I finally decided to start posting to my blog with some regularity again. Whether it will last, I can’t say.
As part of the relaunch I’ve finally upgraded Wordpress to a more respectable (and secure) version, found a new theme and added some cool stuff, including OpenID support for comment posting. All the posts and comments should be intact and everything should be working properly, but random behaviour for the next few days shouldn’t be unexpected…
Okay, so it’s not quite that grand. But apparently Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are going to be using the same sitemap format some time in 2007. Google Sitemaps that is. Infoworld article.
Well it seems that PayPerPost isn’t unique as a few other people are jumping on the bandwagon.
One of the notable ones is ReviewMe from the people at TextLinkAds. Although the theory is essentially the same as PayPerPost, the implementation is different. In PPP advertisers list opportunities which bloggers can the accept. The price paid ranges from about $2.50 to $10 (with the most common being $4 or $5).
ReviewMe works the other way round. Bloggers list their blogs with a price (determined by ReviewMe) and advertisers choose which ones they want to review their product or service. The price paid is dependent on the blog (how exactly they determine I’m not sure but it seems to be some sort of PageRank, Alexa, back-links type combination) and seems to be significantly higher. Of course you’re likely to get fewer offers though.
One offer they seem to be giving to everyone is to review ReviewMe itself (eerily like this) so every blogger accepted should earn something from them. And although I didn’t look at their payout details specifically, I would guess it’s the same as TextLinkAds - at the end of the month by PayPal with no minimum (and possibly other options with a minimum or a fee).
One of the main advantages of blogs as a publishing medium is also a big disadvantage at times - the time sensitive nature. The fact that the information is about as up to the minute as you can get (in general) means blogs are a better source of news (or more importantly opinions about news) than search engine results for instance. But this means that some of your content can be come rather pointless after a short time.
Some articles are essentially timeless however. If you’re lucky and lots of people link to them you should be able to get some steady search engine traffic but people looking for something that specific aren’t likely to hang around after reading them. So FeedCycle.com have come up with a reasonably clever way of letting you push your old content but still keeping a blogesque feel to it.
The idea is to create a custom feed of a subsection of your content. The example they push a lot is a podcast “series” about the same topic, but it can be any thematically linked (and generally ordered) series of posts from your blog. When someone subscribes they get the first post in the series. The next day, they get the next post and so on until the end of the series. There is a plug-in somewhere for Wordpress that lets you mark posts as part of a series and to create navigation links to quickly get between them. Used in conjunction with this would let your users read through the whole series or just sit back and have it delivered.
Now if only I ever posted such a series…
PayPerPost are a fairly new company offering yet another revenue stream for bloggers (although for most blogs the existing ones probably aren’t earth shattering). This one’s a lot more controversial on the surface however. You get paid to write content about something specific. And you get paid quite a lot (at least in blogging revenue terms), usually about $5 per post. It has however pissed quite a few people off.
Jason, CEO of Weblogs seems to be one of the loudest. I’m going to take the wimpy way out and simply say it’s a tool with potential, that can be abused. But in the long run that’s not a problem for the blogosphere. If you destroy your own integrity by blatantly posting ads instead of actual content you will lose out as surely as if you filled the page with conventional advertising. If you don’t annoy your readers however, you will be fine. In this case it means choosing “opportunities” (that’s what PPP call them) that are actually relevant. That’s how Google AdSense came to be accepted, remember?
The following search box will return results emphasising language learning resources.
Performancing.com have just launched a new ad network type thing for bloggers. Ads are sold per blog for a flat fee per month and you get 70% of total revenue. Could be quite good.
Controversial statement? Well that’s the point. There is a hilarious article over at XML.com about the traffic advantages of controversy on blogs.
The funniest part of course is the number of comments from people who read the title of the post but not the content and just threw a normal anti-anti Linux rant. Unfortunately these things only work if you have a fair amount of traffic in the first place and I probably don’t quite qualify.
Some of you may have noticed the blog being down regularly. Well I haven’t fixed it yet. But I finally got the script to work that was supposed to restart it. I eventually diagnosed the problem as an incorrect path setting for the cron daemon. Anyway, it should now never be down for more than a few minutes.
Ooh, my host now has a referral scheme. It doesn’t seem that good for businesses but great for users since they aren’t giving money but USB pen drives. Anyway if you take up the offer on any Miniserver or dedicated server you also get 10% off.
Miniserver or Fully dedicated server.
The Miniserver is what I’m hosted on. It’s half way between virtual hosting and a dedicated server. The server is essentially partitioned across all it’s resources with each user getting a guaranteed usage depending on the number of users. Of course you usually get more than this since most users don’t use a server to it’s limits. The advantage over a dedicated server is simply the price - they start at £19.95 a month. The advantage over virtual hosting is you can do almost anything to it that you could do to a dedicated server except change the hardware or alter the kernel (they’re running Linux). You can even install a different distro on them (they come preinstalled with your choice from a small selection).
The bandwidth is unmetered, but you’re only guaranteed 1/40 of a 5Mbps line on the cheapest option (and this doesn’t allow adult sites - you need the metered option for those).
For anyone like me who needs the freedom to install software but can’t afford or justify a dedicated server, they’re perfect.