So I’m finally back from a little over a week in Australia, my home. I’ll hopefully get back into blogging this week. Australia was a good but hectic trip, nonstop with clients and friends, the client side was good, worked out some new and extended some existing projects, and the friends side was crazy, lots of early morning partying!

I’m still in Australia, I’ll be back on Monday!

I’m off to Australia this week, I’ll be online from time to time in Aus, but I don’t know if I’ll have time to blog much, I’m back in about a week in a half…

So don’t worry, I’ll be back abusing people and businesses in no time

Look, the servers are good, the network is good, the pricing is good, its just the support - there isn’t any.

I HAD 4 GridService accounts with them, now I have 1 with them, my average wait time for tech support is about 2 DAYS.

Well I have 2 GS with them still, about to cancel 1 more now since there’s a ticket open right now that’s over 1 DAY old with NO response at all. Typical shit from them.

So yeah, that’s in progress of being canceled. I recommend slicehost.com, engineyard.com and theplanet.com.

So yeah, mediatemple, feel free to go fuck yourself because your lack of a support department has cost me over $2k (client is pissed at me since they can’t respond). Clients eh? Gotta hate them, but can’t always blame them.

Oh also, I just bought a Windows VPS from a company in Australia, there was an issue, I was able to get on to their live support, and talking to a real person - in Australia in about 20 seconds. Problem solved.

eBay is now only accepting PayPal for online payment – citing that your 4 times safer using PayPal than any other payment method.

Which is bullshit, it’s so easy to receive goods and then reverse a payment on PayPal it’s not funny, it’s so hard to get your money back from people who reverse charges for a bullshit reason it’s crazy.

This is just another move from eBay to jack up its stock price and profiteer since their stock has been crashing over the last few months – well years overall (it was almost $60 in 2002, $40 4 months ago and about a week ago it was down around $25).

It wasn’t too long ago they raised their percentage fee from like 3% to 10% in one hit, they make shitloads off PayPal as it is and locking every other payment provider out of the eBay market isn’t just a monopoly within eBay, but it’s unfair trading as a whole.

So much commerce is done via eBay now days that there needs to be other options for people who don’t want to pay through PayPal – either with an account or with their credit card.

Google is desperately trying to gain some traction with their Google Checkout, but it’s getting nowhere because of moves like this, if you could use Google Checkout on eBay I’m sure heaps of people would be using it.

I don’t know about you, but Yahoo buying out a Web Analytics company called IndexTools, and also testing Google ads on 3% of the Yahoo network search results is a sign of desperation from Yahoo – trying to stop a takeover that I think should happen.

Microsoft acquiring Yahoo in my opinion is a good move for Microsoft, and maybe even a good move for the internet in general, I’m still a little divided on that 2^nd point.

It’s great for Microsoft because Yahoo has a following of developers and general public, both of which Microsoft needs to set up its internet campaign overall – in followers, developers, advertising and more.

Not only that, Yahoo has a whole heap of other services that could be easily folded into the Microsoft family of services, such as their poor music delivery service, mail, developer network, geocities etc etc.

As for Yahoo, well I never thought they had the long term fire power to enter a war with Microsoft and Google, sure they have big numbers, and have for a long time, but Google came along pretty quick and stole a large share of that, and Microsoft is really pushing themselves into the arena.

Yahoo IS innovating, but people aren’t hearing it as loud as when Google innovates, I think Microsoft would do Yahoo some good, Microsoft knows how to make noise, even if it’s not always good. Yahoo has a lot of services that have been launched pretty poorly and developed poorly too, they seem to give up on them at times as well, I think this is where the Microsoft side of things can really help, Microsoft seem to stick with things and push enough resources and money into something until it either works well, or is completely dead.

Personally I think overall it’ll be a good move to join the two, the public might even benefit here somehow, not sure just how yet – besides some nicer apps around, it might mean there’s a gap in the market for another search provider, who knows.

If you havn’t read my last post about entrecard, feel free to do so now so you can understand the context in which I’m about to abuse entrecard about.

This is just an example of the bullshit that’s happening over their new pricing of advertising on sites.

Really bad sites with nothing to offer at all are now at a weighted cost of over 4,000 credits…

An example: http://sfi-income.blogspot.com/, http://seeds-of-dissolution.blogspot.com/.

Now not only have they screwed their pricing structure, but by also allowing ads to go that high they have totally ignored the value of their credits and how much time it takes to earn credits, it’s now like living in north korea where the simple things are expensive and the expensive things are government provided to special people.

Few more days I’m giving them to sort their shit out before I jump ship.

Also, entrecard, if you read this and my last post – I’m available to consult.

I think the reason entrecard is as popular as it is right now is because of the ‘dropping’ that goes on.

People run around dropping cards to A, boost their credits, and B to gain some clicks back from having their card left in other people’s ‘drop list’.

People don’t mind so much having people drop and run, because it boosts their traffic a little, but is also does give exposure to people who otherwise have no reason to visit.

Being able to earn credits for dropping and being able to drop to your heart’s content stimulates an economy of credits.

On the flip side of that your blog is ranked based on the number of drops on average over a week x2. So having lots of drops gives you a higher ranking on their site.

Having lots of drops on your blog isn’t a bad thing either, it gives you a higher rank, some other blogs that DO have more traffic but less people that use or drop entrecard don’t rank as high as your blog may because you might have more people coming to drop cards.

Which again isn’t bad, the rankings are skewed, but that’s the point, to give the lesser blogs more exposure and to try and share the traffic around a bit more. It’s also an incentive to the blog owner who does have more traffic to promote entrecard more to boost their rank inside entrecard, again, this is a win for entrecard, more exposure for them.

Now, what they have done is changed the calculation of credits to advertise on a blog.

Before to advertise on here for example it was 150 or so a day, I don’t get a lot of entrecard traffic, but I do get around 200 unique visits a day, and I have gained new readers from having people visit from entrecard.

Right now it’s 2 credits to advertise on my blog. So they have totally killed what my blog was worth simply because there’s no big queue of people waiting to advertise, there’s no big queue because I decline ads to try and keep some quality and relevance, so right now I have to forgo quality and relevance in order to get my rank back up.

Is this better or worse?

Well I know why they have changed it, they want to stop the ‘spam‘ of people dropping everywhere to gain credits, they have forgotten however the fact is that’s why they are popular, you can visit 1,000 blogs, get 1,000 credits and 1,000 blogs now have 1 extra visitor, everyone wins.

Now there’s no real value in visiting other blogs, or dropping cards, there’s no value for me to have an entrecard widget up high in my site anymore – or at all. Having it up high meant people dropped, putting it down lower means they didn’t, so I can put it down lower now and not worry about drops.

So entrecard loses, they are going to get dropped below other widgets, they are going to lose visitors, other sites are going to lose traffic and people will stop using them unless they change their weighting to something better.

Personally I think it should go back to how it was, rank sites based on the number of drops, BUT moderate the people dropping, weight the drops so the first 50 or so are 1:1.5, the next 50 are 1:1, the next 50 are 1:0.75, next 50 are 1:0.5 and so on, so your encouraged to drop 50 or so, then the next 50 are 1 to 1, then after that your classified as a heavy dropper or a spammer, so the credits for dropping diminish.

This way the people who visit a legit number of sites a day under 100, get rewarded, and it limits net worth of spamming.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on this because I think dropping was a large part of the entrecard economy and it’s going to really kill them, pricing a site based on ads waiting is stupid personally, no longer is a site based on quality, just the number of people in a waiting list, a quality site that moderates what types of ads being shown will lose out and the shit sites that take everything and swap ads will benefit.

My plan this year is to do away with clients totally by the end of the year. Be 100% self reliant income wise.

How am I going to achieve this? The same way anyone else can. By investing my time and energies into my own business ventures, building web based applications based on subscription models and by investing my excess revenue into offline businesses.

I have a whole bunch of targets I need to meet financially, but with the right planning and by putting the right steps in place I should be able to get there.

The same goes for anyone, and anything. Work out what you want to do with your X (X being your website, business, blog, life, whatever). And then sit down and research ways to achieve this.

For example if your goal is to make money from your blog, you really need to work out how that’s going to happen, why would people read your blog, what hooks are in place to get people to register to your mailing list or subscribe to your RSS feed, what value are you delivering to the end reader that they can’t get somewhere else?

In my opinion for a blog it really comes down to content and hooks, if your content delivers value people will read and search engines will index, if your hooks are of value people will take the bait and refer other people to it as well.

If the goal is to build traffic to the site to sell ads or something, then work on small targets, 100 a day, 200 a day, 500 a day, 1,000 a day etc. But don’t just set random targets without ways to achieve them, for every target put in place a set of actions that will make that target achievable.

It’s easy to say I want 5k visits a day and you’ll get that from writing good content. Well you might but you probably won’t, it’s better to say I’ll get 500 a day from writing good content, and search optimising my site, networking with others in my industry, buying ads on related sites and building some link bait.

And then go from there; work on sustaining that traffic and then growing on it to reach that 5k, it’s the same old story on the internet, once the traffic is there the ad revenue will follow.

For me in my position I’m working on building web applications that generate revenue, I’ll be building them with my team of developers in between client projects, and once they are ready for the public we’ll start small with some basic marketing, and no fees for usage, grow the user base, and start working on ways to monetise once the application has a healthy number of active users.

Until there’s a good amount of users on the system, just like high traffic numbers to a site, there’s no point of trying to monetise, you’ll make shit all and you’ll only drive people away.

The thing with blogging is that it gives people a quick fix of content, if you have a problem you can find an answer in a post, if you want to learn something new you can skim through a post and get the details you need quick, if you’re a regular visitor to a certain blog you can skim through the posts and content of the week and only read the bits that are applicable to you.

But with a video blog, to actually get the content, you have to sit down and really listen to the whole video, it could be pointless crap, like most of what I talk, but you don’t know until you get into it. Which takes time most people don’t have – or aren’t willing to spend.

I think the only way a video blog would work is if the majority of the content was still normal text, and then the videos were a content delivery necessity.
As in, walking through a tutorial or showing how to use a system and implement that on your site or something.

I’m sure there’s a market for a whole video based blog, but the traffic to the same content in text form wouldn’t be comparable. And that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? Traffic?