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Updated 253 Days ago
We've been blown off by better than you!
by George Sells
It is not easy being the new kid on the block, and that's exactly what ToastedRav.com is right now. When you call someone and say you're from KSDK, they think you're a high profile TV guy. If you say, "Post-Dispatch," an image of a powerful journalist jumps into their heads. Say, "ToastedRav.com," and they think you're trying to sell them a subscription to the appetizer of the month club! (At least for the moment.)
This past Tuesday, Tom Jones was in town. Jones is a pop music sex symbol. (Or at least he was when our grandmas were still interested in sex) He's kept his career from turning into that of a casino greeter by hitching his wagon to younger stars and doing duets. (If you can call the Pretenders "younger.") It's a nice little business strategy and it's worked for him.
Tom is interesting enough, however, that we felt he'd make a nice video feature on ToastedRav.com. Well, according to the folks at the Family Arena, TJ and his tight fitting breeches are a little to big-time for ToastedRav. (In our defense, however, Tom blew off the Post-Dispatch as well)
For us, Tom's cold shoulder is just the latest in a string of rudeness since we launched our vdieo department a month and a half ago.
Comedian Kathy Griffin came through town last month. Her tour is made up largely of casino performances in front of blue hairs who made a wrong turn looking for the nickel slots. She wasn't rolling the dice on ToastedRav, though. If she's on the D-list, where does that leave us? One stinking Emmy, and all of a sudden the sister is too good for the internet? FINE!
Of course the most heartbreaking and humbling, "hasta la vista" came from Jared Fogle. Subway's legendary lard butt was in town on a promotion tour. His "people" actually came asking us to do an interview....at 7 in the morning on President's Day." Seeing that we had nothing better to do with our time, we agreed. But the second a local TV morning show came calling, Jared ditched us faster than he used to inhale a tin of brownies. He's probably a diet pill junkie by now anyway.
All of the above people have blown their shot. As one of our current users, you're already aware that you're witnessing the beginnings of greatness. The media juggernaut that ToastedRav.com is destined to become will wield its power judiciously, but it will also maintain a long memory. So don't come looking to us when you can't sell out the Normandy High School Gym on your next tour, folks!
Further, we believe in both karma, and a vengeful God,
and I am certain that Tom, Kathy, Michael, and Jared will all suffer greatly for slighting us. (If that doesn't work, Trish Gazall and I will slash the tires on their tour buses if they pass though again!)
This is not to say that we can't land the biggies. Bo Bice knew the score and appeared on this site. Same for Elmo. Now, those are stars!
And we're getting bigger by the day. We even blew someone off recently. We just couldn't make the Village People work in our schedule. Right now, the guy who wears the Indian loin cloth and head dress is probably sitting at a computer trying to think of all the names that have canceled on him who are bigger than ToastedRav.com. Good luck, pal!
© Copyright 2008 ToastedRav.com and Bonneville International
An Equal Opportunity Employer all rights reserved
Keep up the great work - eventually, women may throw panties at you!
I like the slashed tire idea.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.