GigaGamez reports on people trading PS3s for Wiis. Hilarious. I’ve been away from my Wii for over a week now, and I’m missing it already. Wii games are still as rare as hens teeth. I managed to pick up the last copy of the Sponge Bob Square Pants Wii game from JB HiFi at the Essendon DFO just before Christmas. Every where you go it’s the same, half a dozen titles, maybe a few more if you’re lucky. Some one should call the ACCC on EB games, disgusting conduct, they put titles on the shelf but when you go to buy them they don’t have any in stock, and it’s the same in every single EB store, both at home on the other side of the country (Bunbury) and in the various outlets in Melbourne as well. I haven’t tried again today to buy anything, but I wonder if the often promised “we’ll have them in stock after Christmas” was true. Home in a week, just wondering whether I should pick up a new Wii title or actually finish Call of Duty 3 first 🙂

Steve Rubel reports on Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal writing an Op-Ed piece stating that bloggers [are] fools that are read by imbeciles then continues that bloggers “ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.” Yikes. Some one forgot to take their happy pills this morning. It’s just like 2004, when the last holdouts from the MSM were taking ever more personal potshots at bloggers and blogging as they saw the methodology that had served their careers, established literally over hundreds of years, change before their very eyes. Indeed, in the finest tradition of insult hurling journalists, those luddites who are so weak in their prose that they are unable to construct a reasonable and well written argument without resulting to insult and vulgarity, let me respond as one blogger and blog reader who you, Mr Rago, believe to be both a fool and an imbecile:get f*cked c*nt (pardon the language, but to communicate with f*ckwit journalists it helps to curse like a drunken sailor). Neither I, nor my readers, nor the very fine men and women of Australia, the United States or the rest of world for that matter who read blogs or blog themselves are collectively either imbeciles or fools. Sure, some of them may be, the law of statistics over such a large sample group would make this a given, but simply your insults have as much validity as calling all African American’s criminals, jewish people money hungry, or Muslims terrorists. Indeed, if you’d made such generalizations about any of the 3 groups I just mentioned in the State in which I am currently visiting, you would end up in jail. In your case, one can only hope that your employers see the stupidity of your ways and show you what you should indeed be shown: the door.

Tags: Joseph Rago, WSJ

A week in owning a Nintendo Wii, and all is good. I’ve bowled a 180, my son still loves Cars, and all is good in the world.

In the marketplace, the Wii has been totally successful in Australia. I’ve not seen any sales data yet, but you literally can’t buy one in Bunbury, Western Australia, the shops stocking it have all sold out, and every single one of them has told me that there not expecting another shipment until after Christmas. The supply problem though not only extends to the console, it’s become close to impossible to purchase all bar half a dozen Wii console titles in this neck of the woods as well. I went to purchase Need for Speed Carbon and Spounge Bob Square Pants today, Target and Big W didn’t have any, but EB had them on the shelf, yae I thought to myself, until I got to the counter and the young kid serving couldn’t find the Discs. Eventually his supervisor turned up and told him to tell me (all in front of me, rather rudely) that they didn’t have them in stock. After Christmas I was told. EB had about 5 titles in stock, and not many of them, Big W had 3, Target had maybe 6 or 7, none of them titles I was particularly interested in buying. The irony, at EB at least, was on the front counter, where they were selling some sort of Wii game guide for $10 that talked about over 70 titles being available. If they are available, they aren’t here. Much like the US and UK, it looks like Nintendo can’t supply the Australian market well enough. Can’t win them all I guess, but at least in Nintendo’s case, you’re better off not being able to meet demand as opposed to not being able to sell units.

Tags: Nintendo Wii

A nice little personal victory over night in my Click Arbitrage experiment. It looks like taking the focus of the content network with Adwords and doubling my spend in search is paying off. It’s nothing too big, certainly money wise any way, but last night (we’ll Wednesday US time) for my $30 US spent in advertising I saw a $34 US dollar return. Peanuts I know, but it’s the first time I’ve managed to get to roughly even in the arbitrage game. It’s also off a basis of only a small number of clicks, my average CPC is sitting at $2, putting me between 3-9 for the variations on the search. I literally did 15 clicks to get that $34, so it’s a small statistical pot. I’ve cranked up the budget for the next 24 hours so I’ll see how it goes. What I have learnt so far is that you do need a lot of patience with these sorts of campaigns, I’ve tweaked, changed, fiddled. You also need to spend money to make money. I started at $10 a day to see what so of ads people clicked on, I cranked it up to $30 a day, and now I’ve set it to $100 a day. $100 a day is a fair bit to burn on Adwords, but I want to give it a shot a see what the return is like. Crossing fingers.

The SMH reports on a significant statistical shift in gun related deaths in Australia after the introduction of stricter gun laws in Australia, and the gun buy back held at the same time.

Some readers may be surprised to learn that despite my libertarian capitalist leanings, I despise guns, and I’ve always thought that gun laws in the US where bizarre at best. Indeed, I’d positively note that the District of Columbia is currently challenging the definition under law of the Second Ammendment, arguing that it doesn’t allow every man and his dog in the US to own a gun, which is a positve.

But I digress, the statistics show a direct connection between gun ownership and gun related crimes.

Titled Australia’s 1996 Gun Law Reforms: Faster Falls in Firearm Deaths, Firearm Suicides and a Decade without Mass Shootings, finds that in the 18 years before the gun buyback there were an average of 492 firearm suicides a year.

After the introduction of the buyback scheme, that figure dropped to 247 in the seven years for which reliable figures are available.

The only people who should own guns are the police, armed forces, legitimate sportsman or those who require guns for their work (such and Roo shooters, Vermin shooters (dogs, cats, rabbits etc.)). How any society can endorse gun ownership in the average home is beyond me. I do know, and do believe, that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but it does make it a fair bit harder when they don’t have easy access to a gun. Statistics don’t lie.

One of my little distractions this past couple of weeks has been to dabble into the world of click arbitrage, ie: advertising via Google Adwords to doorway pages that lead to a CPA affiliate site. I’ve not put an awful lot of effort into it, but I have run a couple of ads to see what would happen. Suffice to say I’ve lost money, but not a lot (under $50). I spent some more time today looking at the results, seeing why some things were working and why others weren’t. My biggest mistake: allowing too many of the ads to run on the content (ie Adsense) network. It’s scary, but whilst there was a lot more clicks in from sites running Adsense, the results just don’t add up. Search results are ten, maybe twenty times more likely to result in an action (and therefore payment to me) as opposed to content result. My new tweak: I’ve doubled the maximum bid for a spot in search to hopefully get my ads up a bit higher (they were averaging spot 9), and I’ve cut my spend on the content network to 10 cents. I’ll see how the results work out, but I’m thinking that I’ll either cut the bid on the content network to 2c (or what ever the minimum is) or see if I can exclude my adds from it all together in the next couple of days. I’m by no means Mr. Experience when it comes to buying ads from Adwords, but I can even more so now understand the theory of those stating that Adsense is dead: when your looking for a CPA return from your ad, the content network simply isn’t a good buy.

One last tweak: I’ve now time limited the ads as well to times I think would be key times for people looking for the service.

Of course if you’re interested in giving Adwords a shot, click on the button (affiliate link). I think I get a couple of dollars for each sign up, it will all go towards buying more ads I suspect 🙂

I was surfing a totally unrelated story on the BBC website when I stumbled on this: Brits Abroad ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú a comprehensive guide to where Britons live around the world.From the site:

“An estimated 5.5m British people live permanently abroad ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äú almost one in 10 of the UK population”

And where do most of them live? We’ll it would suprise no one in say Joondalup or Rockingham in Perth that the answer is Australia:

They’ve always said that the British have good taste 🙂

The NY Times reports on Nielsen picking up major sites, including Entrepreneur.com cheating on stats by using pop ups. Even the big guys try and cheat on stats.

Terrible news overnight that Star C Foster has passed away. Star was one of the first contributors to The Blog Herald, and although I only knew her from our email correspondence, her writing spoke volumes for the wonderful person she was. She only contributed to The Blog Herald for a short time before moving on to bigger and better things, including gigs for the Gothamist Network, Shiny Media, and a whole pile of other sites as well. Sarcasmo’s Corner was one of the first blogs I ever read on a regular basis, and on it you could see her personality shining through. My deepest sympathies to her family and friends, she’ll be missed by more people than you’ll ever realise. Indeed, I’m not sure exactly when she started blogging, but I’d think she would be pretty close to being a pioneer, certainly she was there in 2002, and was probably blogging longer than that. I say in all sincerity that I hope she truly does Rest in Peace, as someone who gave so much joy to others should surely deserve to, although it goes without saying that she was taken from this world far too early, and far too young. We won’t forget you Star.

Tags: Star C Foster

OK, my second post on what will be probably plenty on the Nintendo Wii, if you’re not interested by all means tune out, but I like to share this stuff. Indeed, the only time I can’t share things is where there’s a legal agreement saying I can’t 🙂

Anyhow, just saw another benefit from the Wii, and that’s as a workout. Played a 3 round match of Wii Boxing, and as I type this the swear is literally dripping from me (ok, so it’s hot here, but I have got a AC on full). It literally was a workout. Throwing your arms around in the air does that. I won in the third 30 seconds in with a KO. Wii really does have the potential to throw the hole couch potato generation on its head, you’ve got to be standing to play some of these games, and in the case of Boxing you’ve really got to be moving, and quick. Sure, it might not be as many calories as a bike ride or a walk, but it’s a vast improvement over sitting on a couch.

Tags: Nintendo Wii