China Attempted To Blind U.S. Satellites With Laser: Defense News.com

If China has indeed fired lasers at US Satellites, then wouldn’t this be normally considered an act of war?

If the US is indeed turning a blind eye to this, then what else is the US Government not sharing?

Interesting interview between John Battelle and Matt Cutts. What I don’t get is the fact that Cutt’s goes on about W3W potentially breaching Google’s webmaster guidelines when he himself has previously said you shouldn’t worry about the search engines with your page, just your readers. It’s one of the reasons I no longer use link condoms in the comments. Aside from the fact that using link condoms punishes legitimate commenters, Matt Cutts’ own advice is don’t worry about the search engines…so I don’t, and there’s no link condoms here…so where is the line, after all, how can you have it both ways?

Tags: John Battelle, Matt Cutts

I listened to a podcast today between Scott Boulch (mentioned yesterday) and a chap by the name of John Jonas. Can’t say I’ve heard of him before, but got to say, here’s a man who talks my language. He’s got two sites, his personal blog, and What’s Crap and What’s Not, a review site covering all the latest in ebooks and Adsense/ make money programs. Suffice to say he won’t be on Joel Comm’s Christmas card list this year…or a whole pile of other people’s either for that matter. Worth a look.

Interesting figures from the China Daily: 34 million blogs in China, but 70% haven’t been updated in over a month. 17 million bloggers in China. 75 million Chinese read blogs (for memory there’s about 110 million people on the internet in China, so thats a big figure).

Technorati tracks approx 50 million blogs. Still don’t believe me that the sum total of the blogosphere is a whole lot bigger than what Technorati tracks?!

Nice review of Bittorrent sites over at this blog (no idea whether it has a name or not…?!) (via Slashdot). I’ve never heard of a couple of the sites, in particular the top ranked BT Junkie. Worth a look.

Tags: Bittorrent

For those of you new to duncanriley.com, or who haven’t followed my ramblings since the Blog Herald days, I like to read and subscribe to ebook gurus. Most of them are completely and utterly full of sh*t, but I’ve always found them interesting from a marketing perspective.

But I digress once again, because for once in my life…ok, I exaggerate, for the first time in a while I’ve actually stumbled across an free ebook offering I do care to recommend big time! Miracles do happen!

Check out Scott Boulch’s free Adsense is Dead, and the follow up Life after Adsense, both available on the same link (note: affiliate links, I get 50c per download if you download them prior to 7:40pm US CST 26 Sep 06…but hey, it’s 50c, I’m not going to get rich out of this 🙂 ).

I’d recommend reading them both.

Sure, I know why Boulch is offering these ebooks for free…he wants to build a list. You know what, he’s entitled to off of these ebooks. For once I can say I totally enjoyed the content.

In Adsense is Dead he talks about the changes at Adwords that mean that Adwords clients now pay a whole lot less for non-search Adwords traffic. If you’ve got Adsense on your blogs you would have noticed this. Adsense returns have dropped…there’s no question about it.

Is Adsense dead? I don’t believe it is fully…but in my opinion it’s not something you should be basing a business on as a sole source of income. Indeed, it should be a supplement to other advertising, not the main focus.

There’s one particular part of the book that made me smile big time. It reads as follows:

Most internet markets started out by selling a legitimate product or service to a legitimate customer over the internet.

But things have changes. Nowadays, most internet markets sell “make money crap” to other internet marketers.

That’s Digital Incest!

(note, his emphasis, not mine).

Here’s a guy that speaks the truth, which is probably why other ebook gurus have come out so against this ebook.

The book goes on to explain how basically all but a few people will make serious money from Adsense…it’s good reading, sensible and logical stuff.

In the second book, Life after Adsense, he talks about affiliate opportunities, in particular the ability to deliver CPA (cost per action) traffic using Adwords. Now of course, you don’t have to use Adwords for this, but the fundamentals of what he is saying is clear. Affiliate programs, those Amazon 96 ideas are back in a big way. Affiliate returns have progressed a lot since then….

I could ramble on all day (hey! I’m being good, my rambling is under control here at duncanriley.com…mostly)….but do yourself a favour and take a look. I may not agree with everything he writes 100%, but it’s great to get a different view on things without someone just trying to flog yet another made for adsense idea on you.

A note if you’ve come here to duncanriley.com due to receiving spam. It isn’t me. I’ve got a catch all on duncanriley.com for incoming email, but aside from one email address there isn’t any others being used. Please don’t send me abusive emails or remove requests, simply, someone is spoofing @duncanriley.com email addresses and sending out rubbish. Think about it some more, if I was going to send spam, which is illegal anyway, would I do it from an email address that included my own name?

Tags: Spam

I was sitting here thinking to myself hmmm…I haven’t posted anything here in over 2 days…news wise it’s been really quite, and with the golden child at home recovering from a tonsillectomy I’ve not been 100% in front of my computer either…indeed, I thought I might write a post about how quite it’s been news wise this week, and then I read this.

Looks like Martin’s sold ePublishingDaily, or atleast the IP developed behind the scenes anyway. Great stuff Martin. I wonder as to whom though,my first guess is Yaro Starak, but after that it’s needles in the haystack guessing. Developing….

Monday morning sucks, and yet it’s good all at the same time.

There’s usually nothing much good to read in my Bloglines subscriptions, and that sucks, because it’s still Sunday night in the States.

But the fact that I’ve got nothing much to read is actually a good thing because it frees up time to do other things, like to write posts about Monday Morning because there isn’t much else to write about this morning.

Conversely Saturday morning sucks as well. Its Friday night in the States and the blogosphere is always busy on a Friday, and yet I don’t work full time on the weekend. It’s family time. It’s time for she who must be obeyed to force me to clean the house…and she has to force me, I despise cleaning. Perhaps one day I’ll be rich and famous, or even have a regular income again, and I’ll be able to get a cleaner in. We use to have cleaner come in once a week to do all the stuff I hate doing, like mopping the floors, scrubbing the toilets etc.., and then I went into the full time blogging game and we had to discontinue the service, it wasn’t economically sound to keep her on. Touch wood that this might change again in the future.