B6S.net

It’s time for the loosely termed “weekly web news roundup” here. I love my Google Reader but there’s just so many sources I’ve subscribed to, that I can’t realistically as much as skim over more than 2-3 days worth of headlines.

Speaking of which, Google Reader now lets you subscribe to pages that don’t have RSS feeds. Just enter any URL and it will keep track of the page for you and report any changes. Pretty cool, I think.

Online Advertising News

WebmastersWorld is undoubtedly a great resource and arguably the best webmasters board around. It’s often too busy, so I like to keep track of it by following the seroundtable.com site. This week they review an interesting thread about the things that bother Google Adsense Publishers. Well worth a read.

Still on Google advertising, browsing from your phone, you can actually click on a Google ad and it will connect you to the advertiser via the phone. It’s an interesting twist that could potentially effect affiliate marketing because, once on the phone, referring sites have no way of tracking sales. You can read more about this new feature here:  Google Introduces Click-To-Call Numbers In Ads.

The iPad. Sigh.

Sigh – because it’s was ALL OVER the RSS feeds this week. iPad this and iPad that. Everybody seems to have something to say about iPad, don’t they? Well, I think Hitler summed it up best in The Meme That Will Never Die: Hitler Debunks The iPad.

And on a Lighter Note

I just LOVED this one:

Travel Site Kayak Sells Seats On Lost’s Oceanic Flight 815

Search Kayak for flights from Sydney’s SYD airport to Los Angeles’s LAX and you’ll see that Oceanic Flight 815 — the very one that crashed on the mysterious island in the first episode of Lost — is one of your options.

What a brilliant publicity stunt for Lost. I tried finding the flight myself on Kayak but failed. If you can find it, let me know.

I just went over my files and I have way over one hundred domain names I need to develop (that’s on top of a similar number of developed sites).

It’s daunting. And it’s not lack of ideas that bothers me, just the sheer volume of work that has to be put into these babies before they start making money.

I actually think I’ve overcome my domain shopping addiction (well, except for the odd slip here and there), but I still can’t let go of domains that easily. I think that makes me a domain collector? or shall I say, a domain hoarder?

Why do I keep renewing these domains for years on end? Here are four reasons for domain hoarding:

1. I have such great plans for them! Surely, I’m going to find the time someday, right?
2. Domain names are like wine – they get better as they age. And I have some that are pretty well aged by now – why let go of them now?
3. Selling domains? too complicated. Finding good buyers that will pay more than $100 a piece for these will take a lot of work. And honestly, I wouldn’t even bother dealing with the sale for anything under $100.
4. There are only so many good domain names. Or even semi-good ones. As the Internet grows, these little pieces of virtual real estate will probably be worth more. Hey, it’s an investment, right?

See? I got me plenty of excuses. Err, I meant, reasons, of course. And besides, I am sure these domain names are very happy to be with me too.

What about you? How many domain names do you have and how many are actually developed?

I’ve never actually tried to add a file for people to download on any of my Wordpress blogs. Until today, that is. I guess there’s always a first time? I had a cat-themed template designed and I wanted to share it with site visitors.

Now, with HTML, it’s fairly simple. I have done that before. All it takes is linking to the .zip file and voila. But when I tried that on a Wordpress page all that happened was an annoying 404 message.

Turns out, you can’t just allow people to download from anywhere on your Wordpress installation. It’s not a matter of uploading the file anywhere on your domain names and linking to it.

Instead, you have to upload the file via Wordpress, which will then make it available for download. The way to do that is using your “Add Media” button here:

I confess, with buttons there to add pictures, movies and audio files, I never quite understood what the “add media” was for. Now I know.  It allows you to upload files to your upload directories and create a working download link for your visitors.

Gotta love Wordpress – always a new trick up its digital sleeve!

Oh, and if you’re looking for a cat theme – you can find that one right here:

Wordpress Cat Themes

Just when you think we’ve seen it all, a new social media application comes along and wham! it rocks the Internet, getting its founders into the digital Hall of Fame. When it seems the online arena is densely populated with huge corporations, is it still possible for you to come up with the next big thing on the Internet? Can your idea be the one that rocks the Internet?

There are so many factors at play, but I really enjoyed Robert Scoble’s recent post highlighting an interesting aspect of successful social media applications: addictiveness:

The social behavior incentive (how your app can be as addictive as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare)

The basic idea is, make your application into a competitive game. Let your users work their way towards titles, figured and new records. Scoble provides some excellent detailed tips on how to achieve just that and do read the comments there as well – there some gems that complement the original post and inject more insights into building a great social media application/website.

I can think about many websites that implement this line of thought. Take Squidoo and Hub Pages, with their scoring systems; Social bookmarking sites with their voting system; Forums with the popular hacks for points, karma, or simply the user title ladder.

The rewards system works. We enjoy building our virtual social media profiles as if they were our character in WOW.  Keep it in mind if you want to get into the social media game and be “the next big thing”.

I’ve seen so many webmasters obsess over keyword density. My latest encounter with this practice was while submitting an article to ezinearticles.

My naturally written articles kept getting rejected by their site because of “keyword density” issues. They measured word ratio and key phrase ratio and ignored synonyms. To adhere to their demands, I opened up a thesaurus and started using synonyms. Only did it for one article, then I simply gave up on submissions.

See, I believe in naturally flowing text. I don’t want to be counting words when writing. I want the search engines to gradually evolve until they can read texts as a human being does, rather than changing my writing to fit into what some people think the algorithm’s variables are.

That’s why posts like the one Matt Cutts made today make me happy. He refers to a post on the Google blog by Google engineer Steven Baker that discusses how Google’s trying to make computers understand language. The general idea being semantics are more than keyword density.

Google’s algorithm can actually read synonyms and even put them within context. This is so much more complex than number of times a keyword appears in your text, so stop worrying about that and just write naturally…

I finally got around to checking the RSS reader, so sharing some articles and posts here today.

The Haiti Disaster was and unfortunately still is major headlines. Google not only donated $1M but also helped assess damages using their extensive damages. Here’s a post showing before and after satellite imagery, and a link to Google’s Haiti page.

As with the Iranian Elections, Twitter and other social media were central to sending in news and pictures right from the scene and Mashable covered this aspect in this piece.  There is also a downside to this, as Twitter and Facebook were used for related hoaxes and worse: SCUM: Haiti Disaster Attracts Hoaxes and Scammers.

Twitter News

The Twitter Flatline: Why Doesn’t Twitter Grow? [STATS] seems to have provoked quite a few responses, the consensus being that Mashable’s Ben Parr got it wrong by ignoring the fact that many Tweeps do not use the Twitter website, opting for desktop application such as Tweetdeck instead. Robert Scoble talks about that and also offers more advice on growing Twitter here: Twitter’s traffic in trouble?

Useful Stuff

Some cool tools that I am definitely going to explore some more:

18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business

And Other Stuff

I really enjoyed this futuristic piece of prose, describing our future life under Google’s (benevolent?) rule:

Built By Google

During the end of December, my Skype account kept warning me that come 2010, I’ll be losing all of the money in my Skype-out account. Since it only came to $6, I didn’t bother doing much about it. The people I Skype with all have Skype too, so I rarely got to use the Skype-out paid service.

I didn’t appreciate the fact that Skype was confiscating my paid money just because it’s New Year’s Eve, but I figured maybe they needed extra cash for the office party.

Looks like other people did get upset. They even sued Skype in a class action suit. Here’s their website:

http://creditexpirationclassaction.com/

In fact, if you were affected, you can go ahead and claim your money, as the suit has been settled out of court:

Skype Communications, on behalf of itself and the other Defendants, has agreed to pay a Settlement Amount of $1,850,000 in full and complete settlement of the Released Claims, which shall include: (i) attorneys’ fees and costs and named plaintiffs’ incentive awards not to exceed $1,000 each, which collectively shall not exceed 25% of the Settlement Amount subject to Court approval; and (ii) availability, on a claims made basis, of an electronic voucher for $4.00 of Skype Credit per claimant from the Net Settlement Amount.

Yup, a whole $4!

Here’s the making-a-claim form – have fun!

And no, I am not making a claim because this is for US folks only.

So, what is up with the much awaited Caffeine?

Back in November 11th I had blogged about Matt Cutts’s announcement that Caffeine won’t be launched until “after the holidays”. At the time, Matt said Google decided to wait with the launch of their highly acclaimed new algorithm update out of consideration for webmasters. The idea was to keep the search results stable over the high season of shopping time.

It didn’t really make sense to me back then. In my post, I said that if Google had a better algorithm, producing better and faster results for end users, they should not avoid launching out of consideration for webmasters. After all, there’s only so much web traffic and one webmaster’s loss is another’s gain.

Well, it’s been over two months now. And almost two weeks into 2010 and still no sign of Caffeine.

In Israel, with major holidays coming up twice a year, the term “after the holidays” takes on a special meaning. “After the holidays” being the ultimate excuse for all those things you plan on postponing endlessly and forever.

No, I don’t think Google is going to postpone the rollover forever. I do wonder what’s making them wait so long though. Is it the recent China business? or were issues with caffeine itself the real reason behind the “after the holidays” delay?

It almost seems poetic that Google – considered to be a global worldwide giant of a corporation involved with nearly every aspect of our online lives – would butt heads with the world’s new leading superpower.

Google’s decision back in 2006 to play by the Chinese government’s rules and apply censorship to Google.cn was heavily criticized at the time. Google justified it by saying “the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results”.

Well, what do you know, China may have let Google get a hold in its fast emerging online arena, but the leopard has not changed its spots one bit. Looks like the Chinese government had no qualms in launching a full 0ut digital attack on Google’s servers in an effort to hunt down Chinese human rights activists using Gmail accounts.

So now Google has decided to stop censoring search results on Google.cn, which they admit will probably mean shutting down Google.cn and moving out of the Chinese market altogether.

The implications are huge. Here are just a few that come to mind -

1. Google may be walking out of what might be the largest online market in the future.
2. Chinese people may be even further cut off from the main Internet hubs. That means online marketers will not have as good an access to this market and Chinese webmasters will be even more limited in their operations outside of China.
3. Google may regain some of the credibility they lost over surrendering to the Chinese government’s demands in the first place.
4. Gmail has proved to be a secure service. Only two accounts are said to have been hacked into by means other than phishing and malware installments. This is about much more than email security – our Gmail logins are now used for so many services it can be scary.

A couple of months ago I tried selling a website through Flippa.com. The sale never went through so here I am trying to sell it here. More about my auction experience below, but first, the site details.

Verdant Forums

http://verdantforums.com

Stats Etc.:

Vbulletin forums (license included in sale).

287 registered users – Threads: 423, Posts: 6,817

PageRank: 2

Indexed Pages: 2300+ (According to Yahoo site explorer)

Traffic: Server stats show a lot of traffic, but I now realize it’s spam bots trying to register. Real traffic – as measured by Google Analytics – is very low.

More about the forums:

VF is dormant, with posts coming in far and few between. It was gaining in popularity back in the day, when my partner Steve and myself tended to it. Other projects took us away from the forums and they have gradually dwindled into lack of activity.

Steve Snedeker is a professional landscaper and he was in charge content on the forums. You will find his writing there in the articles & tutorials section. Steve is a great guy to work with, and has already told me that he’ll be happy to work with a future buyer on creating more content and/or answering topics on the board.

Interested? Leave me a comment here.

The Auction Story:

Somehow, being new to Flippa I didn’t get some of their terminology. I managed to end the auction after 30 days without accepting any of the bids (which went up to $350). Embarrassing, really, as there were two interested buyers at that price, plus another one who contacted me later willing to raise.

Disclaimer: Before I go on, let me clarify that at no point did I ever do anything against Flippa’s TOS. When in doubt, I even contacted them and asked for clarifications. I strongly believe in abiding by a site’s TOS when you use their services.

Since it was a sheer technical error on my part that made me close the auction with no winner, I diligently went back to the highest bidder and explained what happened. To make a short story long, each one of the three bidders turned me down, for their own reasons, and the entire process took me several weeks (trying to give each one of them a fair chance of assessing their position, combined with my own lack of time and attention).

So, here’s your chance of grabbing a fully functional Vbulletin board! If you have any questions or are interested in buying, leave me a comment here.

I’m willing to consider any offer over $150. Under that and it simply isn’t worth my time dealing with the transfer. Feel free to re-post anywhere you like – Twitter, your blog, forums you frequent and thanks in advance!