To be honest, it seems like the whole project was rushed to completion, in stead of taking the time to finish all of its aspects. However, the disappointment made me look back into a time when Microsoft published what is possibly one of their most successful projects in my opinion. Back in 2002, in collaboration with Relic Entertainment, the Microsoft Game Studio managed to concoct an innovatory - and even a bit bizarre - real-time strategy game, which they dubbed Impossible Creatures.

I admit, the actual battles aren’t as glamorous as can be seen in other games, but the way in which you build your army is truly revolutionary. Instead of having an array of units to choose from, the game designers decided to create an interface that allows the user to build his own units by combining two separate species of animals. In fact, this was the only reason I had decided to try out the game, as I’d heard it would be very amusing to combine creatures from different extremes. When I finally did get the game, I realized I had used the correct keyword in my expectations: if anything, the game is very amusing.

The characters, the dialog and even the creatures themselves manage to lighten up the RTS genre by adding a certain humor to the game, one which seems to be lacking in modern-day games. Also, the ability to combine any two of around 50 creatures makes the game one of the most flexible ones I’ve encountered so far. Adapting your army to your style of play is as simple as taking one body part from one animal and adding it to another. Thusly, you get creatures that are either: light and fast/slow and bulky, good melee attackers/good ranged attackers, very effective in packs/stealthy and solitary etc.

The limit of the game’s design is rather the player’s imagination than the number of animals available and the game can therefor offer quite a few hours of serious fun. However, once you’ve finished the campaign, try battling your friends in multiplayer mode to see who came up with the best combinations possible! If nothing else, try the game just to see what goofy combinations you can come up with. You might just end up having a showcase army in no time flat.

The pace at which the traffic grew right from the beginning was amazing. That is because a lot of blogs and websites posted about Social Marker and Social Marker itself was posted on all of those social bookmarking sites. But the biggest traffic getter was Ed Dale from the Thirty Day Challenge. He sent out an email to over 10,000 people I believe. Thank you Ed for it!

All this burst of traffic required me to move to a new server which gave me a lot of headaches. I will talk about that in a post to come. Hopefully I won’t be having any more problems with the server.

The story about Social Marker got promoted to the homepage of Digg.com 13 days ago. That also gave Social Marker a burst of traffic.

The thing that I discovered today, and I was very pleased about it too, was that Social Marker got listed on the Movers and Shakers page on Alexa.com. Here’s the picture to prove it:

There are a lot of improvements and updates to come for Social Marker so if you want a feature that you don’t yet see available just email me or leave a comment about it and we will take it into consideration. Happy social bookmarking!

The sure thing though is that today, the 27′th of September 2007 is Google’s 9′th anniversary. How do I know that? Well… it’s simple really. Head over to Google.com and you’ll see this logo:

If you are wondering how did Google’s logo look for the previous anniversaries, here they are:

The main reason I’ve chosen this blog is for Alucarda’s interesting view on life, which gives her blog the feel of ‘real fiction’. She not only talks about what’s happening around her, she also analyzes them philosophically, putting them in a humorous context so reading some her entries will definitely make you smile.

Next to the entries with the tag ‘itsmylife’ she also has some articles unrelated to her life, some of these being either her own pieces of literature like this one or her own humour, my favorite from that category (and the entire blog) being The Game of Life.

Despite the fact that Timeless Treasures Photography is the 13th most visited site on the internet, it didn’t get chosen because after a hard days work I’d rather pick humor than art. It is an excellent site though, really worth visiting if you are into photographic art!

Remember, if your entry didn’t win this week, that doesn’t mean it won’t win the next week! All you have to do is re-submit it. However, remember, you can only submit one blog per week. The contest will keep going, so don’t be shy and post your favorite blogs, let them be your own personal blog, a friend’s blog or the blog of a complete stranger that you like.

What are you waiting for? Put a comment on this post with your favorite blog!

We also made an All-in-one Bookmarking Button plugin, and we will stress this even further on the site, which is only for Wordpress users. What it does is simply add our button at the end of each of your posts, acting as a submission bookmarklet for the page it’s on. It will not work for you though, if you don’t add it to your Wordpress plugins.

If you really want to see what the plugin does, click the Social Marker button at the end of this article. I hope that will shed some light on the subject. If it doesn’t, please feel free to leave us a comment in the FAQ post. Now, without any further delays, I present you the third video:

Yet after I’ve read through my mail, I realized I will have to explain some terms before you watch the video, not because I don’t think you could figure it out by yourself, but because I realized that it’s a lot easier if I just explain it. Here’s a bit of lingo you should get familiar with:

1. The Bookmarks Toolbar= a toolbar, specific to Mozilla FireFox, located directly under the address field. If you have trouble locating it, simply follow these steps:
   • Click the ‘View’ button, in the upper left corner of your browser
   • Move your mouse over the ‘Toolbars’ option
   • Check and uncheck the ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ option a few times, in order to locate the toolbar which keeps appearing and dissapearing.

   Congratulations! You’ve found the Bookmarks Toolbar!

2. A Submission Bookmarklet= the end result of dragging our button on the Bookmarks Toolbar. This will look like an ordinary bookmark button, with the name SocialMarker.com, but if you hold your mouse over it, the description will show Javascript code, rather than the URL of our site. This is what we use in this video, not a normal bookmark.

If there are other things you’ve failed to understand, or succeeded not to understand, please visit our FAQ post and leave a comment with your question. We will try to answer it as soon as super-humanly possible. For now, though, enjoy the video!

For now, though, watch the following video carefully and you should be well on your way to posting your first bookmark! Good luck!

We’ve all had high hopes for this service and we all wished it would work out, but I think it’s time we faced the facts: we’ve been had! AGLOCO promised us we’d make money just by installing its toolbar, and what did we get? Empty promises, that’s what! But who can you really blame: the con artist or the people dumb enough to believe him?

Honestly, I’d say the latter, because there were obvious signs that it’s a scam, but I think we just didn’t want to see them. The prospect of making an extra income doing absolutely nothing was the perfect bait to lure us in. I think the most obvious example of this is John Chow, who supposedly referred 12,000 people for the service. It’s nice to see that he has such influence, but I really wonder what they thought of him when none of them got paid.

One of the early signs of this being a scam was the lack of new posts on the site, attributed to the fact that there was nothing worth mentioning. How could anyone in their right minds accept that excuse? The so-called global community that’s owned by its members doesn’t feel that recent developments or reasons why its members haven’t been paid is worth mentioning? I tend to disagree! It’s like you’d be a stockholder and find out about a worker’s strike from the news, rather than your own company telling you first. Doesn’t that just sound absurd?

What’s more, recent developments have shattered the faith of every last believer that hoped that they might still get paid. The announcement that Ask.com would be the official AGLOCO toolbar search engine was like a bomb that hit the entire community. If you’re fairly new to browsing the Internet, there’s a good chance that you haven’t heard of this service, since it only owns 2.6% of the market share. And there’s a really good reason why it only owns 2.6% of the market share: It’s because 97.4% of search engines are better! Comparing Ask.com to Google or Yahoo! is like comparing a tricycle to a sports car. Of course you could go to work on a tricycle, but you’d get a lot better results with the sports car - let’s keep the humiliation factor out of this for now, shall we? The truth is, Ask.com doesn’t give the best possible results, and if the aim of the toolbar isn’t to maximize results and minimize effort, then it’s a waste of time.

Thanks very much AGLOCO! You’ve given us hope, only to shatter it completely. But there is a good side in falling for the biggest scam of the year. At least we’ll be a lot more careful who we trust next time! Who needs AGLOCO’s services though, when we have better, paying ones, such as Blog Rush and DealDotCom? You know what I think? AGLOCO, good luck and good riddance!

Like us, both there blogs look for ways to make money online, for example Blog Rush and DealDotCom, yet as I’ve mentioned before, they have different ways of approaching the subjects. Personally, I found John Cow’s method to be a bit more amusing, yet the chemistry that they had during the radio broadcasts was absolutely wonderful! Yes, I admit, everyone who says ‘cock’ on the radio for about 20 times in 2 minutes has won over my heart. Still, it really does sound that the two make a great pair together - even if for all the wrong reasons.

On the other hand, the competition between them is fierce, as they both try to benefit from the same services as much as possible. You’ll see either by their Alexa rank, or by the results they post once in a while, that John Cow has an obvious disadvantage, as his site is a bit lower-ranked than his rival’s, yet that doesn’t seem to discourage him. It seems like he’s even managed to gain the upper hand with Blog Rush, as he’s ‘convinced’ John Chow to register under him. Well, we all know it must’ve been a really dirty trick, but who could blame him? That is how the Internet was started anyway, isn’t it? And how the West was won!

If you haven’t visited these blogs already, you really should, as it fun to read the disputes between John Cow and ‘the Big Beef’. And even if they aren’t at each other’s necks, they still provide decent information about money making opportunities, and, of course, scams - possibly the biggest of the recent ones being AGLOCO, which apparently John Chow was one of the main referrers for. It’s a shame, really, to lose your credibility because you couldn’t predict something like that, yet for every mistake you make, there’s a price you must pay. I’m just curious if Chow will prove that he is indeed a worthy man and admit his mistake - which he already has, in a way, since he hasn’t posted anything about the service in nearly 2 months - or will continue to defend AGLOCO and risk going down along with it.