knofun

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

Ok, so Yumm.com is somewhat live and floating around in the wild. Right now it’s just the restaurant listings section, but users can register, rate and comment on restaurants. To me, this is the most interesting part of launching a site. We are doing all the initial work with Google, submitting sitemaps, linkbuilding, etc. and its so much fun to watch the traffic grow. This is the stage where we look at the user db all the time, check traffic and keyword stats twice a day, and really can be hands on all portions of the site. Once you get beyond a few hundred users you really can’t, and you have to rely on graphs and trending documents. Lots of fun!

Zeropaid is doing really well traffic wise, but pretty soon we may be losing a key member of our staff. Jared Moya, or SoulXTC as he is known on Zeropaid, is joining the Army. Kudos to him for having the courage to volunteer to serve his country, especially at a time like this. He will most certaintly be missed on the site, and we are taking resumes for one or two people to fill his spot.

geek stuff, ventures

Hey friends of mine! If you have a second, scoot over to restaurants.yumm.com and do some poking around. We are far from an official launch but are at a stage where we could use some user feedback. Play around, try and break stuff, and INTERACT, please. You can leave feedback here in comments or email em to me. Thanks!

geek stuff, play, ventures

So I have been with T-Mobile for about 2 years, and today i got really fed up with them and since this is my only platform to vent here I go. I used to have the Sidekick 3, and the sidekick plan from T-Mobile is $19.99 with unlimited messaging, browsing, email, etc. I kicked that sidekick to the kurb and got the blackberry pearl, which I absolutely love. Switching phones meant switching plans to the unlimited blackberry plan, which at the time I had no idea didn’t include messaging, and they didn’t feel it was necessary to tell me that along with all the disclaimers and crap they make you listen to on those customer service calls.

I also have my plan on autopay, meaning my bill just gets paid on my credit card every month. So I usually don’t pay any attention to it, but last month my bill was over $400, so I started poking around. I was doing $250/mo in text messages! On top of that, my pearl crapped out on me this weekend. I could see that I was getting calls and who was calling me, but I couldn’t answer or call back. I could see I had texts, but I couldn’t read them. Now there is absolutely no way I can operate efficiently without my phone, so first thing this morning I went to a t-mobile store and got a pearl for the full retail of about $400.

*time for the only good part of this story*

Blackberrys rock. I plugged my old phone into my computer, clicked backup in the blackberry software, plugged my new phone in, and clicked restore. Viola! My wallpaper was back, my call logs, my texts, my phonebook, EVERYTHING. Awesome and just the way I would want it to work. Kudos to RIM.

So back to the shittyness of T-mobile, I called their customer service people and told them what had happened, and went over my billing history. Since January (when I switched from my sidekick), I had spent over $4000 with t-mobile! This is ridiculous. I got on with a supervisor and went over everything, and basically told them I didn’t really care about the money but spending $400 a month for a phone is just stupid, and if they didn’t figure out a way to make it more reasonable I would just leave. The lady went back and forth, then finally backdated a messaging plan on my account, and credited me $100. Wheeeeeeeeee. I hate t-mobile’s customer service but I am kind of having to accept the fact that all mobile companies suck and I should just be content with my new $120/mo unlimited plan. Now that I have vented, I think I can.

Read great essays on cell phones including one on cell phone history  at HistoricalTextArchive.com. 

geek stuff, mobile phones, rant

In what could be considered possibly the greatest news of all time, Southwest is planning in-flight wifi. Looks like it will be an “additional revenue item” so they will definitely be charging extra for it, but who cares. Can I skype? Can I webex? Can I turn that 45 minute flight to vegas into something productive? Can’t wait to see.

geek stuff

Our story on Pirate Bay’s new plans for a video streaming site made both Digg and Slashdot in 3 days… Go Jared!

file sharing / p2p, geek stuff, ventures, web marketing

Finishing up the touches on a site I have been trying to get done for a while. RSS2Image.com is a site that takes an RSS feed and converts it to an image. Why, you might ask, which would be a pretty good question.

Shawn had an RSS feed on his myspace showing his latest blog posts, which I thought was cool. I wanted to put my blog posts on myspace, so he gave me the simple code he used to create the image, and I put up my posts on my myspace profile. whopeeeeeee.

So I wanted to create a profile for one of my new sites, WineScore.com, and have the latest wine reviews on the profile. I started to create a whole new script to do that, but then I just decided to build a tool to do it all, and now you have RSS2Image.com. I am too lazy right now to do the landing page, but when I am done you will be able to click on your feed image and get to a list of actually clickable titles and stuff. But for now you can select a number of items, colors and whatnot and put up your feeds. Enjoy. RSS2Image.com.

If you work with very many PDF files, you may be looking for a quick and easy way for converting PDF to text. At Investintech.com our PDF converters efficiently convert PDF to Word docs to save you time and money.

geek stuff, ventures

My partner Jorge has made an awesome tool for tracking whats going on with your websites. SEORat is a free SEO tracking tool you can use to track and graph your backlinks, alexa ranking, and more. Very cool and very free.

SEORat.com

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing

Ok, I never thought I would say this but this is an example of user-generated content gone bad. Digg’s users are freaking out over Digg’s mandatory compliance with the DMCA by obeying takedown notices, and wow are they suffering the effects. Apparently the HD-DVD drm has been broken and the simple hex code that is the key to unlocking HD-DVD content is now all over the internet and all over Digg. The MPAA is trying to keep this a secret (hello??? cat out of the bag??), by sending out very hey-look-at-us-we’re-very-sneaky takedown notices. Digg has been physically deleting the posts, but people keep submitting new stories and comments containing the censored number.

This sucks because Digg has no choice here. They have to respect the laws of the land, and the users are just going to rail against them no matter what. Instead, maybe people should file counter-notification notices on behalf of Digg (since its their content being taken down) and get the content legally put back up. Take matters into your own hands people, you know what Digg has to do. What a PR nightmare for the MPAA, but more for Digg. And Jay looked so professional on cnn!!

Look at the stories and the made popular times:

geek stuff

Wow just stumbled on this cool web-based tool that captures any song off myspace and lets you save it to an mp3.. pretty slick.

geek stuff