Central Perk

miercuri, 29 decembrie 2010

Behind-the-Scenes with Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, Dec. 29, 2010

Behind-the-Scenes with Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey

Every year around the holidays, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts selects and celebrates individuals who have, through their lifetime achievement in the arts, contributed to enriching and enhancing culture in America. Watch this video which features behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with this year’s honorees at the White House - Paul McCartney, Oprah Winfrey, Merle Haggard, Bill T. Jones, and Jerry Herman.

Watch the video.

Seth's Blog : Sadly stuck with the status quo

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Sadly stuck with the status quo

JetBlue is ordinarily smart with their web site, which is why their broken system is particularly useful to take a look at. I'm guessing that at some point, management said, "it's good enough," and moved on to more pressing issues. And then, of course, it stays good enough, frozen in time, ignored, and annoying.

The problem with letting your web forms become annoying is that in terms of time spent interacting with your brand, they're way up on the list. If someone is spending a minute or two or three or four cursing you out from their desk, it's not going to be easily fixed with some clever advertising.

Here's an illustrated guide to things to avoid, JetBlue style:

First interaction wasn't so great. If you even bother to build a "please wait" page, be sure it says something useful, or perhaps interesting, as opposed to confusing. Should I press continue?

Throughout the form, JetBlue frequently asks for dates (of birth, say, or issuance). Everywhere else on their site (and in the country they're based) the format for dates is July 10, 1960. But here, just this one time, the format is 10, July 1960. And you can't just type in the date, which is fast, you need to wrestle with pull down menus, menus too dumb to list all twelve months of the year at once, but instead requiring you to scroll if any date is after April...

Alert readers know that pull down menus with more than thirty total choices are a petty annoyance for me, and this one is particularly vexing. There a more than a hundred and fifty countries here, including a few I have never heard of. The United States, home to 90% of JetBlue's customers, is listed near the bottom, but not at it (hint: if you insist on this sort of error in form design, list the popular choices at the top, at the bottom and in alpha... no penalty for multiple listings). (A far better alternative is the auto-completion guessing trick Google now uses in search).

Worse, if you try to type the country (U...n...i) it takes you to... TUNISIA!

Four passengers; 8 times I had to scroll down all the way, then slowly scroll up and then click...

It gets more annoying. For each passenger, I had to choose, "Travel document type". But of course, there's only one travel document permitted, "Passport" which hardly requires a pull down choice I think. Rule of thumb: when in doubt about a question, don't bother asking.

They also wanted to know the nationality of traveler, which is fine, but then two items later, they wanted to know, "Issuing country." While I'm confident that there are a few travelers who have a nationality in one country and an issuing country in another, my guess is that it would be considered a nice gesture if the form remembered your answer from three seconds ago and automatically entered it for you, no?

After painstakingly filling out the form, I was presented with these two buttons at the bottom of the page... hmmmmm.

Doesn't really matter which one I pressed, though, because lady and the tiger style, I got this:

NOOOOOOOO!

And I had to start the entire form over again, from the beginning, with no fields remembered.

I know, I know, this is a rant. But it's a rant with a point:

Fill in your own forms. Make your executives do it. Watch customers do it. See what your competitors are using. Improve the form. Don't use pull down menus for more than 12 choices unless there really is no choice.

"Good enough" is a hard call, but I think we can agree that most online forms, aren't.

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marți, 28 decembrie 2010

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Illinois Governor Wants to Borrow $15 Billion to "Balance" the Budget; Illinois Total Unfunded Liabilities Exceed $200 Billion Already
LPS Mortgage Monitor: Foreclosure Inventory Rising for 5th Straight Month, Nearly 2.2 Million Loans are 90 days+ Delinquent Not Yet in Foreclosure
China, ECB Gov't Bond Auctions Fail; Chinese Interbank Lending Rate Hits 5.67% vs. 3.68% Gov't Bills; ECB Monetizes Bond Purchases; Gold, Silver Soar

Illinois Governor Wants to Borrow $15 Billion to "Balance" the Budget; Illinois Total Unfunded Liabilities Exceed $200 Billion Already

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 06:15 PM PST

The state of Illinois elected a Keynesian nutcase of epic magnitude in Governor Quinn. Quinn's latest brainstorm is to borrow $15 billion to "stabilize things".

Quinn has not said how he will pay back the loans. Then again, he does want to raise taxes like mad and probably will do so. Regardless of what he does, Quinn is so beholden to unions, Illinois will need to borrow again 12 months from now.

Please consider Quinn Weighs $15 Billion Illinois Borrowing 'Option'

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is considering borrowing $15 billion to pay overdue bills and balance the biggest budget deficit in the state's history.

Illinois faces a budget shortfall of at least $13 billion because of declining tax revenue. The state Senate in November didn't have the votes to approve the borrowing of $3.7 billion to cover pension-fund contributions for the fiscal year that ends June 30.

Senate President John Cullerton and House Speaker Michael Madigan declined through spokesmen to say if the bond sale would draw enough support to pass.

The Senate Republican leader, Christine Radogno, criticized the proposal as lacking specifics about how the money would be paid back.

Other ideas under consideration include a 2 percentage- point increase in the state income tax that the Senate approved in 2009. The current rate is 3 percent. The House didn't take the measure up for a vote.

Quinn's new borrowing proposal, which the Chicago Tribune reported today, drew criticism from one municipal-bond investor. Matt Dalton, chief executive officer of Belle Haven Investments Inc., in White Plains, New York, questioned the wisdom of borrowing.

"He's trying to sign up for another credit card," said Dalton. "That's going to put a lot of pressure on Illinois."

The cost of insuring Illinois's bonds against default rose to the highest level in five months as the state headed for the new year without a plan to finance the pension-fund contributions.

Illinois Needs Over $200 Billion Not $15 Billion

Illinois current budget deficit is $13 billion. However, Illinois debt including pension underfunding is $130 billion for fiscal year 2009.

I talked about this 10 months ago in Illinois Pension Fund $61 Billion Underwater; State Borrows Money For 2010 Contribution; California $20 Billion in the Hole Again

Illinois's pension fund is deep in the hole and getting deeper every year.

The state's reaction never changes: borrow money and hope the returns beat the cost of borrowing. Former governor Rod Blagojevich tried that to the tune of $10 billion and it worked out less than spectacularly to say the least. Nonetheless Illinois is back at it for 2010.

Illinois Is Broke

Inquiring minds are looking at Illinois Is Broke, a website mentioned in the above article.
By July, Illinois will be $130,000,000,000 in debt. This crushing load hampers the state's ability to fund public schools and universities, health care, and other essential public services. Most of that money is owed to the state's pension funds and retiree health care plans. And YOUR SHARE of that debt is $25,000 per household.

How did this happen? Basically, Illinois spends $3 for every $2 it takes in. Only in Springfield is this kind of math possible. The state accomplishes this by borrowing or by simply ignoring its unpaid bills. And it has been doing so for years.
Here are a couple charts from the site. Click on either charts to see a sharper image.

Illinois Budget Gap

Illinois Needs Over $200 Billion Not $15 Billion

Flash forward to fiscal year 2010 and take a look at Illinois pension liabilities as shown in Interactive Map of Public Pension Plans; How Badly Underfunded are the Plans in Your State?

Illinois pensions alone are $208 billion underfunded using realistic measures. The overall level of funding is 29%, the worst in the nation.

Click on the above link to see how your state fares.

Governor Quinn's Crazy Borrowing Plan Makes State's Problem Worse

Please consider this email from John Tillman at the Illinois Policy Institute.

Governor Quinn's Crazy Borrowing Plan Makes State's Problem Worse

CHICAGO – Governor Quinn's borrowing plan will worsen the state's fiscal health, not improve it, notes the nonpartisan Illinois Policy Institute. The independent think tank points out that while borrowing now might give the state some temporary breathing room, the funding of core government services will be threatened in the future as the cost of debt service mounts.

"Governor Quinn's borrowing will hit the working class, poor, and disadvantaged of Illinois the hardest," said John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute. "Borrowing costs, combined with annual increases in the expected pension contribution, will crowd out basic government functions in the near future. Our past borrowing is already catching up to us. Illinois would have had an extra $1.6 billion in available revenues this year if not for the debt service costs of previous years' borrowing."

The Institute urges lawmakers to face up to the unsustainable structural overspending that is driving the deficits year after year. The Institute's Budget Solutions 2011 alternative budget showed how Illinois could balance the FY2011 budget, make the pension payment, and have money left over to begin paying down past-due debt—all without a tax increase or borrowing. Had Governor Quinn followed that roadmap, the Institute argues, Illinois would be in far better shape today. Instead, Governor Quinn has put his focus on borrowing and tax hikes in order to avoid taking on the public employee unions, Medicaid reforms, and other reforms offered by the Institute and others.

"It's worth remembering that Governor Quinn only found one program—out of thousands—to veto outright when he signed this year's spending bill in July. Had he taken a closer look at structural spending reforms and not agreed to politically motivated "no layoff and closure" deals with public employee unions, we could be on the path back to recovery instead of being stuck in ever-mounting debt," noted Tillman.

Governor Quinn wants to pair the unprecedented borrowing with tax hikes on those who can least afford it. Under one revenue plan calling for a 66 percent income tax hike, a firefighter and a preschool teacher with two kids earning a combined $80,000 would have to pay $1,440 more in state taxes. This is more than double the expected savings from the federal tax cuts recently signed by President Obama. Struggling families shouldn't have to bear the brunt of the state's ill-advised spend-and-borrow habits.

The Illinois Policy Institute recently released a study, How to Lose Jobs and Alienate People, providing statewide and county-by-county income and job loss estimates associated with plans to increase the state income tax. The study, along with a tax calculator to see how the tax increase would impact individual taxpayers, is available at What You Need to Know: Tax Hike Research and Resources.

Quite literally Illinois is insolvent and Governor Quinn thinks borrowing another $15 billion will help.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

LPS Mortgage Monitor: Foreclosure Inventory Rising for 5th Straight Month, Nearly 2.2 Million Loans are 90 days+ Delinquent Not Yet in Foreclosure

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 03:13 PM PST

A press release from LPS' Mortgage Monitor Report shows Foreclosure Inventory Rising for 5th Straight Month

The November Mortgage Monitor report released by Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS) shows that the volume of loans moving to REO continued to drop as moratoria further delayed foreclosure sales. While the 90+ delinquency category has steadily declined, the number of loans moving to seriously delinquent status beyond 90 days far outpaced the number of foreclosure starts. Nearly 2.2 million loans are 90 days or more delinquent but not yet in foreclosure.

Foreclosure inventories also continued to rise for the fifth straight month as delinquent accounts are referred for foreclosure, but the sale of foreclosure properties continued to decline. When compared to January 2008 levels, the foreclosure inventory of Jumbo Prime loans is nearly seven times higher; the inventory of Agency Prime loans is nearly six times higher; and the foreclosure inventory of Option ARM loans is approaching five times the inventory in January 2008.

The report also shows that one-third of loans that are 90 days or more delinquent have not made a payment in a year; however, the number of new problem loans declined nearly 5.4 percent from October, which is opposite of the seasonality trend that typically impacts new delinquencies this time of year. Self-cures for loans one to two months delinquent increased in November to a six-month high.

In the month of November, 261,153 loans were referred to foreclosure, which represents a 0.7% month-over-month decline. The total number of delinquent loans is nearly 2.1 times historical averages - and foreclosure inventory is currently at 7.7 times historical averages.

As reported in LPS' First Look release, other key results from LPS' latest Mortgage Monitor report include:

Total U.S. loan delinquency rate: 9.02 percent
Total U.S. foreclosure inventory rate: 4.08 percent
Total U.S. non-current* loan rate: 13.10 percent
States with most non-current* loans: Florida, Nevada, Mississippi, Georgia, New Jersey
States with fewest non-current* loans: North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Wyoming, Montana

Charts From The Report

The report is 34 pages long. Inquiring minds may wish to give it a closer look. Here are a few select charts.

click on any chart for sharper image

Delinquent and Foreclosure Rates by Month

Total Delinquency Percent Excluding Foreclosures

Total Foreclosure Percent By Product

Foreclosure Increase Compared to January 2008

Loan Cures

Serious Delinquencies

Foreclosure Starts vs. Serious Delinquencies

While there are some welcome trends in direction, actual foreclosures are lagging. The pent-up need to foreclose is huge.

Moreover, mortgage rates have rising nearly a full percentage point in the last 45 days. This will put a damper on already depressed home sales, making it harder to unload inventory.

Look for months of inventory to soar in the upcoming months with continued declines in home prices. Contrary to what most think, falling prices are a good thing. Home prices need to fall to a point low enough where genuine demand kicks in.

Foreclosure moratoriums are counterproductive and exacerbate existing problems.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

China, ECB Gov't Bond Auctions Fail; Chinese Interbank Lending Rate Hits 5.67% vs. 3.68% Gov't Bills; ECB Monetizes Bond Purchases; Gold, Silver Soar

Posted: 28 Dec 2010 09:51 AM PST

Gold and silver are up sharply with bank auction failures in China and Europe today. Interbank lending rates in China doubled in a week and hit a three-year high of 5.67% vs. the failed auction on 91-day securities yielding 3.68%. This was the Second China Failure This Month To Complete Bill Sale.

China's government failed to draw enough demand at a bill sale for the second time in a month as seasonal demand for funds and higher reserve-requirement ratios left banks with less cash.

The finance ministry sold 16.76 billion yuan ($2.53 billion) of 91-day securities, falling short of the planned 20 billion yuan target, according to a statement on the website of Chinabond, the nation's biggest debt-clearing house. The average winning yield was 3.68 percent, higher than the 3.22 percent rate for similar-maturity debt in the secondary market yesterday.

"Banks are badly short of cash," said Qu Qing, a bond analyst at Shenyin Wanguo Securities Co. in Shanghai. "Given the cash squeeze, the central bank probably won't announce any tightening measure by the end of this year."

The seven-day repurchase rate, which measures lending costs between banks, has more than doubled in the past two weeks and yesterday reached a three-year high of 5.67 percent, according to daily fixings published at 11 a.m. by the National Interbank Funding Center.

"The market is desperate for cash," said Chen Liang, a bond analyst at Guohai Securities Co. in Shenzhen. "It's too costly to park money with debt at such a price given the seven- day repo rate has risen above 5 percent."

"Some banks may be buying the local currency in the foreign-exchange market because it's hard to borrow money in the fixed income," said Li Tao, a foreign exchange trader at Shenzhen Development Bank Co. in Shenzhen. "There is also concern the appreciation may get quicker before President Hu's visit."

The auction was for 20 billion Yuan which is a mere 3.2 billion US dollars and it could not find bidders for that paltry amount. Is this a "year-end" thing or the start of a cash crunch? Regardless, watch what happens when China's property bubble takes a big nosedive.

ECB Monetizes Bond Purchases

Meanwhile in Europe, the ECB fails to fully offset government bond buys, thereby monetizing 13.5 billion euros in government bond purchases.

The European Central Bank failed to attract the 73.5 billion euros from banks on Tuesday needed to offset its seven-month run of euro zone government bond purchases, instead managing to draw just over 60 billion.

"It has happened before but I wouldn't make too much of a big deal out of it," said ING economist Martin Van Vliet.

"The end of year is typically a quiet period and banks books are closed so it shouldn't be seen as a sign that tensions are returning to interbank markets."

Once again we ponder the question "Is this a year-end phenomenon or the start of something more significant?" Right now I suggest China is the real deal. I do not know about the ECB failure but it sure does not look pretty, regardless of the reason.

$SSEC - Shanghai Index Drops 1.74%

click on chart for sharper image

The Shanghai Stock Index is where it was in June 2009. The rally that fueled US equities (Bernanke's printing press), did not do the same for the $SSEC in spite of rampant price inflation and a massive expansion of credit and money supply in China.

Metals

The entire metals futures market is up today, with gold up nearly $22 to $1405 and silver up nearly a buck to $30.20. Copper futures hit a new all-time high of $4.30 a pound. In contrast, oil is nearly flat, up 38 cents to $91.38.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

5 Creative Solutions to Tough SEO Challenges

Posted: 27 Dec 2010 02:40 PM PST

Posted by randfish

December has been a surprisingly busy month for my email inbox, with questions on nearly every SEO subject imaginable. In answering many of these quandries, a common theme emerged - that many marketers engage in SEO challenges with a singular focus on the most common / best practice techniques and don't stray into a creative, imaginative mindset to find alternatives.

Here, then, are six examples of problems I've seen where creativity might prevail over standard techniques.

#1 - High Budget Reputation Management Issues

Several SEOs I know are currently involved in high-budget reputation management, where a company, product or person is attempting to assert control of the search results for their name/brand. Most of the standard techniques involve linking to and/or creating positive or neutral content about the target to push down the negative content.

A creative, alternate methodology might be to create diversity by introducing multiple brands/people with the same or similar names. For example, if a Mr. Thomas Thompson is attempting to push down negative results for his name, you might seek to boost up the profiles/rankings of other Thomas Thompsons and generating buzz about them to make the engines consider applying diversity algorithms to the results. Similarly, you could create fictional profiles (pseudonyms) or characters for the same effect. Hollywood movies, TV shows, short films, authors and actors can even be persuaded through funding or other means to name characters or products a certain way.

#2 - Problems Getting Large E-Commerce Sites Indexed

A number of large e-commerce site marketers have experienced considerable challenges getting deep content indexed. The common solutions include optimizing XML Sitemaps, carefully crafting internal navigation and working to drive more links to deep pages, all of which are certainly recommended techniques, but eventually reach a point of exhaustion.

My recommendations are often to try a few alternatives, including:

Eliminating a large number of pages, particularly faceted forms of navigation (making them accessible only to logged-in or cookied human users and employing rel=canonical), but also products that have very low search volume, no inventory, low margins or frustrating availability. By limiting your product catalog online, you can then achieve full indexation and build upon it.
Creating product feeds, product category blogs and even category/product Twitter accounts to help send indexing signals to the engines. A blog about each of your main categories featuring posts about a few products each day via something like a Tumblr blog can, with a small amount of editorial effort, enable indexing of a few new URLs each day. Over the course of 12-18 months, this can add substantively to the bottom line and be reproduced. Ditto for Twitter and product feeds, though both will need to provide real value to subscribers/consumers (perhaps "deal of the day" type content) to earn subscribers/followers and show the engines they're not just empty scrapers.
Rewriting or adding to the written content on a few hundred sample pages that aren't being indexed. I'm frequently seeing that what appears to be a lack of PageRank/link juice to earn indexing is actually a case of "not enough unique content." If the site is seeing regular crawling to pages that don't make their way to the index, this is often a worthwhile exercise.

#3 - Generating Unique Content for Large Numbers of Pages

When you reach the tens or hundreds of thousands of pages and all need to be separately indexed, the resulting need for more "unique content" on each page can seem an overwhelming task. The common approaches are to either hire/contract/find in-house editorial writers or leverage user-generated content to help boost the content uniqueness, but other approaches are also available.

Human labor using sources like Mechanical Turk or similar services, which I've written about extensively in the past
Building content the Google way - by aggregating the popular words, phrases and sentences others use to describe it (with citation of course). As an example, see how Urbanspoon quotes restaurant reviews or Rotten Tomatoes aggregates critics' reviews. You could even add multimedia content with YouTube, Flickr or other sources. Just be aware that editorial content and review is still critical to make sure these pages are adding value rather than just automatically scraping and re-purposing.
Prioritizing. Many site owners seem to feel that a unique-content project means that every page deserves equal attention, when in fact, it's likely that giving 80% of the effort to 20% of the pages is a much smarter play. Determine the pages that add real value, add your content efforts there, and see the impact before moving on to the long tail.

#4 - Overcoming a Competitor with a Much Stronger Link Profile

I see marketers banging their heads and their link building efforts against a wall, trying to outearn a competitor with a strong lead for a particular keyphrase (or a small handful).

Instead of trying to beat them at their own game, why not work around the system?

Try alternative keywords that could get at the same audience before they're conducting that specific, high-converting search
Consider video content on the major platforms and your own site (using the Video XML Sitemaps protocol) to earn video rankings on the same page (which often draw as many clicks/visits as the first few results)
Create news, blog posts and tweets to help trigger the QDF algorithm and get alternate content types you own in front of searchers and ahead of the first "organic" result
Win the social, branding and "mention" battle, which will often turn to links and recommendations over time, eventually earning you top rankings.
Influence search queries and content on the web through branding, news, social media, content creation, etc. to make Google's Suggest/Instant feature recommend more targeted queries that you own in the rankings.

#5 - Earning Natural, Editorial Links with Optimized Anchor Text

Perhaps the most comment complaint I see in the white hat v. black hat back-and-forth is that white hat link building never earns ideal anchor text. Bollocks!

Profile and biographical paragraphs are one of the best ways to earn the anchor text you want. My professional/event bio has made its way to dozens of sites, all of whom link back in the manner I've requested. These are 100% editorially given, white hat links, often from powerful media or event sites.
Press releases that get picked up by news media sites will often leave the link anchor text you've
Guest writing / guest blogging for a relevant publication often allows for a link back to your site. If you're creative about the formation of that link, you can insure the anchor text is ideal (or close to ideal).
Widgets, badges and embeddable content have fully controllable link anchor text at the time of production - so long as you're not manipulative or appear spammy, the links will point back in the way you've chosen/created.
Titling products, pages, posts and essays with the keywords you're seeking means that those who reference the work will be much more likely to use those terms/phrases in the links others create.
Requiring specific anchor text via citation when giving away or licensing content is another way to insure you're building optimal link text.
Finding friends, family, employees, co-workers, etc. who link to you and reaching out directly to have anchor text modified can result in substantive quantities of optimized anchors.

And, for posterity, I'm going out on a limb here and predicting that exact match anchor text for commercial terms is likely to get considerably increased scrutiny in the next year from Google (see my prior post on how this might be done).

It's true that many times, the basic best practices are the right way to start, and may even be the right solution. However, more organic marketers need to be thinking outside the box, as classic SEO becomes more competitive and dominated by entrenched players.

Please feel free to share your own creative solutions in the comments!

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The Gingerbread White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010

The Gingerbread White House

Each year, the White House Pastry Team comes together with other members of the White House staff to work on a favorite holiday tradition: The White House Gingerbread House. Special features of the gingerbread house include a shadow box view of the State Dining Room and marzipan renderings of the vegetable garden and our favorite four-pawed friend, Bo.

Watch the video.

miercuri, 29 decembrie 2010

Behind-the-Scenes with Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey

Seth's Blog : Sadly stuck with the status quo

Sadly stuck with the status quo

More Recent Articles

marți, 28 decembrie 2010

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

#1 - High Budget Reputation Management Issues

#2 - Problems Getting Large E-Commerce Sites Indexed

#3 - Generating Unique Content for Large Numbers of Pages

#4 - Overcoming a Competitor with a Much Stronger Link Profile

#5 - Earning Natural, Editorial Links with Optimized Anchor Text

The Gingerbread White House

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Persoane interesate

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miercuri, 29 decembrie 2010

More Recent Articles

marți, 28 decembrie 2010

#1 - High Budget Reputation Management Issues

#2 - Problems Getting Large E-Commerce Sites Indexed

#3 - Generating Unique Content for Large Numbers of Pages

#4 - Overcoming a Competitor with a Much Stronger Link Profile

#5 - Earning Natural, Editorial Links with Optimized Anchor Text

Pagini

Persoane interesate

Arhivă blog

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