“IMPORTANT: You must log in to your account and Quick Accept or manually accept the domain. If the Change of Account is not complete within 10 days, the transaction of Change of Account will expire.”

However, they didn’t include any instructions on how to do this.

GoDaddy, you really do frustrate us, you know? I only found out how to do this by Googling it. If it’s really so important you need to say “important” in all caps like that, don’t you think it might be important enough to include a link?

Well, because I’m better at this than you are GoDaddy, I have.

If you got the above message in your e-mail while trying to transfer a domain, go to:

http://support.godaddy.com/help/article/1670

The only reason I’m writing about it is the challenge: They were asked to make a “viral video” promoting an O’Cedar’s spray mop. If you’ve ever had to do this for your job, it had to have pissed you off too.

It seems everyone thinks the way to make a viral video is to make a commerical like you see on TV, then put it up on YouTube. From that, possibly through magic or devine intervention, people will share it around.

Ironically, I found this image for "Viral Marketing" - and outside of me calling it out for stupidity, there is nothing viral about it.

“Sheila! I just watched this commercial for a floor mop on YouTube! You have to see this!”

Only Penn Jillette seemed to understand how viral content works: You make something people WANT to share. You don’t make something you want people to share.

How many of the things you shared, “educated you on the product?” Probably none. Because that’s boring. What you likely did share were people inuring themselves, pets doing weird things, dirty jokes… things that made you laugh.

That’s not where they went on Celebrity Apprentice, though. Both groups pushed on making what were the same kinds of ads you push past with the fast forward button, thankful that you have a DVR.

I dont’ blame them entirely, though – and not just because it’s reality TV, and you can’t trust anything you see or hear on reality TV. I blame the executives of the company for not have a clear idea of what they were asking for. I’ve had those meetings with clients who said, “there’s this video that’s very popular, and I WANT THAT.” Great! Yeay!

And then, “It should tell people all about our product, and showcase all of its features, it shouldn’t  be the butt of the joke, and it should tell them why they must give us their money… but otherwise, go crazy!”

It doesn’t work that way. A viral video that promotes only carries the name of the company or the product – and  then you go crazy. What makes something viral isn’t the sell, it’s the fun.

How much milage do you think the Nintendo Wii got out of the video below?

The answer is Nintendo got a LOT of exposure out of this. I can also guarantee you the executives of Nintendo would have never approved of that video if they paid an agency to make something viral, and this is what they were presented with. That disconnect exemplifies why a company cannot make it’s own viral content if they insist on taking themselves seriously.

I remember the executive of one company explaining everything they wanted in their viral program with the exact same language about showcasing a project.

“Then I’m afraid it won’t go viral,” I told him.

“Well then what can we do to MAKE it go viral?” he asked.

“There’s only one option,” I said. “We go door-to-door with shotguns and MAKE people watch it.”

Seriously – just spending some time coming up with something people will actually want to watch takes much less work.

More than just a centerfold - Deforestation

More than just a centerfold - Silicon Valley

More than just a centerfold - Crack Addiction

As commercials uploaded to YouTube go, this is perfect.

No ad copy, no “take aways” – just something that gets your attention, and keeps you watching. At the end you get the company’s information, AND THAT’S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.

Look at the number of views this thing has gotten! It’s got 2,485 likes on YouTube… and as of this posting it’s two days old! You REALLY think your slick, in-house commercial with nothing but talk about your product is going to beat that!?!

iPod vs iPhone - would you pay nearly $3000 more just to make phone calls?

iPods turn out to be cheaper. A 32 GB iPhone and iPod retail at the same amount: $299. But the iPhone requires a 2-year contract for it to be $299. The handset without a contract is $799 – and without a phone contract, it’s useless. If you pay $100 a month for an iPhone contract, (which is about average,) your iPhone ends up costing you some $2700.

An iPod Touch, on the other hand, does everything an iPhone does except place calls and SMS messages. It can go online via Wifi, in exactly the same way an iPhone can. Wifi is almost always faster than a cellular data plan anyway, so you’d be doing this even with an iPhone whenever you could get away with it.

What’s more, you get access to the Apple app store just like you do with the iPhone.

Of course, you are going to need to take care of your phone issue separately. Since there are so many contract-free companies with cheap monthly talk plans, this is easily solved. In fact, if you’re more adventurous, you can get an inexpensive smart phone plan, jailbreak your iPod Touch, and tether the two together. Then you wouldn’t even need Wifi hotspots to take your iPod online – you’d just need your other phone to be nearby.

I do not understand why anyone pays so much for a phone just to play games or watch movies. It is an insane waste of money to pay so much for what is ostensibly a toy. But if you want to get on board with all of the development being done for the iPhone, this is a much cheaper option.

They have the obvious appeal of showing what are normally talking heads giving their real opinions of today’s stories. More importantly, they combat the very popular Fox News onslaught, which has gone unanswered for so long.

It shows MSNBC has teeth, particularly if you didn’t already know it. You may know Rachael Maddow has a point of view every bit as vitriolic as Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, but with the thought process behind that opinion.

Of course, if you have different political opinions, you won’t like these at all. But even if I wasn’t a raving pinko liberal, I’d appreciate the strategy of fighting the Right’s fire with their own fire.

No, the reason for the title of this post is simple: By buying more phones, tablets, computers and accessories, you are sending a signal to manufacturers that they don’t need to make anything better in order to get your money.

Think about it: Every year, manufacturers come out with products that are largely the same as the ones they released last year. They push a version of Android that’s supposed to be slightly better than the one they sold you last year, or an iPhone that doesn’t have a broken antenna. And exactly how many versions of the Nintendo Gameboy need to be made until they decide they’ve gotten it right?

If you keep buying something new each year, you send a signal to manufacturers that they just need to put out something – anything – to get you to buy it.

If your phone is good enough, just keep it. Stop replacing the stuff you have if it isn’t broken. If enough people finally let manufacturers know they need to innovate something that is actually new before you give them their money, they won’t keep releasing products that don’t entirely work, need patches, or are just useless collections of molded plastic.

A lot of the time, we all skip past this. After the obnoxious explosion of banner ads in the early 2000s, most Internet surfers developed that extra muscle in their brain that helps them not see banners.

But today I clicked through, and I donated to the cause. That graphic on the right rail of my page shows I did. You should too.

Why? Because Wikipedia is an important source of (usually) unbiased information, a quick resource almost everyone has used at some time, that charges nothing and doesn’t ask you to buy, click or link back to. The idea that some day advertisers would be able to smear their logo feces all over the pages of Wikipedia obviously would make advertisers themselves drool.

The rest of us would likely suffer. Imagine a company with a massive ad buy on Wikipedia – which you know would be expensive, given the amount of traffic Wikipedia gets. Then a decidedly bad story breaks out in the news about said company, and the volunteer editors update this company’s page with that information, just as they would now.

Wouldn’t you imagine that company would put pressure on Wikipedia to remove those references? Perhaps they’d lobby to have their page locked down altogether? Would Wikipedia have the stones to tell this company to shove off? Actually, forget that – would they even have the financial ability for that? If they become dependent on advertiser money to keep doing what they do, everything would balance on ad revenue to keep from going under.

Donating makes sure they continue to have the funds to operate without having to answer to corporate interest. PBS and Public Radio like to lay claim to that, but they still have to mention the companies that give them “grants,” which, frankly, is its own form of advertising.

So I’m asking, if you’re reading this, for you to go to Wikipedia, click on the link to give a donation, and then actually do it. If you have Paypal, it will blow your mind how easy it is to do.

And before anyone starts blasting me about all of the other things I could ask you to donate to, I’ve given to the Haitian Relief Fund this year too. But that doesn’t have anything to do with the Internet. So bugger off.

So what? Sites change their layouts in minor ways all the time. It’s only Twitter. Also, I said I wasn’t going to write about social media anymore.

The truth is, I’m not even writing about social media here. Social media, as we thought of it a few years ago, is already dead. (More on that anon.) Their layout change is really about making space for their new advertising system.

Twitter has been using the right side of their screen for sponsored accounts and tweets for about a year as well. When people had the ability to expand a tweet and viewing it and the exchange it created on the right side of the screen, it pushed advertisements off the screen.

This layout change can only be necessary to improve the visibility of their paying advertisers. If tweets are now expanded below instead of to the right, then all that space on the right can remain advertising space. Twitter isn’t losing impressions because of their layout, they’re losing impressions because so many people go elsewhere – Facebook and Google Plus, for instance.

Obviously, they can do whatever they want – it’s their site. But last year’s layout was, in my opinion, a smart way to make the site functional. This new way of doing things isn’t, so money is the only motivation that makes sense to me for changing it.

How THAT is going to keep me from using TweetDeck or something similar to manage my Twitter account, I do not know.

I’ll keep adding to this as I continue to get more interesting (read as: weird) takes on the death of some guy I’ve never met:

“I wonder how long it will take until they discover he actually died last week, and they kept him in a freezer until AFTER the Apple Product Announcement? I mean, what are the chances of that?” – My Girlfriend

“I called in yesterday, and [co-worker] told me, ‘Steve is dead!’ And I thought, like, who’s Steve?” – Co-worker

“See, I think they found a way to graft his mind into the iOS system – so that when the next update comes out, Steve Jobs will be in every device, and will then be able to take over the world from beyond the grave!” – Okay, that one’s me.

“Apple will do fine, until they unveil iRadio or iStapler in a couple of years.” – Someone on G+

“What about Apple putting a Samsung Galaxy S2 into an iPhone case then calling it ’4S?’” Person on G+ responding to that last person on G+

“The reason the new phone is ’4S’ is so they can then say it’s the new iPhone – ‘for Steve.’ I don’t know if it is masterful, or skeevy.” – IT Guy

“It’s not that some famous person died. It’s that someone hugely successful died at only 56 that bums people out. Because if that’s possible for him, it means none of us are safe. We can each get our clock punched at any time.” – Me again.

“Yeah, but pancreatic cancer is a big deal. You don’t get to string your life along like that UNLESS you have Steve Jobs money in the bank.” – Co-worker

“Whatever you do, keep your mouth shut. You always end up saying something really crass when people die. The way Apple fanboys are, you’ll probably get lynched.” – My Girlfriend, before I left the house this morning