Dancing Around the World, Paid For, Everything Inclusive

If you did not hear about Matt Harding yet, then it is about time. He is the guy that became famous for "dancing on the Internet", okay, there are a bunch of guys that are "famous" doing that, but he is the one who did it in public at places around the whole globe.

  The story goes like this...

1. A 32 year old deadbeat who was born in Connecticut, USA and ended up working for a company in Brisbane, Australia decided in 2003 to quit his job and use the money he had saved to do a trip through Asia until he was broke.
2. During the usual posing for tourist photo graphs and home videos as proof for his friends and family that he was at the places he said he was, a friend suggested to do his funny dance, the only dance Matt knows and do that instead of the usual boring posing.
3. He did that for the rest of his trip until he ran out of money. He published his short videos on a web site that he mainly created for his family to check what he was doing and where.
4. The stuff went somehow "viral" on the Internet thanks to social media. It also caught the attention of a company called Stride Gum, who thought that doing more of this kind of videos sponsored by the Stride Gum brand would be a fantastic idea. Matt thought so too, especially when he was told that Stride pays for the whole thing, everything inclusive.
5. The result is his second video, which made him even more famous.
6. Seeing one dude dancing alone got kind of old when Matt had an idea. How about having people dancing with him, people who contacted Matt over the Internet. Stride thought too that it is a great idea and off he was for the third trip around the globe.
7. That video is the 2008 video  and made Matt even more famous. So famous in fact that he was asked to talk at social media conferences etc.

His 2006 and 2008 videos were viewed over 11 Million times EACH on YouTube alone! "Nicht schlecht Herr Specht" as we say in Germany to something like that.

Here are some interesting facts about the locations that Matt visited.

Three videos were released, labeled 2005, 2006 and 2008. Each with the results of an entire trip lasting several months to over one year. The first video from 2005 included 20 locations, the video from 2006 included 36 and the last one from 2008 included a whopping 69 places.

There is also an out-takes video for the 2006 trip with a few locations that are unique and did not make it into the final video. That means that the actual number of places visited is higher than the ones I mentioned.

Unique Places shown in his 3 Videos Abu Simbel, Egypt Agra, India Ala Archa Gorge, Kyrgyzstan Alhambra, California Amsterdam, The Netherlands Angkor Wat, Cambodia Antseranana, Madagascar Area 51, Nevada Atlanta, Georgia Auckland, New Zealand Auki, Solomon Islands Austin, Texas Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Bangkok, Thailand Batik, Morocco Beijing, China Bengal Jungle, India Berlin, Germany Brisbane, Australia Brussels, Belgium Buenos Aires, Argentina Cape of Good Hope, South Africa Chakachino, Zambia Chicago, Illinois Christmas Island, Australia Chuuk, Micronesia Cologne, Germany Delhi, India Demilitarized Zone, Korea Dubai, United Arab Emirates Dublin, Ireland East Jerusalem, West Bank Easter Island, Chile Ephesus, Turkey Galapagos Islands, Ecuador Giant's causeway, Northern Ireland Guam Gurgaon, India Half Moon Caye, Belize Hanoi, Vietnam Haute-Picardie, France Impenetrable Forest, Uganda Istanbul, Turkey Kilimanjaro Summit, Tanzania Kjeragbolten, Norway Kuwait City, Kuwait Lancelin, Australia Lemur Island, Madagascar Lisbon, Portugal Lisse, The Netherlands London, England Los Angeles, California Luang Prabang, Laos Machu Picchu, Peru Madrid, Spain Mexico City, Mexico Miami, Florida Mokolodi, Botswana Monte Alban, Mexico Montreal, Quebec Monument Valley, Arizona Moscow, Russia Mulindi, Rwanda Mumbai, India Munich, Germany Mutianyu, China Neko Harbor, Antarctica Nellis Airspace, Nevada New York, New York Panama Canal, Panama Paris, France Paro, Bhutan Petra, Jordan Poria, Papua New Guinea Prague, Czech Republic Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Rock Islands, Palau Routeburn Valley, New Zealand Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia San Francisco, California Sana'a, Yemen Sao Paulo, Brazil Seattle, Washington Seljalandsfoss, Iceland Seoul, South Korea Siberia, Russia Singapore Sossusvlei, Namibia South Shetland Islands Soweto, South Africa Stockholm, Sweden Stone Town, Zanzibar Suhbaatar, Mongolia Sydney, Australia Tagaytay, The Philippines Taipaei, Taiwan Tel Aviv, Israel Teotihuacan, Mexico Thimphu, Bhutan Tikal, Guatemala Timbuktu, Mali Tokyo, Japan Tongatapu, Tonga Tsavo, Kenya Vancouver, British Columbia Vava'u, Tonga Venice, Italy Very Large Array, New Mexico Wadi Rum, Jordan Wainivilase, Fiji Warsaw, Poland Washington D.C., USA Westport, Connecticut Yangon, Myanmar

Unique Countries of Islands Antarctica Argentina Australia Belgium Belize Bhutan Bolivia Botswana Brazil Brunei Cambodia Canada Chile China Czech Republic Ecuador Egypt Fiji France Germany Guam Guatemala Iceland India Ireland Israel Italy Japan Jordan Kenya Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Madagascar Mali Mexico Micronesia Mongolia Morocco Myanmar Namibia New Zealand Norway Palau Palestine Panama Papua New Guinea Peru Poland Portugal Russia Rwanda Solomon Islands South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Taiwan Tanzania Thailand The Netherlands The Philippines Tonga Turkey Uganda UK United Arab Emirates USA Vietnam Yemen Zambia Zanzibar Places he visited Twice Brisbane, Australia London, England Los Angeles, California San Francisco, California Sydney, Australia Tokyo, Japan* Places he visited on every trip New York, New York Seattle, Washington   *Tokyo actually appears three times in his videos, but only in two of them and not three. Tokyo is the only real duplicate within any of his videos. Tokyo appears twice in the 2008 video. Once in location #29 and the second time in location #42. Also, if you look at the overall data, he rarely made it to the same place twice. 8 places that he visited more than once, out of 114. ... not bad.

YouTube - Where in the Hell is Matt Harding? - Megamix

Link to my megamix video  on YouTube, also available for download in .AVI (XVID/MP3) format and 640x480 resolution via Mediafire.com at this URL.

Here is a link to Matt's presentation at the 2008 Gnomdex conference, which was held between August 21 and 23, 2008 in Seattle, WA, where he talks about what he did and how he did it to travel around the world not only once or twice, but three times. Once on his own expense and twice on somebody else's.

Gnomedex is by the way the tech- or geek-conference organized by Chris Pirillo, who is also notoriously known for his online video stuff and live chat.

What is odd to me now is the fact that just when I decided to write this post about Matt, his web site went offline. WhereTheHellIsMatt.com does not resolve at all. There is a cached version of the site in Google, with a date of either November 8 or 9, so the site was up about a week ago. I hope that this down-time is only a temporary glitch. However, if I would be Matt, I would have a word with the hosting company (unless that company happens to be the sponsor for his web site hosting hehe)

I put up the link to his web site anyway, hoping that it will be up very soon.

Other Links

• Matthew Hardings Public Picasa Albums
• Matt's Typepad Blog
• MattHarding2718, his YouTube Channel 

Cheers!

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Search for ANSI and ASCII Artists and Bloggers

Except for some activities at deviantART was I not successful after over one year of searching to find much (if any) other blogs that are related to the old ANSI and ASCII underground artscene.

Fellow artists who created ASCII art for group NFO files, File_ID.diz or ANSI art for BBS Layouts and Login pictures and logos back in the early to mid 1990's.

It's sad and frustrating. The lack of community makes me spin off with my blog into other subjects, such as deviantART, Wikipedia and Cirque Du Soleil (or Internet Marketing and in a few cases about video games). I also was writing about internet video and music. Nice stuff, but not text art related.

I recenty created a new "Demoscene and Text Art Community" over at BUMPzee!

BUMPzee! is a blogger community / feed reader / networking site with some Digg features. I added another blog to the community, which I found at Blogspot, but that blog does not see much activity anymore either.



Where are you guys (and few girls) of the text art scene, demo scene and BBS warez scene? Nobody blogging? Nobody writing about things that were forgotten by most people and never learned by todays youth? Come on over and contact me and join the community.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Affiliate Genocide - SEJ Post 3-3-2007 - Comments

I know that this post is a bit off topic and I promise that it will not be like it was between May and July 2006.

I made a post at Search Engine Journal yesterday that causes quite some misunderstanding and a discussion that did not have much to do with the original post. That lead to an edit of the post which is available here and includes an Edit Note that points to the original post and comments at my family website.

You can find the original post and comments here.

The family site does not allow any comments so I post this article here at my Roy/SAC blog for the purpose of providing the ability to have people comment or ask questions to go deeper into the subject.

So feel free to add your comments regarding the original post and comments that are about the issue with Nazi-Germany and the Holocaust here. If your comment is about the issue with Google, nofollow and Affiliate Marketing, please comment at the current post at Search Engine Journal. Thanks.

How Could I Miss This?

I had my first anniversary 11 days ago on February 3rd, 2006.

Anniversary, huh? Yeah! This might be not so important to you, but it is, or should be (at least) be for me. Gee, if I forget something like this, what about wedding anniversaries one day.

My future wife is going to kill me.

Well, I am safe today, since I am not married. I am single, busy single single = no girl friend. No valentines day gifts to forget. Yeah, it's today, Valentines Day. You forgot that? I guess you have a wife, fiancé or other long term relationship. You would have remembered otherwise hehe.

Okay, now jokes aside. Ten days ago was my 1st Blogger anniversary.

That's right, One year and ten days ago did I setup my first blog and posted my first blog entry, EVER!

The first blog was this one and it started out as a blog on the blogger.com domain. It moved on the same month to Cumbrowski.com/RoySAC/Blog and in August 2006 to it current location at RoySAC.com/blog.

The Blog got temporarily "hijacked", metaphorical speaking, during the summer last year, when a business issue made me "abuse" my private art related blog (in a broader sense) to discuss issues that are as far off topic as a pork chops recipe on a Islamic or Jewish orthodox blog (conservative and reformed too for that matter, but that's not the point).

I got it back in July and moved my business related blogging to ReveNews.com, a blog dedicated to Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing in particular.

I also maintained the ConsumerMatch.com blog until August 2006. Conna Craig took over there for me in October, because I simply did not have the time for it anymore. I might blog there again in the future. Once in a while. May be. We will see.

My business blogging also brought me to SearchEngineJournal.com, which is a blog related to Search Engine Marketing. How all this happened was posted (dah!) at the beginning of this year at my ReveNews blog.

I don't have a precise count, but I posted over 150 entries at the various blogs and I exclude posts at "blogs" like my deviantART Journal, the ReturnOnAffiliate Blog (site does not exist anymore), MySpace and other places.

I don't have to crunch any numbers to know that the graph that shows my frequency of posting at a blog looks like the graph every company loves to see when they review the development of the companies EBIT of the previous months.

I am looking forward to another year of blogging and have to say that it gave me great joy and the opportunity to get in touch with people I wouldn't have connected with, without blogging and the rest that goes along with it.

If you don't have a blog yet and think about starting one, beware, blogging has a tendency not proven by medical studies yet.

It is "addictive"!

Anybody with a blog who caught himself writing a post for the blog in his head while doing something else that is supposed to get 100% attention (and screws it up, because of it), knows what I mean hehe.

Cheers!
Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Note: I have not made any New Year's resolutions, but may be this one could be called one: I hope to find Bloggers that have a blog like this one, related to ANSI and ASCII Text art, Demoscene and related topics (in a broader sense). So far was I not able to find anything that comes even remotely close. :(

Blog Moved

Quick News. I moved my Blog from Cumbrowski.com to the new RoySAC.com domain (where I moved already all my pages about ANSI and ASCII Text art to less than 2 weeks ago).

The new Blog URL is http://www.RoySAC.com/blog

The Feedburner Feed URL did not change. Also all existing Links to the Old Address should work without problem. I 301-redirected everything from the old address to the new one.

While I was moving the Blog, did I add the option to subscribe to my Blog via Email as little form in the upper right hand corner of my Blog. The old FeedBlitz subscriptions should continue to work in the near future, but I would suggest you sign up again at my blog and unsubscribe from FeedBlitz, just in case.

If you notice anything weird, let me know. Cheers!

Blog hijacked ...but I got it back

If you are a frequent reader of my blog then you noticed that over the last months the mix of topics that I covered with my posts increased.

Some might even got a bit disturbed by this.

My blog was over the last few months "hijacked" by Internet and Search Engine Marketing related topics.

The posts about ANSI and ASCII Text Art, Scene Art, the Demoscene, Wikipedia and deviantArt suddenly became a second priority.

Hey this Blog is supposed to be about the art and the fun stuff and not business.

I have good new though. All the business related stuff, or at least most of it, will not continue here because it found a new home.

I am a Blogger at ReveNews.com since July 2006 because of a personal invitation by Wayne Porter, who is one of the co-founders of ReveNews.com.

The invitation to blog at ReveNews, which is a well respected News Source in the Internet Marketing Industry and Winner of the Marketing Sherpa "Best Blog" Award in 2006, was a great honor for me and I really appreciated it. Visit my Blog at ReveNews.com and join the discussions.

Cheers,

Carsten aka Roy/SAC

Roy/SAC Blog Redesigned - Tribute to Text Art

Anybody who is an active blogger could recognize the default blogger template layout which I used for my Roy/SAC Blog when I launched it at the beginning of February.

I did some changes to it to have it at least look a bit different, but that was not enough, the basic design of the blogger template was still clearly visible.

I used this weekend to take care of that issue for good and redesigned the Blog. The Blog continues to use black as the general background. The MS DOS background was black and ASCII's look best with white font on dark background which made me pick the template with the black background in the first place.

I did not want to change anything about that concept, because I liked at back then and I still like it today.

In incorporated some "fake" and "real" Block ANSI elements into the design. I will probably continue doing some fine tuning over the next months for those elements, especially the text borders.

Over all does my Blog now look much better and you can tell, that it is primarily about me, Roy/SAC and what I did and do using that nick name, ASCII and ANSI Text Art and some Pixel VGA Art.

Please come and have a look for yourself and tell me what you think about it. If you have any ideas, generic or specific or even criticism, do not hesitate and just add a comment to this post. You can do so anonymously, if you do not want to tell me your name.

Cheers,
Carsten a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Here is a sample, that you get an idea. Click on the Image to open a full size screen shot.

Blogs, Blogging, XML, ATOM, RSS explained in simple Words.

I spent the last days several hours on a very comprehensive post about Blogs, XML, ATOM, RSS, Readers and Syndication / Aggregation, basically about the whole thing that is related to every day Web Feeds (more or less).

It's the serious attempt to explain the whole thing to normal people who use the internet, but don't know and don't care how the things work on a technical level in the background.

The trigger for me to write the Article was the request of a Business Partner to explain to him what all this is. He did not understand what posting in a "Blog" makes it different than posting a News via a proprietary CMS tool on one of our Websites.

I think he gets it now. I hope you too.

Here is the Link to the Article: ConsumerMatch.com Blog: Blog, Atom, RSS, XML and Syndication/Aggregation ! ?

Don't be shy to comment it. Positve or Negative.
Thanks

Carsten Cumbrowski a.k.a. Roy/SAC

Blogger, Bugger?!

Blogger was down again today. That's now the second major disrution within one week.

Bummer ...

It made me even start posing stuff in other Services. Like the two posts here which I posted at Rapid Feeds to check their service and also did have the urge to write someting, ...

... because that is the whole purpose of having a blog right?


ConsumerMatch.com Blog Disrupted
Blogger.com is down and causes some disruptions and design flaws on our Blog. It's still usable though because we host the content itself on our server...

Good that we officially launched our Blob today and submitted it everywhere. Not to mention all the changes made to the look and feel and settings.

I would be furious if this would be gone for good. Well, nothing I can do about it right now so I will use the time to introduce ConsumerMatch.com.

ConsumerMatch.com (CM) - Blog - CM is a Comparision Shopping Search Engine and Directory. We list Hundreds of Merchants, Millions of Products and Tons of Coupons, Deals and Specials. Resources, News, RSS Coupon Feeds and Deal Alerts via Email, Promotional Newsletter and more.

Private Blog also Affected
My private Roy/SAC Text Art Blog is affected the same way by the fact that Blogger.com is down. They had problems this morning already and showed errors. I made changes to the blog which were fine first and then suddenly reverted as if somebody restored content from a backup or archive. I hope they will be up soon.

The Blog was also Launched today (Lucky timeing I guess) and I am glad that I enabled the FTP Feature to get the HTML and XML Atom Feed send to our Webserver. Some Stuff used in the Blog Pages are still supposed to be provided by Blogger.com and is the Reason for the weired look and behaviour of some area of my Blogs.

..... Blogger.com ... or ... Bugger.com?!

1st Blog entry. An Introduction is in order

"Who the heck is Roy? What does SAC stand for? and last but not least, What has ASCII to do with Art?" ... Well, you are still here so I guess you will find out :)

SAC was part of the Underground Computer Art Scene during the time of DOS and BBS's.
SAC is short for Superior Art Creations and yes, I came up with this ingenious Name in 1994.

It's about TEXT Art, also known as ASCII and ANSI Art, a very rare form of ART which had it's prime in the early 90's before the realm of the Internet. People that knew how to operate computers well and even loved it were still considered "Geeks" and the stuff on the mind of those geeks were things like Hacking, Phreaking, Anarchy and Warez ;) (then Girls).

I officially retired from the Founder/Leader position in 1999 and as Member on 7/6/2001.
The offical SAC Website moved from http://www.superiorart.org/ to www.SuperiorArtCreations.com (still under construction though).

My official Homepage is located at http://www.RoySAC.com/default.asp.

All SAC Art Packs can be downloaded there, also all PPE's (PCBoard Bulletin Board Scripts) developed by SAC and PNS, graphical tools and more.

Tons of related links and merchandising you can not find everywhere as easily and condensed in one place which is also highly related to computer art and design is showcased and last but not least an article about The 3 ASCII Art Styles of the Underground ...with screenshots to illustrate it.

Well, I guess plenty of reasons to stop by one time when you have a minute.

Cheers, Carsten Cumbrowski a.k.a. Roy/SAC