There are two things that fascinate me in just about equal proportions, politics and horrible web sites. I have always found that they both provide cheap laughs and plenty of things to legitimately fear. So when I came across this collection of “The Worst Political Web Sites” on CNET I was intrigued.

I would have thought given the absolute professionalism and high dollar stakes of modern political elections that all campaign websites would likely be drab but excruciatingly professional. I was very, very wrong. CNET’s collection contains websites as woefully incomplete or amateurishly painful to look at as anything I’ve ever seen.

In a way it’s refreshing that there is still room in the American political landscape for a blogging dog. Shawn O’Donnell’s pet, Josie assures us of her owner’s many terrific qualities and urges the voters of Virginia’s 1st congressional district to vote for the Democrat. While reading Josie the dog’s blog I learned the disturbing fact that Senator Edward Kennedy had a dog named Splash.

The most common problem shared among the bad campaign sites is simply not really having a website. The idea that any candidate in a modern political election could at this late date have place holding sites or sites “under construction” is incredible. But not nearly as incredible as the Independent candidate for congress in Nevada whose web site’s meta-tags include the keywords, Brittany Spears, car rental, scholarships, and baby names.

The list is a fair mix from both ends of the political spectrum and miserable web design knows no party affiliation. However, I did notice that awful Republican sites tended to offend the eye by their design, garish contrasting colors, sappy patriotic symbols, and lots of underlining and exclamation points. The Democrats, on the other hand, tended to have more irritating flash animation.

Halloween continues to be the fastest growing holiday on the calendar. For many years Halloween meant a healthy boost in sales for candy and costumes wholesalers but lagged far behind other holidays in consumer spending. Things have changed in recent years and now Americans spend as much on the spookiest day of the year as they do on Valentines. Both, of course fall far behind the biggest retail holiday of all, Christmas.

Halloween 2006 is looking like it will extend the trend of years seeing higher than ever expenditures. The average American will shell out close to $60 to celebrate Halloween. Consumers spend the most on costumes, averaging about $22, followed by decorations, candy, and greeting cards. This comes to a grand total indeed of $4.96 billion. Last year we spent a mere $3.29 billion, just lazy I guess.

Though costumes are the most costly individual items, the main growth this year is said to be in decorations. A survey for the National Retail Federation on Halloween retail sales said consumers will spend 27% more than last year. The NRF survey, curiously named the Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, estimates nearly two-thirds of consumers will celebrate Halloween this year, up from 52.5 percent in 2005.

The fastest growth in celebrating is among young adults aged 18 to 24, with fully 85% of them taking part in festivities, up from 66.8 percent last year. This age group is a highly desirable retail demographic, they have plenty of disposable income and have been known to celebrate things. It’s not just the kids either. More than 70 percent of adults aged 25 to 44 will also be taking part in Halloween festivities of one sort or another.

As I was looking into this I came across a list of the top five costume themes for adult men and women. I can in no way be sure of the scientific basis of these lists but found them amusing in any case. It would be interesting to hear from costume wholesalers and retailers with their opinion of the most popular costume themes.

Men
1. PIRATE
2. SUPERHERO
3. VAMPIRE
4. STAR WARS
5. FUNNY (clowns and the like presumably)

Women
1. PIRATE AND WENCH
2. WITCHES
3. SUPERHEROIN
4. SEXY COSTUMES (Whatever that means precisely)
5. NURSE

The reasons for operating a handbag resell business are numerous and well documented. There is little wonder that handbags have become a key niche for online stores and auction site retailers. The demand is high, woman need them for practical reasons and want then for fashion reasons. A change of handbags can completely reinvent a woman’s look. There are wholesale suppliers a plenty and quality, desirable styles are easily obtained at prices that make for good profit margins.

As result of the success of handbag reselling there are so many wholesale handbags on the Internet that many handbags distributors are hard pressed to stand out from the others. Without something extra to turn visitors into customers they will simply move on and buy their handbags from some other retailer or wholesale supplier. A struggling purse merchant is confronted with a choice. They must either offer their handbags at a more appealing price or have a range of styles that far out shine the competition.

Handbags aren’t bought based only according to price. Women are looking for handbags that are durable as well as fashionable and inexpensive. Once a resellers’ client pool has grown several lines of more expensive but durable handbags can attract customers willing to pay more for that good quality. Many people buy from wholesale handbags websites because they can find a wider variety of styles than are available in the boutiques.

By now most people are familiar with Airsoft guns. Everyday camo wearing make believe warriors pour into the parks and wooded areas of the world for a friendly round of combat. They choose up sides, set out courses, ignore the poison ivy, and celebrate the joys of electric and compressed air powered war.

Devotes tell us that the game encourages teamwork, offers a terrific release from the stress of the work a day world, and provides them with excercise in a more entertaining environment than the gym could ever offer.

Airsoft guns have existed in Japan since the 1970’s have begun to replace the paintball gun as the weapon of choice among America’s weekend warriors. The biggest appeal of airsoft guns over paintball is probably that airsoft guns look much more like real guns than do paintball markers and have a more realistic firing action. Airsoft fans also claim that the larger mass of paintballs makes them more dangerous than airsoft pellets.

In the 1980’s the Daisy BB Gun Company released a toy gun that fired a projectile that was safe for people to shoot at one other but it failed to catch on in the U.S. The disadvantages of paintball became an increasing problem for participants and as the demand for alternatives to paintball grew new technologies were applied to air powered guns until now batteries that drive an electric motor that can fire repeatedly power the guns. This advance made the guns fully automatic and brought to feel of modern warfare to the sport.

The wholesale airsoft industry is big business, I recently read of one manufacturer that reports $10 million in earnings for the year. Many sporting good and toy wholesalers and retailers have learned that adding a line of airsoft guns and accessories have provided a big boost to their bottom lines.

The guns themselves range from around $50 for the simplest models up to several hundred dollars for the battery powered, fully automatic weapons. A bottle of 2,000 pellets will cost between $15 and $20 per bottle. The gas canisters cost around $20 apiece and must be replaced frequently. New lines of guns and supplies become available constantly.

The AP just reported that Google snapped up YouTube for $1.65 bil. To date:
1) YouTube has yet to turn a profit
2) Was involved in “litigation” for copyright infringement ( though the AP reports these suits were settled).
3) They are also run by a 29 year old CEO and 27 year old CTO.

Well, they also:
1) Have millions of unique visitors per month.
2) 100% brand loyalty.
3) A platform that makes sharing videos with world simple.
4) Worldwide media attention.
5) A CEO and CTO who live , sleep, and breathe .COM
6) Wild passion about their business.
7) A sense of urgency to deliver products that the users want.
$1.6 billion dollars.
9) A desk full of the most qualified resumes in the world.
10) oh..Did I forget? They now have GOOGLE.

Congratulations Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen! Silicon Valley needs more visionaries that understand usability and what exactly it is that users want. I think this is a great acquisition on Googles part. YouTube will help Google deliver the “world’s information” and add, yet, another platform to deliver adowrds.

Yahoo and MSN are sooooooo far behind. Maybe, just maybe, if they started caring about users and customers instead of margins and revenues, they’d catch up. Fat chance.

Jason

This month I will turn forty years old. All in all, not so bad a thing considering the alternative. I once read a quote from Studs Terkle, the author of Working and the Good War. (If you have not read his books, do so.) He said, “People ask me who the hell wants to live to be 84, and I say anybody who’s 83.”

I any case, the looming day has put me in a reflective mood. I’ve been contemplating those four decades and asking my self is the world a better place than it was when I first put in an appearance. Being the glass half empty type I find largely that it isn’t. But that’s just a matter of opinion.

What is not a matter of conjecture are a collection of statistics published this weekend in the New York Times comparing data from 1967 and 2006. Let’s take a look at some of these and see what they tell us about the changes to the United States during my lifetime.

First off, the population of the U.S. reached 200 million people and this year it will reach 300 million. Our population is booming, every day 11,000 babies are born and 3,000 new immigrants arrive. This rate far outstrips the death rate and the emigration rate.

Here is some good news for me, and every person reading this. We are living longer than we did in 1967. Back then the average life span was 70.5 years. It has risen steadily to an average life span of 77.8 years. I wonder how much the fact that despite more than twice as many vehicles being on the roads the number of road related deaths has plummeted since 1967. With a total of 98.9 million registered vehicles there were 51,559 deaths in 1967, in 2006 there were only 42,643 road deaths despite 237 million registered vehicles.

Given that it is not surprising that we are getting older. In 1967 9.5% of the population was over 65 in 2006 that percent reached 12.3.

We talk a lot about the price of gas these days but consider this. When adjusted for the current strength of the dollar gas cost the equivalent of $2 a gallon. The average price this year has been right about $3 per gallon. So while gas is expensive it isn’t quite the monster we’ve come to believe.

Now for one the more unpleasant of the stats. New home prices have gotten so high it’s a wonder anyone but the wealthiest Americans own their own home. In 1967 the average price of a new home, when adjusted to 2006 dollars, was just under $150,000, today the average price is just over $290,000. This stunning increase goes along way towards explaining why in 1967 63.6% of the population owned their own home and that percent has only increased to 68.9%.

Draw from these stats we learn that in my life time living has become a lengthier proposition but but costlier. Not a huge surprise really.

Traffic, qualified traffic is everything! Google latest move is a consideration of YouTube for $1.6 billion dollars. Why is it that these incredibly large, profitable, and intellectually prominent corporations are spending billions on acquisitions instead of creating their own products?

Simple. One word: Loyalty to a service and traffic.

YouTube has million of users whom are loyal to the product, enjoy the interface, and love the executive team. Yes… A 29 year old visionary who understand usability and giving the user what they want. Simple formula.

Would you pay $1.7 billion for YourTube? I would. It’s a steal. Millions of users equals millions of clicks and views. Put that on a proprietary network owned by Google and you have a bigger cash cow. Why make YouTube an affiliate and pay them 50% of a click, when you can buy them outright and take home 100% of the bid, view, impression and action of every user and advertiser. just like Mr. Murdoch “stole” MySpace for a mere $800 million, the same will happen to YouTube.

1. What it is doing to grammar and spelling. - While I fully understand the practicality of using abbreviations such as brb, WYSIWYG, and the like. Valuable seconds are saved, no doubt adding to the productivity of the nation and the quality of personal life. I also think turning the language into a series of sentence fragments and smiley faces can’t be good. I have heard people respond to a joke by saying “lol” instead of laughing out loud.

2. Web sites and online advertising that make noise. -When I am online the last thing I want is someone else’s music blasted at me. This applies to everyone, from the tiniest personal interest site misguidedly thinking we share tastes all the way to major search engine’s encouragements to watch “Lost”. I know I am not alone, studies have shown that nothing drives visitors from a web site like noise.

3. Frauds.- I mean frauds of all kinds. The anonymity of the Internet has made it extremely easy for people to pretend to be things they are not. This opportunity for deception is played out on all levels of the online community. Never mind the simple deceptions of the chat rooms. They are to a degree, when not criminal, expected and accepted. However, I hear from small business people all time decrying that they have been ripped off, in one fashion or another, by wholesalers and customers. Every time a retailer loses money on a fraudulent wholesale purchase they lose some faith in online wholesale generally. Also, the industry might lose their business literally if that retailer’s business depended on that order.

You might notice that contrary to traditional curmudgeonly takes on the Internet I have left spam off the list. At one time I would have included it but spam filters have changed that. Now spammers have to show a little creativity to reach my mail box. My favorites are the ones with little pieces of text meant to trip up the filters. Often this paragraph or so long bit of prose is taken from a classic novel. I enjoy trying to identify them, last week I spotted The Three Musketeers and War and Peace. I also get a kick out of the permeations of the Nigerian Banking or overseas lottery scam. I’ve been asked several times to dispense millions of dollars in charity, after taking a cut, for repentant scoundrels allegedly under going a death bed conversion. I would like to think the three marriage proposals from various princesses were for real.