the face of the planet, website deleted and noone saved down the source, so we’re all anxiously waiting to hear from the original author. I’ve managed to find a zipped install though, that i’ll share with you.

Visit intype HERE and download intype HERE

Download Bend HERE

Apparently, Matt’s success here in life is selling his first company and walking away with millions. Hooray! Now, Matt has a new goal in life, he’s gonna teach anyone ready to be sucked in for a thou how they can be successfull online. Because clearly, that’s what Matt is good at. Selling a software company. Online. Marketing. Magical Bullet. Dreaming the Wealth… It feels like you understood what I was trying to there, so I’m gonna stop it.

Now, Matt launched and you have to take pity on him because he wasn’t prepared for the number of signups. Matt was prepared steal from maybe 25-30 peope, but it ended up in 300. Other businesses would have hired extras and gotten the show on the road. But not Matt. Matt became so overwhelmed that after sending 2 mails (first one telling how flabbergasted he was, and second one asking what his subscribers could teach him) he went away on a 4 month vacation. Or so he claims. Or whatever trolls are using his mail account. Naturally sending 300 mails when you expected 25-30 is a bit more time consuming, so a vacation may well have been needed.

After several months Matt shows up again as if he never left. He then start attemptimg to deliver, only to fail miserably. Several people scream angrily for refunds since Matt has either planned all-along to screw’em over, or he’s simply to retarded to give them what they paid for. 6 months before.

There will be no more testings of products aimed at people looking for “PushButtonWealth” . For the full time I haven’t been around, I haven’t purchased a single one of those. The “Making Internet Moolah Formula” has nothing to do with marketing crappy, outdated free information at a high price to a clueless individual who uptil recently believed Al Gore invented “teh interwebz”.

When people buy the stuff for $2000 they quicklig realise they need a $4000 seminar to teach them how to use their $2000-system. When at the seminar they meet people who wants to pitch them $1000-$1500 to superaccelerate the earnings from their $2000-system they’re on a $4000 seminar to learn how to use. And it goes on … And on …

And on. Until the they get back home, filled with the knowledge of “The Secret” and the “Law of attraction”. They set up the funnel and wait for their attitude and moneygrabbing state of mind to do the work for them. But it doesn’. Not a dime. Except that payment that got wrong.

They call up the designated call-center for the guru and are told “You are not utilising the power fully, there’s a disturbance in your chakras. If you want, I can set you up with a personal meeting with Guru Goorooh and he’ll help you work through it! only $10 000 for the first half hour”.

Read all above and then ask yourself, do you understand how Guru Gooroh becomes rich? Buy selling dreams, and chanting mumbo-jumbo and referencing to two of the most riddiculed cultural items in our history.

My marketing enedavours target smaller markets. No need to sell snake-oil or lie about obvious things. I get in there, hang around for a while, check out what they need and want, and go on an excursion to find it. Some times i tip people off using affiliate links, sometimes just the regular links. Sometimes (has happend more frequently last few months) i happen to have a fitting product or information in my collection, and I share it, Sometimes for a charge and sometimes for free. People like that. I like that.

If someone were to promote an infoproduct to me that seems to cater to my way or have insights on my markets, I’ll buy and review. Most of the stuff I push now is old plr-material (some dating back to ’06) that i add or subtract and rewrite to fit my needs better.

Every one doing business or hunting stats or whatever freaky combination you can think of – needs a linkmanager/tracker. 4 years ago I used a linktool of my own, called myAffiliateLinks, that filled all my needs at the time. I introduced it on a forum and some other places and people wanted to know how much i should charge. After pondering on it (and from some advice of the mentor) I said “nothing. you can have it for free, just give me your emailaddress and name). That crazy little script brought in a good list. I went in to business with an online-friend and we went on to other projects. For a lot of different reasons, some being mine, some being his and some being on completely other people, our cooperation faded out. We still talk from time to time. A good thing came from it though, I got to keep ScriptTricks.com for myself, and I intend to release my FREE stuff there.

So, myAffiliateLinks. Is no more. It’s place as my fav and only linkmanager will be taken over by faster, better and easier to use cousin AffiliateSidekick. Screeshots will be coming up as work progresses. AS will handle on-the-fly-campaign creation, detailed charts and statistics on your in<>out traffic, it will feature automatically created campaign-names and it turned out to be a mean, green, pizzamachine. Pizzamachine may be taken out without prior notice.

Oh, and I also deleted all my mailing lists. I haven’t mailed anything out (no offers, updates, personal letters, no nothing) for … I dunno. Over a year I suppose.

The reason I deleted my mailing lists (besides the obvious risk of subscribers having forgot my name and reporting me for spam) and deleted all posts and comments, you ask?

There is something rotten in the world of Internet Marketing.

There’s been a lot of discussion about a certain, angry little robotic blogger (the blogger in question is of course human. it’s called “playing a character”) stirring up the pot and blowing the whistle on the Old Boys Club (read: the “Internet Marketing Syndicate“) exposing their shady tactics, price fixing and how they’re robbing people blind. Now, rather than possibly having links to products created by people like the guys in this specific cartel, I decided to get rid of them, even if the links were contained within an article calling the product a fraud and asking for public execution of the author.

As I said, there’s something rotten in the world of IM at the moment, and I want no part of it.

I have been marketing online all this time though, just not to the IM-scene. Will keep up making money marketing, but will not get in to the “make money marketing make money-frauducts”-scene. Not a chance.

I’ve decided to simply keep doing the stuff I enjoy doing: Writing, coding and messing around with gfx. That’s what this blog will be focused on from now on. Me doing the stuff I most enjoy doing.

There will be some marketing-related stuff being announced on here soon, so stay tuned