If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

With a lot of focus on social media sites these days one of the biggest newcomers that is becoming more and more popular is Twitter.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twhirl or Facebook.
Twitter has gained popularity in the bloggersphere thanks to several high profile bloggers like Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo. Each of these bloggers has over 10,000 people following their updates on the site. Unfortunately for Twitter their new found popularity has not been without problems. The service regularly struggles, goes offline and features get disabled. The backend has not been able to scale as much as the company had liked. TechCrunch used to post about these weekly but got bored of keeping everyone up to date once the company decided to open a status page for the problems.
Recently a new service popped up which is now taking the focus of the blogosphere, Plurk. Plurk is funded, based in Ontario, Canada, and has a team of seven people working on it at the moment, so you could call it a small company right now.
Plurk takes the Twitter idea of short updates and builds on it with better visual elements (a neat timeline) and many more features. The service seems fast, smart and has a great UI. Whether it can scale well remains to be seen but recently there has been a lot more signing up for Plurk and it has handled the increase well.
The question remains is Plurk a Twitter killer? If it gets the same kind of attention that Twitter has then it certainly has the ability to. The company needs to build a good API and allow for external sites to grab the data and then it will be in a position to truly rival twitter. What do you guys think, do you prefer plurking or twittering?

View: Plurk
View: Twitter

13) When Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to have read, “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” The company thought that the word “embarazar” (to impregnate) meant to embarrass, so the ad read: “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”

12) Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: “Nothing Sucks like an Electrolux.”

11) Clairol introduced the “Mist Stick,” a curling iron, into Germany only to find out that “mist” is slang for manure. Not too many people had use for the “Manure Stick.”

10) Coors put its slogan, “Turn It Loose,” into Spanish, where it was read as “Suffer From Diarrhea.”

9) Pepsi’s “Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation” translated into “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave” in Chinese.

When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the smiling baby on the label. Later they learned that in Africa, companies routinely put pictures on the labels of what’s inside, since many people can’t read.

7) Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine.

6) Frank Perdue’s chicken slogan, “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken,” was translated into Spanish as “it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”

5) When American Airlines wanted to advertise its new leather first class seats in the Mexican market, it translated its “Fly In Leather” campaign literally, which meant “Fly Naked” (vuela en cuero) in Spanish.

4) An American T-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope’s visit. Instead of “I saw the Pope” (el Papa), the shirts read “I Saw the Potato” (la papa).

3) The Dairy Association’s huge success with the campaign “Got Milk?” prompted them to expand advertising to Mexico. It was soon brought to their attention the Spanish translation read “Are You Lactating?”

2) General Motors had a very famous fiasco in trying to market the Nova car in Central and South America. “No va” in Spanish means, “It Doesn’t Go”.

1) The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as “Kekoukela”, meaning “Bite the Wax Tadpole” or “Female Horse Stuffed with Wax”, depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent “kokoukole”, translating into “Happiness in the Mouth.”

source: MoronLand

This is my dog Rocky, its a rottweiller still a puppy and 5.5 months old.

Pownce is a social networking and micro-blogging site centered around sharing messages, files, events, and links with already-established friends. Since the launch on June 27, 2007, new members can only join through an invite from a friend or by e-mail request.

If you want an invitation, please leave a comment and convince me to send you one. I have 5 invitations to give away.

Read more »

THE MILLAU VIADUCT is part of the new E11 expressway connecting Paris and Barcelona and
features the highest bridge piers ever constructed. The tallest is 240 meters high and the overall height will be an impressive 336 meters, making this the highest bridge in the world.

 A Volswagen Polo is loaded in the car towers of the VW Autostadt in Wolfsburg, northern Germany.