This week the Geeks interviewed Twitter enthusiast JJProjects. This is one of the few shows I’ve missed in the last few months, but sit back and listen to Dave, Cait and JJ telling you why you need Twitter.
And if that’s not enough twitter for you, here’s the Common Craft segment Twitter in Plain English.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o]
Until such time as I can find a viable (read: worthwhile) ad service to help offset the costs of the blog, I will no longer be subjecting readers to ads on the blog.
After nearly 9 months of Google Adsense, I’ve managed $3.56. Since Google requires $100 in your account before they will pay out, I’m on schedule to be paid out in Late 2028. A bit too late to cover costs of blogging (though it would make a nice almost 50th birthday present. :razz: )
The Amazon and TTZMedia affiliate programs have also had similar results with a payout from TTZ media due sometime in 2048… and that’s only a $25 payout.
In short, I don’t get enough traffic, and my readers on average aren’t the type to click on enough ads (hell most use Firefox and AdBlock Plus!) to provide an income stream.
An added bonus: the site loads faster now! :mrgreen:
Today when I checked my email I was given a rather pleasant surprise. A comment on one of my blog posts from the folks at Flickr Fight.
Hi, we considered this blog post as a claim and updated our site. Now we are giving a reference and link to photographer under full sized photos. Thank you Flickr Fight Team
Great News! I have to believe that this was simply an oversight that has now been corrected.
This is a topic I’ve been considering for some time now. Many of you (who don’t use an ad-blocker) will have noticed that late last year I began experimenting with placing ads on the blog. The idea behind this was the “get-the-blog-to-pay-for-itself” mentality that most of us go through when we realize that there are costs associated with maintaining a presence online if it’s done using your own domain… and what self-respecting geek wouldn’t want full control over their site??
So that led me to ads. There are four different kinds of ads on the site: the Firefox referal link (via Google), Google Adsense ads, TTZ Media ads on each post, and most recently an Amazon referal ad (left-side near the bottom).
When you let an advertising company into your blog you’re allowing them to place text and images on your site which they say will match the content of your site. I’ve found recently that this isn’t always the case. A post that Dave put up on the GGP blog last week illustrates the point. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait.
Different vendors classify products differently. In this particular case, some rather questionable material ships as a “technology” product because it’s on DVD. Lovely. There are lots of DVDs out there, I wonder how many have shown up on the blog?? I’ve had a couple thousand page impressions of the Amazon ad (not to mention the others) and it really made me think. I’ve had ad-code on the site since the fall, and have managed to rack up an amazing $2.72 (all of it from Google AdSense). To me, the cost of cluttering up the site and the potential for “bad press” far outweighs the benefits of maybe someday possibly getting a month’s worth of hosting paid for.
This time it was an ad for asian girls in an oil-wrestling DVD. At the end of the day it probably didn’t hurt my reputation much, and Dave got some fodder for the GGP blog. But it also didn’t help me much. I expected to see a mini spike in traffic for the day, and that didn’t happen either. And what about next time? What if the next “oops” is more damaging? Bottom line, getting $10 a year (maybe) isn’t worth the crap I’m dealing with at this point.
Expect the ads to come down shortly.
Messaging and “GTD-ish” service Jott has just launched new local numbers in many major cities in Canada. The service has gone from one local number in Toronto, to twenty nation-wide.
Here is an excerpt from the email sent to Canadian Jott users today:
In an effort to protect your privacy, most Canadian mobile providers have blocked caller ID information from being passed to toll free numbers. This leaves the alternative of using local access numbers across the country, so that everyone can send Jott messages without having to pay long distance fees.
Here are the new Canadian local numbers
| CITY | NUMBER |
|---|---|
| AURORA | +12898020110 |
| CALGARY | +14037751288 |
| EDMONTON | +17806287799 |
| HALIFAX | +19024828120 |
| HAMILTON | +19054819060 |
| KITCHENER | +15199572711 |
| LONDON | +15194898968 |
| MARKHAM | +12898000110 |
| MONTREAL | +15146670329 |
| OTTAWA | +16136861502 |
| QUEBEC CITY | +14189072209 |
| SAINT JOHNS | +17097570047 |
| SHERBROOKE | +18193401636 |
| TORONTO | +16477245365 |
| TORONTO | +14168001067 |
| VANCOUVER | +17787868229 |
| VANCOUVER | +16044841347 |
| VICTORIA | +12509847093 |
| WINDSOR | +15198000031 |
| WINNIPEG | +12042728154 |
I’ve been using Jott off and on for the past couple of months, and with the addition of local Canadian numbers, I can definitely see this becoming a regular part of my GTD arsenal.
Well after a far more successful 2007 than I could have imagined, I’ve released the first significant feature update to the Admin Links Widget.
First, THANK YOU to everyone who has downloaded the widget. It has been downloaded an astonishing 2300 times since the inaugural release on August 14th of last year.
The most significant changes for this version are the addition of two new links that you can add to your site:
These links provide you the opportunity to edit a specific page or post from a link in the sidebar whenever you’re viewing a single page or post (ie not the front-page, or a search result). This is particularly useful for blogs which don’t have an edit link built into their current theme.
Please take a moment and download the latest version of the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. And as always, if you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment on the blog.
Here’s a real-life example of how scope creep can absolutely kill a project you’re working on. I tend to find that this particular phenomenon tends to take hold of my projects on a regular basis, and I’ve been actively trying to combat it for quite a while now.
The project in question was a very simple installation of TwitterFeed on my blog. In my recent rediscovery of Twitter, I’ve noticed lots of folks seem to be auto-creating tweets when new posts go up… and quite frankly, I wanted in on that action. 
First, a description of the problem. The scope creep I talk about tends to come up when a simple project begins to show you options that you just have to could implement. Each option can really be a project in and of itself, and as a result the original project (which should have taken 10 minutes) has taken you the whole night and you’re up until one in the morning working on it and then blogging about the problem! 
Here are the basic instructions for setting up TwitterFeed:
Here is the example of what happens when you let your curiosity about the extendability of the same plugin get the better of you. Instead of getting this all to work as expected, it causes an evening of frustration.
I rest my case. So let this be a lesson to you:
I’ve had a Twitter account for about a year now. Until this past week, I think I’d only posted to it about a half-dozen times. But recently, I’ve started to see some value in Twitter. For some of the bloggers that I follow, something that I’ve noticed on occasion is the delay inherent in RSS. Being able to see immediately when a post is made lets me be the first commenter, or gets me some information just a bit earlier.
I was able to post something to my Twitter account this week to give me some ideas for an issue I was having in my life. By allowing a few more people to give me some feedback, I was able to get an answer and set up a post about it.
My Twitter client of choice (at the moment) is Twhirl, which I covered for this week’s Global Geek Podcast.
So over the next while, I’ll be giving Twitter a good run and trying to see who I can follow, and what I can learn. Nuggets. It’s all about nuggets… er tweets.
Just a reminder that tomorrow is the official “Delete your MySpace Account Day”. If you have a MySpace account, and you don’t use it, cut down your Bacn and join in the movement.
I’ve been thinking about deleting my Myspace account almost since the day I got it but always opted out of doing so because of the few friends I have who don’t have Facebook accounts. But by remaining on Myspace, I realize, I’m becoming an enabler. I’m giving those friends no reason to switch over from Myspace by giving them access to my Myspace profile.
Originally posted by Simon Owens.
Visit the originating website, or join the Facebook group.
After the post I did a couple of days back about FlickrFight using images and not attributing them to the photographers who took and own the images, I thought it might help to actually point to some of the things that FlickrFight is doing.
First off, they’re not copying the images, they are getting them from the Flickr API. As a result they have access to all the information required to properly attribute the photos, and I sorted that out after five minutes of looking through the Flickr API documentation.
Here are two Creative Commons licensed images that came up in my search for Sunrise vs. Sunset:
Photo Credit: onurati on Flickr
Photo Credit: mandyseyfang on Flickr
Get it together, FlickrFight. Attribute the photos! Everything you need to know is RIGHT HERE.