What the hell is 'bling' anyway?

First of all, let me say that I can't stand rap crap and anything that is remotely associated with crap that rap is. Even more, I can't stand that normal, everyday language is being so corrupted with this ebonics brain dead jargon. Now that I've made that clear, let's get on to the topic at hand.

I visit a website called Digital Point to keep tabs on the performance of several of the websites I manage, both personally and professionally. DP has a great forum and I've found a lot of good material, advice and even some stupid opinions out there. One member in particular, though, stands out. This is a guy that goes by the name of ThinkBling (hence the need for my disclaimer above). This internet raider has created a website called Bling (gawd that pains me to utter) and he actually has some interesting free software that he makes available for anyone that wants it. The one in particular I'm fascinated with is the Amazon.com application that allows a person to patch in the Amazon website into their own site with very little programming. The only problem is that's written in PHP (I'll go into my php rant later). But the concept is very impressive and I actually found an ASP version (hah, take you php freaks) and I am considering integrating the application into my Project Responder Firefighting Emergency Vehicle website to add value for the website visitors.

So even as much as I can't stand the thought of even using the word (I hate to even call it that) bling, as much as I can't stand fingernails down a chalkboard, it seems this ThinkBling character may be on to something. I'll admit that it takes a while to figure out your way around his site since it looks like text ads on steroids. But overall, I think he's figured out how to be successful on the web by giving something of value away for something that has little perceived value (a link back to a website) which in reality can be a pretty potent concoction when the links end up numbering in the thousands.

Cheers