Monthly Archives: January 2010

Mashable (as ususal) has the best coverage of the new iPad.

It seems as though there’s something in between a laptop and an iPhone. Since I got my Nexus 1 Google Phone just yesterday, I already know that there’s something in between. It’s wonderful to be off of iTunes.

I’ll buy the iPad, even though the name is simply hideous. Apple has such beautiful products, it’s a shame they named their new device after a pantyliner.

I just went to the apple site to get an iPad image, and I got this:

At seven this morning his iPod was due to wake him up. I Bet You Look Good On The Dance Floor was blaring, and my son was sleeping soundly. I wonder what his dreams were?
Next Fluorescent Adolescent screamed from the speakers:

You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your night dress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis
Everything’s in order in a black hole
Nothing seems as pretty as the past though
That Bloody Mary’s lacking a Tabasco
Remember when he used to be a rascal?

Oh that boy’s a slag
The best you ever had
The best you ever had
Is just a memory and those dreams
Not as daft as they seem

I decided to walk in. I gently kissed him on the cheek, and he popped right out of bed. Apparently the music at a ridiculous volume is relaxing to him.

Also, it’s not a competition, but Mr. G is the one who loads their iPods and it’s proof that I’m not the only bad parent.

*You can find the Arctic Monkeys here. They’re terrific, but maybe not for your 8 year old.

Last week I got an email from Bindu Reddy, inviting me to be a Premium Influencer on MyLikes. After poking around a bit, I decided that MyLikes is a community I’d like to participate in. Everything about it makes sense, as it appears to be the natural growth of Likaholix.

Rather than a traditional review, I’m going to give you my brief interview with Bindu Reddy of MyLikes. Also, I’m giving it my full endorsement. It’s a good site, and if great people participate it will be a great community.

Q: How did the shift come about from Likaholix to MyLikes?

BINDU REDDY: We first started Likaholix with the intention of starting a word-of-mouth advertising platform. We wanted to start with a consumer-only site in the beginning so encourage users to genuinely express their interests and build a profile. MyLikes takes Likaholix one step further and allows bloggers/influencers to express/endorse what they like and earn money doing so.
Influencers can also choose to donate the money to charity if they wish. Further more, we allow influencers to create and post Sponsored Likes wherever their audience may be – their blog or their twitter stream

Q: Is MyLikes in beta? Is that why it’s invite only or is your goal to grow slowly with an organic community.

BINDU REDDY:MyLikes is out of beta. You can sign up here – http://mylikes.com/i and become an influencer. However, we do have an invite-only premium influencer program for influencers with > 5000 followers. You must receive an invite to be a premium influencer.

Q: Who else is working on this with you?

BINDU REDDY:I am working on this with Arvind Sundararajan. Arvind was the lead engineer for AdSense at Google and understands ads on content-networks/blogs really well. You can read more about him here – http://mylikes.com/about

Q: I know you’re a Xoogler, how did google docs lead you here?
BINDU REDDY:Before MyLikes I was in-charge of product management for Google Docs, Blogger, Video and Google Sites. Working on Blogger helped me understand influencers and the power of influence marketing. Prior to working on Docs etc, I used to be a product manager for AdWords where I learnt a lot about ads and ad networks.

Q: Why should someone like me join MyLikes? I’m just a mommy blogger. What’s the real chance of real income?

BINDU REDDY:As a mommy blogger, your chances of real income are very good. In the coming weeks, we will be recruiting advertisers in the education, lifestyle, home and baby brands/products space. Mommy Bloggers can post sponsored Likes on twitter and blogger and make more money than they currently do running banner ads and adsense on their websites. We also want to work with Mommy Bloggers and evolve our product to make it useful to them. Also our earnings-per-click can be as high as $1.00 which is much greater than other ad-networks. Mommy bloggers who engage their audience can earn more money with time as we increase your earnings-per-click as you post more relevant likes.

Q: Some people are “liking” carrot sticks, some people are “liking” their computers. Did you have a vision of what direction this would go? Has your vision changed?
BINDU REDDY:We want users to create likes for products/services/brands that they have really looked at and want to genuinely endorse. So liking their own computers is perfectly OK and we encourage that. CarrotStricks, is a fun educational math game and I am surprised that people like it :)

Q: What’s your “like” today?
BINDU REDDY:My Like today is a sponsored one for the company 99designs - We got a lot of graphic and web design done on 99designs. It’s a great website if you are looking to outsource logo, graphic and web design. All the money I make on our website, I am donating to the Haiti – World vision relief fund.

My like today is MyLikes. If you do sign up, you can click here and you will automatically connect with me.

Each Sunday afternoon I’ve been making an effort to drive a few cars. Mr. G. and I both need new cars and it’s easiest to do all the shopping at once. Given the traffic on our freeways it also makes the most sense to do the test drives on Sundays. I’d like to see the car go from zero to sixty, not sixteen.

I found a couple of cars I really liked, but sadly the dealership will only service my cars, not sell them to me. The sales manager wanted to get my husband in, “for a few hours.” His face dropped as I explained to him that my husband would, “come in for twenty minutes, drive a car and pick the options. I’ll be the one to give you the grind while we talk about money factors, residual values and add ons.”

Before I was married I sold cars. I never went a day without selling a car, even in the pouring rain, even if it was just a mini*. I was consistently delighting the owner because I talked to everyone like they mattered, and everyone liked me. I didn’t even care for the cars I sold, they were just rubber and metal to me.

I don’t like the man I met yesterday.

*you sell a car for the minimum and make $500 just to keep the volume up

My answer to the question, “do you shield your children from tragedy?” is a fluid one. It changes every day, every year.

I really want to know what you do, what you hope to do, what you might have done wrong.

This morning my husband needed to talk to one of his co-workers who lives around the corner, and who has two sons slightly older than Alexander. My husband and Alexander rode their bikes around the corner to go and talk and hang out. After an hour, my husband came home and Alexander stayed and played.

I had lunch alone, Jane went to a friend’s house, my husband played tennis, and then I collected the kids. All told my two kids were gone for about two and a half hours.

The afternoon was fun, we checked out Guitar Center’s new teaching facility, went to Vromans, hung out with friends, and then we went to Versailles for dinner. At dinner, as usual we talked to the kids about their days. Here’s how it went:

MR. G: Alexander, what did you do after I left you at our friend’s house?

ALEXANDER: Well, we played basketball inside the livingroom.

MR. G: Oh, do you think Mom would let you do that at our house?

[I shudder]

ALEXANDER AND JANE: Noooooooo  Jinx you owe me a coke.

MR. G: What did you do after that?

ALEXANDER: I rode my bike, the girl rode her bike and the three boys rode skateboards.

MR. G: And then?

ALEXANDER: One of the boys spilled Jamba Juice on himself because he was skateboarding with a Jamba Juice in his pocket.

MR. G: Who took you to Jamba Juice.

ALEXANDER: We just went.

And then the table was quiet, because we all know that Jamba Juice is about a mile from home and getting there means crossing two major boulevards. Five lanes, to be exact.

My husband paid close attention to his plate and muttered, “I’m not sure how I feel about this.”

Alexander wiseley amped up the sweetness and explained that there were five of them, he was in the middle and they crossed the street just fine.

Inside my head I’m screaming: he did it! My little boy crossed the big boulevard! I knew they could do it. I knew I taught them how. Naturally, I said nothing aloud. These parenting moments must be consensus, and sitting at the the table is not the time for the kids to think that their parents might not agree.

There’s a twinkle in my eye, Alexander is sitting up a bit taller, and Jane is waffling. She’s clearly annoyed that at 11 she’s not been allowed to cross the boulevard, yet she wisely sees that she’s ThisClose to being allowed to go an extra mile on her own.

We all pretend to care about some other topic, when slowly, like the sun rising, my husband lifts his head from his plate.

Well, I guess the kids are allowed to go to Jamba Juice now. I guess we’ve been overprotective.

Alexander, Jane and I exhaled. I beamed. Today was a big day.