In times of financial crisis, good advice is even more expensive than usual. Many dogs are frightened to lose all their fortune. Instead of just watching bones go down the drain, Xsara decides to take her fate into her own paws.
Blog action day 2008 is fighting global poverty by raising collective awareness in the blogosphere: Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world
Last weekend #bcv08 took place at HP headquarters in Vienna. The weekend was incredibly intense, special kudos go out to all the guys from Bratislava who came to join us. We're thinking about a bi-city barcamp, a (really slow) ship might make a great location. The two cities are so close, it's time to start connecting!
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…over any other blog catalogue. These guys offer very good value for very little money, considering the popularity of the site. Some of my blogs have been listed for quite a while now, and I like the looks and usability of my blog catalogue profile page. Instead of trying to spam as many irrelevant directories as possible, bloggers are much better off concentrating on a handful of important dirs, and bc is definitely one of them.
Today I became a “supporter”: for 6$ a month bc offers a pretty impressive range of feats: supports receive a special profile icon, geta beta access to all new features and surf a completely ad-free site. Any freeware adblocker can do that as well, but not if you're on a public computer.
I can almost hear your thoughts – nice, but why should I pay for this? Okay, here's the two killer features: first of all, donors are able to integrate their other social media profiles and leverage their catalogue presence by doing so. Currently only twitter is supported, but Digg, Delicious, last.fm and others communities will follow in the near future. And finally, here's the juicy part: bc offers increased visibility, or in their words:
As a premium member your blog will be prominently displayed on our homepage, helping you get the exposure your blog deserves!
There's also a weekly snapshot update (a recurring task that bc should do for every users anyways, as it's in their own interest) or you might wanna spend some more money: an additional business model enables users to rent sponsored category links, the prices vary depending on the demand, but start as low as 8$ per month. Recently, Jeremy did an interview with one of the bc founders on these listings and on their newly launched social search. The reason why the made their prices so cheap is that they hope to make a lot of people use the premium services – at least in my case that worked quite well. I think this longtail-business-model is a lot smarter than high-prize premium placements and it shows that a good longtail site (containing no pr0n) *can* indeed be monetized.
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If donating some money for enhanced exposure in the bigges US blog catalogue (we're talking pagerank 7 here) sound like a good deal to you, simple login and chose “donate” in the account-menu. No subscription fees, just chose the time span (starting form one month), pay via Paypal and you're all set.
Yup, there was a pagerank update this weekend which showed a couple of very interesting tendencies: Google is putting even more focus on the update cycles of a given page, gets stricter with domain pagerank but gives away a lot more juice for deeplinks. Incoming links are of course still the most important factor, but sadly Xsara has been relying too much on good reputation…
While US, Indian and Australian users are still able to fully use twitter's great SMS features, European twitter fans dearly miss the fastest and most direct way to receive updates, a proven system that even works with a 10 year old mobile. I was pretty shocked about the seemingly impossible mission to find a partner for the European market, as one would guess that players like T-Mobile should actually be pretty interested in hugging twitter closely. And I don't believe that a few cosmetic design touches will make up for missing SMS support. I hope that twitter finds a way to enable short message service usage in Europe again, but on the other hand that's the best market-entry point for competitors, as long as they are able to offer SMS integration.
There's no doubt I like the new design – no major surprises in here, just a few investments into the future:
The most significant change you'll notice on the logged-in homepage (/home) is that we've moved the tabs that were on the top of the timeline to the right sidebar. We did this for a couple reasons. For one thing, it makes them larger targets and easier to access. But more importantly, it was an investment in the future. We plan to have more tabs, and we'd run out of room putting them along the top. This was the driving factor for this redesign, but you won't see all the benefits until a future release (hopefully, very soon!).
The completely unnecessary archive tab has been removed (finally – it showed exactly the same tweets that are listed on the personal profile page), some more Ajax is supposed to speed up page loading and the customizable design editor has evolved, featuring a couple of standard templates. The “fave” and “archive” icons have not disappeared completely, but they only become visible now when the mouse pointer hovers a tweet.
Like most power tweeters, I don't care much about those things – I don't know a single heavy user who is actually using the web interface, so the look of the skin is not really a big topic here. There's a large number of clients (from iPhone to Linux) available, and brilliant little pieces of software like Twhirl make twittering a lot more fun. I'm really curious about the new features, and I'm pretty sure the next release will not just be cosmetic one.
btw: Friendfeed bought some new clothes as well.
This week Xsara is making an important experience the hard way: even in the world of SEO dog enterprises, human ressource planning turns out to be a crucial factor in business success!
Yup, it's true. Of course a lot of my friends asked me, why I'm leaving such a great opportunity behind: Big G gives me everything I need free of charge. Unfortunately, I do not work at the headquarters, I'm just a simple member of the data collection department, and I'm working from home.
And that's where all the trouble began: I was working part-time, and I did a lot of projects besides my Google job. And when the money started rolling in, the trouble began: soon I found out, that G is a pretty greedy employer. They're generous with the freebies and all that, but in return they ask a lot back. I know I run just a tiny business compared to this multi-national corporation, but I still feel very uncomfortoble about giving them insight into every single one of my projects. There are a couple of sites I run for my customers, and there are even more domains which I run for my own purposes, which are quite diversified but all end up in the idea of bringing some cash home. My business techniques proved quite succesfull so far, and I'm not willing to lose income streams by offering Google full insight into what I use as an alternative for Adwords, to name just one example.
Neither am I too happy about the idea of sharing all my linkbuilding techniques with Google or even all my customer data – this would even conflict with my standard NDA by the way. So there's only one happy end to this relation.
I'm leaving. We spent some fun times together, now it's time to move on: no more Google Analytics on datadirt.
If you considering doing the same, you should definitely take a look at John Andrews great posting on this topic!
Image Credits: K
Every SEO knows that from time to time you gotta spice things a up a little bit. Xsara is no exception… especially since she has discovered the full marketing potential of DogBook: “I especially dig the apps that make me receive bones on a daily basis”, she says. “I never seem to be able to digg the ones I hid in the ground the day before!”
Today I got invited for an interesting new facebook group: it's all about a so called Jesus: he's a guy invented by some antichrists with the sole intention to mis-credit our true one and only saviour, Lord Jeebus Chuck Norris. So repent, SINNERS – and never forget what Jack Donaghue said about Irish catholics on 30 rock: “There's always the crusing guilt!” On the facebook group page it says:
JESUS save SINNERS.
JESUS told us about LOVE.
JESUS told us about TOLERANCE.
JESUS told us to HELP the others.
JESUS told us about PEACE.
JESUS told us about FREEDOM.
JESUS told us about FORGIVENESS…
lets go this way together.
But while Jesus is walking on water, Chuck Norris is walking on Jesus. Or swimming through land. So shouldn't the intro rather say:
CHUCK NORRIS is his own SON.
CHUCK NORRIS punishes SINNERS.
CHUCK NORRIS told us about MARTIAL ARTS.
CHUCK NORRIS counted to INFINITY. twice.
CHUCK NORRIS told us to SMASH THE FACES of others.
CHUCK NORRIS told us about the dangers of PEACE.
CHUCK NORRIS is FREEDOM.
CHUCK NORRIS reminded us that FORGIVENESS is for pussies…
lets go his way together.
Who let the dogs out? It's happening again! Google, the old dog catcher, doesn't like sold links at all, so Xsara has to cover her trails. But there's something she might have overlooked…
