BlogDoofus

I just read a Slashdot Item about the next generation in ‘Capcha’ technology. These bright young researchers have come up with a two step captcha system that in the first step, shows you a graphic with several overlapping images and asks you to figure out the geometric center of one and click on it. The second step shows you a picture and asks you to choose one word from a list to annotate it. If you want, you can try a demo of the new captcha..

I tried it and while it’s not that hard to deal with, I have a problem with captchas in the first place. I understand that there’s a need to verify that somebody is a human and not a robot, but visual captchas are often very difficult to read. Entirely too many of them use super light, faded misshapen letters on a light pastel / off-white background. Talk about a recipe for eyestrain!

If I have to have a captcha, and I do in the comments of several blogs, I prefer the kind that doesn’t require eyestrain in order to read them. Hopefully the anti-comment-spam plugin that I use for WordPress, Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, will continue to use the non-eyestrain images that it has so far.

There’s been a lot of buzz and flap lately about WordPress 2.5 and after a lot of misgivings, I decided to bite the bullet and give it a try. I upgraded this blog to 2.5 just a few minutes ago and I’ve got a few raw impressions to start out with.

1) There are things like the Media Library which has a lot of potential for people that use a lot of pictures, music or video in their blogs.

2) A lot of the controls, most in fact, have been either changed, or just plain moved. I’m one of those ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ kind of people and I really like unnecessary changes.

3) This brings me to the Admin panel or Dashboard as many like to call it.

I hate it.

Not only have things been moved around and some have even been renamed for no good reason that I can think of but they also had to go and “Wigetize” the thing. Widgets wouldn’t be all that bad if it was at least possible to add new widgets to the dashboard.

Up to version 2.2, there was incoming links displayed from both Technorati and Google. In 2.3 they took out the Technorati inbounds. I didn’t care for that so I figured out how to put the Techorati Inbound links back on the dashboard and then posted how to do it on my main blog. I know I wasn’t alone in this opinion because that how to post got a LOT of traffic over the next few months.

I also don’t like it’s color scheme at all. The fact that you can go to the users panel and select between two color schemes just doesn’t do it for me. Yeah, it lets you change to the same classic WordPress colors, but the layout is still wrong and THAT’s what I’d like to be able to change in addition to the colors.

So now I’m going to leave this blog at 2.5 for now and it’s not going anywhere near any of my other blogs until I have the ability to make this thing behave the way I want it to.

Technorati Tags: wordpress, wordpress+upgrade, wordpress+2.5, review, colors, layout, admin+panel, dashboard

I recently ran across something that claimed to be a list of one hundred Adsense tips. The problem with it is that the author was very obviously trying to stretch the daylights out of what they were writing so that they could technically come up with one hundred entries for it.

For example, the first several entries were definitions of terms like CTR (Click through rate), Impression count, CPC (Cost per click) and advice to spend time reading the AdSense Program Policies and the Terms and Conditions.

This is all valid, even useful, information but it hardly qualifies as “Adsense Tips”.

If you’re going to write a “tips” post, then cut to the chase and actually write genuine tips, something that can actually help the reader who does what you advise. Frankly, I would much rather have a list of 23 really useful tips than to have a list of 100 things, most of which are there only to increase the number of entries.

Technorati Tags: adsense, tips, adsense+tips, top+100+lists, tips+posts, useful+informaiton, writing+technique

One of the newest sources of traffic out there is Entrecard. The way it works is that you sign up and add a widget to your blog. Then, while logged in to Entrecard, anytime you visit a blog that has the Entrecard widget, you “drop” your card on their widget.

Each time you do this earns you a credit. You also earn credits every time somebody drops their card on your widget. The third way to earn credits is by selling advertising space in your widget for other people’s sites. The price (in Entre Credits) is calculated based on the number of drops on your card by other people so the more people dropping on your card, the more credits you can earn for advertising.

I signed up for this with Tinfoil Chef (my relatively new cooking blog) and in just the first two days the traffic has gone from an average of 40 to 60 page views a day as of a couple days ago to 188 page loads as of 10:45pm on 3/10/08.

Granted, it does take a bit of time visiting other sites to drop your card, but there’s an answer for that too. At OBlife.com you’ll find an “Entrecard Blogs Browser“. It’s a handy tool that allows you to quickly drop your card on the widgets of lots of other Entrecard users quickly. I’ve seen reports that it’s possible to drop a hundred or more cards an hour. I personally have been able to do about 60 or so without a problem (I keep stopping to read interesting items instead of bookmark them for later)

It’s new and as yet there’s no telling where it’ll go but for now it’s certainly a good traffic machine. Yes, it means spending some time dropping cards but there is also a growing market of Entre Credits for sale

Technorati Tags: advertising,, blog,, blogs,, browse,, browser,, build, traffic,, building, traffic,, entre, card,, entrecard,, generate, traffic,, making, money,, monetizing, blogs,, promotion,, traffic,, traffic, tools,, widget

If I were to put a one word subtitle on this it would be TANSTAAFL (There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) or perhaps It’d be a good idea to quote P.T. Barnum’s famous line about the birth rate of suckers.

I’m talking about a plan that’s been talked about on GMA and other places in the last few days. I find myself in total agreement with “401k Debit Cards? What Will They Think Of Next?” in that this entire concept is a dangerous one

So, what is the 401K debit card is all about? Say you’ve been doing ok for a while and you’ve built up a decent sum in your 401K retirement plan. Then along comes some kind of financial trouble and you’re strapped for cash. There is a company that’s making it possible to get a debit card that allows you to spend money out of your retirement fund.

Essentially you’re borrowing money from yourself, which you have to pay back or it’ll hurt your retirement plans. The lenders and such all make money on the deal because they’re charging processing fees both ways. Lenders are going to really love this idea because it allows them to lend you your own money which means that they assume zero risk.

The big problem comes when you start counting the costs involved. If you borrow against your retirement plan, then more than likely while you’re paying it back you are not contributing nearly what you could be (if anything) to your retirement fund. This card also makes it entirely too easy to use up your retirement funds because it’s just a debit card and it’s too easy to overuse it and find yourself without any retirement funds at all.

Then there’s a real kicker… this whole thing is built on the premise that you’re going to be in the same job the whole time. If you lose your job for whatever reason (or just change jobs depending on the details of your 401K plan), then all of the money that you’ve pulled out of the 401K plan becomes due in full right then and there.

There are times when something like this can be considered a good way to do something, but only if it’s an absolute emergency and you do it in a single lump sum to cover some unexpected catastrophic debt situation. The thing to remember here is that you’re borrowing your own financial future and you need to set the bar VERY high. This sort of thing should be absolutely a last ditch effort.

One of the most, if not the most, important things about monetizing a blog is generating lots of traffic. If you don’t have the traffic then you’ll never get the clicks on any of whatever kind of advertising systems that you use.

I’ve already covered a little bit about how to generate traffic and because of it’s importance I’m going to devote a series of entries to the topic of generating traffic… especially generating enough traffic so that the small percentage of people who click on your advertising links will be a large enough number to represent a significant income.

so far, I’ve talked a little bit about Techorati and Stumbleupon and made a brief mention of MyBlogLog. I think perhaps that the post about stumbleupon was a reasonable introduction to it, however The others are going to need to be expanded on.

Then there are actually a LOT of “social Bookmarking” sites, each of which can be a significant source of traffic if you use them right. They’ve each got their own rules and their own audience of people that use them and follow stories posted there. Part of knowing how to use them is knowing which one’s not to use for a given type of entry.

For example a blog entry about something that was related to computers / internet or possibly even security might be a candidate for posting on slashdot but on the other hand an article about growing a particular variety of rose would fall flat.

So, over the coming days / weeks / whatever, I’m going to be talking about the ones of these that I personally have used and then I’m going to explore the others, looking at them from the point of view of a new user (which is what I’ll be in most cases)

I’m expecting to learn a bunch about finding ways to drive traffic to a blog.,

One of the basic things about monetizing a blog (or any website) is the fact that no matter how good your SEO is or how great your content is, if you don’t get traffic to the site nobody is ever going to see it. And of course, if nobody sees the site, then nobody will be there to click on your advertising and thus the whole venture will be doomed to failure.

So, once you have a site and some content on it, even if it’s not optimized or 100% the way you want it, you need people coming to the site. One of the biggest tools for generating traffic these days is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a different type of social networking site. Once you install their toolbar on Firefox, you can use the “Stumble” button to be served random pages within the categories that you choose when you set up your account.

You can also use the “I Like It” button to add new pages to StumbleUpon. If you hit the “I Like It” button and you don’t get the add a site dialog then that means it’s already been added to the system and you’re giving it a thumbs up .. a positive rating. The more people that do this for a particular page, the more likely that page will be shown to people that are doing random Stumbles.

This means that StumbleUpon can be a great way to introduce your content to lots of people and if its actually something they like, they’ll give it a thumbs up and increase the potential traffic you will get from StumbleUpon.

The key here comes back to a basic rule of any website promotion campaign. Content is king. If what you write (or the pictures / video that you post) is something that people will like, find useful or funny. You could even create a game in flash or javascript. As long as your content is created for the visitors to either serve some need or entertain, you will get some visitors that like the site which means there’s a shot that they’ll bookmark it and return. There’s also a shot that they’ll share the site with others.

Good content + StumbleUpon = traffic + return visitors + advertising clickthroughs

… and I know that’s not good for a blog, especially a new one that’s totally starved for traffic. So now its time to start doing something about bringing traffic here. One of the many things that you can do is to join online communities such as MyBlogLog. It’s another point of exposure and thus another place where traffic can come from. I started this process a while back but then I got distracted because of a bunch of stuff going on IRL and I’m only now getting to the part where I post the verification code so that MBL will accept that I actually own this blog.

So here it is:

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Now the widget in the sidebar should start working.

Well, Super Tuesday is over and I suppose sometime in the next few days all of the news media people and the political experts will get everything figured out as to who won what and who is going to continue their bid for the presidency and who’s going to end up dropping out.

On the democrat side it’s going to be a fight between clinton and obama all the way to the convention. The republican side is still anyone’s guess. Far as I know, nobody’s considering pulling out if they don’t do well, so that means they too will go all the way to the convention.

I’m certainly hoping that either Huckabee or McCain wins it for the republican side because the democrats aren’t going to have an acceptable candidate this year at all and romney…. he’s no better in my opinion.

It’s once again time for the super bowl as super bowl XXLII (that’s 42 for those of us that don’t read roman numbers!) and everybody’s getting ready for what is expected to be a really good game.

On the one side, you’ve got Eli Manning and the Giants. They’ve not had a shot at a super bowl kickoff in better than seven years. This means that they’re hungry for it and they’re going in knowing that they’ve got something to prove.. something that I guess from tv interviews that I’ve seen recently that they’re pretty much used to.

On the other side of the field is Tom Brady and the Patriots. They’re three time super bowl champions and so far this year they’ve had a perfect season with a record of 18 wins and 0 losses. winning this year’s super bowl will put them at 19 and 0 which if I’m not mistaken will be something of a record breaker in and of itself. It’ll beat the 16 and 0 record that the Miami Dolphins had back in the seventies and might even be the first 19 - 0 season by a pro football team. Of course, I haven’t actually looked that up yet so I don’t really know, I’m just saying what I think and could easily be wrong.

I have looked up a few things though, such as the details for the super bowl start time, an all important factor if you’ve got any ideas of watching the game. It’s scheduled to start at 6pm Eastern Time on the Fox network. The game will be played at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona so the weather ought to be pretty good.

In any event, regardless of who wins (Go PATS!) it ought to be a really good game if only because both teams have got lots of reason to want that victory.