Entries from March 2008 ↓

The Akutagawa Award is the highest honour for new writers and Mieko Kawakami is this years winner.

She’s started her blog in 2003, which explains why she was able to get mieko.jp as her domain name. She used to be a bar maid and a bookstore assistant, and a fledging nobody singer. Now her blog has brought success to her singing career and she averages about 10,000 hits a day. This is really a sign of the times. Blogs are getting so much more mainstream that they are being referenced in traditional print media. In previous generations, this award would have gone to ‘real’ writers and Shintaro Ishihara’s (who won the award way back in 1955) comment sums it all up on how the older folks just don’t get the new media

The egocentric, self-absorbed rambling of the work is unpleasant and intolerable

Yes, that’s what most blogs are mate. Just random, self obsessed ramblings of nothing in particular. There’s no real definite formula for blogging success. It’s so easy to start a blog, but it’s soo hard to hit the big time. The only sure thing is that you should start early so that you can learn from your own blogging experience… I know I have!

Popularity: 4%

I’ve always wondered why they’ve designed the guard rails that look like a ramp… What happens when a car collides with it?

Today I found the answer… (photos from yours truly!)

Edit 19/03/2008: The pics have made it to the second page of the MX! Thanks Steve

Popularity: 4%

Normally I don’t enter in any blog post contests or paid reviews unless I was already going to write about them or that topic. Scott Wainner has caught my attention since he introduced himself via John Chow’s blog. This guy hit the big time in the dot com boom, selling up his ResellerRatings.com for a princely sum, only to blow away his cash like a kid in a candy store. Now he’s back at it again, joining the web2.0 scene and blogging all about it.

He also happens to be giving away $20 to the first 100 blogs who spread his word on the need support Longevity Research - not just living longer but living indefinitely. I’m not too sure why you’d want to live indefinitely cos I’m sure I’d be dead bored after a few thousand years.

Popularity: 4%

There’s a new breed of bloggers fighting to dethrone Shoemoney and John Chow as the most read “make money online” blog in 2008 - they’re called suupper affiliate blogs. They grab your attention with massive cheques and huge six figure screenshots (and in some cases fobby photos), then they set out to systematically explain exactly how they do it. I’ve always been sceptical about blogs like this. You’ve got to wonder if you’re making so much money why would you blog about it and get more competition when you could spend that same time working on your ad campaigns or basking in the bahamas. In most cases, I feel that these blogs are purely set up as a ‘catablogs’ or product blogs. Just like where dpreviews writes about cameras and rakes money from the camera sales, affiliate blogs write about earning money as an affiliate and rakes it in from the affiliate referral signups. I know this works because I’ve just signed up to a few affiliate programs from some of these guys affiliate links. They will now reap a small percentage of MY affiliate income perpetually. What this means is that if they get 10,000 visitors a month, and say 10% sign up to an affiliate program they recommend, and 1% of these people actually turn out to make $1000 a month (on average), they will get $200 a month (assuming a 2% commission). After 12 months of consistent blogging, that would make it $2400 of residual monthly income.

Amongst the littering of affiliate blog rubbish (insert zac johnson’s face here cos he’s completely failed to deliver after such a huge rap from my paid review posting… and he never sent me the t-shirt I won! - admittedly I’ve never bothered complaining about the t-shirt cos it’s just a stupid t-shirt.), two worthy affiliate blogs have stood out for me.

1. Paul Bourque
2. Jonathan Volk

Paul’s leading the race at the moment with a couple of huge screenshot$$ but Jon has the added advantage of having a cutie behind him.

There’s a chinese proverb that goes along the lines of.. behind every successful man is a supportive woman.

Popularity: 6%

Febuary was an intense month for me. I’ve been:

1. Juggling the blog theme redesign
   As you can see, I’ve almost removed all traces of the copyblogger theme I started with - it’s still a work in progress though. I’m glad I’ve done this cos whilst mandigo was nice and flexible, copyblogger loads a million times faster and now I can say there’s no other blog that looks as crap as as unique as mine
2. Searching for and registering domain names.
   My domain count is now at a massive 97! That’s 3 more to crack the ton! Whilst there’s still the temptation for me to grab that exact matching keyword dot NET domain, I’ve learnt that the age of a domain is vastly more important than its keywords. This has prompted me to be buying domains that are at least 2 years or older. Whilst this has costed a bit more, the rewards have been worth it. These domains get indexed faster and I’m finding that (for my cases anyway) google seems to look at the keywords in the path more than the domain name itself. So what this means is that instead of getting a brand new domain like FindASoulMate.com, I’d rather get DatesOnline.com if it is 2years + old. I’ll then make it a mini dating site and have a page with the path datesonline.com/find-a-soul-mate/.

   This actually makes sense to me and I think it’s a smart change for Google. Often the best sites on the net have meangingless domain names (from a keyword perspective anyway) - Take techcrunch and mashable for example.

4. SEO’ing my mini sites
   this has been the most time consuming and boring part of the process. Trying to obtain endless links for my sites has become to labourious and I’m researching the best options to either outsourcing this or automating this. More on this in a later post… I hope.
5. Increasing my PPC and Affiliate knowledge
   There’s a growing tidal wave of affiliate bloggers out there and I’m soaking in all I can. Apart from putting a few ad buttons here and there, I’ve always been lazy about pushing affiliate programs because I’ve had the impression that it’s a dodgy industry and I hate faking / lying in an ad copy just to get the sale. Let’s face it, 90% of people who sell affiliate stuff have never used the product themselves so how can they endorse it with a massively long landing page that proclaims it’s the best thing since sliced bread? Apart from the dodgyness of it, I’ve also lacked to passion to promote stuff that I’m not interested in (online dating??, dieting??, ringtones??, etc.,) Well, in the last few months ( and more so last month), I’ve stumbled across a few programs that I absolutely think rocks, passes my ethical / moral test, and I have no problems pushing to even my best friends. More on this later… I hope again.

So what has all this meant for Feburary? A grand total of $364.31 for the whole month.

I know it’s still way less than what I earn in day offline but I’m happy that it was more than Jan - as you can see I was flat out in Feb and I haven’t had a chance to monetised all 97 of my domains. March looks more promising though, especially with the changes to the Adsense T&Cs (which reminds me, I still need that adsense compliant privacy page) and my affiliate endeavours. I’m aiming to break $500..! :D

Popularity: 14%

If you haven’t heard, the Scarlett Johansson eBay auction is now live! Check it out:

Colin Firth went for a cheap $9,300. I would put my money on it that Scarlett will easily top this… perhaps doubled or tripled. Although the auction says it is a meet & greet, some newspapers have reported it as a ‘date’ with Scarlett. If that was the case, this would easily fetch $100,000. As it turns out though, your actual time with the goddess may be quite limited due to her schedule.

The winning bidder will receive:

* Two tickets to the world premiere of He’s Just Not That Into You. The premiere location has not yet been determined but will be in either Los Angeles or New York this July.

* Chauffeured car service to the premiere

* Hair and makeup for one by Privé

* A meet and greet with Scarlett Johansson at the premiere

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:

Q: Is Scarlett Johansson answering emails through this auction?
A: Scarlett Johansson is not able to check emails sent to her through this auction.

Q: How long will the meet and greet last?
A: There is no set amount of time but it is estimated to be a brief visit due to Scarlett’s schedule that evening.

Q. Are travel and accommodations included?
A. Chauffeured car service to the premiere included. All other arrangements (including hotel, flight, additional ground transportation, etc.) arenot included and are the responsibility of the winning bidder.

Q. In what city will the world premiere be held?
A. The world premiere will be held in either Los Angeles or New York. The winning bidder will be notified once the location has been confirmed.

Q: Are there any age restrictions?
A: The winner must be 21 or older, but their guest can be younger, provided that the winner is a parent or legal guardian.

Q: Is my bid tax deductible?
A: Your winning bid is tax deductible to the fullest extent allowed by law. Please consult with your tax adviser for more information.

Popularity: 5%

If you were like me, you would have been presented with the updated Adsense T&Cs, skimmed through them, and blindly hit the accept button. Whatever.

Today I did more reading on it and apart from adding references to video ads which I don’t use or care about, there were a few HUGE changes that absolutely EVERY adsense publisher should be aware of. Makes me wonder why they don’t highlight the changes to you.

1. You MUST have a privacy policy on every site you display adsense

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

crap. What cookie management??? Someone give me a generic adsense compliant policy!

2. More than one adsense publisher ID can be used on the one page

This was removed from the T&Cs:

In addition, You agree that while You may display more than one (1) Ad Unit on each Site Web page, You shall not display any Ad Unit on a page that contains Ads associated with another Google AdSense customer (e.g., Your Web hosting company), unless authorized to do so by Google.

I can see all the free web hosts and adsense sharing site owners rejoicing already!

3. You can have a referal button on its own page without additional content

This was removed from the T&Cs:

Each Web page(s) that contains a Referral Button must also contain other content related to Your Site.

I haven’t used google referrals much, except for get firefox now. I can see this being a huge bonus and might dabble into this again soon

4. You can display adsense on error, registration, thank-you pages… even in EMAILS!

display any Ad(s), Link(s), or Referral Button(s) on any error page, on any registration or “thank you” page (e.g., a page that thanks a user after he/she has registered with the applicable Web site), on any chat page, in any email, or on any Web page or any Web site that contains any pornographic, hate-related, violent, or illegal content;

The no adsense on error pages, rego pages, and thank-you pages were always questionable for me. It was so easy to slip up on because often you just install a cms, plug in your adsense code in the template and with most cms you can’t control which pages it doesn’t appear on. This is more an admission from google that they’ve realised it’s not that important anyway so let’s keep it easy for us publishers.

The email part of this T&C is interesting. By removing the reference to emails, this means that now you can display adsense in an email? How do you even do that? I’d imagine you need an email client that lets you edit the html so that you can insert the adsense scripts. Certainly if you just tried this on gmail, it would auto convert your adsense tags into normal text rather than rendering ads out.

I wonder if this is a typo from google in that they’ve actually accidentally removed too much out of this T&C. To be able to include adsense in an email is open slather for all the spammers to embed adsense and get readers to click on the ads. How would google be able to police this when they can’t access the original email that the adsense is displayed on?

Popularity: 4%

Wordpress 2.3.3 was released over 25 days ago as a ‘urgent security release’. Unfortunately it’s taken this long to get the mu branch of it updated by the Auttomatic team. I tried just copying the wp 2.3.3 over my mu install but obviously that doesn’t work.

Link: Download mupress 1.3.3

For me the major fix was adding the ‘permalinks’ option back in the admin panel. I’m not sure if I was just blind or what but I swear it wasn’t there in v1.3.2. Now I can finally get rid of the dates in my permalinks!

For the upgrade, all I did was

1. copy over the files
2. Log into Site Admin
3. Hit the Upgrade button to update the database schema

easy peasy. I didn’t bother about deactivating & reactivating my plugins or taking a backup… such is my trust in the wordpress platform :)

Popularity: 5%