Archive for 2008

Lots of Twitter home pages look pretty, but few have any useful function to them.  I’ll admit that I am a function over form person, even though I do try to keep it balanced out.  But for me a thing typically needs to work well first before it gets all dolled up.  There is the obvious point that some things need to be organized well enough to be useful so I’ll leave that as it is.

Well, over the last few days, I’ve spent far too much time on my least favorite ‘time suck’ activity.  Designing my business cards.    I just really hate doing business cards.  Don’t know why, its just an activity that grates on my nerves like nails on a chalk board.

That said, when I saw this twitter home page today for dhinchcliffe (Dion Hinchcliffe), I was reminded that twitter accounts can not only be pretty but they can be functional too! 

I do not have the optimal layout or design on my own twitter account yet, but I think I’m going to try and apply some of the lessons that dhinchcliffe has applied very well and do a little benchmarking on my own profile.

Where do you stand on twitter?

I’m curious where do you stand on this issue with Twitter.  Do you think too much personal information or business card like info on a twitter account is appropriate, inappropriate, nerdy, to corporate, practical, finally gives twitter real purposes, dangerous for privacy reasons or all of the above and none of the above?

Personally, I like it, but I do recognize that everyone has different perspectives on things like this and that is probably the reason why there are so many different ‘faces’ on twitter. 

Here’s one of my wish list items for the new year in SocialSpark.  I’d like to have the option to set auto-benches in SocialSpark with custom options.

Benching – the function that prevents a blogger from taking and additional article opportunity from one of your campaigns until a fixed amount of time has passed like a basketball player benched for doing something wrong, except in this case the blogger has done nothing wrong….  hmmm terminology. . .

I’d like to be able to set benches

• based on just a blog as opposed to a blogger, which can have the unintended consequence of benching multiple sites that have not covered your opportunity yet
• based on any specific time limit I might set
• that are indefinite in time when I choose and then after I give the actual article a rating will automatically default to a new time limit (including time served) based on the quality of the article, high quality and traffic and results might generate a removal of bench faster, low quality might result in longer bench so the blogger can reflect and get better, and low or slow traffic might stay in place until the blogger has hit a traffic or conversion goal.

The thing is I really do not like the bench at the blogger level.  If a blogger has more reach, coverage or influence through additional niches and they have done some good work for me already, I want to see what else they can do!

That said, you don’t want to have a blogger do an opportunity on the same material too many times or it can and usually will get a little stale! 

I have a confession to make.  I love the childish images that many so-called news organizations use to suck in traffic from Google News.

This type of thing used to be a lot more rare.  These days it happens, well it happens almost every day.  People are not just using odd ball pictures to match up to different headlines, they are photo shopping images and making custom ‘avatars’ essentially to go with these stories.

The site above about the surgeon that used human fat to power his cars showing an apparently naked fat white man in a convertible mini, is definitely photo shopped.   Unlike many sites (Canada News) when you click on the image, you actually see a big image of the original on the subsequent page that offers up this story, along with Indian News, and Bollywood pictures, plus the obligatory heavy load of Google Adsense ads to keep the site in the black from the wave of heavy traffic this crazy picture will generate.

So I know its wrong to fall for this childish sense of humor.  It is akin to tagging or graffiti, but it definitely appeals to my inner comedian just above fart jokes and just below an over used pun.  I wonder what gaming Google News with stupid pictures will do for a person’s karma?  Will you come back as a cock roach if you photo shop too many fat guys into a mini?  Or will that laughing Buddha in a miniature car get you elevated higher in the universe.

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but for the time being I will continue to enjoy the joke.  The news is far too ugly these days not to appreciate a little humor from time to time.

More Gamed Images from Google

What does the iPhone have to do with a mostly naked lady taped up in bumper stickers?

I guess if Wal-Mart can’t actually sell iPhones at $100, they can at least market scantily clad women.  ;0  (I do realize that Wal-Mart didn’t write the article above)

This article on pledging to Abstinence was apparently just begging for a gamed up image, but Gaming Google News with a chastity thong with bondage implications? 

If teenagers are getting their news from Google, odds are they are not going to remain chaste for very long at all.

For a long time I shied away from running contests on my own websites.  Mostly, I was not convinced that they would actually generate traffic.  I’ve recently changed my mind on that after running two contests (one much more successful than the other). 

As a result, I’m looking to understand the phenomena of contests and give-aways in general and for me, the only way to do that is to experiment.   

So I’m going to not only run more contests on all of my websites, I’m going to cover how other websites are working to do the same thing, thus sharing some insights into the process for my readers here, and for those of you that are interested helping to highlight a contest or two that you might want to consider entering.

Now this year, I’m going to be traveling all over the place for business and writing purposes.  Along the way, I’m looking to achieve two primary goals:

• Meet interesting people at new media conferences and events
• Go to Interesting places and do interesting things

Sometimes those goals will align and sometimes they will be very far apart.  But sometimes the places in between those places will be the place that I may need to spend a day or two before venturing on to my next destination.

I used to travel a lot more when I was younger for vacation purposes.  These days, I’m trying to pick that habit back up and build it back into my lifestyle.  When I was younger Branson was not a vacation destination(at least not one that I had ever heard of).  For that matter neither was the Atlantis resort, nor space tourism.

Times change!

Now, in this case my goals above align a bit.  I need to hit a number of stops working with bloggers, businesses and clients across Illinois and Missouri.  Branson provides a possible stop over for me, and they also happen to have a website that is running a nice little give away.

The contest seems to pick a winner every month and all you have to do is enter your name and contact information.  No credit card seems to be required.

Don’t force a Subscription on someone and Blind Side them with Fees!

That is a pretty important point.  I don’t like contests that try and gather your billing information or try and get you to subscribe to something for a free fee that kicks in later and this does seem to be a free entry.

Now, I do like to visit interesting places and see new stuff.  I think that if nothing else going to see their Titanic exhibit might be worth the photo shoot or video diary entry.    I think I could also have a lot of fun in Hollywood Wax Museum or in the Ripley’s museum.  Those have to both be worth gold to a blogger looking for content. 

I’ve also never been in a helicopter.  I’ve actually been thinking about doing a helicopter tour of Vega, but I’ve flown in and out of Vegas so many times, it almost seems like a silly thing to do.  Catching some new scenery that I’m less familiar with in Missouri might be a lot more interesting.

Now, if I am able to schedule the trip with my kids involved as well, miniature golf, hiking, and go cart racing are going to be a must.  I’ve done duck boat rides with them in the past and don’t recommend that for kids unless the tour enables you to get in and out of the duck boat a lot.  The other thing that I think would be cool would be a hot air balloon ride, but for that one, I think I’d wait for summer to get here.  I went to basic training in Missouri in the winter, and have no intention of venturing out doors in the cold, so bring on the hot Missouri weather for me any day.

I have noticed that in SocialSpark the CPC and CPM numbers do not calculate correctly at an overview level until the campaign is completed and paid out to bloggers, which can take up to 30 days after the campaign is done.  That’s not good for giving you live information about how your campaign is going!

The problem is in the Cost to Date number.

The Cost to date number at the overview level, only shows the cost as calculated by the amount actually charged or finalized against your account.  Any amounts charged for blog articles do not count against this total until the blogger has been paid.  So on the campaign below where the actual Cost to Date should reflect several thousand dollars, it only shows the fees charged by Izea, hence the CPC and CPM numbers are extremely low.

Tip!  Dig into the actual Posts to get a sense of what is going on!

So if you want to know what is actually happening with your campaign (assuming Izea has not yet fixed this metric problem), you have to click into the actual Posts tab of SocialSpark and review the metrics (CPM,CPC) for each and every blog article.  At that level it does correctly show the amount ‘to be paid’ to bloggers assuming their articles are reviewed and accepted.

Isolating the Problem

I noticed this problem in calculation on a SocialSpark campaign where I picked a fixed cost scenario as opposed to creating a daily budget spend.  When you look at the excel downloads in the Overview Report and Detailed Report, it would appear that those reports were designed for the Daily Spend variety of campaign and not the fixed spend campaign.  The daily spend campaign was implemented first, and I suspect that Izea simply did not code up new reports for their new type of advertising campaign.

Tip to Izea! 

Take a look at your queries and reports on the new campaign type and see if it still makes sense.  You may need a new report type to match the new type of campaign.  Reporting may even need to be rebuilt for the system to handle the growth into areas that include affiliate ad campaigns and this campaign type of fixed spend.

I noticed an interesting little tidbit on an email from AirTran this morning.  About half way down the email they had a little blurb stating that AirTran now accepts PayPal.

Now as a internet publisher and blogger, I receive a large portion of my income in the form of payments through PayPal.  Even a great deal of my consulting work is paid via PayPal.

I also travel a significant amount and typically pay for my travel expenses with PayPal.  There was a time, when have PayPal as a checkout option was the mark of a web presence that could not afford merchant services or could not afford to pay a web designer to implement it.  That was also back when PayPal had a much smaller user base of users (before eBay and before blogging came into existence).

Now that PayPal is becoming more main stream, a website that does not offer it is actually possibly going to face a negative perception issue in the opposite direction.  Especially since PayPal pays 1% cash back on purchases made via PayPal.

  First off, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Top10Tech.  We would like to to share with you a cool little (free!) program called The Levelator.  It levels the volume levels on sound files.  For example if you are recording a call with multiple callers on skype, you can drag the wav files onto the Levelator, and it will level the volume on the two tracks to the same level.  It can also work if you have recorded a panel session with multiple speakers that may have different volumes because the speakers recording levels were set differently or because the speakers were further away from the microphone.

Its a cool little program and the free download can be found at The Levelator from The Conversations Network.

I have a lot of friends and contacts that write about blogger, how to use it, how to use it better, tips, tricks and everything.  That said, I’ve never seen anyone do a more comprehensive review, coverage, build, tutorial what ever you want to call it than the site called Blogger Buster.    If you are using blogger today, and want to take your blogger blog to the next level, I highly recommend this website. 

For the record as a person that blogs on Blogger and WordPress, I still recommend WordPress sites hosted on your own account, but there are times when you must use blogger and/or when you just get stuck there.  The tips and guides on Blogger Buster might just make you forget about your Google Woes. 

I’m going to cover this site even more after the holidays, and I’m primarily just writing this article so that I don’t lose track of it!

I’ve just seen the first article relating to CES 2009 that actually has me excited about going.  It is this quick article talking about LG which will offer a laptop display that can be illuminated by sunlight as opposed to backlighting the display with laptop battery power.

This has me excited, because this is exactly the type of solution that I have been looking for where I work.  My office is out doors.  I work on a WiFi fishing dock in North Carolina. I am one of the early beneficiaries of the mobile revolution and gave up my office in a high rise in Buckhead to get my work done hovering over a lake.

Working outside however presents many challenges, and sunlight is definitely one of them.  When you have a laptop in the sun, the bright sun washes out the screen that is typically backlit by an LCD panel.  The LCD lights are just not as bright as the sun. 

So it appears that LG has come up with a unique solution.  It has found a way to use that sunlight and reflect it off of plates in the screen that can then enable a laptop user to see the screen.  LG claims that this will be about 3-5 times brighter than a typical laptop in the sun.

Even more cool than being able to see your laptop screen, is the fact that this reflective mode cuts down on power consumption by about 75%. Last year I went to CES hoping to find a solar panel solution that would enable me to keep my laptop powered while working out doors in a continuous fashion.  That wasn’t possible then, but if you combine this laptop display option with newer solar panels this year, you might just be able to get closer to keeping a laptop continuously powered in the sun. 

That’s why I am excited!

I just have one question.  Why are they going to debut this panel in a private room in the Bellagio?  I’ve stayed in the Bellagio a few times and while it is a very nice place, its not exactly bright.  Why not set this up outside where people can see it in action under the sun?

The panel will debut at the International CES, being held in Las Vegas next month, at a private room in the Bellagio Hotel.

LG Debuts Sunlit LCD Panel At CES – 12/22/2008 12:02:00 PM – TWICE

Maybe LG has heard that it has been overcast and snowing in Vegas a lot lately.  On a similarly dark note, it would appear that LG itself does not see the synergy in this particular product development and solar energy as they recently discontinued a joint venture with Conergy to develop solar cells due to ‘economic uncertainty’ which I would guess has something to do with both the global depression and oil prices that have fallen below $40 per barrel making solar energy look expensive all over again.