Netizen

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Where Have You Placed Your Ads?

Until yesterday my ads were in the white zone, at the very bottom, and on the side bar in the middle. I had this if-you-build-it-they-will-come attitude. Once I start getting enough page hits, revenue will follow, that was my attitude. But the point is, ad placement works at all page hits levels.

I moved my ads to the orange zone only yesterday evening, and already my earnings have gone up by a factor of four, and I am only half way through the day.

I made two major changes on my three primary blogs yesterday.

For now Nepal and Barackface have the most blog posts, but now my primary blog is Netizen.

I used to have only one blog post per page. Now I have three blog posts per page.
Now I have ads at the bottom of each blog post. That also ends up being ads at the top of two blog posts. So I have one in the orange zone, and two in the red zone now. And that has made a huge difference.

A less cluttered side bar also makes a blog more user friendly. And the footer now only has a search engine. That makes the blogs look cleaner.

And all this was very easy to do. For those of you familiar with the Blogger dashboard, click on "Layout." Then click on "Page Elements." Go to the box called "Blog Posts." Click on "Edit." There you can decide you want three posts per page and that you want to "Show Ads Between Posts." Google only allows for three ads per page, so three posts per page is a good number.

Because I now have three posts per page, now I don't feel the pressure to write particularly long posts. And so yesterday I had the busiest day ever at Netizen measured by the number of posts. So ad placement is not the only reason the earnings today are so much higher.

And yesterday I wrote my first blog post advertisement: Advanced Global Materials. Google makes money from ads, so can I. It is a problem only if all your posts at your blog are blog post ads. But as long as you maintain a healthy ratio between your regular posts, and your ad posts, and you clearly state at the bottom of a post that it is an ad, I think you are okay. (Sites That Pay You To Blog)

Like Deng Xiaoping said, to make money is a good thing.

Twitter Is Not Micro

Image via CrunchBase

Take the links away, and Twitter is not going to be fun no more, at least not for me. And I don't see what's micro about full blown webpages, news articles, blog posts, pictures, video clips. When I envision a tweet, I don't envision 140 stale characters. I envision a few words that point me to a weblink, more likely a tiny URL, that I might have the option to click on. That is not to say I don't enjoy tweets that are all words and no links. I do. But they are in the sea of links. That is why I enjoy them. It takes seconds to skim through an all words tweet, and usually another with a link is right below.

That is not to say I am a link clicking monster blindly clicking the links away. I pick and choose. But then that is why you carefully choose to follow people. Your library of Twitter contacts should be such that whenever you jump into your stream you find at least a few links to click on. I find that every single time. So when I go online, of all the places I could go to, Twitter ends up being the one with the greatest pull. You have to convince yourself it is not distraction, it is education.

Twitter is not micro. Twitter is smart. Can't do without Twitter in this day and age of information overload. Twitter allows for a smart consumption of information. You swim in the Twitter stream for half an hour, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 10, and you feel like you are in the loop, with the world. You know what's going on. You know all the right people. Heck, you follow them. They can't say no.

The tweet is the ultimate equalizer. Some of the fanciest names in tech put out tweets that are not that different from the kind of tweets I put out. I feel level with them much of the time.

After I have a new blog post, I tweet it, I don't submit it to Digg, or any of the similar services. I do use Delicious for bookmarking. But often time I just tweet an interesting link. I know I can track it with one Twitter search down the line. So I use Twitter also for personal bookmarking.

Twitter keeps my blog fresh. I guess there you could argue Twitter is indeed microblogging. But then, is it? My tweets tend to be link rich.

Demi Moore and I joined Twitter the same day. I have 230 followers, she has 520,738 followers. I am guessing she is better looking.

The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Cupcake: Android 1.5

Android has an interesting list of new features. Just like the distance from your laptop keyboard to the internet is zero, Android seems to envision that the distance from your mobile phone to the internet ought to be zero. That picture you shot from your mobile phone should end up straight at Picassa. Why download? Why upload? Why the drama? Same with video. Take it straight from the mobile phone to YouTube. Skip the download, upload drama. Online photo and video editing would be tackling the same problem from another angle.

The new Android looks to be muscular and ambitious.

Image by netzkobold via Flickr

https://twitter.com/Android_Bot/status/1522494989
Finance 2.0 Manifesto

On The Web

Android 1.5 Highlights | Android Developers
Sneak a Peek at the Next Version of Android
Android 1.5 Early Look SDK | Android Developers
Android Developers Blog: Getting ready for Android 1.5
iPhone 3.0, meet Android 1.5 | Tech Gear News - Betanews

In The News

Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders CNET News

Top 5 features in Android 1.5 (Cupcake) ZDNet Blogs

Google Announces Android 1.5 with Significant New Features Brighthand

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Skype: Hub

AOL Time Warner could not build the promised synergy. Now looks like eBay and Skype are a repeat history case. Could this perhaps been predicted at the outset? Is a Microsoft going into hardware losing direction? Or is it reinventing itself? Nokia has reinvented itself many, many times over the decades.

eBay and PayPal were synergistic. Skype was stretching it.

But then will the Skype spinoff make enough money for eBay that the original deal will have been worth it? At 405 million, Skype has twice the community size as Facebook. When Skype got bought a lot of people were like, oh no, they overpaid. But looks like not. The founders of Skype would be happy to buy it back. The brand made half a billion last year. The two and a half billion price tag could be recouped in a matter of years.

Skype is a hub, it is a community, it is the iPhone of that big rectangle. And it is capable of doign iPhone like things. Yes, I am talking about applications. I have a feeling Skype will really take off when we enter the ubiquitous wimax era in a few short years. Now is the time to do the homework for the best possible positioning.

Image via CrunchBase

In The News

eBay to launch a Skype IPO in 2010 CNet
Next Office will come in 32-bit, 64-bit versions
Big media leads Webby Awards nominations
OutlookDeck brings Twitter concepts to e-mail
Analyst: Microsoft deal could save Yahoo $1 billion
Just how sexist is nudity in gaming?
Sun Microsystems debuts new x64 servers
Should Sun buy Novell?
Server start-up taps IBM-Intel tech, eyes Web 2.0
Google touts Android 1.5 features to coders
BoostCam does instant two-way video chat
iPhone to become a home systems OpenRemote
Microsoft fills Excel, Windows, Word holes
The final frontier: Solar power from space
Zune phone ad campaign coming?
MC builds up to 3 petabytes of virtual storage

The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter

Sex and the City

Image by hawaii via Flickr

I must admit there have been times when I have struggled with doing a Guy Kawasaki on Twitter: follow everyone who follows you. Should I? Should I not? I decided against the idea. For Guy Twitter is a broadcast medium. Noone else does that part better than him. His tweets get retweeted more times than that of any other. He is numero uno.

And there is Bhupendra Khanal, the top tweet in Bangalore, as in the one with the most followers:

Business Analytics: Twitter : Why unfollow who dont follow you?

He is a software guy, a CEO, who has come up with this program that allows you to follow or unfollow people about 50 at a time. He is brutal. He sees no point in following those who don't follow him. His following shot up to over 20,000 in a matter of months.

I decided I am biased towards an organic growth of my following, so I did not go down the Bhupendra route either, although we were and are good friends.

I found at Twitter what I did not find at Facebook. After I signed up at Facebook I realized my number one urge was to say hello to people I had never met before. Next thing you know I had about 1500 friends there. Then I signed up for this Facebook group that shall stay unnamed, and started emailing people in that group. Facebook deleted my account. 1500 friends gone. That was unfollow Facebook style.

I got another account, and now I have 500 friends, almost all of whom I personally know. Some are online friends I have never met in person, but we have interacted online enough that it feels like friendship. And I have over 40 friend requests and counting that I have decided to not accept, not decline either. If I end up chatting some of those and becoming online friends, I might still accept some of them.

At Twitter not only do you get to follow absolutely anyone you wish to follow, my number one dig has been this idea of being able to follow luminaries in the tech industry. Once in a while you come across this blog post or that which has recommendations of the people you get tempted to follow.

And clicking on the follow button is not enough. How well do you know them? Could you recognize them in your stream two months later? Could you name the company they might be associated with? Can you remember at least one blog post of theirs you have read?

How do you do all that? You spend some time on the profile pages of the people you follow. You read their intro. You reply to some of their tweets. You go read a few posts on their blog. You get to know them well enough that the next time they show up in your stream, their tweets look extra interesting to you. Each tweet by that person helps you know them a little better.

If you do that well enough, you just might strike a two way friendship, or rather followship, with a person who until recently was a distant celebrity to you. Like Craig Newmark, or Darren Rowse.

Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

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