Its time for peace loving Muslims to speak up

This is an awesome peice that I have reproduced... He makes a point that I myself have come to realise in parallel: moderate and peace loving muslims need to do something about their world to prevent it from crumbling away. A good example is Muslim Feminism - where is it? Who is the leader? The main ones that spring to mind for me are Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia and Bangladesh.

And now for that post...

A German's View of 'Fanatics'.

This is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read. His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is said to be Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a well known and well respected psychiatrist.

A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. 'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'

We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.

The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march.. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals.. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.

The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

China 's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.

And, who can forget Rwanda , which collapsed into butchery.. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany , they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun. Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.

As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on!  Let us hope that thousands, world wide, read this and think about it, and send it on - before it's too late.

.......Emanuel Tanay, M.D.

Useful Phone Codes

How to increase number of rings before call goes to answerphone / voicemail on Vodafone NZ:

Dial in the following prior to pressing "Send / Call" button, will increase time to 30 seconds before answerphone:

**61*021700100*11*30# [send]

Very handy! As I understand it, this might not work for PrePay users, and might require you to be "On Account".

Turn off Caller ID temporarily (for telecom land-lines), dial this before dialing:

0197 [wait for new dial tone then dial]

This will turn it off until you hangup - just the one call.

Dialing the "revertive" - used for testing your landline ringer works:

137 [hangup]

How to display your phones IMEI number (its like a phone serial number):

*#06# [send or it should show automatically]

Telecom Landline Voicemail:

083210

Vodafone Voicemail when called from another phone:

707 [from working mobile]

+64 21 700 700 [from anywhere]

Comprehensive List of NZ Free Competition Sites

The sites below all offer pointers to websites and companies offering free stuff and competitions in New Zealand. The first two are the most well known, and some even refer to each other. Still though, its a good list and useful for SEO's looking to use free give-aways as a method to build links and traffic to their sites. I've filtered out at least one site that I figured was spam, but most appear to be legit. Please let me know if any of these aren't working and should be removed.

NZ Free competition sites:
http://www.contest.co.nz/
http://www.kiwicompers.com/
http://www.blinky.co.nz/online-competitions/
http://www.winnow.co.nz/
http://www.entrybox.co.nz/
http://www.ourfreestuff.co.nz/cat/Contests/ (Dead)
http://www.getfrank.co.nz/competitions/ (Only for promos via Get Frank)
http://www.gimme.co.nz/competitions
http://www.winbig.co.nz/ (Dead)
http://www.free-stuff.co.nz/ (More of a list of other comp sites)
http://www.realfreesamples.co.nz/ (Only good for FMCG samples)
http://www.vouchermate.co.nz/ (Has free account for business owners to list vouchers)
http://www.uktv.co.nz/competitions/ (Might be OK to push UK products to Kiwis)
http://www.brandinabox.co.nz/ (Dead)
http://www.newzealandfreestuff.com/ (Can't find contact details, might be dead)
http://www.tharrin.co.nz/free/contests.html (Good as dead)
http://www.nzpages.co.nz/search.html?q=competition
http://www.nzs.com/entertainment/competitions/

International:

Somewhat relevant:
http://www.salefinder.co.nz/
http://www.flicks.co.nz/
http://www.grownups.co.nz/read/lifestyle/37/enter-competitions-win

And there we have it. A big list of free giveaways websites in NZ.

Be careful of malicious Facebook applications

Sometimes I get invited to install apps on my Facebook and it always makes me wonder when I see the amount of data that they are about to get hold of. I normally quit out at that stage and decline the offer. So today I decided to have a look around, do some research, and find out the dilly-o on Facebook app security.

It turns out that is now possible to check if an app has been approved by Facebook (see the last two links).

So here are somefairly eye-opening articles about how dodgy Facebook Apps can be:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_safe_are_facebook_applications.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koobface

http://us.trendmicro.com/imperia/md/content/us/trendwatch/researchandanalysis/the_real_face_of_koobface_jul2009.pdf

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/010308-facebook-secret-crush.html

To the credit of Facebook however, they do now have a "Verified Application" program, which you can read about here:

http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=247

So this is good, and you can find if an app you want to install is verified or not by searching on its name. I did a search for Farmville, an app that I have used in the past, and noticed it does not contain a tick of approval. Luckily for me, I run this on a Mac so nothing bad has happened so far, but it does make me pretty weary of Facebook apps still. FB have done a good job but they need to do a little more I reckon.

The new App Directory is located at:

http://www.facebook.com/apps/directory.php

How to show fully qualified URL in Analytics

The following advanced filter can be used to modify how URLs are recorded in your Google Analytics account. I recommend applying this to a test profile before putting this on your main profile, since as it affects the URLs recorded this has the ability to wipe out your Goals since it changes the URLs of every hit.

Here's how its done:

1. Click the "+ Add Filter" window from the profile settings screen (its under "Filters Applied To Profile")

2. Choose either Add New Filter for profile or Apply Existing Filter to profile. The second option is handy if you have already defined a few filters for other profiles in the account. The idea is that once you have defined a filter, you can easily just add it to a profile without redefining it.

3. Check the radio button for "Custom Filter" (it will be set to Predefined Filter initially) and this should change the way the form looks to something like the screenshot below.

4. Check the radio button for "Advanced" which should open up all the advanced controls.

5. In the Field A -> Extract A section, set the controls to "Hostname" and (.*) for the text field. This opens up a regular expressions "capture" group that stores the hostname of the page in variable $A1. This is actually the domain name of the page with your GA codes, normally just one website, but this fully qualified url filter is handy for making "rollup" trackers that can be place across an entire enterprise of sites with different domain names (more on that later).

6. In the Field B -> Extract B section, set this to "Request URI" and (.*). The regular expression is another capture group that will stash the full path in to variable $B1. The path is usually something like /contact-us.html for example.

7. In the Output To -> Constructor section, set this to "Request URI" and the expression to: /$A1$B1. Don't be tempted to put /$A1/$B1 since the path variable already starts with a forward slash, whereas the domain name does not have a slash (its just a domain name). This will join the "www.funk.co.nz" in your domain name $A1 with the path "/blog/online-marketing/google-analytics/how-to-show-fully-qualified-url-in-analytics" in your $B1 variable together to give the full URL (minus the http:// part) as: www.funk.co.nz/blog/online-marketing/google-analytics/how-to-show-fully-qualified-url-in-analytics (this is the hit that will show in your Top Content report).

8. For the remaining checkboxes, put a tick in Field A required, Field B required, Override Output Field. Ensure your Case Sensitive is set to "No" which is most likely the best option for most people.

9. Hit save, do some hits to your site, and wait 24 hours for the reports to come through.

10. If its working you should see something like this:

The resulting top content report now shows the fully qualified URL. My first try shows a configuration error - notice the double slashes after the domain name? This is a good example of why you should do this in a testing profile before applying to the main profile, as this was caused by my regular expression of /$A1/$B1 which I have now changed to just /$A1$B1.

Linking multiple Analytics accounts to Adwords

Some handy info here from the GAAC* Program Google Group.

The question was posed that while it is true that you can link several adwords accounts to one anaytics account by having these accounts pull in the "cost data" from many Adwords accounts, people were wondering whether it is possible to link several analytics accounts to one adwords account?

The answer provided was that the "linking" that adds the AW cost source to GA and lets you see GA data from within the AW interface, works in certain regards on a 1-1 basis only.

Adding cost sources, though, can be done from multiple AW accounts to multiple GA accounts, all you need is a skillful Google account manager to do that for you. After this has been done, you can, as you probably already know, go in every profile of every GA account you have added a cost source
to and apply/unapply it. This type of setup can be seen below with a live screenshot of an Analytics account with 2 cost sources attached but only one of them "applied" with the tick:

Apply Cost Data GA

One important thing to bear in mind though: Only the first (primary) adwords account you link will enable you to pull analytics goals to adwords. The others will be secondary cost sources. This primarily linked GA account would be the one that appears when you click the GA tab in Adwords:

Google Analytics tab in Adwords

In some cases it is crucial "who to link first" i.e. first linkage you do manually and second via account manager - just make sure the first linked account is the main GA+AdWords activity in order to best integrate.

*GAAC stands for Google Adwords Certified Professional.