Vintage Boots

I must say I like these extremely high heeled laced boots with quite short toe box. They remind me those 50s fetish pictures with Bettie Page and other pinups.
Talking about boots, why don't you have a look at (and maybe take part in) my friend Shoegal's new Boot Contest?
It's fun, sooner or later I'll join too.

High Tide Heels

Are the Ladies ready to go on holidays? Are they already done with their luggage? In case a pair of fins is missing, I suggest this evening model, perfect for a Hollywood swimming-pool party or to dive at midnight from a thirty meter long yacht.
This stiletto fins picture has already spread around the world, just Google "High Tide Heels" (or also "High Heel Fins", "Stiletto Flippers" or anything like that), and find dozens of forums and blogs that reposted this topic in the last few weeks.
Since somebody says I post too seldom, I will join the chorus, trying to update the state of the art, inasmuch as it costs nothing.
Let's say first that the picture's origin is still uncertain, apart from the fact that the plate reflected in the display window is Belgian (it's said to be a shop in Liège, maybe an art gallery) and in fact, as long as I know, the first to post it was a Belgian blog in March.
More recently the photo was reposted by British, American, German, Swiss, Greek and Italian blogs, just to name a few, and was sacred by Manolo's Shoe Blog, that also made clear this not being a completely new idea, but already seen on the catwalks by Australian designer Lisa Carney and by more famous Jean Paul Gaultier.
These are the certain facts, then we only have speculations, for example it's not clear whether or not these stiletto flippers, seen also in coral red, are on sale somewhere or if somebody even tried or bought them, in order to sport them on some very stylish beach.

There Is Something About YouTube

The recent purchase of extremely popular video web site YouTube by Google for $1.65 billion in stock is probably one of the biggest news to date in the internet world. The site, which was started by three 20-somethings last year, is a free video warehouse that allows users (something like 100 million a day) to upload or download movies. Rumors emerged that Yahoo was in the bidding war until very close to the end. Sequoia Capital, which funded YouTube with $11.5 million, earned more than 40 times what was invested in a company founded in February 2005. Other news report of CBS, Vivendi-Universal and Sony BMG joining a new branded channel on YouTube to deliver featured content.
On the other hand News Corp-Fox, which owns MySpace, the first YouTube competitor in the web video market, didn't hide sort of unease about Google's move, given the recent agreement for hosting Google ads on the famous social networking community. Last weekend, subtle changes occurred on MySpace’s homepage and user pages to make MySpace videos much more prominent and accessible. The default user profile page now has a video section that automatically displays a video if the user has one uploaded.
In other words the web video world is exploding, and the "viral" video technology invented by YouTube is the engine of this explosion. What's this "viral" stuff? It's the ability of embedding any YouTube video in a blog or web site just as simply as this...

Italian Elections: Prodi Wins Kicking Penalties

I understand that it can seem strange to find a political comment on a niche footwear blog like this, but there it is. After all STYLETTOS Italy is an Italian web site, so you can't be silent when all, really all, are saying theirs. Blogosphere rumors give a measure of the mess where Italy is lying. After the violent tricky electoral campaign orchestrated by the Right, last night we reached the paroxysm, and at 3am we still had to stand made up figures, victory claims, threats and proposals of compromise. Then today, after forty years, also the supergodfather Bernardo Provenzano dulled out from the cylinder hat.
But in the end Prodi made it. It's not exactly the luminous dawn that everybody expected, today the sky is gray no more and no less than yesterday. Left should reflect first of all about its inadequacy: if you want to rule the country, you must have the courage to transform a kind of mercenary army in a serious and unitarian political proposal. Start from this victory after penalties to defuse Berlusconi's soft dictatorship and relaunch Italy. But before I would still place the matter of restoring a fair, simple and effective electoral system, instead of this kind of Russian Roulette, invented by the usual tricky christian-democrats, and accepted with tightened teeth by all the opportunists among Right and Left.
Personally I never digested the result of the majority system referendum in 1999, won by 90%, but invalidated for a fist of ballots. No French double turn or German proportional system, but majority sistem with single card and proportional correction. The small parties' nomenklatura would say that it is a step behind, but in my opinion it is from here that the Democratic Party will have to commence.

The Way We Were

I discovered a web service which is useful and impressively big. It's the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, a sort of time machine allowing to see how the web was in the past, going back until 1996. The service is also linked with the great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, and contains the time archives of whichever web site, for a total of 55 billion pages.
If you are interested in the history of STYLETTOS Italy you will find that, since the amateur beginnings in 2002, many new contents were developed but the style of the site, essential and a little severe, didn't change much.

The Red Stiletto

Things you find surfing the web. This Red Stiletto car was created by David Crow using a 1972 Honda CB 350 motor and running gear. The car took him four years to complete, and features an alloy tube frame with fiberglass shell and hand rubbed paint. The Red Stiletto was shown at the ArtCar Fest in San Jose, California, and reported by many web sites and blogs: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and maybe more.

Why This Site, Why This Blog

From now on, also STYLETTOS Italy has its own blog. I began to attend the blogosphere, and I realised that interesting and innovative things are emerging between all the blah-blah. What is impressing in the first place is the size of the phenomenon, nearly 27 million blogs online and about 2 billion links (Technorati data), 700,000 posts and 70,000 new blogs every day, and who knows how much more underground stuff.

This site could not remain outside from such a lively and continuously evolving reality. By now the blog is only a substantial reply of the old "Why this site" page, supplying information and clarifications about the development and the history of STYLETTOS Italy, but it is obvious that this section will have to take its independent route, still to be invented.

I'm eagerly waiting for comments and suggestions, otherwise what a blog is it?

Google AdSense and STYLETTOS Italy

But now a good piece of news: I finally found the way to monetise this web site adequately. I don't even remember where I got the idea, I tried to place Google Ads on the site and I discovered that IT WORKS! I can make in one week more than I earned in three years with other affiliate programs. And this I believe without weighing too much on this site's character, but on the contrary adding useful and interesting contents and features.

It is to be admitted that whoever invented this is a genius, those Google guys found the Columbus' egg, or if you prefer the chicken with the golden eggs. The idea is simple and brilliant at the same time: after creating a search engine which everybody must pass, and setting up a system that displays ads that are relevant with the search, they extended this system to third parties, addressing to every single web page and blog that signs-up with the program the most appropriate ads in a completely automated way. Doing so Google encourages web sites development, redistributing to the publishers part of the revenues, which are paid by the advertisers with an auction system that is quite complex and fully automated as well.

It's a milestone of a new age: somebody perfectly understood Internet's nature, which is not one-to-many but many-to-many communication, and found the way to intercept this traffic for commercial purposes with efficient services and a sophisticated artificial intelligence technology. Try and see, just browse the pages of this site to realise that the addressing can get on every page the most relevant ads, even if there is still some weird combination. The system is pay-per-click and these ads are very likely to be visited and so to bring revenues, because they just comply with what visitors are looking for. In my opinion the main advantage of Google AdSense, compared with usual affiliate programs, is that you don't need that the visitor buys something to get the commission. It's more or less as being paid just to bring people window-shopping.