knofun

I used to read Jason’s blog all the time. Nowadays I can just get a pulse of what the hotbutton issues are for the day, and visualize what his blog looks like. Link to Mahalo SERP page for this, link to Mahalo SERP page for that.

Right now Jason has 15 articles on the front page of his PR7 blog, calacanis.com. Of those 7 promote the idea of “human search” or link directly to Mahalo. 5 of these exist for no reason other than to link to a Mahalo SERP. Of the remaining posts, 2 are devoted to Jason declaring his “a-list blogger” status and getting his laptop speakers replaced, 1 is promoting his facebook group, 1 is talking about what other people are saying about him, 1 is an insightful post about Google removing paid links and what he would have done about the situation if he were still running Weblogs (interestingly enough he also says all the cross linking on Weblogs blogs was not for SEO), 1 is linking up Brian Alvey’s new comic book site, 1 is a review of smartlinks (talking about how they link to mahalo), and the last is a youtube video of a little kid rapping.

The posts I take issue with are the Mahalo SERPS, I know he is just promoting his new company but it feels a lot like linking strictly for Google’s benefit. I know tons of people read his blog, so I don’t have a problem with his self pronounced ‘a-list blogger’ status, I am glad he is getting replacement speakers and as a leader of a tech company it is important to know what people are saying about you. Funny stuff and linking to your friends is all good too.

I really was into Jason’s blog when he was promoting Weblogs, and in retrospect I guess he hasn’t really changed the blog that much, he has just started a new company I’m not all that interested in. In past days all those links to Mahalo would have been talking about handling his staff of writers, tech problems related to publishing, content on his network, stuff that I am into. Now its all human powered search and I’m sick of it. I know you need PR7 inbound links to drive free traffic to your serps by getting them in google’s serps, but come on! At least if you are going to give yourself all those inbound links take off the “nofollow” on Mahalo’s outbounds!

My 2 cents.

Oh yeah, and when was the last time he mentioned the Knicks?? Just kidding, I know that was a low blow.

geek stuff, web marketing calacanis, mahalo

So for the last three days Google Adsense has not been reporting properly. I guess I am spoiled by the big G always being so on point, so I am a little confused by this one. The situation is when you login to your normal Adsense control panel you are presented with an overall view of that day’s earnings and you can hit a dropdown for detailed stats by channel. Every Adsense publisher I know uses channels to optimize and track their ads, this is a heavily used feature of the program. To have it not working is disheartening to say the least.

I understand that every website / program has problems from time to time, but usually Goog will let us know on the Adsense Blog or something. Jensense hasn’t even posted anything, and she is usually on every little rumor. The only peep from Google has been users posting Adsense support responses on DigitalPoint:

Hi,

Thanks for your email. There appears to be an issue with channels not
properly tracking data, rest assured your aggregate data is registering
all impressions and clicks.

I’ve escalated your issue to one of our tech specialists. We’ll get back
to you shortly. I appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

Sean
The Google AdSense Team

My guess? The last post on the Official Adsense Blog is about being able to manage your ad units from your control panel as opposed to modifying the code on your pages. This probably involves you being able to change things by ad unit and channel, and somewhere in there they had a bug in the reporting code. But come on Goog, let us know!!!

update: Seems to be working better but still showing a disparity between aggregate stats and channel stats. Google Groups has some more info as well.

geek stuff, web marketing adsense, google

Remember when Halo 3 came out? People went nuts, long lines and all that, and by the end of the weekend the game had brought in over $170 million, making it the LARGEST ENTERTAINMENT RELEASE EVER.

Feeling punked already, some Hollywood guy named Mike Hickey, an analyst at Janco Partners, commented, “The audience on this game is the 18-to-34 demographic, similar to what you’d see in cinemas. This could last for several weeks.”

He goes on to say that another box office drought may be ahead, as the release of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto IV looms in the distance–current ETA the first quarter of 2008.

Not feeling like they were punked enough, Microsoft executive Bob Frederickson said “We thought we’d get some good sales, but nothing like this. With escalating ticket prices and the crappy movies Hollywood has been putting out, People are just hungry for entertainment.”

Yuk yuk yuk…. funny stuff.

geek stuff halo 3, hollywood, microsoft

Popular TV streaming site TV Links has been shut down and the owner arrested. I won’t link to it here because someone has put up a typical domain parking page for the clueless traffic. Keep in mind this guy, who lives in the UK, wasn’t hosting any copyrighted content. He wasn’t stealing anything. He LINKED to streams that are publicly available on the internet. Hmm, who else links to copyrighted content? I would love to see them try and arrest Sergey and Larry for that shit.

As usual there are tons of TV Links replacement sites popping up, so nothing has been solved from a copyright protection standpoint, just the ruining of a young man’s life.

file sharing / p2p, geek stuff, rant

The longest one-syllable word in the English language is “screeched.”

“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.

Almonds are members of the peach family.

The symbol on the “pound” key (#) is called an octothorpe.

The dot over the letter ‘i’ is called a tittle.

Ingrown toenails are hereditary.

The word “set” has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

“Underground” is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters “und.”

There are only four words in the English language which end in”-dous” tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

The longest place-name still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimau
ngahoronukupokaiwenuakitanatahu, a New Zealand hill.

Los Angeles’s full name is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula” and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size, “L.A.”

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.

Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.

In most advertisments, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10.

Alfred Hitchcock didn’t have a belly button. It was eliminated when he was sewn up after surgery.

Telly Savalas and Louis Armstrong died on their birthdays.

Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy.

Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer.

The muzzle of a lion is like a fingerprint - no two lions have the same pattern of whiskers.

Steely Dan got their name from a sexual device depicted in the book ‘The Naked Lunch’.

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

The Ramses brand condom is named after the great phaoroh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, “therein” the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, ere, therein, herein.

Duelling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

John Larroquette of “Night Court” and “The John Larroquette Show” was the narrator of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “Its A Wonderful Life”

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.

It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up.The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it’s mouth.Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach’s contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

Cranberries are sorted for ripeness by bouncing them; a fully ripened cranberry can be dribbled like a basketball.

The male gypsy moth can “smell” the virgin female gypsy moth from 1.8 miles away.

The letters KGB stand for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.

The name for Oz in the “Wizard of Oz” was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence “Oz.”

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

‘Stewardesses’ is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand.

To “testify” was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.

The combination “ough” can be pronounced in nine different ways.The following sentence contains them all “A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.”

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.”

Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs only have about ten.

The word “Checkmate” in chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah Mat,” which means “the king is dead”.

The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of lore when the engines were pulled by horses.The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight
staircases.

geek stuff, other, play

A few weeks ago, I was shocked to find Zeropaid.com had been banned from Digg for “spam.” I don’t have the exact quote for reference here, but I recall it being something like “This domain has been widely reported for spamming the digg community.”

Let me explain a little bit about our news and how we promote stories on Digg and elsewhere. We employ an editor and staff of talented and dedicated writers to generate our exclusive technology news. We are included in Google news and have been linked to from such illustrious sources as WSJ, MSNBC, Wired and more. Naturally we want to give that news as large an audience as possible, and getting a front page Digg is something highly prized by the writers on our staff, kind of a badge of honor or at the very least recognition that others value their work. So we submit our most worthy stories to digg, and a couple of our staffers will digg it. We do not have any duplicate accounts or an army of diggers. We do add digg badges to the stories we submit so our readers can interact and cast their vote if so they choose.

So shocked as I was (and frankly a little hurt : - ) about Zeropaid being branded as “spam,” I wasn’t too worried. After all, we don’t spam and Digg is one of the good guys right? This was just a case of our competition falsely reporting us right? Sure enough, I think our editor sent an email and *poof* we were unbanned. Cool, right? Wrooooooong!

After being reinstated, we have submitted a few stories to the normal digg reaction, everything going good up until about 30 diggs, and then wham we get buried. I shurgged it off and told the guys to try harder. I did do some research, and found that some people were complaining about being buried after being unbanned. Hmm maybe there is more to this.

Come yesterday, our editor Jared posted a great article on P2P in China. We submitted it to digg last night and crossed our fingers. Sure enough, BURIED after 30 or so diggs. See for yourself:

http://digg.com/tech_news/China_Taking_P2P_to_the_Next_Level

We DID however get a full mention and link on TechCrunch which was cool. I was bummed about the burying but still wasn’t ready to complain. But then I saw the TechCrunch article get submitted and eventually make it to the homepage. Enough is enough, I say!

When you submit an article on Digg, the second of four rules is:

Link Directly to the Source: Save people time by linking directly to the original news story.

Kevin Rose had a dream of Digg, and this is not it! This is not it! (sorry for my lame Gladiator reference) It’s not fair that another author gets the credit when my editor was the guy busting his ass, and it’s not fair that another site gets the revenue boost and link love of a front page digg. We didn’t break the rules, but we sure got hosed. Notwithstanding the cool backlink from TechCrunch, thanks guys.

Oh well we will continue to do what we do and produce great original technology news regardless of Digg, but nevertheless I feel it is their responsibility to address these issues. Yes they need to police the community to combat the ever rising tide of spammers, but doing what they are doing now is like tapping everyone’s cellphone to catch Osama.

digg, geek stuff, web marketing digg, techcrunch

Wow. Someone write this down as a historical day for internet marketing. Oh wait, I am. Let me preface this by saying I use StumbleUpon a lot. I am an avid Stumbler and Stumble Marketer, and I participate in a lot of group Stumble marketing so when I find a new technique that seems intruiging, I pay attention.

So to the good stuff. I fired up Firefox (yeah i meant to say that) this morning and had a wierd red 1 by the stumble button. Curious of course, I moused over it and it said I had a “site waiting for me.” Wow, I’ve been working in web development for 9 years and I’ve never had a “site waiting for me.” Naturally, I was excited. I clicked, and got a message from a SU user drcoolj telling me about a house for rent in Canada. I am friends with drcoolj so I am sure we have done some SU exchanges in the past, but this is a whole new level of SU marketing.

I did some investigation (clicked one button on the toolbar) and found that he accomplished this through the “sent to” functionality of SU. Currently there is no way (that I saw, am I wrong?) to send a page to all your friends at once, but even with a rapid fire cut and paste recommendation it seems pretty effective. Nice idea drcoolj, especially for something like a rental ad.. immediate google love!

geek stuff, stumble, web marketing seo, stumble, stumble upon

Put up a new skin yesterday and been playing with it. I think it is a little more readable than the other one, the fonts were just too small. Or maybe I am getting too old and just can’t see anymore
At any rate, I am going to continue to clean this place up, need to organize categories, get the quotes widget back. Hmm.. maybe I will just write a cool quote widget for everyone to use. Lol like I have that kind of time. Maybe just a widget so people can have quotes that I think are cool hahaha. In the meantime, you can click here to see quotes that I think are cool.

geek stuff quotes, wordpress skin

I finally made it to Pownce, check out my profile here. Seems pretty cool so far, I will probably post more thoughts here later.

Let me know if you need invites, I have a bunch.

geek stuff, ventures

So I was stumbling along when I was supposed to be working as usual when I stumbled on this article about getting stumbled. Whatever, I give a lot of seo/webmaster/affiliate stuff the thumbs up so that makes sense. But wait! I stumbled back into my memory (yeah I know, but its funny to me) and remembered this SU vs fark shoemoney article that I stumbled on a few days ago. Must have worked well for shoe cuz he followed it up with the oh-so-classic digg vs SU post the next day. Seems to me that Stumblers like stumbling on stories about StumbleUpon!

Zeropaid gets a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon, and we are featured on the front page of digg about once a week on average. Here are the main differences between Digg traffic and SU traffic:

• I get about 3 times as many visitors from digg as I do from SU
• Digg users have a bounce rate of 90.27% and SU users have a bounce rate of 31.69%
• Digg users spend an average of 28 seconds on the site (we are a tech news site, I’m guessing all they need is the first paragraph?), and SU users spend on average 5 times that
• Neither of them are all that good for making adsense revenue

The lion’s share of Google Adsense clicks come from visitors that get to our site from…. Google Search. This is the real beauty of SEO, the holy grail of leisure income: get users from Google, send them out through Google and every once in a while check your bank account. Great in theory, but harder than it sounds. So why bother with Digg or SU? Well, I like traffic. All kinds of traffic, I don’t discriminate!

Real reason? People blog. And link. And what do they blog and link? The things they see every day, on their favorite news site or through their favorite website discovery toolbar. So get stumbling!

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing