Category — Random

All of this hype with blogging is starting to spread to most of the major media outlets. Is this good or bad? Well, only time will tell. Personally, I don’t think this is such a great idea.

I realize that social media is the “wave of the future”, but the whole basis for most established traditional media outlets is their integrity and quality. When major media outlets such as my local media outlet, The Indianapolis Star, try to become “social” then it really doesn’t work out as well as you would expect.

Go to IndyStar.com and check out any article, like this one, and read some of the comments that have been left regarding the article. This is just downright wrong, and I think some of these people need to be educated before posting. Sites like IndyStar.com need to disable comments or start heavily moderating them. It’s quite obvious they just want to get people involved like bloggers do, but they must realize they cater to a completely different audience. They cater to the general public while blogs and bloggers cater to more tech savvy users that are capable of using search, like Google, to find what they are looking for.

There is a lot of great things that the Internet and bloggers have which major news companies don’t. But if major outlets are going to start mimicking - Please do NOT allow for commenting. It’s just going to be a flame war between hundreds of thousands of un-educated people with opinions.

Hello everyone..

I apologize for wasting your time, but wanted to point something out to all of you in this post.

If you ever want to start a company, and then in your first year you receive several billion dollar offers, then I highly recommend you take them.  You can do a lot of good with that money.  Don’t pull the old “I’m doing this right thing, sorry, I don’t need the money” crap -  Don’t pull a “Zuckerberg” by turning down the moneyon something that has no sustainability or future.  I mean, seriously… I was probably one of the first people on Facebook back in the day and I saw this coming all along.

Why Are They Going to Fall?

1. Their revenue model sucks.  How are they going to make any money to justify all of their hype?
2. Their costs are way too high.  Seriously, do you know what it takes to run a website like that?
3. People are realizing that content = money.  People make the content, and so they are one by one dropping facebook and monetizing the information they have to offer the world.  Why the hell would you help someone make money from your life, content, and information when you can do it yourself?  Seriously, think about it.  This applies to MySpace too!
4. Any time you get this many fucking college and high school kids in one place, it’s bound to be a disaster.  Drama Drama Drama…  for every couple on Facebook, one of them leaves because of drama at some point.  It’s just a matter of time before the drama affects you and drives you FAR away from FB.
5. Zuckerberg is pissing everyone on the West Coast off!  I mean, if your idea is great, but your company is failing and living off other VC’s cash, then why the hell are you walking around and talking like you have a shield around you?  I have news for Zuckerberg…  He’s pissed off the only people that can help him.. bloggers, and media.  Even Arrington is pissed off at him.  Don’t deny it Michael - He took half your staff!

Look, I’m counting the days until MZ is just another millionaire like the rest of this country.  Until then, he can have his moment… he already passed on the billion dollar offers.

This is worse than watching some retard get greedy on Deal or No Deal and have the 1 dollar box at the end.

Within the past few months, Google has made some pretty wild moves to help their advertisers get more for their money.  But are they digging their own grave by worrying too much about the advertisers than the publishers?

The short answer to this question is - Yes.

Cause & Effect (speculation):

Cause:  Google changes advertising clickable region from entire ad to only text.
Effect:  A decline of about 7% in paid-click revenues from December 2007 to January 2008.

Cause:  Google updates Adsense display URL policy.
Effect:  Unknown.  As of this post, this change has not yet taken effect.  Effective date starts in April 2008.

While Google appears to be taking steps to clean-up the paid search results and quality of clicks on their ads, it is also hurting their bottom line.

Hopefully the ad-spending will rise in line with the quality of the visitors to their websites or we (Owners of Google Stock) are in for some hard times.  I am confident that Google will recover the short-term losses, but only time will tell.  I feel Google is mandating these updates so closely together so the effects are only felt in a single fiscal quarter before showing improvements through the higher dollar demands these better quality ads will demand.

Over the weekend, I decided not to post on my blog.  I wanted to see the importance of posting regularly on my RSS Feedburner Chicklet.  To my surprise, the number went up over night last night but went down on the first day without new posts.  I am unable to draw a conclusion from this and I will try again when I have a larger amount of subscribers.

Don’t worry; I will be posting more again as of today.  I built up quite a nice list of future articles to post.

I have run several eCommerce businesses in the past.  One of the biggest problems is dealing with an open source community, paying too much for a pay cart only to find out the pay cart is based on that open commerce one that you hate, and dealing with foreign languages.  In addition to that, they all template differently, and you have limited features and functionality.

Well, say GOODBYE to all of those problems!

Say hello to Magento Commerce.  Enjoy.

I will be writing a more comprehensive piece on this software as I use it and get more in-depth with it.