Internet marketing

courtesy of http://www.jamesjordan.tv/tag/internet-network-marketing/ 

(as his copyright was only for 2009)

Pffff, sometimes internet is just not easy.
I needed to make a copy of a video for somebody. So I grab an empty DVD pop it in, start Nero and, wait, 4.7 gig space for a 730 mb video? That's a bit overkill isn't it? Especially for a lightscribe DVD...
Up to the next cd I had. Damn. 700mb space...

So now I have two options:
Simple: put it on a USB drive and bring it over.
Hard: Add more videos and make a proper DVD with a menu and stuff.

Why do I always go for the hard way??
In search of a free DVD movie maker that works I went with the mainstream and choose Sothink Movie DVD Maker. It's free, better than Windows DVD maker, and the only catch is: "Has a prompt text on interface; Leave information on burnt DVD chapter(s) indicating that is created by the free version." Does that mean a little watermark logo on the video? Screenshots? Nothing... So on to the internets for a search. After 10 google pages, mine shows 20 results per page, and about 15 tabs further on the terms "Sothink free movie DVD maker", "Sothink free movie DVD maker review", "sothink free movie DVD maker forum", "free DVD maker text on video", etc. I came to this conclusion:

• Free software is big business, because the amount of websites with free software offering and some copy-paste of the makers website is virtually endless, with dozens upon dozens of links to 'downloads for free software'.
• The program does what it says on the tin.

The only way to test this for sure is to burn it and check. Luckily the program saves to the harddrive if no writeable CD-rom is available! So in the hour I had to wait for the test run I had time to search for a "internet fail" picture.
I finally stumbled on the above picture and that shows exactly why the internet is not about giving information any more, but just leading people to nowhere. It's also surprising how many "marketing gurus" you'll find that sell stuff on the keywords "internet fail". But the only conclusion I have is... ...how to put it nicely. Ah well, let's use Bill Hicks' words: "If you are in advertising or marketing, go kill yourself. Seriously."

Personally I'm against suicide. It's the last thing I would ever want to do, but internet marketing is just getting sicker and sicker, leading to 100s of pages just to create links and links and links. Maybe I'm just old-school and wish to cut out the middle man.
Problem is that, due to this whole thing and my own business, I'm being forced to do the exact same thing. Drive traffic. It seems that it's all about traffic, traffic, traffic. Creating links to make google believe you are popular, creating clutter. "You have to have a clear vision" this so-called "internet millionaire" says. Posing next to a Ferrari owned by millermotorcars.com showing his ultimate vision. I think the best thing to become an internet millionaire is this. Just saying you have a vision and calling yourself millionaire just isn't cutting it. Especially if you are going arseways in creating traffic as the above picture taken from his website shows.

So, what do I think of the DVD movie maker? I don't know. While it's doing it's thing on the videos I discovered it converts all the AVI's to MPG's before creating the DVD. One AVI increased in size, the others decreased. The SRT-subtitle files where embedded automatically, and no sign of "Free" anywhere as a watermark on the videos, but the quality is not what I was looking for due to compression to the mpeg2-format. This was the only available option and it doesn't show on the website that the "Pro" version does have the capability to convert or better yet, no conversion at all.
It only shows a screen for a couple of seconds at the beginning of the movie, claiming it's made by the free version. Which is good. But the conversion from AVI to MPG before making the DVD is a big downside. Just copying the original AVI-versions was almost 4 gig. Using the DVD maker turned it into 4.17gig. I'll skip the whole DVD making process and keep the original files. My friend can only play DVD's on the computer any ways, so it doesn't really matter.
Time wasted, lesson learned: sometimes you just want something, sometimes you have this bright vision and sometimes you're just have to ask for it, but usually, in the end, it just doesn't work that way!