Social Media Network

7 Reasons Why You Should Start with Affiliate Program

2008-06-07T00:18:00.000-07:00

There are thousands of business opportunities online. Most of them require some capital to start with. Not affiliate programs!

Here are 7 reasons why you should consider joining an affiliate program as your home based business.

1. Joining an affiliate program requires no outlay of capital. That's right, none! You can join an affiliate program for free and start promoting the product immediately.

2. The internet marketing tools are already provided for you. A 'top' affiliate program will supply you with lots of affiliate marketing tools that are 'ready to go'. You just copy and paste and put your affiliate code in. Then you start selling.

3. You do not need a product. It takes a LOT of time to develop your own product to sell online. With affiliate programs, the product is already there. Someone else spent all the time developing it so you do not have to.

4. Affiliate statistics are already provided as part of joining an affiliate program. You do not have to go out and buy expensive software to track your sales because the product owner is doing that for you. You don't even have to pay for it, it's free!

5. You do not have any 'time lag'. With most businesses it takes a certain amount of time in the 'start up' phase. With affiliate programs there is no such thing. Once you join you can start selling.

6. You do not have to worry about sales administration and technical support. The product owner takes care of the sales process and all the after sales service. All you have to worry about is receiving your affiliate check!

7. You do not have to worry about direct contact with the customer. In an affiliate program you are a re-seller so if the customer has a complaint they contact the product owner, not you.

Affiliate programs are simple to join, easy to start promoting and best of all they have no downside. If one affiliate programdoes not work out, you can leave and join a different one.

Is Your Website Blacklisted?

2008-06-07T00:14:00.001-07:00

A blacklist, as the name implies, is a list of people or companies who have met with the disapproval of others. In the online world a blacklist refers to those people who have been marked as responsible for generating spam in a very big way. Blacklists are also known as blocklists.

Blacklists are used to combat spam in a very specific way. When spam is reported to one of the relevant spam fighting organizations the IP address the spam originated from is added to a banned or blacklisted IP addresslist. An IP address is the unique location of you or your website on the Internet - think of it as your "home address" online. To put it simply every www.domain.com Internet address has a matching IP address. Any email coming from your website domain also has a corresponding IP address. If your IP address is present on a blacklist then you're potentially wasting your time sending email to customers.

Why are you wasting your time? Modern spam blockers come with the most common blacklists installed and/or allow you
to import updated blacklists into your spam blocker. This allows to you block a huge amount of spam but you may also, potentially, block legitimate email. Blacklists are not foolproof.

There are two types of IP address:

Dynamic - changes every time you connect to the Internet. Most commonly used for dialup Internet access. Spammers love these because they're very hard to track and 100% disposable.

Fixed/Static - All websites, most large companies and some individuals use fixed IP addresses. This can cause huge problems if they're reported for spamming.

When an IP address (dynamic or fixed ) is reported for sending spam it's added to a blacklist. There are three different types of blacklists:

Temporary
An IP address placed on a temporary blacklist will have email coming from that IP address blocked for several hours. After a few hours the offending IP address is removed from the blacklist.

Permanent
When an IP address is added to a permanent blacklist any email server configured to block email from this list will never receive email from that range of IP addresses again.

Comprehensive
This is the most damaging of blacklists. Not only does it block a single IP address it also blocks the IP addresses next to it. For example if the IP address 192.156.66.67 was added to a comprehensive blacklist then all IP addresses close to 192.156.66.67 will also be blocked. This can be a huge problem for those website owners using virtual hosting because if your host has ever appeared on a blacklist then you're also on the same blacklist, by default, because of the shared hosting from the same IP range.

It's important for all website owners to check whether or not they're on a blacklist. You'll need your IP address (available from your webhost) and you can check your blacklist status at: www.mail-abuse.org/cgi-bin/lookup

Blacklists are a necessary evil due to the volume of spam being sent each day but are not an exact science. Take a few moments from your day and ensure that your website or email address is not being blocked.

Email Etiquette – More Than Just Manners

2008-06-07T00:09:00.000-07:00

We all understand the importance of good “people skills” when it comes to our interpersonal communication – it helps us get the results we need. Our communication determines the opinion others have of us – knowledgeable or ignorant, pleasant or rude, professional or immature. Most of the time this is in face-to-face or telephone conversations where we have some control over the impression we make on others.

When it comes to netiquette (Network Etiquette), it’s not as easy to control how others perceive us, and yet it’s even more important. Why? Because what you write and how you use email can affect whether your email gets delivered, read, or responded to – and what that response is! In addition, there are numerous “technology traps” that are easy to fall into. Have you ever seen someone accidentally send an angry or sensitive response to a huge group of people by using the ”Reply All” key?

And before you say to yourself "I already know" and stop reading this article, realize that every single one of us could benefit from a few simple reminders on the proper use of email, not just from a personal view but also from a business standpoint. If you're doing business on the internet – and using email to communicate with your customers – then this article is a must read for you! You may already know many of these tips, but even the most experienced user will find a few rules you were not aware of or have fallen into the habit of breaking.

Think, write, and think again.

Email is a static, one-way channel – unlike live communication, there’s no way to get immediate feedback (from facial expressions or voice responses) to know if we are being effective or even understood. So think twice before hitting the send key. Is there ANY chance that the recipient might misinterpret what you want them to understand? Do your thoughts come across as abrupt or angry? Could this email accidentally affect your reputation? The hastily written word may lack feelings and the true emotion you intended. You might be smiling as you type, but your note could come across as sarcastic or mean-spirited. Remember – there’s a person on the other end, not just a computer.

Use a meaningful subject line.

This is the first thing your reader will see, so use the space to help them understand the contents of the email even before they open it. Using the same rule from above, type in a subject that relates to the message you're sending, rather than leaving the subject blank. Without a subject line your note will probably be seen as another piece of junk mail – not everyone will recognize who you are just from your email address. Many internet service providers (ISP’s) filter out suspicious looking email, and a blank subject is a big red flag. Also, try to avoid generic words like "Hi" or "Check This Out" to avoid having the recipients spam or virus software delete your message!

The beginning, and the end.

Always use a salutation, even if it’s short. Start your message with "Hi", or "Hello", or "Dear", whatever works best for the intended recipient, and whatever reflects your personality. Think about this: when you call someone on the telephone, don't you say "Hello" before telling them what you want? Email messages should be no different. At a minimum, address the email to the person.

Don't forget the end of your message too! Always sign your messages with your name, and say "Thank You", or "Sincerely", or something else appropriate. You can even setup a signature in your email program that will automatically display your information at the bottom of every email message you send. For directions, use your email programs help file and do a search for signature.

Protect your recipient’s identity – use “To:”, “CC:” and “BC:” properly.
There are a few simple netiquette rules for using the address fields in email.

If your email is being sent to just one person or email address, place it in the "To:" field. This should be the person who is responsible for sending you a reply.

When your email is being sent to more than one person and all the recipients truly need to know who else is receiving it, put all the addresses in the “CC:” field.

For email sent to multiple recipients who have no real reason to know the names and email addresses of everyone else to whom it is being sent, put all the addresses in the “BCC:” field.

(Some email software requires at least one address to be placed in the “To:” field. Put your own email address in the “To:” section if this is required.)

By default, not every email program has the BCC field available for viewing. If you cannot see the Bcc field in your program, check your programs help file for directions.

Give memory a helping hand.

When replying to emails, include a copy of the prior notes you’ve traded with the person on the topic, don't just send a new one. I may receive 50 emails a day that need a reply and it’s not always possible to remember every single 'conversation' with every single person. Please don’t make your reader go looking through their ‘sent items’ folder or email ‘recycle bin’ to refresh their memory!

Use the ‘Read Receipt’ sparingly.

In some cases, it's crucial for both parties to know that a message was received. However, in normal day-to-day activities you should not request a read receipt for every single message you send. It's annoying to the recipient to have to click that pop up box every time they get your email. And it is an invasion of privacy. Don't forget – just because they have received it doesn't mean they have necessarily read it, so receiving a read receipt doesn't actually prove anything other than that the message was received. And for day to day communications, is that really necessary?

URGENT!

The boy who cried wolf. Do not send all your messages as URGENT, or HIGH PRIORITY. If your recipients keep receiving messages marked that way, then eventually the red exclamation point loses it's effectiveness – except to reinforce how important YOU think you are. Reserve these messages for those that are of utmost importance!

Avoid special formatting.

For your day-to-day messages, don't use colored email backgrounds, colored fonts, special fonts, images or other "pretty" type of formatting to your messages. Keep them clean – this makes it easier for the intended recipient to read them and reply. It's best to send messages in plain text to ensure everyone will be able to read them, since not everyone has their email set to receive html emails. You would be amazed at how bad your note may look to someone viewing their email on a handheld device or an older computer. By keeping your emails clean, they will also load much faster for the recipient!

Don’t SHOUT!

If you type in all capital letters, your reader will see this as yelling, or they will think that you were just too lazy to use proper text formatting. It’s also hard on the eyes – did you know that it takes longer to read something written in all caps than it does to read something that is properly formatted?

Proof, spell-check, and use proper formatting.

Poor writing skills are a direct reflection on you! And the reader never forgets the person who writes an undecipherable message. Spell checking will prevent most misspelled words, but you should always proof your email in case you've written the incorrect word (that was spelled correctly). For example, month and moth, where and were, all look correct to a spell-check program. Use proper capitalization, punctuation and formatting. Break your paragraphs when the subject changes, or if they become too long. Don't use excessive formatting (too much bold, too many exclamation points and question marks, etc.) Too much of anything will make your message harder to read. You want to make your message easily readable, as well as understandable. Proofread it to ensure it make sense, and never assume the reader knows what you mean, always spell it out for them. The time it takes to proof and spell check is minimal compared to the lasting impression you will make if you don't take the time.

Take the time to send a reply.

Even when someone emails you something that doesn't need a direct response, follow up with them in a timely manner just to let them know you received their message. It’s amazing how often people will ask for advice, and not even reply with a short “Thank you” when they receive their answer. A simple message telling the sender is sufficient. And this lets them know you did receive it, that it didn't just get stuck in cyberspace somewhere.

If they didn't request it, don't send it!

No matter what you think may be acceptable, you cannot email someone about your product/service without their permission. Unless they request that you send them an email, or you have previously done business with them, then it is illegal to send them an email, period. Any recipient can easily forward your email to their ISP and report you for sending unsolicited email messages (SPAM).

This report would result in the immediate removal of all your websites/email address from most servers. You would then join a list of “prohibited senders” meaning that servers would not allow any messages attached to your domain name to be received by their customers - the people you are sending your messages to.

You might be thinking, “but I get emails every day about products/services that I didn't request information about.” Sending unsolicited email messages (SPAM), is kind of like speeding. Lot's of people do it, but it is against the law, and no matter how long you may get away with it, you are bound to get caught!

Compress, Compress, Compress!

If you are sending an email with several large attachments, it is often better to send them in a few separate emails, so that you don’t send a document that is too large to even open. Or, you can try compressing your messages into a zipped file. It doesn’t reduce the size of images or pictures very much, but it works great for text, spreadsheet and program files. This is very easy to do, and will make your file size much smaller, and make the recipient much happier. Check out www.winzip.com (for those on pc).

Hoaxes as helpful hints.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Do not forward everything that gets sent to you. We've all seen them – the chain-letter emails that promise if you forward to x number of people you'll get paid, or you'll win something, or you will be lucky forever. It's all a hoax, a scam, and the only result is huge numbers of email transmissions that slow down servers all across the country. If you receive one of these emails from a friend, reply to them (in a very nice way) and explain to them why this isn't true, or ask them to stop forwarding them to you.

Virus, or virus advice?

Many viruses are spread by email masquerading as warnings about – a virus! If someone forwards you a virus warning, which usually contains instructions for removing a virus from your computer... check google.com for that virus BEFORE doing anything. Chances are, it's also a hoax, and if you do remove that "bad file" from your computer, you're actually removing a necessary component crucial to your system!

Wow, that was a lot of information to take in at one time, but I congratulate you for sticking it out and reading the entire article. Please share it with your family, friends and colleagues.

Is global warming a real concern, or just a popular fad?

2008-02-29T00:12:00.000-08:00

It's really hard to know for sure. There's a lot of "proof", But, on the other hand it's a great story for the media and a great common enemy for government to rally the troups. So, I say FAD. For a more balanced view than what you can get from the popular media, check out http://climatedebatedaily.com/ and make up your own mind. BTW - let me know what you think.

If you could have 1 superpower, what would it be?

2008-02-28T23:53:00.000-08:00

Quite simply, if you could control peoples actions and thoughts then you wouldn't need any other super powers. You could get the strongest superhero to do the heavy lifting, the smartest superhero to do your end of year taxes, and the most cunning superhero to make loads of cash for you.

Or you could just make everyone pay you 1% of their income every month and tell them to be REALLY happy about it! Times 5bn or so people, that's a lot of cash to keep you going. If you wanted to do some fun stuff, you could make everyone believe you were invisible whenever you wanted (some people already have this 'skill' except it's all the time - especially in corporate world)

You could make every woman on earth believe you were the greatest guy that ever existed, and every guy believe that you were the shining example of a perfect role model.

Basically, since true power is in the mind, thats got to be the place to start!

22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts � Website Design, CSS and Search Engine Marketing

2007-12-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

Web designers are always looking for ways to save time and simplify the design process. Well, creating a basic layout doesn’t have to take any time at all. All of the resources listed here will help you to create the structure for CSS-based designs. None of these resources are templates that attempt to replace the need for a design; rather, they all aim to simplify the process by creating a skeleton that you will build upon.

22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts >> Website Design, CSS and Search Engine Marketing

25 Headline Formulas That Have Blessed Web 2.0

2007-12-15T21:54:00.000-08:00

25 Headline Formulas That Have Blessed Web 2.0

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

2007-06-11T00:20:00.000-07:00

Let’s put it straight - simplicity is more complex than you probably think it is. To design a web-site in user-friendly tones, presenting all information and removing unnecessary details isn’t easy. In fact, many designers don’t manage to find the right mix between details and their presentation on the screen, which usually results in an information overkill and/or decreased usability. However, some designers do manage to find the right balance and create usable, elegant and clean web-sites with simple layouts.

Centered Designs

1. Davidville

2. The place Garrett Dimon calls home. | GarrettDimon.com

3. Drew Warkentin | Creative Solutions Daily.

4. Goplan - Online project management and collaboration tool

5. Business Logs: Blog Design, Blog Consulting, Web 2.0 Services.

6. 31Three - Web Development in Niagara, Ontario

7. 45royale, Inc. | Atlanta Web Design and Development

8. JeffCroft.com: Homepage

9. Web Design - Normanton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire - Grove

10. Jewelboxing - Super Jewel Box Packaging System - CD and DVD Cases

11. Studio MIKMIK: Graphic design and illustration by Michael Lewis

12. journal // hicksdesign

13. [Beta] Rapid coding collaboration: Springloops

14. Corking Design | Daniel Cork freelance web designer based in Manchester

15. Tijs Vrolix

16. Visit MIX07

17. Apple - iPod + iTunes

18. The Book Magazine - read online book reviews, author interviews

19. kottke.org :: home of fine hypertext products

20. Simple software to help you get organized: 37signals

21. t:m

22. The Missing Link - Homepage

23. Wishlistr: Skapa din egen onskelista

24. IconShoppe ~ Royalty-free stock icons for the web

25. Solution Watch - Your descriptive source of solutions

How the Porn Industry is Utilizing Social Media Network

2007-06-03T01:19:00.000-07:00

We've all heard about how the pornography industry will decide which next-generation optical disc format (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) will ultimately become the industry standard. Today with the addition of StumblePorn, let's take a look at the pornography industry's foray into the social media space, which is now almost complete. Beware, this post may not be suitable for all audience and for all social settings.

Socially Driven Pornography

In the first category we have several participants, primarily thanks to Pligg and how easy their content management system has made it to establish a socially driven site that essentially replicates all the functionality of Digg (minus the community). First we have MoSexIndex founded by Daniel Gluck, executive director of the Museum of Sex. And among the dozens of other similar sites we have we have socialporn.

Porn Video-Sharing

In the second category, and following in the footsteps of YouTube and how it popularized the online video sharing phenomenon we have several sites that let you upload, watch, and share pornography videos. Most prominent of these are YouPorn and PornoTube.

Social Porn Browsing

Somewhat similar to the first category and built exactly along the lines of popular web browsing toolbar StumbleUpon is StumblePorn. Just like in the non-porn plugin you choose what kind of pages you want to see (i.e. the kind of porn) and the plugin helps you stumble to those pages. One thing to note is that StumbleUpon does have an adult content section even though I doubt that the content on there is as graphic as what you will see in the new startup.

Ultimately the point of this post is not to simply direct you towards tools that let you access free pornography, but is to document how the social media space is maturing (no pun intended). This is another example of one more industry acknowledging the potential of social media as a medium for disseminating content and utilizing these various models (Digg, YouTube, StumbleUpon) to their benefit.

Notably missing, however, is pornography-based social networking. And considering that social networking has surpassed pornography in terms of online hours spent on each activity, it is foreseeable for the industry to embrace social networking as well.

Shrek 4 and Shrek 5 Announced

2007-05-31T10:21:00.000-07:00

Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg has announced that there will be a Shrek 4 (2010) and Shrek 5, but THAT IS IT!

“It’s a finite story, has been from the beginning and I think that’s part of its integrity, part of its strength, that we’re not thinking this up as we go,” he told The Age. “Ultimately we will come back to understand how Shrek arrived in that swamp. We will reveal his story.”

So there you have it. We have a prequel story to look forward to, and who knows what else. Oh yeah, and there is that Christmas special, and the theme park ride and… okay, realistically, the Shrek franchise will never truly end - will it?

P2P: Introduction and Real World Applications

2007-04-04T22:14:00.000-07:00

As the connection speed of the internet has increased, the demand for web related services has also increased. After the Web revolution, peer-to-peer networks evolved and currently have a number of different usages - instant messaging, file sharing, etc. Some other revolutionary ideas are still in research. People want to use peer-to-peer in many different applications including e-commerce, education, collaborative work, search, file storage, high performance computing. In this series of posts, we will look at different peer-to-peer ideas and applications.
Introduction
Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have been receiving increasing demand from users and are now accepted as a standard way of distributing information, because its architecture enables scalability, efficiency and performance as key concepts. A peer-to-peer network is decentralized, self-organized, and dynamic in its pure sense, and offers an alternative to the traditional client-server model of computing. Client-server architecture enables individuals to connect to a server - but although servers are scalable, there is a limit to what they can do. P2P networks are almost unlimited in their scalability.
In "pure" P2P systems, every node acts as a server and client - and they share resources without any centralized control. However most P2P applications have some degree of centralization. These are called "hybrid" P2P networks and they centralize at least the list of users. This is how instant messengers or file sharing programs work - the system keeps a list of users with their IP addresses.
Different applications of P2P networks enable users to share the computation power (distributed systems), data (file-sharing), and bandwidth (using many nodes for transferring data). P2P uses an individual's computer power and resources, instead of powerful centralized servers. The shared resources guarantee high availability among peers. P2P is a really important area to research, because it has a huge potential in distributed computing. It is also important for the industry as well, as new business models are being created around P2P.
P2P Standards
The key thing for the architecture of P2P networks is to achieve reliability, efficiency, scalability and portability.
For the moment there are no standards for P2P application development, but standards are needed to enable interoperability. Sun has tried to implement a framework basis called JXTA, which is a network programming and computing platform for distributed computing. Sun was the first company to try and develop standards for P2P, but surely other companies will also try to implement their own standards. Microsoft, Intel and IBM are investing and working in their research laboratories on P2P supported application frameworks or systems. It is an open area where no standards are accepted yet.
Gnutella
Gnutella has been used in many applications to allow connecting to the same network and searching files in a centralized manner. It's an open, decentralized search protocol for finding files through the peers. Gnutella is a pure P2P network, without any centralized servers.
Using the same search protocol, such as Gnutella, forms a compatible network for different applications. Anybody who implements the Gnutella protocol is able to search and locate files on that network. Here's how it works. At start up, Gnutella will try to find at least one node to connect to. After the connection, the client requests a list of working addresses and proceeds to connect to other nodes until it reaches a quota. When the client searches for files, it sends the request to each node it is connected to, which then forwards the request to the other nodes it is connected, until a number of "hops" occurs from the sender.
According to Wikipedia, as of December 2005 Gnutella is the third-most-popular file sharing network on the Internet - following eDonkey 2000 and FastTrack. Gnutella is thought to host on an average of approximately 2.2 million users, although around 750,000-1,000,000 are online at any given moment.
The industry use P2P networks in many different ways, each with different business model and different infrastructure. So now let's look at some real world applications for P2P...
Instant Messaging
The first adopted usage of P2P applications was instant messengers. Back in the early days of the internet, people used gopher and IRC servers for communication. These technologies could only handle a certain number of users online at the same time, so there were delays for communicating whenever the server was approaching its limits. However the use of P2P changed the whole idea of IM. The bandwidth was shared between users, enabling faster and more scalable communication.
File Sharing
The peer-to-peer file sharing era started with Napster and continued with much more powerful applications such as Kazaa, Gnutella. These programs brought P2P into the mainstream. Although some P2P file-sharing applications have stopped because of legal issues, there is still a high demand in the industry. Now Napster has gone 'legit' and there are new media P2P apps like Joost (P2P TV) arriving on the scene. We will discuss this more in the next post.
Collaborative Community
Document sharing and collaboration is really important for a company. This issue has tried to be solved by internal portals and collaboration servers. However the information has to be up to date and with portals this wasn't always possible. Collaboration with P2P broke that barrier, by using peoples computer resources instead of a centralized server.
Groove is a software with P2P capabilities which was acquired by Microsoft in April 2005. Groove is now offering Microsoft Office based solutions, mainly using P2P for document collaboration. It also allows the usage of instant messaging and integration with some video conferencing solutions. It provides user and role based security, which is one of the most important aspects of P2P for an organization. Groove is also a “relay server” to enable offline usage.
IP Telephony
Another major usage of P2P is IP telephony. IP telephony revolutionaries the way we use the internet, enabling us to call anywhere in the world for free using our computers.
Skype is a good example of P2P usage in VoIP. It was acquired by eBay in 2005. Skype was built on top of the infrastructure of P2P file-sharing system, Kazaa. The bandwidth is shared and the sound or video in real-time are shared as resources. The main server exists only for the presence information and billing users of the system whenever they make a call that has charges (e.g. SkypeOut).
High Performance Computing - Grid Computing
High performance computing is important for scientific research or for large companies. P2P plays a role in enabling high performance computing. Sharing of resources like computation power, network bandwidth, and disk space will benefit from P2P.
Hive computing is similar - it is where millions of computers connecting to the internet can form a super computer, if it is successfully managed. One of the popular projects is SETI@HOME (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), which enables users to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It is a voluntary project with more than 3.3 million users in 226 countries - it has used 796,000 years of CPU time and analyzed 45 terabytes of data in just two and a half years of operation.
Some industrial projects also exist in this area. Datasynapse is charging users for the CPU cycles they use. Open Source projects also exist, like Globus and Globus Grid Forum.
Coming soon...
In Part 2, we will explore future applications of P2P. In the meantime, let us know which real world applications you use right now and what you think of the P2P industry in general.

GospelTube, the YouTube for Christians

2007-04-03T09:35:00.000-07:00

GospelTube is a Christian video sharing community that allows visitors to watch and share Christian and Gospel videos worldwide through a web experience for the whole family. People can see first hand accounts of great messages from people who care most about spreading the word of God or find videos that could be a blessing to someone who is going through difficult times. Video clip sharing on GospelTube.com is seen as powerful way to minister to a broader audience as more people turn to the internet for more information and is helping ministries get their message out all over the world via video sharing.

CYBER DATING GUIDE

2007-04-02T21:30:00.000-07:00

On the web, men are pigs. In real life, men are real pigs.

Welcome to the world of internet dating! Within this exciting new social network, one can hide behind a detailed facade of fabrications and lies which, until now, has been a luxury reserved for CEOs and elected officials.
And what convenience! Back in the day, meeting new friends required time, money and the possibility of public humiliation. The web has changed all that by enabling those of us seeking love to make utter fools of ourselves in front of millions, from the safety and comfort of our own homes! Read on, good hunting and may you find what you desire - or at very least, what you deserve!
Creating A Personal Profile Screen Name
Your personal profile screen name is the one of the first impressions you'll make on a prospective partner. It's important to give some thought to this seemingly innocuous but extremely important detail. For example, "CityCowgirl5280" conjures up an image of a breezy gal who's comfortable in a little black dress or boots and jeans, and probably lives in Denver. On the other hand, "UrbanSow4000" would probably suggest a cantankerous Fräulein who spends her leisure time mindlessly bulldozing through all-you-can-eat buffets. You can see right away that it's all about the details.

Be willing to spend some time fine-tuning your name! Patience and repeated editing are the building blocks of good writing. Here's what a little extra effort did for our lady's screen name:

So-so:WhinyClingyNutCase
Good:AverageGirlNextDoor
Better:CurvyDumbAndBlonde
Best:ObedientBreweryHeiress

And here are some good rewrites of our gentleman's screen name:
So-so:FatStupidLecherousPig
Good:AllAmericanNiceGuy
Better:RichHotAndGullible
Best:BillionaireWithPacemaker
In Summary: Spend a little time thinking carefully about the image you wish to project, and it will pay off later.

top ten reasons why myspace is better than facebook

2007-03-30T00:07:00.000-07:00

Traffic. No one can deny the masses that click their way to MySpace everyday. Hitwise data from December 2006 puts MySpace at No. 1, ahead of both Yahoo! and Google. They also have two subdomains in the Top 20. The mail domain comes in at No. 5 in traffic and their blog platform is No. 14. Facebook has respectable traffic, but fails to crack the Top 10. Want user data? How ’bout 155 million-plus and growing.
Brand leader. MySpace has become synonymous with “social networking for the masses.” Facebook, which used to have firm residence in the hip, college-only market position is now trying to out-MySpace MySpace. Ain’t happenin’.
Media powerhouse. Videos, music, concerts, films, comedy acts, IM and photos help make MySpace an impressive outlet to consume media today and is sure to only get more dominant in the future.
Rock ‘n’ roll will never die. In light of last night’s Grammy’s, one can’t deny the lock MySpace has as a centerpiece for every band that’s currently putting out music. Allowing users to feel like their one degree away from their favorite rock (and other categories) stars is a good position to be in.
Mo’ money. MySpace has an ownership with mega-wads of cash. Facebook doesn’t.
Rupert Murdoch. Don’t underestimate the power of experienced leadership, especially if that experience “gets it.” Murdoch is as smart as they come and knows media as well as anyone in the world. His empire is scary impressive.
Unique URLs. I can promote my own MySpace page using the following URL: http://www.myspace.com/jcheesman. Promoting my Facebook page isn’t as clear-cut. The growing number of movies and other media properties promoting their MySpace URLs in commercials and other mediums will only make this more important. Do you own myspace.com/YOURBRAND? You should.
Customizable pages. With varying degrees of Web design know-how, MySpace pages are easily customizable, even to the point where your page can vaguely look like MySpace at all. The Marines’ MySpace page is a good example of this. Facebook doesn’t allow such customization that I’m aware of. The only exception is for sponsors, and those seem to come with limitations and a price tag.
News Corporation and phat partners. If you take a look at the monster network MySpace belongs to known as News Corporation, it’s big and far-reaching. MySpace is global. And they have Google under contract to the tune of $900 million through 2010 running their search engine and contextual ads. EBay may be next. If things ever got bad at MySpace, falling back on such reserves is comforting.
Classifieds. MySpace has a platform by which users can post classifieds for free. No, it’s not Craigslist, but it’s a far greater leap than Facebook has made. The social networking leader is also in talks with eBay to deliver an auction platform. As far as jobs are concerned, MySpace users have access to the millions of jobs currently at Simply Hired as well. Will the deal with Jobster - who will have about the same job content as MySpace - make a big difference? We’ll have to wait and see. Interestingly, jobs posted on MySpace fail to make it to the vertical job search engines that I checked. Wonder why? At a minimum they should be on partner site Simply Hired.

When Social Web Tools Get Creative

2007-03-22T21:39:00.000-07:00

A social network like MySpace can help you express yourself and communicate. A bookmarking tool like del.icio.us can help you save and share stuff. A wiki can harness teamwork to build a webpage about whatever it is you care about.
But these social, accessible, dare-I-say-web-2.0 tools can be brought to another level to enable you to make something you can bring back to your offline life. Then they’re not just social, but collaboratively creative. Think Ze Frank’s the ORG or Instructables or Tabblo, which was bought by HP today.
Here are a couple examples. Their user bases are relatively small, but I’d like to think that their utility will give them lasting appeal, especially on a mainstream level.

Exhibit A: Social bookmarking for the home. MyDesignIn, in addition to providing a social bookmarking tool for collecting prospective sinks and couches and whatnot, has built a Flash floorplan tool, where you can drop the items you’ve bookmarked into a diagram of your space. It’s pretty functional considering the Marblehead, Massachusetts-based company is still working on raising its first round of funding.
You can play around with the plan, get recommendations based on users with similar tastes, and eventually get dynamic pricing information. Having a social bookmarking tool just for home-related stuff is not all that appealing, but transforming those bookmarks into a representation of your own home makes the hassle of a separate account worthwhile.
Exhibit B: Social networks for creating music. If social networks are the new shopping mall, as some have proposed, then it follows that much of the activity is about as productive as Mallrats. Not to take this metaphor too far, but perhaps this particular mall could have a recording studio, where musicians can remotely collaborate.
That’s an idea that’s occurred to a lot of people: see Splice, Jamglue, Indaba Music, YourSpins, Mix2r, Rype. In most cases, these sites offer some kind of web-based tool for remixing and collaborating on music.
I think they’re onto something here, though I’m not sure it’s a business. In various interviews, the people running these sites told me they were differentiated because they were targeting professional musicians, or instead amateurs, or even kids goofing off — or because they’re signing deals to license content for their users to sample, or rather all user-generated.
“It’s almost become a dating site — ‘emo girl looking for emo boy,’” said Matt Rubens, co-founder of Seattle-based Jamglue, which has 6,000 registered users, and 50,000 unique visitors per month. “The social currency of the site is to remix a song.”
P.S. Let us know what other sites you’ve used and liked in this category.

Teapotters: The 3rd Dimension of Social Media Networks

2007-03-21T23:09:00.000-07:00

Social networks are sprouting across the internet faster than you can shake a stick at, however a social network for 3D artists is quite the rare find. Teapotters is that rare discovery. It’s your standard run of the mill community, however just knowing that it revolves around 3D work is unique in itself.
Right off the bat, you’ll have to go through a small installation of the 3D Life Player plug-in. This will allow you to view the models that other members have uploaded and give you the freedom to zoom, pan, and twist and turn the models at your leisure. Each user is able to upload their 3D work from Blender, 3D Studio Max, Maya, Poser, and Lightwave, just to name a few. Also, on the upload page there are many choices of customization for your model(s) including: privacy preference, tagging, license selection, and whether or not you wish for your model to be available for download

On the main page there is a little summary of your activity and other various information coupled together with a gallery of thumbnails of any models that you personally uploaded. You’ll find small statistics such as a percentage of account usage, profile views, and number of times your profile has been saved by others on the sidebar. Links to your Contact List and profile editing are also openly available from your homepage. In the Edit Profile section you can change your password if needed, select your preferred 3D player (3dxml player, or virtools player), upload a picture of yourself, and decide whether you want your email address visible on your profile page for the public eyes to see. Note: using the 3dxml player requires ActiveX support. Below the main information are places to fill out more in-depth details: company name, address, website, current skills, and a brief description of yourself.
In the actual 3D interface you can pan (moving left, right, up and down), rotate the camera, zoom in and out, and re-frame the model back to its original position. You are also given the option to see the actual wireframe of each model along with the ability to smoothen the hard edges of any objects by anti-aliasing them. They also have a full screen option if you desire. You’re also able to comment on any of the models.

When viewing a model, the side bar will indicate file name, file size, object count, polygon count, surface count, vertices count, texture count, and which authoring software it was created in. If the creator has allowed it, the model and textures can freely be downloaded and experimented with by users. A counter of the amount of times a model has been download is also present. You are also enabled to add tags to models in addition to what the author had originally put for tags. Furthermore, in each model’s page there is a HTML widget giving you the code to implement it into a blog, a MySpace, or simply a normal forum. Additionally, there’s a directory listing all the currently signed up members to Teapotters. There is, of course, a listing of all the uploaded 3D models with thumbnails as well. You can sort models by favorites, and users by contributors. Models are organized by tags and the program in which they were created in is also indicated. Another nice feature is that you are able to add any member’s RSS feed to your personal feed reader to continually be up to date with any new models from that specific author.
Members have a Contact List in which they can add and sort people into a Friends List or Business List. You can manage your contacts, invite new contacts, and view your contact history in the “Manage Connections” portion of the site. They have a small “How It Works” section, describing briefly how to use Teapotters and you’ll find a demo video in this section as well, if you’re slightly confused on procedures. They also have a small blog to keep you informed on any updates done to the website. Also, some of the models that have been uploaded to Teapotters are actual models from popular games on the market currently. Who wouldn’t be at least curious to examine in detail how exactly these figures were constructed? I wish they gave members more than a single invite to give away to anyone interested in the community. However, this small downfall is easily trumped by how functional and organized the network is.
Teapotters was a nice fork in the road on the endless avenue of mundane social networks that are blanketing the internet like the plague. There aren’t many 3D networks are out there that can adequately present your work as well as Teapotters does. I’m anxious to see how well they do once they’re out of private beta.

Google Launches Pay-Per-Action; a Threat to Affiliate Networks?

2007-03-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

If you’re reading this post, then you can expect a flurry of news covering Google’s beta launch of its Pay-Per-Action (PPA) product for AdWords. Yep, after years of hinting, Google is finally ready to let us test their platform on a CPA (cost per action) model. (If this sounds familiar, reports surfaced back in June, that Google was offering a limited test of CPA)
The beta test is restricted to AdSense for content in the U.S., will run separate from the regular auction model, and you may not even get a chance to test it for a few weeks, while they roll it out. That being said, this is a significant expansion of the CPC (cost per click) model, with advertisers being given the option of paying when a customer buys a product, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other actionable task on the advertiser’s web site.
On the publishing side, AdSense publishers will be able to opt-in to display PPA ads from Google and even whether they wish to display a single ad, a cluster of ads or match to a specific keyword that is relevant to their page content. Publishers also get to preview the ads, including company name, logo etc, before the ads go live.
As the broker between the advertiser and the publisher, Google will take its cut of any incentive offered. For example, if the advertiser offers $2 per sign-up, the publisher may see only $1.50 offered for the same sign-up. Google will pass on to publishers the net-incentive only.
Publishers also get a new “text link ad” format (I wonder what Patrick Gavin will have to say about that), which allows them to display JavaScript ads that appear as a single text link. Publishers will be able to search for text link ads that match their chosen text string. Perfect for bloggers looking to monetize their site, but would prefer to add embedded text links, rather than whole blocks of ads.
Now, here’s where my post title comes in to play.
A platform that allows advertisers to offer a reward based upon a sale or sign-up?
A platform that allows publishers to select text, flash or images when displaying advertisers incentives?
What does that sound like to you?
To me, it sounds like a clear threat to the likes of Commission Junction or LinkShare – or any other affiliate marketing network. Google, for all intents and purposes, has just entered the affiliate marketing arena, with the battle cry that they can do affiliate marketing better than the affiliate networks can.
Now, I feel obliged to inform you that when I posed this suggestion to Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google’s advertising products, he was very quick to deny any intention to compete in the affiliate network space. “We think this is different from the traditional affiliate marketing industry”, said Kniaz. “[It’s an] extension of the current AdWords product”. Oh really? Kind of like how Google doesn’t see itself competing with Microsoft’s office suite.
When I pushed Kniaz to explain why Google is so keen to distance itself from any associations with affiliate networks, his response was that the new PPA platform offered “more automation, more options, more control” than affiliate networks.
Sounds like fighting words to me!
UPDATE: You can view more details of PPA here.

Web 2.0 - Over and Out

2007-03-20T00:27:00.000-07:00

Many of us in the VC community have been quietly wondering about the state of Web 2.0 innovation. We aren’t seeing much. Startup activity remains strong, but the consumer web landscape seems to be populated with the same bodies with different skins. Another video deal here; another social networking deal there, and social [feature] everywhere. k'l
The apogee of this Web 2.0 hit me on Friday when I was having lunch with my daughter in San Francisco. There was a conversation at the table next to us between a 30-something and a 50-something, The younger was explaining to the elder that they had web site with the following attributes

Users can share any kind of information from files to photos Storage isn’t expensive, so we don’t police it today, yet Users can invite their friends; that’s how we get new users We launched a few months ago and are doubling every month We haven’t quite figured out our revenue model, but we think it is freemium (“Let me explain what that means…”) Of course, this is the generic Web 2.0 company template. Overhearing the dialog felt like the 2007 version of Joe Kennedy getting stock tips from his shoe shine boy. Web 2.0 is in the water, drink up.

We now know the fourth quarter of 2006 witnessed the mainstreaming of Web 2.0. It began with the YouTube acquisition, followed by a rather incumbent-centered Web 2.0 conference, culminating with the coronation of user-generated media as Time’s Person of the Year.
The notion of Web 2.0 as a wave is now rather long in the tooth, as cycles go. I believe Tim O'Reilly and John Battalle first coined the term in early 2004.
I thought one way to check the energy dissipation around “Web 2.0” would be to look at Web 2.0-centric media. Three properties that one can reasonably say are pure plays in the Web 2.0 mainstream are Techcrunch, Gigaom, and Technorati.

Say what you will about Alexa ratings’ accuracy, all three of these properties show a similar falloff in Reach from their Q4 peaks, all notably right around the Web 2.0 Conference.

I am not suggesting that Web 2.0 services are losing steam. On the contrary, the concepts are quite main stream. Take the poster child for user-generated participatory content - Wikipedia (below). It's a monster.

Much of the "easy" innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave. Web 2.0 was cheap - thanks to open source, simple - thanks to RSS/REST, and distinctive - thanks to AJAX and Flash. It helped more than a little the Google has continued to entice us all with the abundant profits in Internet advertising.

Now the hard work begins, again. The next wave of innovation isn't going to be as easy. The hard problems in the WWW are no longer usability or ease of everyday content creation. These problems are solved. Digital cameras, SixApart, WordPress, and digital video cameras showed us how ease it could be. Now the hard part is moving from Web-as-Digital-Printing-Press to true Web-as-Platform. To make the Web a platform there has to a level of of content and services interoperability that really doesn't exist today.

The Web today still resembles MS-DOS more than MS-Windows. Every website is an island, an island that knows nothing about any other website. This is no different than the world before the Windows Clipboard. All 640KB of memory was available to whatever application was running. The point of integration was the User. As it is today. Ask anyone who uses a SaaS application.

I am not alone in observing where the world is going. The hard problems in the vision of a true web-as-platform involve all the usual hard computer science issues. How can we normalize information from disparate sources to make it interoperable? How do we get to a lingua franca without waiting for moribund standards (think CORBA and SOA)? How can we then manage the transition of legacy information and services into this world of interoperability?
VCs have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future. Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible. Web 2.0 is now firmly in the category of What Is.
The only thing I can say in defense of "Web 2.0" is that it's not "Venture Capital" (from Google Trends).

MySpace launches politics channel

2007-03-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

MySpace, the largest Internet social network, said on Sunday it has launched a politics channel ahead of the 2008 U.S. presidential elections.
The News Corp.-owned site’s politics site, called the Impact Channel, will feature links to the profiles of 10 presidential candidates — five Democrats and five Republicans.
MySpace attracted some 60 million U.S. users in December, according to comScore MediaMetrix, and about 90 million globally.
Over the past few months, candidates have vowed to use the power of the Internet to communicate directly with voters. Internet and technology-savvy young potential voters, like MySpace’s audience of teens and young adults, have been notoriously hard to reach.
Democratic hopefuls Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, former Sen. John Edwards, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson have all used the Web to announce their plans.
“Our digital candidates banner will be the yard signs of the 21st Century and our political viral videos and vlogs (video blogs) are the campaign ads of the futures,” Chris DeWolfe, MySpace chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Digg’s importance

2007-03-16T20:35:00.000-07:00

Digg revolutionized social news when it launched in 2004. Since then, it has become the undisputed champ of news link ranking sites. They just recently crossed the million mark. And their influence goes far beyond those user registration numbers.
Tangible evidence of Digg’s importance: the raw number of clones and Digg gaming schemes out there. We’ve seen rigging, vote buying, profile sales, and accusations of thug rule . The dozens of clones include a not-bad SourceForge project called Pligg , which lets users “build their own Digg”.
But Digg’s ubiquity and influence doesn’t mean it’s perfect. A number of startups are tackling the same problem as Digg - sharing of good content via link submission and some form of voting. One of them, stumbleupon, actually has more registered users than Digg. For the most part, though, these sites won’t be able to do much damage to Digg’s steady growth. But many of them are worth looking at, and they all have individual features that could, if incorporated into Digg, make it a better overall service.

*Personalized refers to recommendations uniquely tailored for each user

BlinkList takes a distributed approach to the Digg model. It lets anyone get their own link blog where they can add their favorites. BlinkList then looks across the whole network and ranks the site based on how many other users added the link.

ClipMarks, Instead of full URLs, Clipmarks lets users share just the best parts of webpages. Using their plugin, you can bundle together your favorite selections of content from a webpage. This includes text as well as pictures and video. Submissions are then “popped” by other members of the community, with the most popular at the top. Using the plugin, you can also submit your clips to your blog. Currently, the site’s two pane page layout gives me the feeling of looking at the net through a steamship porthole.

CoRank confronts the mob mentality on Digg. Digg promotes stories to the front page based on the votes of the whole community, resulting in a lot of noise for users with interests different from the crowd. CoRank lets you look at all submitted links or filter out the noise by subscribing links from just the users you choose. Only the highest rated stories from your subscribed sources make your front page.

Netscape has also taken on Digg’s mob mentality, mixing in their own team of anchors to submit stories and cut out spam. The anchor’s stories are featured on the front page along with the current top 25 stories. They also got into a little hot water with their recruitment practices. Netscape has managed a greater variety of content in it’s front page, pulling 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels.

Instead of a submission free-for-all, Newsvine implemented it’s own form of quality control by only allowing users to vote on content from the Associated Press and other user’s personal articles. Users are given a live feed of all the latest AP stories, voting on articles and writing their own on their personal column page. Newsvine shares 90% of all revenue generated by advertisements on your column page with the user. Users can also personalize their feed
OpenServingOpenServing is a product of Wikia, and the opensource version of BlinkList works for fun or profit. The concept is the same, a personal page of links, democratically ranked by your friends, but it also lets you post your own ads on the site.

Reddit made headlines when Conde Nast acquired them. The site is a favorite of mine and is still up and running, with some key differences from Digg. Reddit rankings are based on an absolute vote (+1 for hot, -1 for cold), meaning a story can dance up and down Reddit’s top page instead of being buried out of existence by a few power users. To see what’s on top now, there’s also a “hot” list. This type of voting system also means the front page can be stagnant, to the chagrin of some users , but it has also avoided Digg’s payola scandals. Another bigger differentiator for Reddit is their recommended article page, which suggests links based on your voting pattern.

Spotback Spotback is an automated alternative to Digg, that aims to use personalization to improve the signal to noise ratio of the stories you see. You train Spotback by clicking and voting on the stories it digs up. Voting positively on a story causes Spotback to reveal the next most relevant story. One of the best parts about Spotback is that it doesn’t even require a registration to get up and running.

Spotplex is another automated link site that automatically submits stories from blogs carrying its badge. Stories are then ranked on the Spotplex homepage based in part on how many views the article generates (the algorithm is still being tweaked). The site’s automation and closely controlled blogroll seems has avoided the types of rigging Digg was subjected to, but it lacks the community of commentors that make these social media sites addictive.

StumbleUpon provides a different user experience while discovering and digging up links. You use a tooblar (FF & IE) to tag, submit, and vote for links. While the site does rank links the main experience is by taking a random walk around the internet. It keys in on Diggs greatest strength, an easily accessible constant stream of interesting links. StumbleUpon is definitely catching on, they recently surpassed 2 million users .

Social network traffic up 11.5 percent; MySpace still dominates

2007-03-16T08:18:00.000-07:00

According to Hitwise, the US market share of Internet traffic to the top 20 social networking sites grew by 11.5 percent from January to February 2007, to account for 6.5 percent of all Internet traffic in February 2007. Perhaps unsurprisingly, MySpace is still the heavyweight in a market made up of featherweights, with an 80% share. Facebook is MySpace's closest challenger with 10% of the market.

Market Share of US Internet Visits to Top 20 Social Networking Sites

Source: Hitwise
Whilst it's hard to envisage anybody stealing MySpace's crown, Friendster, which pre-MySpace was dominant, now has a measly 0.34% share — reminding us that MySpace's pole position is their's to lose.
The fastest movers and shakers were both social networking sites that specialize in building communities around music and other media — Buzznet (up 148.4%) and iMeem (up 145.7%). Other fast growing sites include Hoverspot (up 19.6%) and Bebo (up 17.8%), which both compete more directly with MySpace.

Social Media Network

7 Reasons Why You Should Start with Affiliate Program

Is Your Website Blacklisted?

Email Etiquette – More Than Just Manners

Is global warming a real concern, or just a popular fad?

If you could have 1 superpower, what would it be?

22 Resources to Easily Create CSS Layouts � Website Design, CSS and Search Engine Marketing

25 Headline Formulas That Have Blessed Web 2.0

Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Centered Designs

Left-aligned Designs

Vibrant and Dark Designs

A Little Bit More Noisy, but Still Simple and Clean Designs

Worth Mentioning

How the Porn Industry is Utilizing Social Media Network

Shrek 4 and Shrek 5 Announced

P2P: Introduction and Real World Applications

GospelTube, the YouTube for Christians

CYBER DATING GUIDE

top ten reasons why myspace is better than facebook

When Social Web Tools Get Creative

Teapotters: The 3rd Dimension of Social Media Networks

Google Launches Pay-Per-Action; a Threat to Affiliate Networks?

Web 2.0 - Over and Out

MySpace launches politics channel

Digg’s importance

Social network traffic up 11.5 percent; MySpace still dominates