Believe it or not, it was Matthew Inman, creator of the oatmeal web comic (http://theoatmeal.com) that brought the fact that there is a campaign to purchase Tesla’s Wardenclyffe laboratory on Long Island NY and turn it into a museum dedicated to Tesla to my attention...

The badassery of this happening is obvious.

So I am here to do my part, besides emailing a bunch of people and donating already I am writing this in the hopes you do the same. The $850k goal is just to purchase the property. Its my hope the people that check this site out will donate and also spread the word so that not only will the property be purchased, but also raise above and beyond to get the funding for the actual museum as well.

Here is Inmans post on it:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_museum

Here is the indiegogo campaign:
http://www.indiegogo.com/teslamuseum

Now, if you want to donate but fear your wife/husband/significant other will kill you for doing so, you can send a check for a tax-deductible donation directly to:

Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe
P.O. Box 552
Shoreham, NY 11786

So yeah. THATS a good comeback for an ensuing argument, eh?
"Sorry I dropped $X on this idea, but dont worry, we will get it back later! Relax!"
Well, its what Im going for at least.

All of this as per:
http://www.teslasciencecenter.org

FOR SCIENCE! LIGHTNING-Y SCIENCE!!
Internets, to the rescue!

As per:
http://blog.wpkg.org/2012/07/01/java-le ... -2012-fix/
QUOTE:
If your java applications suddenly started to use 100% CPU, you’ve hit java leap second bug.

First, you may check if you have the following in your dmesg:


[10703552.860274] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

Fortunately the fix is straightforward:

/etc/init.d/ntp stop
date `date +"%m%d%H%M%C%y.%S"`

You don’t have to restart your java applications (tomcat, wowza, or whatever using java); it should be enough to run the above commands.

You may want to enable ntp the next day (there were some reports that enabling it makes java misbehave on some installations).

Apparently this issue has knocked down lots of Linux servers running Debian, Ubuntu, CentOs and the like around the globe!
/QUOTE

Helped me quite a bit. Thought it may help you.

Moar.
http://blog.wpkg.org/2012/07/01/java-le ... -2012-fix/
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/ ... conds.html
http://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html

As previously noted, I needed to pick up votes. I noticed that the same 10 to 20 groups were consistantly in the top rankings. This is impressive, considering there are literally thousands of groups.

Needless to say I check out their profiles to see what they were doing to garner such success.
What I found surprised me.

Their success seemed to be related to way the website is laid out.

If you look at a groups profile page, for example, heres mine - http://warped.battleofthebands.com/u/OfficialVerde - You will notice that on the bottom it shows recent votes and recent fans - and gives a thumbnail for each.
What these top bands were doing was to vote and fan other bands (initally that were not in direct competition with them) and by doing so, they got some visiblity on those bands profiles.
What would happen is that all the traffic those other bands were pushing toward their profile, after intially voting to help out their buddies or whatever there were all these other things to look at, so a few would click on them and listen to a song or something. This lead to more song plays, which brings that bands rankings up a bit higher. Also, the bands that got voted for often would return the favor by also voting for the other band.

It was kind of the same concept as an impulse item at a supermarket checkout line, where they put the candy, chapstick, and other stuff you really dont go to the store to buy but if its sitting there in front of you after the fact, you tend to buy it.

Very interesting.

So of course, I tried it out.
Yes, it worked. I had many many bands voting for us over a day or so.
Cool.

This however was not really helping anything. I noticed that many of the bands that were voting for us didnt even play a single song.

It was solely a promotional move - and it felt kind of spammy.

After pushing on facebook and twitter and such, even releasing new songs as a way to garner interest (as I mentioned in my first post) we were averaging about 50 to 60 votes a day, which included the other bands voting for us self-promotionally. I was lacking in interest, and effectiveness... and even effectiveness.

I needed something. Something to garner as much interest and excitement as I was feeling about watching my band rise through the rankings.

... and I think I found it.

I took to facebook and rather than posting something like 'We need your vote' or 'please vote for us' I changed the format a little bit.

I posted the following:

We are only 15 votes away from being listed on the front page! Sign up and vote now! HURRY! http://warped.battleofthebands.com/u/OfficialVerde

... and I killed the thumbnail to the link as well.

A few people voted. I made some phone calls, sent a few emails and text messages and we made the front page. This wasnt exactly the way this was supposed to work. Sure enough, in about 5 minutes we got bumped off the main page.

I took to facebook again anyway and posted (again with no thumbnail):

YOU GUYS DID IT! We made the 1st page! U GUYS ROCK! VOTE FOR VERDE - This is why its called a BATTLE of the bands http://warped.battleofthebands.com/u/OfficialVerde

This comment took off a bit. likes, shares, comments... in other words - ENGAGEMENT.

That engagement translated to votes. Within an hour we were ranked #1 in local (NY) bands, jumped 20 spots up (in NY) and landed in the top daily votes overall. Votes were flying in. We hit our previous daily vote average before lunchtime. As more of our fans voted and our rankings rose, more bands voted for us as well in order to try to capitalize on our success in making the front page and we gained momentum.

Awesome.
So why the sudden outpour after 5 days?

I think what made the difference in engagement was not so much the message, but how it was presented.

I offered a goal. A realistic goal. We need 15 votes. I believe people thought, hey I could help with that... and some did.

What made the big difference was the last post. Heres how it differed from the others that didnt get much engagement:
I didnt ask for anything.
I gave a thanks (made them feel good, "promoted" them instead of us)
Showed that a goal was accomplished (sense of accomplishment, unity)

Those reasons gave people a reason to share it with others. A kind of "Look what I did" type of thing.

This experiment is leading me to believe that all social media is really nothing else than a form of self promotion, whether you realize it or not.

Now I have to figure out how to capitalize on that.

Meanwhile, links:
http://warped.battleofthebands.com/u/OfficialVerde
http://warped.battleofthebands.com/home.eb
http://warped.battleofthebands.com/artists/bands.eb
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Verde/220705967971861

Im keeping this short and sweet.

Speaking about ACTA, EU commissioner Karel De Gucht said:



(as per http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAct ... ormat=HTML)

So yeah.
I mean, what else can you even say about that.

Heres where I saw it:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201206 ... week.shtml

Good luck, Europe. Sounds like you're going to need it.