Justin Germino Ramblings

The Princess Bride

“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” So goes the mantra of the best swordsman in the history of all time. Inigo from The Princess Bride has travelled the world in the twenty years since his father was killed by a six-fingered man, learning the art of the sword with all the masters until he is, without doubt, number one. Searching for the six-fingered man, Inigo encounters the Dread Pirate Roberts, who knocks his confidence by besting him with steel. His confidence returns later in the film, however, as he finds his mortal enemy. A chase on foot through a castle culminates with Inigo receiving what should be a fatal wound to the stomach. Repeating his mantra over and over, Inigo plugs the wound with his own fist, and proceeds to continue the fight one-handed, finally avenging the death of his father.

Kill Bill: Part 1

Perhaps one of the most epic swordfights occurs as the finale to Kill Bill part one. Black Mamba (Uma Thurman), using steel crafted by the legendary Hatori Hanso, single-handedly defeats dozens of opponents. Coming at her with a plethora of weapons, the Crazy88 are no match for her prowess with the blade. In one of the most blood soaked scenes in cinema history, Black Mamba defends herself against Japans most powerful underground fighters, including Gogo, a half-mad schoolgirl bodyguard wielding a deadly ball and chain combination and determined to defend her mistress to the end. After almost twenty minutes of on screen action, this scene culminates in a battle of swords and wills, in a beautiful snow-covered garden, as Black Mamba finally decapitates O-Ren Ishii, queen of the Japanese underworld.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon uses a masterful combination of classic sword-fighting techniques coupled with fantasy abilities, such as the capacity to leap the height of buildings in a single move, to create a visual masterpiece. There are too many fights in this film to distinguish one as the best, but Jen vs Shu Lien in the weapons room has to be a contender. Changing swords almost as often as they cross them, the characters demonstrate awesome skill as they fight against each other and the power of past legacies.

Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones

Any piece about sword-fights would of course be incomplete without a Star Wars reference. George Lucas brought the light-saber into public consciousness in 1977, and it has become the most famous and certainly most emulated sword ever since. From Yoda duelling Count Dooku, through the epic battles of the Jedi Knights, to the final battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, countless scenes are offered up for viewing pleasure. Now with six films to choose from, it is impossible to select the greatest battle, so we advise you to watch them all.

The best swordfight scenes was compiled and brought to you by Vue Cinemas.

I finally reached the rank of Secret Agent for the Dragon society in The Secret War, this now allows me access to the early beta weekend for The Secret World next weekend.

I already pre-ordered the game but too excited to wait until it’s June release date.  In the meantime I had unlocked 25 new items to use in game from my participation in The Secret War and can’t wait to try them all in game.

-Justin Germino

Blog Engage kicked off another great contest offering and this is the Guest Blogging Contest May 2012, this contest like the others offers a $250 first place prize to the winner who can bring the most traffic, and social media shares/comments to their article.

Last month I was able to place 2nd in the April guest blogging contest and won $150 2nd place prize, which I used to help fund the current May Video Game Giveaway on DragonBlogger.com.

I won’t be competing in the May Guest Blogging Contest because I became a sponsor for this one, and wanted to take a break from entering the guest blogging contests for a bit.  (I am considering putting my own together for summer time or early fall).

In the meantime, if you own your own blog and want a chance to earn any one of the cash prizes.

First Place – $250 USD
Second Place – $150 USD
Third Place – $100 USD

Eisley Jacobs was kind enough to send my family a copy of her two Dragons Forever books Born to be a Dragon and Blink of a Dragon and my 8 year old son started reading the first book recently.  He started enjoying it right off the bat and mentioned that it had an easy follow along concept and allowed him to connect with the character Meia and of course anything fantasy fiction catches his eye.

If you have any fans of Eragon, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, particularly a younger reader 6 through 12 then I would consider giving them these two books as a gift to keep them reading and entertained.

The Dragons Forever books are $6.99 as paperback books on Amazon.com  but only $2.99 in Kindle Fire format, so if you happen to have Kindle Fire’s I recommend saving the money, the book reads very well on the Kindle Fire and would be good to have kids use the Kindle Fire for reading instead of just playing app store games all day.

-Justin Germino

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I will have to thank @Ileane for finding Plusses and showcasing it a few days ago, this service basically turns your Google+ stream into an online microblog of sorts that only helps further showcase your Google+ stream.

Now, it kind of reminds me of the simplistic layout of Tumblr, and I don’t see a way to customize the plusses URI to make it more page friendly, mine is http://www.pluss.es/103639435705622807627/ where I would prefer it to be www.plusses.es/dragonblogger if possible.

There are only a handful of options at the moment

But it does give someone the ability to follow your Google+ content like a blog, this could be useful if you are very active on Social Media and want to offer a blog like interface to your Google+ conversations.

-Justin Germino

I am engaging in The Secret War which is a social media tie in game to The Secret World where you can earn in game unlockables early by participating and helping your factions take over countries and regions around the world.

I am currently part of the Dragon faction which origin is based out of Seoul, South Korea.  With my handle being dragonblogger and the faction motto of being unpredictable I almost figured it to a Chaotic Neutral alignment in game terms and wanted to be something different.

The first video of the game I saw was of the Dragon faction and it kind of resonated with me.

In the Secret War you help take over regions by deploying agents (you get 1 for signing up, the rest you have to recruit from Facebook friends) you can also use propaganda where you broadcast exclusive game images and video and get points for people clicking on the shared links.

This would be the first time I ever participated in a social media game on the PC that involved inviting others on Facebook to join, I normally won’t bug other people with game invites, but I have a mission.

If I can earn enough points, I will gain early access to the Beta of The Secret World on May 11th weekend.  I already pre-ordered the game and am dying to get my hands on it.

If you are on Facebook and you want to sign up to help my battle to keep the Dragon faction on top, let me know your Facebook name and I will send you an invite.  You just have to sign up, you don’t have to participate for me to get the points.

-Justin Germino

Recovering from umbilical hernia surgery on Thursday last week, it took until Friday before I could walk up the steps to be able to check my work emails and start catching up on some blogging activities.  Sore all through the weekend and pretty much unable to do anything except chill on the couch watching Harry Potter marathon, Avatar and playing my iPad.

I did have some limited mobility and was able to play Call of Duty Black Ops with my boys where we alternated between Zombie Mode and creating custom warriors in a team deathmatch with my two boys versus my own soldier.  It is pretty fun and the boys have a good time, they make a good team and my oldest is really good at the game.

In the meantime, maybe if I am feeling better I wanted to go see Pirates Band of Misfits today at the theater, but not sure if I will be feeling up to it.

-Justin Germino

Have you actually seen clear and concise benefits from your Klout score yet?  Have you seen perks being offered that you could accept and participate in?  Klout is a measure of your social media influence and tracks Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter influence giving you an overall ranking or score based on other accounts.

But How Accurate is Klout?

Engagement, replies, retweets and conversations are supposed to be what drive Klout up and you can see people with high numbers of followers have lower Klout than others because they may get the fans/numbers but don’t have the interactivity which indicates influence.  What good is having 200k people following you if .0002% will respond if you pose a question or try to tell them how excited you are about a website/product and hope they follow your link?

Klout is supposed to be all about measuring your engagement on social media, you shouldn’t just be a nameless broadcaster and make sure you contribute to conversations to increase Klout.  I started having my doubts about Klout and it’s accuracy after doing my own research and reading this post about Klout Score: http://www.johnpaulaguiar.com/klout-score/

@JohnAguiar who is a blogger and social media preneur I follow told me months back one of his ways he gets participating in that he joins trends constantly and is always on the lookout and participating in big conversations where notice and responses are sure to happen.

He manages to do a phenomenal job responding and interacting with over 111,000 followers and still taking the time to respond to each and every person that replies with a question or statement that warrants a response.

So when I see my own Klout score with just over 14,000 followers I can only try to guess how my much smaller account could have such a close matching Klout score.

Logically I try to break it down to what Klout may be looking at that might justify this.  I notice I have almost 2x as many tweets (this is probably from my calls for poetry words and blog RSS feeds), plus I heavily use Buffer, JustRetweet, and some other sites to help promote others articles and such, but I wouldn’t consider these interactive but just promotional and shouldn’t be measurements for influence.

I do think that I was able to drive a lot of extra Klout with my giveaway contests going viral and becoming very popular, I have received hundreds of retweets on some articles. 

In comparing our Klout accounts, only recently were my metrics higher than his account and I can only assume my contest article promotions were the driving factor.

One thing of interest, you can see that both John and I use Facebook as our primary method of influence.  This was pretty interesting because both John and I have WAY LESS followers on Facebook than on Twitter.  I have 14k Twitter followers and only about 2,271 friends on Facebook.  John as mentioned has 111k Twitter followers and around 4,009 friends on Facebook.  This shows you how much more powerful Facebook is at reaching people and influencing them vs Twitter as a Social Network I think if the influence metrics can be believed.

How much clout does Klout really have?

Well, based on my comparisons I am not really sure if Klout is completely accurate in the score it assigns social media entities.  I know that I don’t have as broad a reach as John Aguiar who to me has a great command over social media communication and influence.  To rank me as highly in comparison when my networks and spheres of influence are only 1/2 as large on Facebook and 1/10th as large on Twitter seems a bit off.

I can’t really explain why my account would be rated the same score, maybe some of my 14k followers are higher quality than those 100k followers but it is unlikely to be that big a difference.  So far other than a few extra perk rewards I am not seeing too much benefit from having a Klout score of near 60, my best Perk so far was getting a free copy of Men of a Certain Age Season 1, but haven’t had anything nearly as interesting since.

-Justin Germino

Application wall post visibility issues wound up plaguing me over several weeks without even realizing it until I found out that all of my feeds to my profile in Facebook were set to Only Me visibility the other day and learned it had been that way for a long time.

So basically for weeks I was wondering why no likes, comments on my timeline and it was all because all of my dlvr.it, NetworkedBlogs and Hootsuite posts even to my Facebook timeline were all restricted so that only I was seeing them!

I didn’t set this, somehow Facebook defaulted all my connected apps and changed them to “Only Me” for visibility.  So the solution was to manually go through all of my Facebook apps and switch them back from “Only Me” to “Public” visibility for the applications that publish a blog feed or social media manager applications like Gremln, Hootsuite and Tweetdeck…etc.

Bottom line, check your apps and check your timeline, if you see locked symbols next to your timeline posts you know there are restrictions to post visibility and if you didn’t specifically restrict who you wanted that message to be seen by, you need to do some investigation and change the application post settings.

-Justin Germino

I just couldn’t wait and even though I am still playing Star Wars: The Old Republic I pre-ordered The Secret World which comes out on June 19th.  The game is a modern day based MMO that removes the traditional "classes and limits" where you literally can keep switching out abilities and customize your character infinitely.  There are no levels, there is no dying (unconscious) and the game is set in modern times where every conspiracy you ever imagined is true.

I used to love the role playing game Dark Conspiracy which I played with my friends and brother as a kid, and we used to have our characters fight monstrosities that would invade from the subways, wyverns and demons that would spawn and roam through the Empire State building and so much more.  Now this game recreates that kind of concept and reminds me of a Stephen King / Davinci Code type of game.

In my pre-order I got the Screaming Demon ring and the special "dog" companion and T-Shirt.  I have no idea what benefits or bonuses they give in game, but I am dying to find out.

-Justin Germino

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