PERSONAL CALENDERS

You know those calenders you have on your page?

Well, I don't like them very much. Right now in the right gutter of "My Multiply" I can see upcoming events, like a staff appreciation party for someone I've never met, a dentist appointment for someone I've never met, someone celebrating Nancy Grace's birthday, someone remembering George Harrison, and all sorts of odd and personal things.

If they're personal, I don't care, that's your personal information! You shouldn't be posting your dentist appointment on your Multiply site! Right now, I have one event from a friend I know, and a birthday of another friend. The rest I don't even know who they are. Why am I getting these? Why do I care? Who is posting such personal stuff?

Take care when posting in your calender. You don't know who's getting it.

-Ze Baron

EQUALITY

It's a good thing, right? Equal rights for women and minorities... equal this, equal that... well,:

Suppose you are trapped on a boat with no water other than what you have on board, and there is no opportunity for a while to gather more water (either from the land or from rain.) There are 25 on board. You have 25 empty equal-sized Nalgene bottle, plus large jugs that the water was stored it. It is not feasible to gather water, individually, on a needs basis from these jugs. Once they are opened, the water cannot be saved, it must be either drunk or put in the Nalgene bottles. You know, for sure, what each fellow traveler's needs are when it comes to water. That means you know how much that person needs to survive until more water is attainable. There is enough water in the jugs to fill the Nalgene bottles halfway. Be aware of the morale repercussions that will ensue based on how you fill these bottles. (See poll.) You cannot add circumstances beyond what I've outlined.

-Ze Baron

WE'RE A PEACEFUL RELIGION...

...and we'll kill you to prove it!

Click here to hear the story of the British schoolteacher.

Isn't it wonderful? A woman's elementary aged class votes to name a teddy bear "Muhammad," some of the parent's complain, and she get sentenced to 40 lashings. For those of you that may not understand, under Sharia law, an embodiment of Muhammad is punishable by the previously mentioned 40 lashings. Sudan is under Sharia law. Muslims took over the Sudanese government and are committing genocide against the native black popluation in Darfur.

People challenge President Bush for holding people in Guantanamo Bay without charges being brought against them, but why aren't they yelling and crying and wetting their pants that a British senior-citizen teacher is going to get whipped like a sailor over a damned teddy bear?

-Ze Baron

Music on Homepages

What are your thoughts on music on homepages? (If you go to someone's page, music automatically starts playing.) If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to my page and take a looksee. I'm anxious to see how this poll turns out since I have been debating over this since I came to Multiply. Usually, I just have a piece of music I like for a few days, then remove it until I do/don't find new music.

Groups

I was scanning groups in Multiply here, and came across some doozies:

United States Sucks

If you like criticizing the most powerful and hatred nation in the world, this is your place. Feel free to coment about foreign politics, military, government, people mentality and F*cking Bush!

Free Palestine

Our Goal: the Promotion of a two state solution, Peace and Human rights for Palestine and Israel. We also want to break the silence/ taboo and expose the many Myths on this conflict.

Bush is Stupid

If you can read this you are not the president.

Boycott Israel Campaign

People of good conscience have chosen to boycott israeli products and companies supporting the zionist entity. Their ethical purchasing decision however is frustrated by the lack of accurate information as to which companies to boycott.

We have carried out extensive research to identify the guilty companies. All our findings are provided here. Where ever possible, we have included full references for the source of our information so that you may independently verify its accuracy and understand exactly how each company is contributing its support to israel. We thank all those organizations who's research we have utilized.

Terrorism

Group dedicated to discuss all kinds of terror and aggression, such as:

1. Islamic terrorism
2. Israeli terrorism
3. American terrorism

“… Terrorists... terrorists... terrorists…” – Fragments from G. W. Bush’s discourses.

IRAN HAVADARANE PADESHAHI PARLEMANI

آینده از آن نسل جوان ایرانی است

Mow The Bush

Ever since that dreadful, god-foresaken day when George W. Bush was elected president of the United States of America, our country has plummeted downhill in an uncontrolable fiasco of unfortunate yet preventable events. This predicament stems from the various negligent manners Bush uses to solve problems. The sheer ignorance and stupidity exhibited by this man makes me ponder the question "why the hell is he in charge?" This man is clearly not qualified to make smart and effective decisions regarding the burdens and struggles weighing our country down. It seems as if the man is completely clueless on how to regulate the ever increasing calamity America is facing these days. But then again, the man can't even perform simple everyday tasks such as pronouncing elementary words, spelling his own name, and tying his own shoes. The miserable tragedy of it all is that the American people elected him for a second term. Good God, is it just me, or is this some perplex mysterious enigma that solely hardcore republican traditionalists can bare to comprehend?

LOVE YOUR LORD

ALL YOU LOVERS OF GOD COME IN PEACE.
This is the Group which spreads love and awareness of Allah,
so if you love him or want to spread his love around the world please come and join.
People of all faiths and religions are welcome to join, please feel free to witness the Love of Allah or God or whatever the name you call your God to Him belong the Most Beautiful Names.
People of all faiths are welcome to post anything which promotes the love and awareness of God.

Muslim

A Multiply.com community welcoming everyone having an interest in Islam as a faith, Islamic cultures, issues
and topics for friendly dialogue, discussions, and exchanges of information, whether for promoting personal strength and belief or in search of a better understanding.

May we all be guided to the straight path...

NOTE: kindly, we request the members and the new members to know that group it has been created in order to showing the world that muslims are good and peaceful people and to publish the true thought of the way of the prophet Mohamed
(salla ALLAH alayihi wasallam), and the right way of his companions.
all ppl can register here and we welcome anyone from any place-religion-thoght of the world , with one condition,
respect our thoughts and our religion here and is prohibited publishing another any material without islamic sunna thought.

The Islamic Society

A place where muslims can meet and talk on Islamic issues

Al-Qur'an

This group collects the recitation of Al-Qur'an's Mp3. We hope you will also contribute the mp3's as well as listening to it. Hope this small efforts will get some benefits and counted as a good deeds towards Allah the Almighty.

Ahlul Bayt's creed of faith

As salaamo a’laikum,

Welcome to Our Islamic Discussion Groups.which mainly contains Teachings of Islam and shia belief. All are welcome to join, regardless of caste, religion or nationality.Our concept is Discuession's Teaching's and seeking knowlegde...

The aim behind this effort is to spread the Islam all over the world and to share with Muslim world news, current affairs, Qaseeda,marsiya, nauha, Majalis, sports , other topics of common interest etc. Posts are to be moderated but not to be dropped, edited or censored. The purpose of the group is to gain knowledge on all these subjects.

This is need of our today to keep in contact with the believers of distant area and tell them acquiring knowledge, constant rememberance of imam mahdi(a.f.t.s), giving charity of his behalf to ensure his safety increase our love and attachment to ahlulbaith(a.s). All are welcome to join, regardless of caste, religion or nationality. Qita, Nazm, Naat,qseeda , article etc.) can be written in roman English.

The views of the members posting's does not necessarily agree with the views of the moderator's. The author shall be solely responsible for his views as express by him in his post. I am sure the group shall soon prove a great center of knowledge.


Enjoy Your Stay and Share With Us Your Knowlegde

Admin

Some of these seem more malacious than others... ("USA SUCKS") but it's probably best to at least have them on our radar. -Ze Baron

Y!360 REFUGEES HEADSHOT CONTEST VOTING

Well gang, it's midnight here on the East Coast. That means that submission time is closed... but voting starts now! Since Multiply (as gracious as they are) only has polls with 10 options, max, I had to hunt down a HTML one that I didn't have to sign up for, didn't have to do this or that... blah blah blah... enough whining. I found this one, and it seems pretty good.

It told me that I set it so that you can only vote once per year... and I also chose that only I could see the results. Whether that's true or not, we'll see. It's pretty simple. Click on the button to see the submissions, vote, and be on your happy merry way. Results will be back in a week.

Which headshot should be selected for Y!360 Refugees?
	Entry 1
	Entry 2
	Entry 3
	Entry 4
	Entry 5
	Entry 6
	Entry 7
	Entry 8
	Entry 9
	Entry 10
	Entry 11
	Entry 12
	Entry 13
	Entry 14
	Entry 15
	Entry 16

-Ze Baron

MARS ATTACKS

This is the scene when the Martians first land. I gotta wonder why this movie didn't do better, what with the star-packed cast. I can pick out at least four well-known celebs in this clip. There's tons more, too. Check it out...

CALLING ALL PHOTOSHOP WIZARDS...

...and other Refugees!

Time to enter the Headshot Contest is running out! All entries will be due by Sunday, November 25, 2007 at midnight, EST.

If you need to know information about the timing of this contest, check out the calender. I outlined how the contest is going to be run, in terms of dates, so you should find it very helpful. I suggest that you change your view of the calender to "Month", as show here to the right, so that you can see how everything is laid out, as opposed to just day-by-day.

The calender can be found here.

To see the latest entries into the contest, go to this album. I have since disabled comments because people were hinting to which one entry was theirs, and that was strongly discouraged. I will be trying my best to upload new photos every night (realize it'll be late, though.) The entries so far are promising! I've already picked out the one which I think I'll vote for (unless a better one comes in!)

To review the rules, please go to this blog. Any entries that do not follow these rules are subject to disqualification.

All entries are at admin's discretion.

-Ze Baron

A NEW WORD

I think too much -- it's official.

I suppose this new word has been thought of already, but I'll throw it into the arena:

governmentality (n.) [guh-VERN-ment-AL-ity.] -- Mentality of politicians whose ideas don't translate well into the real world.

Beverly and I were discussing daylight savings time. See, I bought a clock that automatically changes itself -- not an atomic clock, though. I bought this clock a year before Congress changed the laws so that Daylight Savings Time was moved by two weeks. Now my auto-changing clock only changes two weeks after everyone else. I refuse to change the clock manually. I'll change it back, then two weeks it'll move back another hour, and I'll have to move it forward. That's not how it works!

Beverly and I came to the conclusion that Daylight Savings Time has outlived its purpose. It gets dark here around 5:00 PM... what a damper for your day.

-Ze Baron

LURKING

I don't know if any of you guys noticed, but when you go to a page, the owner of that page can see who all came to that page. They get a history, complete with headshots and hyperlinks. While this is typically benign -- I see that a bunch of people read this blog and didn't comment, or that or whatever. I suppose it's a harmless feature. The difference is that on 360 you could lurk with no consequence.

Some days when I'm out scoping people out, without commenting (I don't do it often,) I'll get a "Thanks for coming by my page" or a "You came by my page but were pretty quiet" comment. I HATE that with a passion and a fury!! If I wanted them to know that I came to their page, I'd've bloody said something! Sometimes I'm just getting music, sometimes I'm scoping out members of Refugees to see their pages, etc... it just drives me nuts. I don't care if they see that I've been there, but don't thank me for coming when all I did was look at the page.

Today I got the most rude invite... they said (paraphrase) "You came to my page for a download... at least you could invite" or something like that. I know for a fact that, unless they changed their music sections, I did not go to their page!

This really, really, really drives me bonkers. I don't hunt down every passer-by who stops in for a read. I don't think anyone should... it's almost like disrespecting people's privacy.

I think I've officially found my Multiply pet peeve.

-Ze Baron

LURKING

I don't know if any of you guys noticed, but when you go to a page, the owner of that page can see who all came to that page. They get a history, complete with headshots and hyperlinks. While this is typically benign -- I see that a bunch of people read this blog and didn't comment, or that or whatever. I suppose it's a harmless feature. The difference is that on 360 you could lurk with no consequence.

Some days when I'm out scoping people out, without commenting (I don't do it often,) I'll get a "Thanks for coming by my page" or a "You came by my page but were pretty quiet" comment. I HATE that with a passion and a fury!! If I wanted them to know that I came to their page, I'd've bloody said something! Sometimes I'm just getting music, sometimes I'm scoping out members of Refugees to see their pages, etc... it just drives me nuts. I don't care if they see that I've been there, but don't thank me for coming when all I did was look at the page.

Today I got the most rude invite... they said (paraphrase) "You came to my page for a download... at least you could invite" or something like that. I know for a fact that, unless they changed their music sections, I did not go to their page!

This really, really, really drives me bonkers. I don't hunt down every passer-by who stops in for a read. I don't think anyone should... it's almost like disrespecting people's privacy.

I think I've officially found my Multiply pet peeve.

-Ze Baron

Handy HTML Hints!

I've been messing around with HTML and I think it's pretty neat. No, I don't mean posting glittery graphics all over the place like a graffiti artist, but just to make commenting more efficent. For example, I can make text italics, bold, or underlined in a comment, because I learned some easy-to-remember HTML tips. Sometimes my blog formatting screws up but I just patch it together with some HTML and it looks good as new. I've even learned how to make a neat little button. Here's an example of that:

Isn't that just awesome?!? I probably sound like an idiot, being amazed at HTML, but it's really neat-o! I'm not going to go into details for tricky HTML, and I haven't even touched CSS, but I'll help you guys out. Realize this works best in comments since you already have the buttons in blogs, not to mention that you have click "Edit HTML" As you can guess, insert the text you are trying to change where it says "insert text here."

• If you want to make something bold, then type "INSERT TEXT HERE"

• If you want to make something italicized, then type "INSERT TEXT HERE"

• If you want to make something underlined, then type "INSERT TEXT HERE"

Sometimes when I compose a blog or a message, a line will break into two and then the third line will run off and off to the left instead of staying in a fixed area. I edit the HTML and use the
link as a line break to resolve this.

I will cover the button in a later post if everyone can grasp basic HTML!

Now, two standard reminders:

1. RESPECT the requests of page owners -- some people don't like pictures or any fancy HTML.
2. PLEASE post questions in the "Q & A" section. Blogs are for announcement type information only!

-Ze Baron
Y!360 Refugees
Founder/Admin

Neat Stuff (and a contest!)

I installed two site trackers on Refugees over the weekend, but I've since removed one. The one that you see there is "Site Meter," used for tracking hits.

I was reviewing the information for our group. I wanted to share this neat little graphic. It illustrates where our last 100 visitors have been from. We've gone international! There's a few from England, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, South America, and Pakistan but most are from the East coast of America.

If you are encounter problems here on Multiply, like things that don't work, I'd suggest downloading Mozilla FireFox. I use it strictly for viewing Multiply. It works GREAT. For my other internet-viewing needs, I use Opera. My Internet Explorer (7) crashes a lot. *sigh*

If you are having problems with your Yahoo! Instant Messenger, remove it from your computer. There is a service called Web Messenger available. It's your IM service, except in your internet browser! The URL is webmessenger.yahoo.com. You don't even have to download anything.

For Thanksgiving, I've come up with a contest that we're going to hold here. We initially started out here with the picture of the sinking ship, with Y!360's logo and an arrow to the ship. I photoshopped that picture, and it worked great, but as our needs changed, we needed a new logo. We had to get off the Yahoo! bashing and morph into a support group, a community group of sorts. A center for the transplanted community of ex-360'ers. I looked through my (extensive) pictures from the internet, and came upon this one. I think it's neat looking, but it doesn't necessary pertain to our group that well.

The contest is to either find a picture on the internet, take a picture, or photoshop a picture that will work for our group. The contest is starting now, and will end six days from today, November 18th, 2007. The ending time for submissions is 12:00 AM, EST. And yes, I'll be up until then! All submissions must be emailed to my email address, arrow.of.day@gmail.com. I will upload them the album titled "Y!360 REFUGEES HEADSHOT CONTEST" [link] upon receipt, or as fast as I can. All photos will be uploaded within 15 minutes of the ending time.

The rules are as follows. The logo cannot...

• ...bear Y!360's logo.
• ...bear Yahoo!'s logo.
• ...bear Multiply's logo.
• ...bear any advertisements, etc.
• ...be any overtly copyrighted material.
• ...be obscene.

The logo must...

• ...be received by the specified time to my email address with your Multiply username as the subject line.
• ...follow Multiply's uploading rules.
• ...be semi-group related.
• ...be submitted by a group member.
  

Please realize that all submissions are at the discretion of the admin.

Judging and selection for the logo will take place the week after the deadline for submission. A blog will be uploaded featuring a poll and either the pictures or a link to the albums. The logo will be chosen by the people! Encourage your fellow members to vote for yours, and get your friends who aren't here to join up and vote for you.

The logo will remain our group's official headshot for two weeks, at the minimum.

Currently, the album features Multiply's official logo. This logo is not going to be in the contest. The reason that photo is in there is because I could not upload a blank album. The current logo is also up for voting, so if you don't like any you see, you can refrain from voting or choose the current logo.

Thank you all for being wonderful. Keep it up.

-Ze Baron

BLAST FEATURE

There's been recent clamor about Multiply incorporating a blast, both in MUDS and in Refugees here. While the one on 360 is nice, I'd like to offer a potential counter-point.

First, I suggest you open up my Multiply page --> zebaron.multiply.com

Second, I'm going to give you some knowladge if you don't know what I'm going to talk about. A blast on 360 looked something like this... go HERE to my 360 page. At the top, the the brownish rectangle where I have information about my leaving 360 for Multiply, is the blast. This could be used for displaying your favorite quotes, telling visitors to your page a quick notice ("I'm leaving 360," "I'll be out of town," etc) or it could be used for directing people to an outside link. If a link to an Mp3 file were put in the link section a "Play" icon was displayed there. There is also a feature to reply to the user via a PM, though this could be turned off.

Blast updates were fed into your friend's "Home" page, an equivalent of Multiply's "My Multiply" area. While this was nice, in some cases, for receiving updates, it was usually bothersome because it forced blog content down. Some users only used their blast to advertise their page, which was very annoying.

Here on Multiply, we don't have a explict feature like that. However, if you go to my Multiply page (HERE), look where I have the American proverb. That is called the site title. Initially, I used the site title I used on 360, but I later abandoned that in leiu of this idea... using that area as a blast of sorts. To change it, you go to "Customize this page" below your welcome message, hit "edit" in that module, and then change it. I've found that it takes about the same amount of time to change that here as it did to change a blast there.

Some users have suggested using the "Welcome" area as a blast. On my page, that area is titled with "Willkommen" and lists the "About Me" that I moved from 360. This feature would be good for a blast as well, though I chose the above option because the site title is in a much larger font.

If Multiply wishes to accomadate the cries of the 360 users who want a blast, they could do that very easily. Instead of adding an entire new module to clog people's blogs (that rhymes!), simple changes to the site title could fix that. The easiest way to do that would be to add a box to user’s “My Multiply” page similar to the one on 360, shown to the right.

[This feature would enable you to edit your blast from your 'home' page, the equivalent of your 'My Multiply' page.]

That way, Multiply would not need to change any modules on our pages, saving the integrity and the streamlined look, while giving us a more accessible way to change our “blast,” per se.

I personally do not want Multiply to bend to everything requested. This is Multiply, not 360. We left 360 for a reason… if we try to mold our new home to look like our old one, what have we truly done?

I am ashamed that people would demand this and that and this on MUDS and Multiply Customer Service. A friend has told me about the goings-on in the posts of MCS. I implore you to please be decent and please, please, do not post another blog on the same topic at any of these groups if there is not a new one.

While we may be citizens of this community, we don’t have the right to charge in here and pretend we’re calling the shots. For now, try and implement my suggestions above, and if Multiply deems a blast a good thing, they’ll add it.

Personally, I don’t want a blast. While I liked having one, the way that the site title is set up works better, in my opinion. And, on the bright side, the site title accepts HTML, something 360’s blast did not.

If you’ve got any questions about my suggestions here, you can send me a PM or leave it in the comments. Please, though, don’t trash Multiply’s official groups.

The poll that has been posted at MUDS can be found HERE.

-Ze Baron

THAT'S SERVICE

Well... I'm amazed again.

I sent a letter a few days ago to the Multiply Customer Service (CS) asking them if they could help me out. I changed the logo for Y!360 Refugees a week or two back, but it still had not changed on the user's page to the new logo. After about three days (now today) I got a reply:

"Hi Baron,

We're having a look into the cause of this issue, and will let you know when it's been corrected. In the meantime, I'm sorry for any inconvenience this might cause.

If you have any further questions, please let us know.

Roy"

I was a little disappointed by this, and I sent a letter to the friend who suggested I contact CS. I said I was a bit disappointed, but at least they were looking into it. She told me to keep watching the problem and that it could be fixed soon. I went and checked on my page... and lo and behold, the new logo was there! Whoo-hoo!

Alexa.com is a reputable website that tracks the hits of other web sites, usually community-oriented pages. Right now, Yahoo.com is at the top of the leaderboard, where it's been for quite some time. Google.com, YouTube.com, Live.com, and MSN.com fall in behind it to round out the top five. MySpace.com, Facebook.com, and Wikipedia.org follow them. You can find the top 20 HERE.

I decided to check some things out. I went and looked up Multiply.com. You can find the results for that HERE.

Notice in mid-October, after a small decline, Multiply suddenly got a lift, and is continuing to lift. What happened in mid-October? The Y!360 Team blew us off with their apathy and announcement of 360’s closing. This is when the pe

ople started fleeing… myself included. The average user visited 15.4 unique pages whilst on Multiply.

This is the graph for yahoo.com. Realize that it is not the graph for 360.yahoo.com, since 360 is a portal of Yahoo’s and cannot be counted separately via Alexa. The page for Yahoo! can be found HERE.

Notice that there is a hump there in early- to mid-October where Yahoo!’s traffic slumped off. Yahoo! had a 1% decline in page views over the last three months. Multiply had a 3% gain. I doubt that the fleeing of refugees touched Yahoo!’s traffic, but it appears we certainly did Multiply’s.

It also says that 47% of visitors to Yahoo! go to mail.yahoo.com. 13% go to search.yahoo.com. 5% go to 360.yahoo.com. These are the top three portals, mind you! It’s also amusing: 1% of Multiply users go to customizedthemes.multiply.com. That must be one big group!

HERE is an article from techcrunch.com, showing page hits for social sites. It lists them in order of growth. Topping the charts is Imeem.com, followed by aim.com, digg.com, facebook.com, and flickr.com. Xanga.com is at the bottom. You guessed it: Yahoo! 360 is the second last, losing 51% of it’s traffic over the last year. In 9/06, 360 had 5,697,000 unique visitors. In 9/07, 360 had 2,774,000 unique visitors. That probably sealed it’s fate for Mr. Yang, even though 360 was the third most-visited portal of Yahoo!.

The Multiply team has announced a major upgrade for security/privacy. To read about it, go HERE. This should help people fix their settings sweepingly as opposed to doing it one by one.

Well, that’s all I’ve got to say – except, if you haven’t joined Y!360 Refugees, and you’re a refugee, I’d suggest you do so, pronto! There is plenty of help and a warm community of similarly displaced users. (Of course, who am I to tout it? I’m the founder!)

-Ze Baron

WONDERFUL...

I keep getting banner ads across my "My Multiply" page. I get one of two ads: The first is some of the current eBay listings for Scarface items, and the second is "singlemuslim.com", "USA's LEADING MUSILM MARRIAGE SITE." 

I know why this happens. The ads are targeted to your content. I have a sound byte of Scarface in my music section, and I constantly mention Muslims in my blogs about the Middle East.

Who feels like signing up at singlemuslim.com? I bet all of the woman's profile pictures are just of them in their burkas...!

I also saw THIS story yesterday. It made me scream "WHAT?!?" I can't see that there is that big of a market for these I mean, yes, Islam is a huge religion, but don't all new cars come with compasses and almost all cars have glove compartments! Did you also see that they're in talks with Volkswagen AG, (German) and General Motors, (American), to "turn around its fortunes"? I'm thinking if the sanctions work, GM and VW could be held liable if they participate with this company since it would be working with Iran. The company lost over $150 million last year, though, so there's hope that it will go down the drain.

-Ze Baron

TESTING... TESTING

I tried something new tonight. I went over to Blogger, owned by Google, and activated my account. Since I have a Google account for Google Talk and GMail (yes, I'm avoiding Yahoo!), all I needed to do was activate the blogger portion. The reason I did this was for my own sense of mind and to test out a feature of Multiply that 360 did not have.

I'm going to be mirroring, or cross-posting, all of my new posts. That means that whatever I post over there (nothing) will post here, and whatever I post here should post there. That way, I'll have a back-up and an archive. It's just extra precautions.

Hopefully, this post will mirror to Blogger. We'll see.

My page over there is nothing much, but if you want to visit me, I'm at zebaronjosef.blogspot.com. Anything "better" was already taken, oddly enough. I'll get back to you guys through a blog if this is successful.

Hopefully I'll have more blogs for you this coming week.