An afternoon at the Podcast & New Media Expo

This morning I woke up while it was still plenty dark and made the drive from Las Vegas, NV to Ontario, CA for the Podcast & New Media Expo. As this was my first foray in to the world of Podcasting, I opted to go check out the (free) exhibit hall only rather than sit in on the (pay) sessions. Had to do over again, I wish I would have paid for the sessions and spent the weekend at the expo rather than just the afternoon. I still feel like I learned a lot after speaking to many of the exhibitors, but also feel I could have learned a whole lot more.

We were able to catch the Keynote speech interview of Jim Louderback who is CEO of Revision3. While the bulk of the interview centered around his company, the way they do things and the content that they produce, he did have some interesting things to say regarding the podcasting industry and where it’s going. I also learned a new word from Jim; “Snackisode”. You can check out the the Expo Podcast page if you’d like to relive some of the content.

Here are some of the cool hardware and software tools I was introduced to at the show (in no specific order):

There were a few dozen other vendors who easily could have been added to this list. These were just some of the ones that stuck out in my head.

If you are looking to start a podcast or vidcast, you should definitely check these guys out.

PayItToMe.com: Crazyness or Genius?

This morning on TechCrunch I read about a site called PayItToMe.com. It’s a new site with an interesting concept: Joe Public sends in photos of items that they want including a price. The items get posted on the “desired items” page. Advertisers select an item that they are willing to buy for the person. Once purchased and confirmed, the photo is moved to the front page of PayItToMe.com and is now linked to the page that the advertiser chooses.

If this idea is genius or insane, I’m not sure. But, I was willing to give it a shot. What do I have to lose? I sent in the following photo this morning at 8:38am:

heroes.jpg

At 11:50am I received a Paypal payment for $40.00. Holy crap, it worked! I’m off to Amazon.com to buy Season 1 of Heroes!

Full disclosure forces me to tell you one final piece of the puzzle. My $40.00 payment came from a guy named Renaud in Belgium. Coincidentally, that’s the name and location of the guy running the site. It’s quite possible that this is how he’s handling the transactions, but who knows. My payment may have been a way for him to get a link moved to the front page at a reasonable price. And, heck, he is getting some extra press out of the deal so how bad can that be, right?

Regardless, I’d like to thank payittome.com and Marc Dehareng (the supposed purchaser of my item) for the cash to purchase Heroes.

I’m a bit biased now that I received my payment, so I’m not sure I should weigh in on the crazyness or genius debate. But, feel free to leave your comments and let me know what you think.

Cheers.

BlogRush threatens cheaters. Is this wise?

This morning I woke up to a lengthy email from the folks over at BlogRush talking about the changes that they are making to their system. Everything they were saying in the first half of the email sounds great and I was happy to hear that they are listening to their audience and making some needed changes. Though, I think they have everybody’s best interest in mind by doing a manual blog review for new registrants, I don’t think this is going to solve their issue. It would still be really simple to register using a real site (in English) only to bypass the manual review and then load up the BlogRush widget on an exit-pop from an off-shore porn site. (just an example)

The second half of the email gives me cause for concern. Many years ago, at a previous job, we had a problem with some people trying to cheat our system. We started putting some additional safeguards in place to stop them. When we stopped any traffic that came through that was fraudulent, we put up a simple notice that said, “Fraudulent data, your IP has been recorded.” Within a week our system received dozens of hack attempts and DOS attacks. It was as if the fraudsters took our message as a personal challenge and they were intent on bringing us down. The email from BlogRush is far more direct than our message was. They are not just suggesting they will shut down your account. They are guaranteeing prosecution.

So for all you cheaters that joined BlogRush and had your fun trying to siphon off some traffic, hopefully it was fun.  And I’ll go ahead and make this statement right now… IF you were one of the people that has been cheating our network I’m going to give you ONE opportunity…  quit now and we’ll pretend it never happened.  I think that’s more than fair.

BUT… if you continue after this point, all bets are off.  We WILL eventually discover what you’re doing, where you’re trying to send traffic, and we will prosecute you.   I GUARANTEE IT.   Sorry, but WE HAVE NO CHOICE NOW.

While I fully understand their frustration and I understand the point that they are trying to get across, I think the “attack” stance that they are taking is a dangerous line to be drawing in the sand. The number of script kiddies out there who have nothing better to do than figure out ways to mess with your app is immeasureable. While you may have the best of intentions, a direct threat like this may not be the best solution.

I’m very interested to see how things work out for BlogRush over the next couple weeks. It sounds like they are heading in the right direction. For everybody involved, I hope they haven’t kicked a sleeping bear.

SpeedLinking - September 25th

Blogging for a living isn’t something that I’m interested in doing. But, blogging my way to a decent supplemental income sure sounds like a lot of fun. In order to make money blogging, I think it’s important to keep up with “the industry”. Where better to get that info that from other blogs who talk about making money by blogging?

Here’s a list of some blogs I’ve been reading on a regular basis lately:

- ProBlogger.net
- CopyBlogger.com
- Bloggrrl.com
- 45n5.com
- BloggingTips.com
- AlisterCameron.com

I’m looking for other blogging related blogs that currently have an alexa rating under 100,000. If you know of some, please leave a comment and let me know about them.

Cheers.

I need to change my name to iGeeeek

MacBookIt has been 12 - 15 years since I have owned a Mac. My first one was a $3,000 laptop that had a battery life of about 40 minutes and enough computing power to perform 5th grade algebra. Oh how the times have changed…

Back in February Todd took the leap and ordered himself a MacBook. Since that time he has commented several times on how nice it is. Todd being the uber-geek that he is, I value his opinion above most others when it comes to things of this sort. However, I just haven’t had a need for a new laptop as my IBM ThinkPad has been getting used on a very limited basis.

Fast forward 6 months …

This week I have been in a few discussions with some people regarding the possibility of helping to run a podcast based blog for somebody who has great content, but little time. With several of my associates and friends all happily working on Macs, it seemed this may be a good time to take the plunge myself.

Before clicking the submit button on my order I asked Carl (a self proclaimed Mac/Apple FanBoy) some questions about the Mac. The most important question I had for him had to do with how easy it is to switch the keyboard from a QWERTY layout to the Dvorak layout. Once that issue was put to bed, I logged on to apple.com and placed my order.

I opted for the “starter kit”, if you will. I ordered the 13-inch: White 2.0 GHz. I upgraded to 2 GB RAM and the 160 GB hard drive. I’m considering this the “dipping my toe in the Mac waters” purchase to see how I like it. But, at just over $1500 with the upgrades & tax, it seems like an awfully big toe.

So now I wait. My status page says I’ll have the new MacBook on or before October 1st. Seems so far away right now.

Sorry Blog Rush, 3 strikes, you’re out

Based on my personal experience with BlogRush and after hearing some other bloggers talk about the large number of impressions and the drastically low number of clicks they were receiving, it was becoming quite obvious that the real winner in all of this is BlogRush themselves. I certainly don’t have a problem with a company offering a service but yet reaping the rewards. Heck, isn’t that what Google does? They seem to be doing OK and I don’t hold it against them that they benefit off me checking my email on their site rather than another. But, I digress…

Strike 1 for BlogRush came Monday morning when there had been dozens of impressions and zero clicks on any of my served up headlines. That was actually only half of it. The other half being that I had still yet to run across my own blog title and link in a BlogRush application on any other site.

Strike 2 came Tuesday morning. By this time, my interest in keeping the app on my page had already hit the skids. So when I loaded up my front page and it took an extra 10 seconds while it tried to load the BlogRush app, if I had not been at work and heading in to a meeting, I would have removed the code right then and there.

Tuesday ended up being busy and I never got back around to removing the app from the site. Then came Wednesday.

When I loaded up the page on Wednesday morning, in place of the BlogRush app was an error message. Apparently they were having troubles with their system and they would be back up soon. Strike 3. This time I was not heading in to a meeting so I removed the app from the site immediately.

This is certainly not the first web tool that came on like a lion and left with a wimper and I’m sure it won’t be the last. I wish the guys over at BlogRush all the success they can handle. But, you’ll need to get there without this geek.

Keys to success: blogging on schedule

This post is being written for completely selfish reasons. It’s meant to be a glaring reminder to listen to my own advise.

One characteristic of most successful blogs is that they post consistently. Many of the blogs I read post on a daily basis, and some post several times per day. This is an art that I haven’t yet mastered. I’m lucky if I post twice a week. But I am working on it!

Since I have a full time job and a family, my free time spent on the Internet in the evenings is fairly limited. This means that if I’m going to write a proper blog post, I need to sit down, focus and get to work. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out that way and I find myself aimlessly surfing websites that I’ve found from a link off a link off a link. 30 minutes later I’m left wondering how I ended up reading a page about the Heritage of Pet Grooming and where in the heck my evening has gone. I start out with the best of intentions, but sometimes end up going to bed after getting nothing done that I had set out to do.

A big part of my problem is that when I sit down at the computer, I don’t usually have a topic lined up that I plan to write about. That’s not to say that I don’t have topics. I have plenty of them. But, they are usually all swimming around in my head and in no real order. Today I have started working on two things that should help me combat this issue; I created a blog schedule for the next month, and I penciled in the topics for the next few posts.

First off, the schedule. This is an important one for me. I am currently writing on a few different blogs, and I find that there will be a week where I post on 1 blog 3 or 4 times and other blogs will go with 0 posts. To help with this issue I have written in each blogs name on the date where I plan to make a post. Some sites will be updated 5 times a week, some 3 and I have one that will be updated 1 time per week. With the new schedule in place, I now have a place where I can look and see immediately which site is due for a post. Having a schedule to go off of will save several minutes going through each site to figure out how long it’s been since it’s last post.

Penciling in the subjects is a way for me to also cut down on the amount of time it takes to get a post written. Once the topic is known to me (usually a day or two before post time), I will start brainstorming the topic and doing research in my spare time so when I sit down to write, I’ve already got a healthy portion of the post written in my head and it simply a matter of getting it on (digital) paper.

I’m confident that blogging on schedule is going to help me grow my readership and be an overall boost to the quality of the site.

Why aren’t you Blog Rushing?

There is certainly no shortage of people writing about BlogRush.com this weekend. And, for good reason.

If you haven’t already heard, BlogRush is a new services that takes the RSS feed from your blog and displays a headline on other blogs who are also in the BlogRush network. The sites you will be displayed on is based on the category you select for your site. This keeps the article headlines related to your site’s content.

The base idea behind this isn’t new. This is the Web 2.0 version of a Banner Exchange network. The different being, rather than being stuck with 1 banner to display in a network across thousands of sites, instead your headlines and your site name get displayed on like minded sites. It looks to be quite powerful. Like so many others, I’m testing it out to see how much extra traffic it will bring to the site.

To give you a quick idea on how it works, you sign up your blog and then place a small chunk of code that will display a box like the one shown here. Then, each time your page is loaded, your account gets credited with 1 view. Now, when somebody loads up a different website in your same category, a listing for your site will be shown 1 time. It’s a 1 for 1 exchange. You can earn extra credits by referring others to sign up for an account. For each page view on their site, not only do they get 1 page view credit, so do you. The referral credits are given 10 levels deep. If you happen to get a popular site to sign up under you, you can really rack up some valuable credits.

If you are using Google Adsense on your site, you should probably steer clear of BlogRush for the time being. This post from the Google Adsense blog suggests that traffic exchange programs are against the rules for sites using Adsense.

While this is most likely not the be-all-end-all of traffic generators, it is certainly worth testing out. I’m sure in a week or two you will see another set of posts from the Blogosphere telling you how good or bad the Blog Rush is treating them. I’m sure I’ll be one of ‘em.

Let the rush begin!

5 plugins your blog shouldn’t be without

One of the main reasons so many bloggers use WordPress is the amazing amount of plugins made available by the fantastic WordPress community.

Here is a list of 5 plugins I consider the “standards” for any blog:

Spam Karma 2 - With millions of blogs out there, it’s no surprise that spammers have written scripts to find WordPress blogs and submit comments with links back to their own sites automatically. Spam Karma 2 does an amazing job of keeping out the riff-raff while letting through the honest to goodness commenters on your site.

Subscribe To Comments - One of the easiest ways to build a regular visitor base is to let your commenters subscribe to the comments. When a comment is left, the visitor can subscribe to receive an email every time another comment is added to the subscribed post. The email reminds them to come back and check out your site. Couldn’t be any easier.

All in One SEO Pack - This plugin automatically titles and tags your pages and posts using best practice methods for getting listed in search engines.

DoFollow - Selectively disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments on your blog. Easily configurable from your blogs admin section. Encourage savvy users to post quality comments on your site by offering them a valuable link back to their site.

FireStats - So far this is the best stats package I have found for WordPress. It provides a quick view in to your sites visitors, what sites are driving traffic to yours, what your visitors are searching for to find your site and more.

Do you have your own set of “must have” plugins? I’d like to hear about them. Leave a comment and tell us about them.

Happy Birthday geeeek.com

It’s hard to believe, but it was seven years ago today that I purchased geeeek.com. Several people over the years asked why I came up with geeeek.com with four “E”s and not some other random number of duplicate letters. The reason had to do with the purchase of a car. I had just bought a pick-up truck and was trying to come up with a personalized license plate idea. “geek” was already taken. I had already seen “webgeek” and “netgeek” driving around in my area, so I figured I would just fill up all 7 available letters that California lets you have. So, I tried to purchase “GEEEEEK”. It was taken. I was a little bit surprised. So, I shortened it by 1 and a “GEEEEK” was born. I followed it up by purchasing the domain name shortly after without having any real plan for what I was going to do with it.

Over the years the site has gone through many a design change. I used the WayBack machine to walk down Amnesia Lane. One of the first designs for the site was “borrowed” directly from eudora.com. The first recorded page is from April 1st, 2001.

While browsing archive.org, I realized that some of my earliest blog posts were actually written about a year before their dates that are listed on the current site. At some point during a switch over, some dates must have gotten munched. Oops.

It took just over 2 full years before geeeek.com became a blog. Back then I went through several different tools for producing the blog. It wasn’t until 1/21/2004 that I installed WordPress and then migrated all the posts over. At the time of this writing, geeeek.com has 276 posts. Here are some of my favorite posts from over the years.

My first blog post is still one of my favorites, and, the annoyance of the Ketchup Burger still plagues me today! Actually, looking back at my first month of posting, I wrote a lot about my annoyances with fast food. Here is another gem from the fast food industry from 2005.

One post that has consistantly driven traffic to my site since the day I wrote it was a short post from November of 2003 about the game show Press Your Luck and the guy who basically held the show hostage and won over $110,000. Much of that traffic is from my #1 listing on Google for the search term “No Whammys”.

Back in Feb of 2004 I got the tattoo that will forever tell the world that I am a geek.

While going through my history, I realize I complain about the medical profession quite a lot. Some examples: Here, Here and Here

Ahh, the story of my first ever live No-Limit poker tournament. I had been playing poker for a while and this was certainly not my first tournament, but, I always had stuck to limit poker and I had even played some Omaha tournaments. It’s a shame that Nevada Palace will be gone in less than a year from now and will be replaced by a new casino. Actually, it’s not a shame at all. What was I thinking?

It was in August of 2004 that I realized how scary the word “Cancer” can be when the doctor is talking you you. This turned out to be cancer round 1. Round 2 happened in May of 2007.

Back in April 2005 I got to drive a race car 130+ MPH and didn’t have to worry about the police chasing me.

I played in my first World Series of Poker event in June of 2005. I realize now how little I knew about the game back then…

In January 2006 I found out that my wife has the tendency to be way tougher than I am at certain times…

In February of this year I went on a diet and started exercising. I’ve since lost over 30 pounds.

In June of 2007 I wrote the post that got the most comments so far. Catching somebody stealing turned out to be a hot topic.

Over the years I have written about so many different topics. My site has gone from being a personal blog to a poker blog, to a collection of movie and book reviews and recently it went on a little trip to being an Internet marketing blog. I can’t say for sure where it’s going to end up. I like writing about Internet marketing and the cool tips and tricks that are out there. But, I also like writing about so many other topics that it’s hard for me to stay focused. I’m pretty sure what I need to do is settle on one main genre for this site and then create different blogs for different purposes. I have already started a new one for my dieting / fitness and a different one for writing about poker. I’ll have to see what topic comes up next.

I hope to see you all still here in 7 more years.

Thanks for hanging out.