Archive for December, 2006

Performancing can be described as being an internet community for professional bloggers, and has greatly grown in the last little while, expanding into blog advertising and publishing as well. PayPerPost is the leading, but in my opinion not the best, pay per publish service that bloggers can utilize to make some extra money from their blogs.

Here is what was written about the transaction on the PayPerPost blog.

PayPerPost, the leading marketplace for advertisers to reach bloggers, videographers, photographers, podcasters and social networks, today announced it has signed a Letter of Intent to acquire select assets of Performancing LLC, operator of Performancing.com, a popular Internet community site for professional bloggers. Through its purchase PayPerPost gains a number of powerful blogger support tools including Performancing Metrics, the leading, free blog analytics service, and Performancing Exchange, an online “classifieds” for bloggers.

Written and maintained by individuals who make their living in the blogging trade, Performancing.com has amassed a community of over 28,000 professionals since its launch in 2005. In addition to information and discussion on the subject of professional blogging, the site provides a means for advertisers to connect with bloggers and place ads on their weblogs based on the site’s subject matter, readership and ad pricing.

Two assets PayPerPost has not agreed to acquire include the Performancing for Firefox blog editor technology and the Performancing Partners ad technology.

“PayPerPost is committed to furthering the development of a strong and viable professional blogging community. Performancing has created several very innovative services that help bloggers become more successful in their work,” said Ted Murphy, chief executive officer of PayPerPost. “We believe this acquisition not only helps marketers and bloggers, but also solidifies PayPerPost as the premier destination for those who make their career in weblog publishing.”

Performancing Metrics, one of the assets purchased by PayPerPost, is a free service tailored for bloggers to track visitor stats, including AdSense auditing, for their blogs. The platform, now in beta, reports blog visitors, blog comments, ad clickthroughs and much more.

Performancing Exchange is a free online marketplace for companies, blog sites and others wishing to employ professional bloggers. The classifieds have brought a number of bloggers and employers together for both short-term and long-term relationships.

“By connecting Performancing’s professional services with its own technologies and robust infrastructure, PayPerPost is giving consumer generated media creators a strong and unified source of information,” said Nick Wilson, co-founder of Performancing.com. “This is an excellent combination that will continue to serve the needs of bloggers, their sponsors and ultimately their readers.” The acquisition is scheduled to complete by the end January.

In the spirit of maximizing value for existing Performancing members, PayPerPost has created an ad opportunity at PayPerPost.com specifically for existing Performancing Metrics members to review the Performancing Metrics and Performancing Exchange platforms on their blogs and get paid for doing so.

Hey everyone, the lack of posts is due to Christmas being just around the corner, but I’ll be back and better than ever after this holiday weekend. I hope everyone has a very safe and merry Christmas and an even better new year. For those of you who don’t celebrate Christmas, have a good weekend :).

Now really who doesn’t love that little flash game Line Rider, it’s totally viral and the best part is, there is no score, there isn’t any levels, it’s just you drawing lines to for the fun of seeing what you can get your little friend to do.

Today inXile announced that it would be bringing the lovable flash game to the Wii and DS platforms. Now I’m sure your thinking it’s way to simple of a game for someone to pay for it. Well, according to inXile they will be adding features to the actual retail package to make it worth paying for, as to what those features are, no one really knows.

With the Opera browser in the Wii you can also play the original flash version as well :). Both titles are slated to be released next spring but hopefully we’ll get some more information before that.

I was surfing through Digg this morning as I always do during my first hour at work, and I was going to view the programming category when this black screen appeared with this on it.

 

 

 

 

 

I’m looking forward to seeing what this upgrade brings.

Update:

After posting this I surfed over to TechCrunch and found this:

Later today, Digg, which just celebrated its second birthday, will release a number of new features.

The primary release is the first content area of the site that isn’t news-focused. Users can now Digg their favorite podcasts (feeds and individual episodes). The podcasting homepage will list the most popular podcasts by category (comedy, gaming, health, etc.). Their aim is for Digg to become the first stop for people looking for good podcasts, which will have standard Digg voting, discussion, etc. The Digg team isn’t putting it this way, but it’s clear that this is an experiment to see if users will adopt the Digg model of voting on things to non-breaking news. If this is successful, look for Digg to launch new types of content areas on the site. Technorati has a similar feature ranking blogs.

The other big new feature will be the relese of “Top 10 Stories,” and area of the site where users can see the hottest stories at any given time, including stories that have fallen off the home page but are still seeing lots of votes and discussion. A separate Top 10 area is designated for each category

Other changes today include:

• Digg is now Widescreen: They’ve moved from a fixed width page to a flexible layout allowing users to make use of bigger screen real estate. Navigation links have been moved to the top of the screen.
• Video Enhancements: The main change here is a way to view videos directly on Digg in a lightbox. See screenshot for visual.

In today’s world of business distance is becoming less and less of a factor because web collaboration has come a long way.  With use of applications such as Writely and DabbleDB.

Yugma is a web conferencing application similiar to Webex that allows you to share your desktop to up to 10 people for free, and upgrade plans are available if you need to share it with more.  The best part about this application is that it’s Java based so it’s compatible with any platform you choose.

The basic free plan allows up to 10 people to share your desktop, annotation tools, and allows you to make someone else the presenter.

Upgrade plans allow you such things as keyboard and mouse sharing, recordable sessions, scheduling sessions, and gives you 100MB of sharing space.

Skype released version 3.0 today.

Not much has changed accept for some interface changes, that really do spice it up.  Skype is a great program that has really revolutionized the idea of VOIP as well as internet communication.

I use it for family in different provinces, and it’s great for business communication for long distance communication.

Calling PC to PC is free, and with only small fees to call mobile and landline phones.  You can also purchase a phone number so that people can call you from mobile phones and landline phones.

I’m now offering premium advertising in every blog post for just $1 a week.  This is a great opportunity for those of you with an internet or technology related site to get some premium  traffic.

Click here for more information.

One thing I will admit about myself is that I am in no way design inclined.  Most of my designs are farily bland and more often then not I will get a third-party to come in and clean up my messes.

Sometimes I’ll come up with something that actually looks good mind you, but that’s only because I use tools like Daily Color Scheme which I wrote about a little earlier, and an even better site called Color Schemer Gallery, which has really nice color combinations to help you with those tough jobs.

What’s really great about Color Schemer Gallery is that most of the schemes are user submitted, so it’s not always the same bland colors of the same designer. They also offer some handy little software applications that help you with those color catastrophies in prices ranging from FREE to $49.99.

They also have an active Community Forum for those of us who need a little extra help.

I see so much email in a day that I’m ready to stop using it…well…I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a big part of my life as I’m sure it is yours as well.  Tamadaa is a simple web-based email solution that allows you to use your own private domain as well as services such as Gmail and Hotmail to host your email using their sleak and clean interface.

The webmail interface itself has really nice Ajax effects, easy navigation, and folder management.  Everything is really clear and nothing should be a task when using it.  You can easily add accounts which all get placed through the same interface and changing between them is as easy as two clicks.

The product is still in Beta but you can signup to have an account upon release.  You can also test out the demo, although some of the functioning isn’t available quite yet.

I would definitely like to see more settings available, such as an address book, and email signatures.  An auto-responder feature wouldn’t be too bad either.

Tamadaa is heading in the right direction and I can’t wait to play around with it when it’s finished.

The one thing that I really dislike about WinXP is the fact that customization is really inhibited unless you use third party software such as Windows Blinds or StyleXP, so when new WinXP themes are released directly from Microsoft, it excites me a tad.

To go along with the launch of the Zune Microsoft has put together a Zune WinXP Theme, that I must say looks pretty friggin good.

The theme is Black with Orange as it’s accent color, and looks amazing in my opinion.  I aways switched between the standard Blue/Green template and the Olive color, but I think I’ll stick with this one.

It comes with a background of a crowd at an event, but I took that off and replaced it with something that I would actually like looking at :).