Posts filed under 'Main'
Every year around the Superbowl or NCAA final four we always see those articles about how the event will cost companies billions of dollars of productivity. The general theory is that people will spend all this time putting together squares, making party plans, and just talking about the game around the water cooler.
Of course, all of these studies fail to realize that if employees weren’t talking about the game, they’d be talking about something else. I don’t know anybody who goes into work and spends their entire time there being productive. Everybody makes a little bit of friendly conversation.
I was shocked though, when I didn’t see a similar article for the latest Harry Potter book. Articles like these are a surefire way to get mainstream press – almost as good as the annual “AAA says traffic will increase over the 4th of July” article.
But then I realized the true effect of the Harry Potter book – it’s over 700 pages and people WILL read it. So while reading won’t affect people’s time spent at work, it will affect what they do with their free time.
A recent thread at Search Engine Roundtable suggests that webmasters are seeing traffic decreases since the book was released.
I can attest. I not only spent most of Saturday and all day Sunday finishing the book, but I saw adsense revenues on one of my teen-frequented websites drop from $100/day the weekend prior to about $30/day this past weekend. My traffic dropped by about 15% too!
Looking at some of my client adwords accounts, their clicks are down too as compared to last weekend.
It appears that while we all read the latest Potter adventures, we’re sacrificing reading other stuff online. It only makes sense.
Will this cost billions? Probably not. If anything the book will make us all unplug for a while, before hurriedly logging back on to discuss the ending. I’ll give you guys a few weeks to finish reading before I offer my take of the entire epic.
July 23rd, 2007
One of the reasons I chose Lulu for my book instead of an actual publisher is the shopping process. After you write a book you can spend months submitting it to publishers and waiting to hear from them. I soon learned that most publishers were only interested in talking to you if you a.) had previously published work, or b.) had an agent.
I couldn’t help but chuckle today when I read this article. It’s such a great summary of the problems the current publishing industry faces.
Basically, some young author changed the names and titles of a Jane Austen book and submitted it to 18 publishers. Only 1 caught the plagiarism – the rest flat out rejected the book!!
That’s exactly what I found. Publishers aren’t interested in quality of writing anymore, they’re interested in sales volume. While it sounds like a good short term strategy, it’s going to lead to problems down the road. As more and more new authors are rejected, they’re going to turn to on demand services like Lulu or CafePress.
I was able to not only hit my target release date, but earn an average of $0.75 more per book sold and not have to deal with an agent by self publishing my book. I expect to see these services thrive as time goes on – not just in attracting publishers, but in long tail type sales as well.
Thoughts?
July 19th, 2007
I made an amateur web designer mistake today, but luckily Google’s cache was there to bail me out. Somebody alerted me to a spelling error on one of my smaller sites, so I opened it up in my editor to fix it. Some of you know where this is going.
When I opened it up, I opened it live… on the server. When I clicked save, the editor crashed. Bye bye went the page of my website. It just so happens that this was the homepage.
Luckily, I designed the site so that actual content was all in include files – separate from the PHP logic. Heading over to Google I managed to do a search for “cache:www.example.com” and view source to get all my content back.
If it weren’t for Google, I’d have had to wait a few hours until I could get my hands on a backup version of the website’s code.
Thanks Google.
July 18th, 2007
I recently had to install firefox on a new computer, and I realized I didn’t have a convenient list of the plugins I use on a daily basis. Since I figured others might benefit from this information I’m making it a blog post instead of just a note to myself.
Here’s my essential firefox extensions:
Some noteably cool ones:
CustomizeGoogle is one that every SEO should have. It not only numbers my search results, but lets me quickly take my searches from Google to Yahoo to MSN with just one click.
Google Global is another SEO must – especially if you have Canadian clients like we at brandlabs do.
Screen Grab is cool too. It lets me save a picture of the webpage I’m visiting without having to do that printscreen + paint stuff.
Web Developer is perhaps the most useful though. There’s no way I’d be able to function without it. I’ve become totally dependent.
It’d be neat if you could package and distribute a version of firefox with a bunch of extensions already selected, settings checked, etc. That way you could have the SEO version, the web developer version, and the my parents version. I think that would greatly expand the firefox market share.
What do you think? What are your can’t live without extensions?
July 17th, 2007
I have to agree with Mike Arrington. The wall street journal is pretty off on their write up of blogging history. They just published an article saying happy 10th birthday to blogging. While the word may be only 10 years old, the concept isn’t.
I myself started blogging in 1998… only we didn’t call it a blog or a journal. We called it a website. Back then though, there were no fancy files like wordpress. You needed to know how to get hosting, and write your own perl (later PHP) scripts. Of course, I didn’t invent blogging either.. I saw others doing it before me and said “hey cool.. me too.” That makes me think “blogging” is a bit older than the WSJ says it is.
Even in dotCULT’s heyday of 2000 we didn’t call it blogging. Maybe they’re talking about the popularity of the word blogging… if so, then it’s not even 10 yet.
Also, I’m tired of hearing the phrase iPhone Application. There’s just no such thing. What you’re really talking about is a website. Sure it may use iPhone style graphics and look really good at 320X240, but it’s still a web page… not an iPhone application. Speaking of which, I DO have 2 iPhone formatted websites: NoSlang.mobi and RPSgame.mobi. They’re not applications, and they’re not just for iPhones. You can use your Nokia too if you want. Let’s stop calling things by stupid names and call them what they are.
July 16th, 2007
Can having your server go down harm your rankings? It appears so!
When apache and cpanel on my txt2day server tried to update itself automatically, something went wrong that required a server reboot. Unfortunately, I was out of town and couldn’t do it until 4 days later.
It looks like Googlebot came through while it was down though – that’s when problems occurred.
Doing a query for just the word txt2day shows a totally different site at the #1 spot. I’m not sure why, maybe somebody can explain.
Doing a site:txt2day.com shows a couple sub pages, but not the home page.
I’m usually willing to give things like this time, but it’s been almost 8 days now… and googlebot hasn’t reindexed.
I’ve re-submitted the URL to google, changed text on the homepage so that googlebot will see it’s changed, filed a reinclusion request for the homepage, and linked to it from several sites (including this one)
I’m not sure what else to do. The site used to be in the top 3 of google for any text message related term. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if and when the rankings return.
To compare, Yahoo picked up that the site was back about 2 days later. MSN has re-listed the site, but with the wrong title and no rankings now.
July 13th, 2007
If anybody works at BellSouth..oh nevermind you’re probably not reading this.
Nobody with BellSouth DSL can access any of my websites that have jonesy.biz as their DNS servers.
I’m not quite sure why… It’s had this DNS server for over 3 months now… long enough for you to update your listings.
Why is that? It’s not only affecting dotcult.com but noslang.com and feedbutton.com as well.
If somebody could give me some answers I’d be very grateful.
I doubt there’s an issue with my DNS settings, because I’m posting this right now..
So what gives? Throw me a bone here.
July 12th, 2007
Some of you may remember that I was at one time an editor on shoutwire. Shoutwire is a Digg style site, but with a little more moderation to prevent spam. It also offers editorials.
One of the editorials I wrote for them the first time is still in their top 5 most popular. It’s called My Daughter’s a Tramp, Isn’t it Cute. You may remember it.
I left Shoutwire shortly after that when one of the people in charge started making unreasonable demands from us unpaid editors. He treated us like outsourced labor – and poorly.
Anyway, Shoutwire was recently purchased by Tubearoo (stock symbol: TUBR) and after seeing that a 400 day article was still in their top 5, they invited me back.
I’m not sure how long I’ll remain there or what, but my plan is to try to post 1 new editorial every week.
Here’s my first one.:
Paris Hilton… Is all it takes to make you read this.
Check it out.
July 12th, 2007
Wow! I went up north from Wednesday through Sunday and my phone spent more time in other people’s hands than my own. I couldn’t go anywhere without a bunch of 16-25 year olds running up to me and asking to play with my phone.
It’s not like I was showing it off though…. there was no need to. My own cousin didn’t notice I had one until 2 days had passed, but that didn’t stop everybody else from noticing every time I was on the beach and took a phone call or checked an email.
I was curious as to why there were so many articles about it, but now I see why. People really do like it, and it IS that cool. I guess the newness just wore off on me.
The worst part is that the edge service didn’t work at the beach, so I couldn’t show off what I think is the coolest part of the phone.
Anyway, I did manage to take a bunch of pictures with the camera. I’m loving the fact that I can just touch a couple buttons and boom they’re on flickr. You can see them at my flickr account if you want.
Anyway, I’m still digging through hundreds of emails (443 to be exact) that I received during the 2 days I took off.
I’ve got some new projects in the works too… (or possibly quite old, you’ll see.) I’ll talk more about that in a few days when I have time.
July 9th, 2007
If email was the first killer app of the web, and social networking is the current one, then the iPhone web browser is going to be the killer app that revolutionizes the phone industry.
Never before have I seen so many articles about people making their websites or applications work on the iPhone. There are games made strictly for the iPhone, AIM clients made for the iPhone, and scaled down versions of Digg, Google Reader, Twitter, Flickr, and any other popular site you choose.
If anything is going to kick off the .mobi revolution than this is it! I think the iPhone is going to cause developers to start thinking about mobile phones when they develop their pages – and it’s about time. It’s where the web is going.
I know it contradicts the Berners-Lee description of the Internet. It DOES destroy an essential property of the web. I also think it’s it’s time for the web to evolve. I don’t think the phone browsers will ever be 100% the same as computer browsers. They shouldn’t be – they’re a different experience.
Anyway, in keeping with the trend I’ve put up an iPhone version of my Internet slang translator. You can check it out at NoSlang.mobi. It’s a totally scaled down version, but it’s still got all the power of the full one. Go ahead and bookmark it if you like.
Update: When I was testing stuff for the iPhone I started by fooling around with a basic rock paper scissor game. It’s very easy to code, and something fun to do. Anyway, a friend said I should release it as an iPhone app too, so I present to you: RPSgame.mobi – rock paper scissors for the iPhone.
If there’s any interest in a dotCULT version let me know and I’ll make one. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you can start coding up a WordPress plugin to make a .mobi compatible website out of your current blog. I’m sure it’d get heavy use and press.
July 3rd, 2007
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