Archive for the 'G.U.N. Updates' Category

Date: July 11th, 2008, Filed under Finances, G.U.N. Updates, Gold Investment, Oil Report

Chicago, IL
By A.B. Dada
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It’s been 6 months since I updated the Gold versus Oil Chart and Data spreadsheet. I am going back to it now and will start posting the old charts daily, because of heavy demand. I didn’t realize people liked them so much.

The spreadsheet is publicly available on Google Docs by visiting this link.  I will have all the data through the current week finished this weekend, but I truly hope I can get some volunteers to assist entering data going back to all of history.  There is no decent online source for this comparison data, so if you’d like to put in 15 minutes a week (enough to enter in 3-4 months of data for every category), drop me an email.

If you’re not familiar with the charts I provide, I provide them in a way that is completely different from any other site online.  Here is a view of the last chart I added, dated 11/06/06 (yes, 1.5 years ago):

How is my chart different?  Instead of showing costs in a useless fashion, I show all costs based on a moving ratio to gold’s current price.  Why is this important?  It shows fluctuations of the other commodities’ prices based on gold’s movement.  I also show a barrel of goods price with the same averaged fluctuation.

I feel this provision is better for analyzing prices based SOLELY on market trading (ignoring supply and demand factors).  For those of us who believe that the dollar’s fall is the primary reason for commodity price increases, this chart gives you a glimpse into that reality.  When prices rise and fall together, they can often times be related directly to the fall in the dollar’s value.  When prices rise and fall separately, they can often be related directly to supply/demand issues, and somewhat on speculation.

If you’re interested in helping out, drop that email.  It’s not a huge investment of your time, but it will create a wonderful resource for others to share.

Some sites that are coming soon to the Global Unanimocracy Network:

The Dollar Bubble Blog

Taser News (reborn)

The Pension Bubble Blog

We’re also looking for co-bloggers to add some articles on a weekly basis.  If you’re interested in writing 2-3 articles per week for a small salary, you can email me at the same address above.  Topics vary across the entire spectrum of the Global Unanimocracy Network.

Comments: none

Date: December 12th, 2007, Filed under Open Discussion

Seen some interesting news we missed on any of the topics we cover? Have some off-topic discussions you’d like to invite others to talk about? Post your links and comments in this thread. We’ll try to cover interesting news in a later post, and we’ll provide a noon-time open chat every day.

Comments: 1

Date: December 11th, 2007, Filed under Open Discussion

Seen some interesting news we missed on any of the topics we cover? Have some off-topic discussions you’d like to invite others to talk about? Post your links and comments in this thread. We’ll try to cover interesting news in a later post, and we’ll provide a noon-time open chat every day.

Comments: none

Date: December 11th, 2007, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

Zion, IL
By A.B. Dada
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Yahoo News has an article about an event that hasn’t happened in many years: the old media television networks are having to refund advertisers. NBC is refunding their large advertisers to the tune of an average of $500,000 a piece. The article doesn’t dig into how many advertisers are getting some cash back, but it does offer details on why it’s happening:

Fourth-ranked broadcaster NBC has quietly begun reimbursing advertisers an average of $500,000 each for failing to reach guaranteed ratings levels, the first time a network has taken such a step in years, media buyers said.

It seems to be a given reality that the mainstream networks are hurting. There’s a plethora of channels to watch, the advertising is very one-way, with advertisers not really knowing who is watching their ads, or if they’re even watching them at all. My own home media center automatically removes ads before I even watch a show or newscast. There’s software that will do it almost in realtime (just start watching the show 15 minutes after it starts taping, and the ads are gone).

Online advertising is a different story, though. I’ve seen my own numbers grow significantly in the past 12 months, even with the traffic way down from the lack of updates. I know quite a few people who are earing $20 cpm numbers, meaning they’re taking in $20 for every 1000 visitors to their site. Considering some medium sized sites generate 50,000+ visitors a day, this could mean that a strong blogger could be taking in almost $1000 a day in income. It’s relatively unheard of today, but I’ve seen the checks to prove the value.

Even Google News is now syndicating links to new media sites, such as Slashdot and LewRockwell.com, as news instead of a blog. It amazes me that many of these organizations can exist, with a healthy infrastructure and staff, and compete head-on with the bloated, inefficient, and dying old media structure.

Some people point to the writer’s strike as the reason that the old media is refunding these big figures, but I disagree. It is evident that their model is failing, just as the radio and CD models are failing. We stopped using the Yellow Pages years ago (thanks to Google Mobile being much faster and current). We stopped listening to the radio years ago, thanks to Podcasts and the iPod for music. We’re even leaving the newscasts and catching the updates on YouTube.

The good news is the growth in variety of opinions that are out there. Personally, I love the blogosphere, but I’ve made steps to modify my reading experience: if a blog doesn’t allow comments, they’re gone from my RSS feedreader. If they censor comments, they’re also gone. I’m even taking steps here to try to reduce my ratio of old media links to new media links, as I’m finding individuals who report on the news with a more accurate angle, even if they may be more biased. At least I know who is paying them, and it’s generally Yahoo or Google advertisers.

2008 will be a wonderful year for the web-focused writers. The Kindle may increase the readership of the popular blogs and new media sites. I’ve made this site compatible with some phone browsers, and I’m seeing more people with iPhones browsing the web for news and opinions. Too bad for the old media, though. They held on to spending millions a year lobbying Congress for more control, when in reality the People have decided against them.

If you haven’t started your own personal blog, I highly recommend doing so today. I’ll be starting a short series of rules, definitions, and directions on getting involved in getting your opinion, views and thoughts out into the rest of the world — and maybe making a few bucks a day to offset the time spent.

Comments: 1

Date: December 10th, 2007, Filed under Open Discussion

Seen some interesting news we missed on any of the topics we cover? Have some off-topic discussions you’d like to invite others to talk about? Post your links and comments in this thread. We’ll try to cover interesting news in a later post, and we’ll provide a noon-time open chat every day.

Comments: none

Date: December 6th, 2007, Filed under G.U.N. Updates

Sorry for the ugly Wordpress Theme, we are actually reskinning all the sites and are playing with some new code from this theme on our test site. Hopefully this ugly one will be gone, but we are using some of the code on our new site. The new site will be easier to navigate, have a similar “Recent Comments” list on a sidebar (as it is below in this ugly theme), and be better designed to work over mobile phones and PDAs.

We have launched two new sites which we are updating daily: Full Reserve Banking, and Taser News. Both sites are no longer subdomains on the unanimocracy.com website, since we will be working to expand our “empire” with easier to remember domain names. For $8 a year, it’s a worthwhile investment.

Please note that we are now looking for people who would like to contribute articles and opinions to the site, including what we call “live bloggers.” Live bloggers will have the ability to just email a blog entry for late breaking news, which will automatically post to the site. That means you can provide fast news from your PDA, phone, or anywhere you have email, without having to use the clunky Wordpress system. If you’re interested in adding your comments, opinions and interesting news, please drop us an email or a comment below.

We are also changing some of the subdomains into full domains, and will be renaming some of them. The “Gold Investment” site will become a Financial News and Opinion site, with gold and commodities being a subcategory. The “Anarcho-capitalism” site will be split into “Government News and OpEd” and “Religious News and OpEd,” also two separate full domains. Lastly, the Entrepreneurship site will be restarted again, as will the Be A Man site, again as separate full domains. We’ll be working harder to provide an easier to navigate empire of sites, and hope to have all our work done.

We will be liveblogging, vlogging, and photoblogging on our trip to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia that we’re leaving for on Christmas Eve. It should be an interesting trip as this trip is solely for pleasure and travel, not for shopping or much business. The trip is relatively open ended, but we plan on at least 4 days in Europe, 2-4 days in the Middle East, and around 10-15 days in Asia.

Lastly, we are working on integrating the old forums into the comments section. We found some decent code which should help us integrate it, but we’re not the greatest at PHP and SQL, so it is a process. Please inform us if you see rendering errors, or any code errors that pop-up. We’re hoping to cover IE6, IE7, FireFox, Opera, and a variety of mobile web browsers. If you use a different browser, let us know if you see problems (Safari, etc).

We’re going to speedlink to a few sites that we like each day, and if your blog falls under any of our topics, let me know if you’d like to be speedlinked daily.

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