All of a sudden the previously full feed from Techcrunch has moved to a part feed (click image for larger shot)…is this an accident or a deliberate move? Will Scoble and others who hate part feeds now boycott Techcrunch? Developing… 🙂
Tags: Techcrunch, Scoble
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.
So I finally got my hands on a very nice, HD Dobly Surround Sound Copy of Jericho. As per Fridays post, no comment as to how 🙂
General thoughts. Not bad, not bad indeed. I can’t get she who must be obeyed to watch it though because the premise of the show is too dark for her….which conversely which is why I was drawn to watch it….after all, watching television shows is not something I do a lot of.
The first episode naturally introduces the characters and sets up the premise of the entire series, that somehow the entirety of the United States has been wiped off the map by nuclear warfare with the except of this small hick town in Kansas (somewhere over the rainbow??)…which the show notes suggest is done via terrorism, and although theoretically exploding a nuclear war head or two in various cities throughout the United States wouldn’t be overly challenging to a terrorist, destroying the whole country is a bit far fetched….but I digress, because this is pretty much it so far. TV and Radio is knocked off the air when the bombs go off, which makes sense, after all the electromagnetic forces of such an explosion would knock out such transmissions, but oddly the power goes out some time later….that part makes no sense at all. The towns folk try to contact the outside world…and cant contact anyone. Stupid really: surely satellites of some sort would still be working, but even if we take modern communications away, haven’t they ever heard of Short Wave? If no one else was out there at all, they wouldn’t be alive because the world as we know it would have ceased to exist.
We leave the first episode with the towns folk going home for the evening after fighting amongst each other for petrol (gas) and the local petrol station…which is again odd given modern bowsers rely on power for their pumping process…so how come they were working if the power was off?.
So will I watch next week. Yes.
Overall rating 6.5/10
Looks like a promising drama in the “what if” premise of other quality shows such as Sliders 🙂
Tags: Jericho, Channel Ten, CBS
All for funny money of course 🙂
Michael over at the Solostream blog posts that the NY Times is looking for a WordPress developer. As much as it’s nice to know that even a huge MSM company like the NY Times group is using WordPress, the criteria is a bit rough, in particular “2-3 years experience developing and maintaining WordPress blogs”. That would mean you’d have to have started developing for WordPress prior to September 2004. Given WordPress didn’t really take off in a huge way prior to the MT 3.0 launch in mid 2004 it’s pushing things, and even looking at the Whois record for WordPress, the domain was only registered in March 2003…ie, WordPress itself is only 3 1/2 years old! Getting someone with 3 years experience is well….a very big ask indeed 🙂
Techcrunch reviews Zecco. WTF? God help us that there’s a startup with a business plan that actually might meet an unmet niche….oh no, because Techcrunch would much rather hype flash in the pan over capitalised and business plan free startups that create solutions for problems that don’t exist.
But probably more seriously here, who at Zecco doesn’t Mike Arrington like? Is there some past history here? after all, given the usual gushing reviews we normally get, this one is cold and calculated. Sure, they’ve got the Neil Kjeldsen is an expert disclaimer out front, but seriously can we trust someone with a history with paid brokers to be positive about a threat to their industry + this would have had to have been signed off up the line prior to publication as well.
Tags: zecco
Interesting post at Techcrush, a Web 2.0 review site:
We put down our pencils here at the Crush-Room for the next days due to possible legal issues. Please stay with us, we will see how things are going to work out.
Legal issues? we’ll the only possible person who could have legal issues with the site would be Mike Arrington, and it would be related to the name of the site, presuming that Arrington’s TechCrunch is a trade marked name. Now before everyone jumps up and down and says that it’s fair game legally because the name may well infringe on Arrington’s trademark, isn’t Web 2.0 suppose to be about being inclusive? Sure, the name similarity is there, but it’s hardly a major Techcrunch competitor, and we’re hardly going to mix up Techcrush with Techcrunch now are we? Story I guess is….developing 🙂
Update: Tony from Deep Jive Interests (via the comments) points to this comment on his blog where it would seem Mike Arrington confirms that he would be behind the C&D/ legal action against Techcrush. Mike can blame lawyers all he wants, at the end of the day he’s the one who says yes or no.
Tags: Techcrunch, Techcrush
Last night was the debut episode of Jericho, the new American series based around an end of the world sort of scenario…and a series that for once we haven’t got to wait 6-9 months to see after its debuted in the States..indeed we got to see it 12 hours after it’s US debut.
I’ve got no idea whether it’s good or not, but having held a long morbid fascination with end of the world tales since my youth, I wanted to check it out. But here’s the catch, I was out when it was on last night. But being the dutiful (ok, occasional) TV watcher that I am, I bought up the TV guide on my Windows XP MCE box and clicked on Jericho to record it before I left. So I get home late last night and think to myself…hmmm, I might start watching what I’ve recorded.
What do I get?
David bloody Tench.
Apparently at the last minute Channel Ten decided to dump Tench to 9:30pm and run Jericho at 8:30pm (a word to the wise, Channel 10 should just dump Tench altogether). Unfortunately because there still isn’t a legal, or official EPG available for MCE and Tivo style boxes here in Australia, my EPG provider didn’t get the update.
OK, I thought to myself, all is not lost, after all CBS is offering re-runs of shows on it’s site, I’ll go over there to watch it.
Click on the link, get some ads running….and running, maybe 3 minutes of ads…and then: buzzzzzzzzz. CBS won’t show the episode to people outside of the United States!
Channel 10 and CBS: you suck, and you wonder why people download shows from bittorrent. Oddly enough there were 4 different recordings of the Jericho first release on Torrentspy today…not that I’d download anything like that of course 😉
Tags: Jericho