Archive for June, 2007

Well it looks like Apple finally took the plunge and as of Version 3, the famous Mac browser is now available for Windows XP and Windows Vista.  I took the liberty of installing it on both my work computer and home laptop and must say that it works pretty well on Windows.

Although I love Macs and Safari is the default Mac browser, I’m a FireFox user and have no real reason to change that, so I don’t see Safari being used very often if at all.

The interface is nice and clean like it’s always been, and Safari is a very quick browser that takes up very little resources.  One thing that I’ve been complaining about and that really annoys me is when I’m on a webpage and wanting to go to a new one and click on the address bar for the first time it doesn’t highlight the entire address like it does in FireFox and Internet Explorer.  Just a small annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless.

You can download the new beta today and check it out, who knows, maybe you’ll like it.

As most of you already know the iPhone is slated to be released June 20th in the United States, which means that Apple has some new television ads that really make me want one now!

Although this is a type of site you usually don’t see me reviewing, I felt it was appropriate as the site itself is a Web2.0 application.  The service is called Nymbler and as you can probably guess, it’s meant to help you choose your baby’s name.

The interface is very clean and easy to navigate so you can get in and out with a baby’s name as soon as possible, and this can be a definite plus if your wife is going into labor :).

Unlike most services like this that only list baby names categorized in Male and Female, Nymbler goes one step further and provides what they call ‘Inspirations’.  These Inspirations are used to help you choose your baby’s name based on a set of other names.  So if you enter you and your wife’s name as Inspirations, it will list names that are based on trends, and style choices using their “Hunch Engine”.

You can easily add names you’ve found to your Inspirations and quickly favorite your most loved names for future use.  If you’re having problems with choosing a name for the new arrival, why not give it a shot.

In today’s world it’s easier then ever before to make money with your website or blog, and their are new ways being developed every single day.  We can use Adsense, Text Link Ads, and AuctionAds, each based on a different advertising model, but all are after the same thing, to make money while helping to make you money.

I’d like to introduce you to a new advertising method called ‘mashing content’, basically it works like this;  You signup free The News Room and you can embed full licensed into your site or blog by providers such as Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-PRess. 

So how can you make money you may be asking?  Well each time you embed a video on your site you have the opportunity of making money via CPM (Click per thousand) of up to $4.00.  You also make money when someone embeds the video from your site.  This is an absolutely insane opportunity for video blogs and should definitely run with this.

An example embedding below shows a simple one column layout, but they have others that will suit the needs of your blog, and embedding the video itself was extremely easy, and Live Writer made it even easier.  You can also win prizes ranging from digital cameras to new cars just for embedding information that your visitors are going to want to see.  Seems like a win/win to me.

Here is a great article that will really get you thinking, and keep you motivated.  It’s these types of things that make me want to be better person, do things like these effect you like this?

21 Suggestions for Success

Early last month ReviewME added Marketplace Listings in a way to compete with what PayPerPost has offered since it’s conception.  It seemed to be an early semi-success in the beginning and I’m sure ReviewMe only saw it’s popularity increasing.  I decided to go back and check it out, see how many advertisers were taking advantage of this feature, and to my dismay there was no campaigns available.  Did I mention that this was two weeks ago? Since then I’ve kept checking back and no campaigns were available, and for those of you who are interesting my blog is categorized in ‘Technology’ which is the biggest category.

So it appears that the marketplace turned into a flop, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole paid review model has failed, but it definitely needs to be revisited.

In my opinion ReviewMe should’ve just stayed with it’s original service of just providing a means for advertisers to choose between blogs in a specific niche, it was obviously working well for them.  Although the Marketplace didn’t hinder them financially because they never really lost anything besides times in the process, they really never gained anything from it either.  All they really did with the Marketplace was shown it’s users that it could do something that PayPerPost already has.

We know that the reason these services exist is to make money for the larger blogs, but as a smaller blog is it even possible to make money off of this?  I mean, yes your blog is shown to hundreds of advertisers, but why would they choose you over someone else cheaper and more well known?  If you have ReviewMe on your site please let me know how you rate your success compared to your blog traffic.  My blog hasn’t got a single review even though it’s slightly above average in the ReviewMe ranks.

I’d like to know what new type of model paid reviews could be based on, I’m going to think about this one myself and make a follow up post within the next week or so.

NoFollow was originally introduced to prevent spammers from posting on blogs and getting from free SEO from it, but it obviously hasn’t worked, and those of you with Akismet can attest to that. All NoFollow does is prevents search engine spiders from following links in comments so they won’t actually get any search engine exposure.

I’m very happy to say that I’ve removed the NoFollow tags on SuperJustin.com so any and all comments that you make will get some sweet SEO, and all you have to do is comment.

If you’re interested in removing the NoFollow tags on your Wordpress 2.0+ blog, then you can check out this plugin.

Well PayPerPost is at it again, this time with direct competitor to ReviewMe called PPP Direct.  Just like ReviewMe’s process advertisers can select specific blogs that they wish to write about their product or service, and in return they get a more targeted form of advertising.

Unlike ReviewME, PayPerPost does not offer a marketplace of bloggers, instead advertisers would have to come accross a person’s blog that offers PPP Direct, and by clicking on an icon that PPP provides the advertiser can purchase a blog entry.  This is definitely a poor business model because most advertisers will never even know about the smaller blogs that me better a more suitable and affordable means of advertising.

PPP does however take less of a cut at only 10% which means more money in your pocket from the post that you actually wrote, instead of the 50% that ReviewMe takes.

I’ve never been a big fan of PayPerPost since I’ve began blogging and reading about the blog ads model, although I do write some posts for them every now and then, but only if I can find a relative posting opportunity that matches my blog, and I do them very rarely ( I don’t believe that my blog is best suited for the service ). 

There is a very good possibility of this thing taking off and it’s only because of those people who religiously use PayPerPost.  Those same people swear by it and it always surprises me.  Some blogs just have nothing to do with anything and adding to it is PayPerPost’s randomness.  Oh well, I guess to each his own.

Just recently Windows has released a Beta 2 version of it’s Windows Live Writer, and all I can say is that it’s about damn time.  When Windows Live Writer was initially released I really enjoyed the idea of being able to blog while not having to actually go to my site to do it, don’t get my wrong I don’t mind going to my site and blogging but sometimes it’s just easily to load a nice sleek program and do it there.

I used Live Writer for a few weeks and the fact that it was in beta kept coming back to haunt me with multiple problems including how images were uploaded into my blog posts, but after testing the Beta 2 version for the last few days I’m definitely back on the Live Write band wagon.

The application looks much nicer than it’s predecessor with the typical gradients of Windows Live, and has a plethora of brand new features that will make your blogging experience 100% enjoyable.

New Authoring Capabilities

• Inline spell checking
• Table editing
• Ability to add categories
• Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad
• Support for excerpts and extended entries
• Improved hyperlinking and image insertion
• Paste Special

Integration and Compatibility

• SharePoint 2007 support
• New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers
• Automatic synchronization of local and online edits
• Integration with Windows Live Gallery
• Support for Blogger Labels

Plus…

• New look and feel
• Available in 6 languages
• Improved accessibility and keyboard support
• Many other frequently requested enhancements!

Agreeing with the majority of what I’ve seen thus far the inline spell checking is and absolute godsend and truly makes my life so much easier (Yes, I use FireFox so it has inline spell checking anyway, but as I’ve said before, I don’t always like to load up my browser to make a blog post).

 Backing up is one of the most crucial things that any site owner and even computer owner needs to do, yet most of us don’t.  I’ve been guilty of it myself and I’ve lost a lot of important data.  Now in the days of Web 2.0 you don’t even have an excuse anymore not to backup your files because there are plenty of automated Online Backup websites and applications out there, one of which being IDrive-E.

IDrive-E provides a free 2GB of backup space without any catch which includes automated backups without any restrictions or bandwidth limits.  You can backup any types of files you want so you don’t have to worry about losing a specific type file which a foreign file extension.

All of the files you backup are stored in there world-class data centers with complete data encryption so even your most precious of data is safe and secure.

If you’re looking for a little more than 2GB of space, you can just as easily get an unlimited amount of storage for only $4.95 per month with the Pro version of IDrive, which is cheaper than any of it’s competitors.

 

Sponsored Review

Update: After a quick e-mail to the creator of IconFinder he informed me that IconFinder will be re-released in late June.

Earlier last month I wrote about a new Web2.0 website that allowed you to easily find icons and graphics for your websites called Icon Finder. I’m really liked this website and from the input I received from some of you, I could tell that you found it to be quite handy as well. I’m revisiting it today because if you may have noticed it’s been down for a few weeks due to the high amount of traffic that it’s received and according to the note left on the website they are currently looking for new hosting.

I’m not one to gripe, but when a service that I would use regularly is down for weeks at a time due to finding new hosting I see a problem with that. It’s fair to say that hosting isn’t the only thing that the site is undergoing because web hosting does not take months to find nowadays. This brings me to a very good point that I’d like to make when developing and implementing a website.

Don’t Leave Your Visitors In The Dark

If you’re site is getting pummeled by traffic and your current host/bandwidth can’t handle it, then do your visitors a service and tell them about it, which I can see was done write by Icon Finder. The problem in my eyes is that we haven’t heard anything in weeks from the site which includes no updates, no new web hosting, nothing at all.

My suggestions would be to a. Make regular updates on the frontpage of the site letting your visitors know where your current progress is at in your search for hosting or other conflict hindering the site’s activity. b. Install Wordpress and start a blog in which you can easily convey information back to your readers. Most people see this as a lot of extra work for such a small issue, but most of your visitors will greatly appreciate it. c. Keep an active mailing list, (as long as your not sending out spam) your visitors will appreciate the contact every now and then with updates.

So there we have it. There should be no reasons for anyone that visits your site not to know what is currently going on with it, especially if it’s down.