Finally, the day has come. I have been waiting patiently for 11 months to share this with you. Meet; Red Bull Stratos

Wow. It has been forever since we’ve updated this site, however, I just remembered my login information. I was talking with some friends of mine last night about blogs, my friend Brandon Jones & Andi Elloway both have their little on-line blog zone thing-a-ma-jigs, so i figured i’d get mine back up and moving.

Hello world. A lot has happened since we last spoke. I moved into a new position at Red Bull, moved to a new city and am continuing to learn, hustle, party and progress everyday. I have met dozens of new, rad people in my new town and life is generally good. Today is a good day for me personally, as the project I worked on for months last year has finally hit the air waves.

Check out below: Red Bull Riders Cup. School of Surf aired on MTV2 this morning and will continue for the next 6 weeks, pay attention, you may see your dude get some facetime on screen sucka!!

Here is a presentation from Paul Marobella - Managing Director of Wirestone/Chicago a Marketing Solutions Company that works with global brands (like Oakley, Nike and dozens of other market leading brands) to deliver targeted customer experiences - that shows how top athletes are engaging into Social Media with examples from Lance Armstrong, Michael Phelps and of course the Flying Tomato Shaun White.

And just in case you dont understand what the below post is about, then heres a little demo. Follow my lead, don’t worry, I won’t let you down.

1. Reach into your pocket
2. grab your phone and get ready to text
3. text “BRANDONBROWN” to the number 50500
4. set your phone down.
5. wait for it…
6. wait for it…
7. Boom! You should receive a SMS / Text message with all of my contact information.
8. Give me a ring, let’s talk business.

Hey guy, hey girl, why you living in 2006? it’s 2009 - wake up, get with the program. Go green, save a tree, go digital with your business cards. How often are you out and about, start talking with someone who you think has the possibility to provide some value to you down the line - go to do a business card swap, add onto your network and bammm, no business cards with you. Well, it might not happen to you (because you dont have job, bum) but it happens to me. Contxts.com is here to save you, and this service is pretty damn rad.

Contxts is so much more than a professional social network. It’s a way to make meaningful connections while out and about. Business cards are so 2007. What with the environment in shambles do you really want to be that guy who is handing out chopped up pieces of bleached trees? We here at Contxts.com think that our site will solve this problem and more. By using SMS, built into every mobile phone, you can easily and rapidly distribute your credentials.

- Exchange all of your professional information with a single text message
- Keep all of your professional contacts organized in one place
- It’s eco-friendly (txt messages don’t kill polar bears)
- Rid yourself of “old school” business cards
- Link with other professionals

So I am quite sure that all of you saw the inauguration this morning but if you didn’t, not to worry Sunday Never Comes is here to quench your inaugural thirst. 

So whether you be a Republican, Democrat, Independent, or any other party, he is OUR President now so let’s all gather behind him and support him… as most of us did for the 43rd President… Even when he blew.

Ever been cruising through the internet, checking out redtube or some other informative website and you come across a word you have no idea what it means? or maybe you want to translate it to french so you can impress your girlfriend? you know - what does “POV” mean? Well now, luckily, someone has answered your prayres. The Hyperwords Company has created “The tool that is so useful you’ll wonder how you ever manged without it.” so read on and peep game foool.

Some believe that this “Hyperwords” Firefox plug-in could change the way people browse, discover and aggregate information. Currently when one reads text online only certain words are hyperlinked for more information. But with the Hyperwords plug-in, every word becomes a hotlink, thus creating an even more immersive web experience. Users can highlight a word and choose from options to search, seek references, translate, shop, even map.

For a demo (in firefox, if you dont have firefox and are for some odd reason using IE go puke on yourself) click here: http://www.easierweb.info

To watch a demo click play on this nifty video;

Hey there little fella, did I confuse you? Let me re iterate…… you ever feel like youre addicted to myspace? Logging in multiple times a day to see what your 15 year old neighbor is up to with her and her friends. Shopping around at the mall, catching up on her teen vogue gossip. Well fear no more, as now, there is a reason for you to be wasting away all your time on social networking sites. Perhaps you thought only teeny boppers, extroverts with no friends “off line” and pedophiles cared about how many friends they had on social networking sites such as facebook and myspace. Well think again - Google cares too.

The word on the street is this: Google is going to start “ranking” social networking users according to how influential they are. The most influential users on a social network, as determined by a predetermined equation, something such as # of friends x logins x posts a day x how many people read your posts will be strategically chosen to display google adwords on their profiles.

This is happening, and is true. Google recently applied for a patent on the technology and given their track record with discovering ingenious ways on how to monetize online advertising - it only seems fitting this a step forward with their heavy user-targeted-ad-buy-relevant-content-to-everyone strategy…..or something like that.

In a nutshell the web giant will apply this technology to rank search results on certain online personalities in an attempt to sell advertising on their respective profiles.

Patent application documents published this year show the company has devised a system to “rank” users of social networking sites depending on how influential they are.

Users would be given a rating based on how many people visited their profile, how many friends they had, how active they were, which groups they were a member of and so on.

The most popular users in a community, dubbed “influencers” by Google, would then be singled out to have advertisements displayed on their profile.

“The number of advertisements displayed on a profile depends on the rank of the member within the community,” reads one example of how the system would work.

A spokesperson for Google played down the application and said the company filed plans for many ideas but did not act on all of them.

“We file patent applications on a variety of ideas that our employees come up with. Some of those ideas later mature into real products or services, some don’t,” said Google Australia spokesman Rob Shilkin.

“Prospective product announcements should not necessarily be inferred from our patent applications.”

The patent application was revealed in July after being kept under wraps for 18 months in line with the US Patent and Trademark Office’s pre-grant publication rules.

The office has published 69 applications for patents filed by Google so far this year, containing ideas ranging from smart billboards that could display products available in nearby stores to floating data centres that draw power from waves.

The 15-page document on social networking ranking details a series of methods to determine a user’s influence that go beyond simply counting how many friends they have.

For example, a user who acted as a conduit between different groups of people would be ranked higher than one who had more friends belonging to just one circle.

“Factors such as member interactions, content on member profiles, dynamically changing size of the community and the like establish a hierarchy within a community where certain members are more popular than others and, consequently, wield enhanced influence over other members,” the application says.

The application also mentions the possibility of using PageRank, the system Google uses to rank search results, to determine the influence of each user in a community.

If adopted, the system could give Google an edge over rival Microsoft in controlling advertising on social networking sites.

Microsoft currently has a deal to provide ads for market leader Facebook, in which it owns a small stake, while Google has a partnership with MySpace.”

Playboy Mexico’s Holiday issue has sparked a bit of a controversy, Model María Florencia Onori from Argentina is on the cover bearing a striking resemblance to Mary… Jesus’s Mom. The title on the cover says:  ”Te Adoramos María,” the Spanish — “We adore you, Mary”. This was published last week on the exact date when millions of Mexicans celebrate the festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Very important, not only for Mexicans but for all Latino-Americans. Playboy of course denies any correlation between the magazine cover and Mary or the festival. The publisher for Playboy Mexico said: ”The image is not and never was intended to portray the Virgin of Guadalupe or any other religious figure.” 

Now the Catholic Church and others are calling this a desperate attempt to sell magazines. I don’t find this desperate though, I find it to be a regular marketing ploy. Businesses use all of our holidays to sell their products. I guess my thing is, if you don’t like what they are doing, don’t buy it. Fact is they are doing nothing illegal and Hugh Hefner is The Man. Period. 

On a different note about old Hugh, he shipped out his 3 tramps and moved in two knockout twins… Who I imagine are also tramps, God he is the man.

So the stage was set for Guns N Roses last week to proclaim their spot back on top as an elite rock band and Dr. Pepper took notice because they too have waited like many fans for over a decade for the release of Chinese Democracy. So Dr. Pepper in a very smart marketing scheme decided to offer a free 20 oz soda on Nov. 23rd the release date of Chinese Democracy (Dr. Pepper also claims to have 23 flavors…AHHHH.) Thats right folks you get a free Dr. Pepper and you don’t even have to go waste $10.99 on the new G’N & R album. Sounds pretty good eh? Except something happened. We all love free shwag so everyone flooded the Dr. Pepper website and crashed the server forcing many coupon clippers not to receive the free coupon. So G’N & R turns around and sues Dr. Pepper. HUH? EXCUSE ME? G’N & R demands a public apology and monetary returns for fans…..yea Axl like your fans are ever going to see a dime. I can’t wait to see how this story unfolds.