Sam I Am's Blog

I'm going to start doing posts of interesting ideas/sites I come across every now and then on my personal blog. This is the first...

The guys from The Big Word Project have a massive hit on their hands! The moment I saw the site I shot off an email to Peter saying "next million dollar homepage right here". I found out about it yesterday courtesy of my favourite (non travel) blog, Daring Fireball.

Quoting "John Gruber @ DF"

New viral web site “dictionary” from Paddy Donnelly and Lee Munroe, two students in Northern Ireland. The gimmick is simple: pick any word you want, pay $1 per letter, and you get to “define” that word as a link to your web site. I bought two.

I was rather quick to the party as there were about 500 words 'defined' when I first visited the site. I picked up 10 or so really nice words, so was quite lucky. 24 hours later there's over 1600 words. That's a good 1000 words, let's say at 6 letters per word average. 6000 dollars to Paddy and Lee in 24 hours and they are only just getting started!! This site is going to get a lot of publicity and press, both on- and offline. I don't doubt that for a minute and then just watch the sale of words skyrocket. I'm not kidding when I say I think they're going to have at least 75 000 words defined by the end of March. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if it was 150 000!

There's still some really short words left, but you can bet all the good ones are going fast (although not as fast as they would be if all the big name SEO weren't partying it up at SMX, hehehe). Brilliant really because the more short ones are gone the more people will be spending. At the moment they won't let you change the link you enter when you buy a word, but imagine if they start allowing that. Words like 'travel' and 'hotels' (yes, that's one of ours, yay!) could get a really nice price on auction if this takes off in any way near what I imagine. Heck, if Paddy and Lee didn't feel they were making enough money they could even charge for changing URL's

It's extremely rare to see such a brilliantly simple idea executed so well. Keep an eye out for about a thousand clones in the next few months!

Is it just me or does this video give you goose-bumps? It was done by Will from the Black Eyed Peas and has been watched at least 4 or 5 million times on Youtube already over the past ten days or so. I can tell you that from the perspective of someone outside of the US (and being half American) it really looks like there is already no other candidate for president - and this video more or less seals the deal. In fact it seems like the hardest bit will actually be getting the Democratic nomination. But there's just something about this Obama guy....

I actually kind of feel sorry for any Republicans running this time around because both the remaining Democratic options seem at least 10x better. Then again I guess any realistic Republican knew that there was no way a Republican was getting elected after the last 8 years.

Mil and Suz came over for the weekend and brought a rather LARGE box of lego which kept Malia (and the rest of us) busy for hours

At DOGA they were exhibiting this revolutionary new mask for mine clearers. It's surprisingly light. I certainly don't envy that job, no matter how cool the mask looks!!

To the Munch museum on Friday. For anyone heading over to Oslo, it's FREE entry till the 1st of April. Of course they're still at work restoring the 'Scream' that was stolen a few years ago but one of the two pastel versions is hanging. The National Gallery has the other oil version of the Scream (there's two pastel and two oil versions) if you just have to see it.

Then there was some skiing at Tryvann on Saturday.

A stroll in the Botanical Gardens on Sunday.

Better late than never, here's some pics from a white xmas in Morgedal. Personally I think Santa was looking pretty good this year

It looks like our video provider might still have some issues with sound on the 3gp format, but other than that the uploading seems to be working a-ok My favourite subject on the swing, her current favourite outdoor activity: