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Free Safari for Windows earns Apple millions
Safari has arrived in Windows land. Wince IE7 and move over Firefox, the fastest slickest browser on earth from Apple is ready to take over the number 2 spot. Slap me upside the head that claim smells like Steve Jobs bovine fecal matter. But he has every motivation to aim high, because the FREE browser will earn his company loads of money!
Nothing in life is free, at least nothing from a big corporation. There is always some angle going on that brings in revenue without the end user immediately realising it. So how does freebie Safari, for instance, generate lucre? Easy. It has Google search built into the browser bar. That free feature generates, according to some research by this fellow, $25m a year for Apple (to use to pay the developers, presumably working for mercenarily big bucks in Cupertino.)
Free Firefox generates $50m annually for Mozilla to offset their code monkey pay roll.
In layman's terms, every time someone searches, Google make a note of it and pay Apple/ Mozilla et al a few cents. Simple economics and a win win and significant income if you can get a lot of folks using your browser.
Netting millions of new Safari users
The trojan horse is iTunes, another free software that has plenty of features to make music management a joy. It is also a free money-making ride into a billion dollar store.
Apple will be able to lump free Safari for Windows onto the 1 million daily downloads of free iTunes, and grow the user base by a couple or three. Sounds like a plan to capture a few percentile points of market share.
Blogs are free and easy to earn money from!
Related to browsers and free, I suppose a blog is another free-to-use money-maker, assuming the blog is set up to generate revenue. Adsense is free to use, but makes money for Google and bloggers. It is a good business model.
And the free funny quotes widget from The Pisstakers: quotes link to various monetized blogs, so the zero cost code being installed around the internet by bloggers should generate real money via subtle pay per click or affiliate leads. Sadly, any widget-generated visitors to my site go to a blog that has nothing to sell!
Old Safari for Mac is sooo old
Meanwhile, in typical fashion, I find myself going against the grain and saying that my old version of Apple Safari for Mac is in fact crap. I have dumped it for the nippy Camino browser, poor relation to Firefox. As Mozilla need the money more than Steve Jobs, I support my favorite free browser by using integrated search, as should you!
And thanks to John Gruber for the inspiration for this post
Do Follow, No Follow, or silly fellow?
27 May 07 Filed in: Internet
Talk about a storm in a coffee pot. Silly fellow, John Chow dot com mogul, has decided he is going to nickel and dime some of his readers with a $10 a month comments oriented scheme. He is offering commenters a backlink to his site via a Do Follow applied to any comments they leave on his site. Woo hoo say some, boo say I, wtf is a Do Follow, say many.
By default, Wordpress and many other commenting systems tell Google not to make a big deal of the links that commenters create with their names when they leave a comment ie the in-built coding says, Google, No Follow Ed, man! On the other hand, Do Follow unleashes the beast and advises Google to do something constructive with the link.
Woo hoo is what you hear from the bloggers who think it is cool to get a link to a PR6 site just for leaving a comment plus $10 in John Chow's piggy bank. And for his part, John Chow is probably thinking $10 x a large proportion of 5000 subscribers hmmmmm. $$$$$$$$. I say boo, though, along with a few others, and here is why.
I don't have a crystal ball, but if I, or you, were to advertise, "For $10 a month, post comments all over this high PR site and get a backlink every time." what would happen? Most likely scenario is, instantly a certain pool of not quite tech savvy people would go mad and trawl through my every old post leaving remarks like, "Cool, nice blog, I agree, You're a twat etc etc."
There are a couple of quick points worth making, methinks!! Content is king, and bulk commenting schemes produce crap content. Readers, as well as Google will read crap comments and make up their own mind about the quality. Net result for all concerned in the long term - not good!! The long story follows:
While the demented ones are wasting their lives commenting inanely in the hope of getting loads of link love, it is highly debatable that Google would think very highly of their comments.
Certainly a Do Follow link is going to be better (in theory) than a No Follow link , so the $10 deal appears to have a positive side, but...
But, indeed! As far as Google is concerned, compared to links in the body of a real post, these comment-based links hold marginal value from the outset. Worse than that, from a Google perspective at least, the more comments-based links (or any links for that matter) populating a page, the less value each link has. The $10 link love scheme encourages lots of people to leave lots of links, so you know the dilution process on any page is going to be major.
It also gets worse. The idea that you have a link on John Chow's homepage because you paid $10 and commented on a front page article, is false - as far as Google is concerned. Within a couple of days, the article drops off the homepage, and it loses its homepage PR. It is how it works. That article fights for its own popularity level as a standalone page. The post's new PR will invariably be less popular than the homepage that attracted you to the DoFollow offer. In the blink of a $10 transaction, your link love payback on the back of a comment binge will be majorly diluted.
Google logic, therefore, says your return on $10 a month "investment" has almost no lasting value, and the more pointless link-grabbing comments you leave, the worse it gets.
To be honest, $10 x a few thousand sounds nice, but I don't think that the return is worthwhile compensation for the repercussions of a drop in the entertainment value of a site built with long term gain in mind.
If you assume that comments are a part and parcel of the overall content of the site, you want to encourage the highest quality comments to keep rolling in. Some of the best remarks made on the Pisstakers are to be found in the comments section, so I wouldn't want to dilute their quality. But, if I gave a green light to you to spam the comments section, that part of the site would turn to rat's poo and I would expect a few readers to start complaining, "Hey Ed, your comments (ie an important part of your content) are shit, we arent commenting any more and certainly aren't reading them either." This isn't a great scenario!
Most blogs depend on a relationship, a sense of community and discussion. This is where comments play a major role in the success of a blog. John Chow is expecting advantages from a proliferation of crap content? If that is a good strategy, please don't show me a bad one, buddy. Or maybe it is all a pisstaker post ?
It could be argued that my pessimistic Do Follow for cash forecast is based purely on what I think would happen if I applied this Do Follow policy on my 200 uniques a day site. On that basis, sure, mine is not necessarily an accurate forecast of the scenario on John Chow's 4000 uniques a day site. I say otherwise, because the evidence I based my assumption on is from what I see on John Chow's own site. This Do Follow deal of his is based on an idea he already has in place, and it ain't that great at all!
To be fair, his comments section is generally vibrant and the quality of many commenters is quite good, but that is only half the story! His comments boxes are already peppered with crap, thanks to a scheme that encourages commenters to strive for Top 10 Commenter status each month. ie If you leave loads of comments, you will get one of these same Do Follow links that I am talking about now with the $10 scheme. People are leaving 100 comments a month. Feel the quality - not!
Can a variation on this comments-based theme (times 10) really improve the quality of comments / the quality of his site content / the chance of attracting more readers? I think not.
John Chow may well retract his latest experiment as another bad, sorry, "evil" idea and will carry on as before. But he may not, and certainly lots of bloggers will be tempted to give him $10 just to see what happens.
Fans of his may say I am missing the point and it is all about the numbers game ie he is evil, always pushing the envelope and the figures show his earnings are constantly rising, regardless of experiments. Maybe, but he hasn't tried charging like this before!
But maybe John Chow thinks that with such a big readership in place, eating his every word, he can get away with subtly worsening the content? Good luck trying to mask the mass of crap coming his way. The skewed mix of sponsored posts and real content is already attracting adverse comments, but hey, income is up so who cares!!
To reiterate, the evidence isn't great if you expect appealing comments (ie more new reader bait) to rise from incentives to mass comment.
As a blog owner offering the Do Follow service correctly, ie as part of your friendly helping hand to people who contribute a realistic number of meaningful comments to your site, go for it. It is a good use of the tool.
As a blog owner offering this type of inverted cash for comments strategy to readers, I would reflect and quickly draft a backtrack post - sorry this was a bad experiment , we are stopping it / radically over-hauling it now. Of course I could be a greedy short termist dummy, take the $10 now and pray I can blag my way out of it once I have earned a few bucks.
And finally, as a site visitor contemplating handing over $10 to spam comments boxes galore, I suggest you act like a wise fellow and do not follow the DO Follow for $10 scheme. Put your $10 away and spend 5 minutes answering my Blog Interrogation - an easier and far more constructive way to create content and gain some readership. Or write a post on your own site that others find worth linking to. Anything but inane comments on someone else's site. Proper content is king!
And thanks to Phishie for alerting me to this original story. His is almost the sole external link on this page so far. Almost pure link love, man.
What's a Do Follow, dude?
By default, Wordpress and many other commenting systems tell Google not to make a big deal of the links that commenters create with their names when they leave a comment ie the in-built coding says, Google, No Follow Ed, man! On the other hand, Do Follow unleashes the beast and advises Google to do something constructive with the link.
Woo hoo is what you hear from the bloggers who think it is cool to get a link to a PR6 site just for leaving a comment plus $10 in John Chow's piggy bank. And for his part, John Chow is probably thinking $10 x a large proportion of 5000 subscribers hmmmmm. $$$$$$$$. I say boo, though, along with a few others, and here is why.
Do Follow craps on content
I don't have a crystal ball, but if I, or you, were to advertise, "For $10 a month, post comments all over this high PR site and get a backlink every time." what would happen? Most likely scenario is, instantly a certain pool of not quite tech savvy people would go mad and trawl through my every old post leaving remarks like, "Cool, nice blog, I agree, You're a twat etc etc."
There are a couple of quick points worth making, methinks!! Content is king, and bulk commenting schemes produce crap content. Readers, as well as Google will read crap comments and make up their own mind about the quality. Net result for all concerned in the long term - not good!! The long story follows:
Look at Do Follow from a Google standpoint
While the demented ones are wasting their lives commenting inanely in the hope of getting loads of link love, it is highly debatable that Google would think very highly of their comments.
Certainly a Do Follow link is going to be better (in theory) than a No Follow link , so the $10 deal appears to have a positive side, but...
But, indeed! As far as Google is concerned, compared to links in the body of a real post, these comment-based links hold marginal value from the outset. Worse than that, from a Google perspective at least, the more comments-based links (or any links for that matter) populating a page, the less value each link has. The $10 link love scheme encourages lots of people to leave lots of links, so you know the dilution process on any page is going to be major.
It also gets worse. The idea that you have a link on John Chow's homepage because you paid $10 and commented on a front page article, is false - as far as Google is concerned. Within a couple of days, the article drops off the homepage, and it loses its homepage PR. It is how it works. That article fights for its own popularity level as a standalone page. The post's new PR will invariably be less popular than the homepage that attracted you to the DoFollow offer. In the blink of a $10 transaction, your link love payback on the back of a comment binge will be majorly diluted.
Google logic, therefore, says your return on $10 a month "investment" has almost no lasting value, and the more pointless link-grabbing comments you leave, the worse it gets.
Look at Do Follow from a site owner's standpoint
To be honest, $10 x a few thousand sounds nice, but I don't think that the return is worthwhile compensation for the repercussions of a drop in the entertainment value of a site built with long term gain in mind.
If you assume that comments are a part and parcel of the overall content of the site, you want to encourage the highest quality comments to keep rolling in. Some of the best remarks made on the Pisstakers are to be found in the comments section, so I wouldn't want to dilute their quality. But, if I gave a green light to you to spam the comments section, that part of the site would turn to rat's poo and I would expect a few readers to start complaining, "Hey Ed, your comments (ie an important part of your content) are shit, we arent commenting any more and certainly aren't reading them either." This isn't a great scenario!
Most blogs depend on a relationship, a sense of community and discussion. This is where comments play a major role in the success of a blog. John Chow is expecting advantages from a proliferation of crap content? If that is a good strategy, please don't show me a bad one, buddy. Or maybe it is all a pisstaker post ?
John Chow is expanding on a bad idea of his!
It could be argued that my pessimistic Do Follow for cash forecast is based purely on what I think would happen if I applied this Do Follow policy on my 200 uniques a day site. On that basis, sure, mine is not necessarily an accurate forecast of the scenario on John Chow's 4000 uniques a day site. I say otherwise, because the evidence I based my assumption on is from what I see on John Chow's own site. This Do Follow deal of his is based on an idea he already has in place, and it ain't that great at all!
His current Do Follow plan
To be fair, his comments section is generally vibrant and the quality of many commenters is quite good, but that is only half the story! His comments boxes are already peppered with crap, thanks to a scheme that encourages commenters to strive for Top 10 Commenter status each month. ie If you leave loads of comments, you will get one of these same Do Follow links that I am talking about now with the $10 scheme. People are leaving 100 comments a month. Feel the quality - not!
Can a variation on this comments-based theme (times 10) really improve the quality of comments / the quality of his site content / the chance of attracting more readers? I think not.
John Chow may well retract his latest experiment as another bad, sorry, "evil" idea and will carry on as before. But he may not, and certainly lots of bloggers will be tempted to give him $10 just to see what happens.
Fans of his may say I am missing the point and it is all about the numbers game ie he is evil, always pushing the envelope and the figures show his earnings are constantly rising, regardless of experiments. Maybe, but he hasn't tried charging like this before!
But maybe John Chow thinks that with such a big readership in place, eating his every word, he can get away with subtly worsening the content? Good luck trying to mask the mass of crap coming his way. The skewed mix of sponsored posts and real content is already attracting adverse comments, but hey, income is up so who cares!!
Do Follow or No Follow, that is the final question
To reiterate, the evidence isn't great if you expect appealing comments (ie more new reader bait) to rise from incentives to mass comment.
As a blog owner offering the Do Follow service correctly, ie as part of your friendly helping hand to people who contribute a realistic number of meaningful comments to your site, go for it. It is a good use of the tool.
As a blog owner offering this type of inverted cash for comments strategy to readers, I would reflect and quickly draft a backtrack post - sorry this was a bad experiment , we are stopping it / radically over-hauling it now. Of course I could be a greedy short termist dummy, take the $10 now and pray I can blag my way out of it once I have earned a few bucks.
And finally, as a site visitor contemplating handing over $10 to spam comments boxes galore, I suggest you act like a wise fellow and do not follow the DO Follow for $10 scheme. Put your $10 away and spend 5 minutes answering my Blog Interrogation - an easier and far more constructive way to create content and gain some readership. Or write a post on your own site that others find worth linking to. Anything but inane comments on someone else's site. Proper content is king!
And thanks to Phishie for alerting me to this original story. His is almost the sole external link on this page so far. Almost pure link love, man.
Spring widget for CDP
09 May 07 Filed in: Spring widget
Another week long exposé of a humor blog, this time CDP.com, offering a mix of posts on entertainment and personal stuff. Plenty of sharp images too. All this, courtesy of Feedburner.
Digg HD DVD mob aren't so pathetic after all
03 May 07 Filed in: Internet
Digg provoked usual on-line nonsense
In case you don't know, Digg is a killer idea for a social news site - let the readers decide what is or isn't newsworthy regardless of the credentials of the source. Vote it up, digg it down blah blah.
As usual, after reaching mega star status with millions of hits a month, a sector of the masses started to taint the dream. 15 year old Diggers took to hunting in packs, burying targetted bloggers regardless of the quality of posts; racking up some shammy status of their own as big Diggers, claiming to be important when they weren't. The usual adolescent behavior and to my mind, as an older fart, highly irritating. But oh well, they probably spend more money than me at Digg, so who am I!
The HD DVD key that changed the world
What is happening now at Digg? Initially the Digg nuts went nuts posting a single line of numbers that holds the key to decrypting the HD-DVD’s made before April 23, 2007 Woo hoo, something for free again - losers. The manufacturer wanted none of it and ordered Digg to remove the posts. Digg did.
It seems like the kids came good, though,and hats off to them for changing the world for the better, combining their democratic votes to reverse the fall-out of blatant censorship by a sponsor. Kevin Rose, Digg head honcho, re-considered his decision under the welter of protest and let the world post whatever they saw fit on this topic.
Fallout at Digg?
Some say that Digg may be going down fighting, seeing as they need sponsorship to make their business model work, and they are killing future business relationships by blatantly disregarding the wishes of a current sponsor. Maybe, maybe not.
Bob meets World makes a good point, though, that users not sponsors made Digg what it is, which indicates to me that maybe Digg per se wouldn't die, but their relationship with this particular sponsor will.
But, then there appears this Allsux post that throws more fuel on the fire and it don't sound good. Peering at the small print, I think it is saying that Digg's relationship with HD DVD will experience a high definition death and probably once the HD DVD lawyers have finished with their ass, Digg as a whole will die, regardless of how many sponsors say they are cool with running the gauntlet of the masses.
Pisstakers solution to managing the Digg drama
I reckon Digg should re-invent themselves retrospectively as a spoof news site - where you can print almost anything with little fear of legal reprisals.
If that doesn't wash, Digg should just ride the wave and announce to all sponsors current and future: You know what they say about publicity, good or bad, it gets you hits. Also, remind sponsors that they shouldn't affiliate themselves with a breaking news site if they don't want breaking news to appear on it. It is like supporting a Pepsi campaign and then racking them because their product rotted your kid's teeth.
And once Digg have suckered up, then, send HD DVD a few million bucks of venture capital money set aside for development. Just tell investors that sometimes you have to go backwards before you can go forwards!
Kevin Rose needs some gummi bears
The messengers, Digg, may be shot by these sponsors, but I will sponsor them to the tune of 1lb of gummi bears a week, if anyone would care to break the secret key to winning MyBlogLog Sunday. Publish this critical info on Digg, in fact anywhere you like (with a link back to Digg) and get Kevin Rose some free consolation candy. Not that it will ever happen, seeing as my top Digg score has been about 9.
Blogjuice - to calculate popularity or humiliation?
18 Apr 07 Filed in: Internet
Alexa relies on a dodgy tool bar used (and manipulated?) exclusively, almost, by webmasters, not real people
Technorati was gamed easily in 2004, & the 2000 bloggers trickery continues
Who are Bloglines and who cares about incoming links?
Bah humbug. Funny and popular people everywhere, enjoy your own 100% pulp, I mean Blog Juice medal, and fellow upstarts, relax!
It has been hard accepting that I languish in the nether regions of the Blog Juice funny heirarchy - but I will survive, maybe. Just throw money, that should console me.
365 ads
19 Apr 07 Filed in: Spring widget
Happy Birthday 365
All week the humorous internet marketing 356 ads blog will be featured on The Pisstakers homepage. Enjoy their funny stuff and creative marketing ideas.
All week the humorous internet marketing 356 ads blog will be featured on The Pisstakers homepage. Enjoy their funny stuff and creative marketing ideas.
Best Blog Design nomination in Bloggers Choice Awards
14 Apr 07 Filed in: Web design
Money-Making Mike picked up on my recent post and with a swoosh of the pen from Polliwogs Pond owner, Polli, it looks like the site is votable at this address.
Sweet, and let's hope the positive fall-out goes the way of the theme designer and magister, Bonsai Studio.
Quite interesting to me was the accompanying text for the nomination.
I forgot I wrote that, or did I!The Pisstakers is a multi-faceted humor blog covering web, tech, world news and quirky stories. As you can tell from the blog's name, articles are somewhat cynical, sarcastic and humorous (and have nothing to do with urine.) For the purists, content is based on genuine events and topics and never strays too far from the truth.
Pisstakers and Bloggers Choice Awards
13 Apr 07 Filed in: Blogging |Web design
Bloggers Choice Awards are like the Oscars for bloggers. To be honest, I am not a fan of the Oscars, too much glitz, not enough substance and debatable voting. When blogging is at stake, though, I thought that maybe I should peel back my cynicism of this style of competition, and get stuck into the Bloggers Choice Awards. So I did.
Best of what award section?
I maintain that at this stage of my blogging career, it is daft to try to enter as Best of...blogger in one of 29 sections, because I am not even 7 months old in bloggy years. So, to play fair, I have tried to get nominated for best blog design, the theory being, that judging for that category relies totally on the here and now, an instant impression.
With a design, there is no requirement to dive through the archives to the first post, then shoot back to the here and now to compare the consistency of writing. No need to hunt through the content looking for Best of... material to eulogise about. Just load one page and go on your gut instinct.
I am still awaiting a nominator, but when I get one, I will be glad to do my bit to further raise awareness of the many designers striving for recognition in their field of endeavor. Especially Bonsai Studio, who designed our theme.
My Best Bloggers Choice votes so far
As far as worthy Bloggers Choice Awards winners in other sections, I've been busy-ish. I did vote for Mikes money Making Mission as Best Business Blog, Polliwogs Pond is a Best Blog about Stuff winner in waiting, MyBlogLog has an outside runners-up chance at Best about Blogging, Bobbarama will do well with his best humor blog, and MyExtraLife Radio should be Best Podcast, based on the review we did of them, alone.
And I went mad and selected Wil Wheaton for best celebrity blogger. (I felt for Wil Wheaton when Diggers get thuggish with him, just for being him, and he responded with plenty of gusto.)
Talking of Oscars
The definition of Oscars is: a panel of pompous judges who waffle over lunch about what they think is the most politically correct winner.
This was never illustrated better than when El Woody Allen won best foreign film at The Spanish "Oscars" at the Santander Film Festival last year. It was so obvious he was going to be the winner when they announced the nominations. He was simply the biggest box office name, giving the competition most credibility. Shame the cynics saw straight through the strategy, and the quirky Mr Allen earned 3000 pesetas for the 3 DVDs that got sold outside the ceremony that night.
As I say, I feel a little skeptical of any Oscar-like competitions, in whatever sphere of endeavor, but in blogging, I think any good excuse for a mutual love-in, and a bit of extra publicity for the winners, is fair enough, and no harm done. Keep track of our voting.
