AlexaDex - trade website shares by traffic

I've been thinking of Ofer's Traffic based investment post and did some searching online for similar posts, and was I surprised to find AlexaDex which is a game site in which virtual shares of websites are bought and sold according to their traffic reports. You'd be amazed to see how many users play there, buying and selling shares of websites such as CNN, Yahoo as well as smaller and less known sites.

Related posts:
Traffic based investment
How Much Is My Blog Worth?

ClickDragType - game with no instructions

Here's a quick game for all of us by the name of ClickDragType2 .
Got a few minutes? Try figuring out how to complete levels in this game that prides itself that it has no instructions. I just got past level 1 and quit for the time being. Probably will come back to it later.

I cannot belief how many people get frustrated by this game and seek help.
Here is a link to some game hints (even though the comments are for ClickDragType1, this comment is for ClickDragType2).


Related posts:
ClickDragType 3 - 5 new levels
Red Square game - a good way to pass the time
Puzzle land - short quest game
Getting paid to play games

SEO tips - avoid spellchecking

SEO is one of the longest paths to bringing traffic to your site is something most site owners will agree about. It takes a while for the search engines to index your site and for your site to reach a significant position that users will see in the first page of their search results. Marketing managers who use PPC programs such as adwords and overture know that it usually pays not only to buy the keywords they are looking for but also common spelling mistakes of those words.
While reviewing my web analytics reports I found that several spelling mistakes I have made in a few posts have actually brought a lot of traffic to my site from Google as well as MSN.
The first one I caught was spelling calndar instead of calendar and the second was spelling technoraty instead of technorati. So, using intentional spelling mistakes can be a nice way to bring traffic to your site, but only if you're not ashamed for those mistakes to be pointed out by your readers.

Related posts:
google's new video ads
Searching - can you find what you want?
Google Trends - what are we searching for?


Technoraty taggs: SEO Google Search Adwords Traffic

TalkDigger - track your blog links

While reviewing the refering sources of my blog in google analytics, I came across an unknown link named TalkDigger. As claimed on their website, TalkDigger is a new way to find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Internet. It allows you to search for your blog's URL and get search results that link to it from: Technorati, Google, MSN, Yahoo, Bloglines and digg. the resutls get ranked and ordered by importance of the link leading to your blog.

I am thinking of adding this to my toolbox of useful blogging application. How about you?


Related posts:
SEO tips - avoid spellchecking
Evolutionary posts
How Much Is My Blog Worth?

Evolutionary posts

I have decided to try a new concept which I named "Evolutionary posts".
Evolutionary post is a post which is released to the world as a title and a few lines of text and gets expanded (not modified but expanded) along time. This allows a fast post of an interesting subject as well as the ability to turn it into a full fledged article over time.

How does one start publishing evolutionary posts?

1. Take an idea
2. Turn it into a descriptive title
3. write a first paragraph
4. write some more paragrpah titles
5. post it
6. pay attention to incoming comments and update your post according to them
7. give credits to commentors who influenced your post (Thanks cat)
8. republish the post.
9. redo from step 6

Related posts:
How Much Is My Blog Worth?
Moving on up
CoComment - track your comments

How Much Is My Blog Worth?

Dana Carlson of Business Opportunities Weblog has written a very cool widget named How Much Is My Blog Worth? which calculates the value of a blog by it's links according to Technorati. I tried it for Ohad's Internet News and got a better result then I expected to get.

My blog is worth $2,258.16.
How much is your blog worth?

Can it be so? Is anyone willing to put some money here? Just kidding.
As more links are added to my blog, I will update the value in this post.


Related posts:
Moving on up
Liz thinks we are SOB

Getting paid to play games

You cannot possibly imagine how excited I was yesterday to receive an email from Moola.com about participating in their closed beta. Moola (which I am still not sure where their name came from) is a new company that has developed an online gaming platform in which players get to compete against each other for real money.
where does the money come from? It comes from commercials shown to you before each game (and to keep us honest, they ask a question about the commercial shown). Each time you play against another player, one of you gets the total amount of both your wagers.

The games
Moola currently features only 2 games.
The first game is called "Gold Rush" which is played in 6 rounds. In each round the player has to choose one of his 6 gold nuggets (numbered from 1 to 6) and place them on a scale against the pther player's choice. the winner of the round gets the value of both nuggets as well as a random nugget which is placed in the middle of the scales.
The second is named "Ro-Sham-Bo-Fu" and is a take on the classic rock,paper and scissers with a twist where in each round (6 rounds per game) one of the available choices (e.g. rock) is randomly chosen and players get bonus points for not using it wether they win or lose that round.


And now for the fun part:
I have 1 invitation left that I can share with one of you. All you have to do is to convince me that you are the one who should get it. Once I receive enough reasons, I will choose someone to get this invitation to play Moola's cool games and participate in the beta. Should that be You?


Last updated; May 31 2006


Related posts:
ClickDragType - game with no instructions
It's the weekend - some cool video games
Catch 33 - a fun online game

Video ads offered by Google

In a press release made yesterday by Google, video ads were announced.
In addition to the current ad formats such as text, image and flash, video ads will also be available to publishers worldwide. As site owners might reject video ads starting to play automatically on their site, Google designed the new ad to be "click-to-play" which means that users viewing a video ad will see a static image out of the video first and only after clicking it is the video going to play. The new ads will support geo targeting as well as keyword and site targeting.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch bets against video ads making it in the following post

What do you think of the chances of video ads succeeding?

Moving on up

Some of our articles take time to write but it seems like the hard work is paying off. I have just finished reviewing links to Ohad's Internet News from other sites.
By using Google's advanced search, Technorati and the referers tracked by our web analytics I found the following links:
1. Successful blog by Liz Strauss which put us in her list of SOBs.
2. A site in German (probably about investment) referring to our Traffic based investment article.
3. Marketing Monger by Eric Mattson published a carnival of marketing in which he included the google trends review.
4. Check out Frugal For Life where the Carnival of personal finance # 49 links to my own making money online post.
5. And...at the last possible moment, please accept Mighty Bargain Hunter who also links to our Traffic based investment in his Carnival of investment



Here's a promise to keep writing good posts worthy of your links.

CoComment - track your comments

What is CoComment?
CoComment is a centralized comment manger that allows you to keep track of comments you post in websites from a single place. By creating an account in CoComment and adding a small JavaScript to your browser, you can attach tags to comments you post and track responses to them.

Who is it for?
CoComment is especially useful to people who interact and comment in several sites. I personally found it an amazing tool that allowed me to track my comments over a dozen sites. I really likes the fact that it allows publishing of an RSS feed of my comments and responses to them, so I can add it to my RSS reader which is NetVibes.


Technorati tags: CoComment NetVibes Blog Comment

Guba - the Usenet at your service

Anyone who has been connected to the Internet for a few years now, has encountered the word Usenet. The Usenet is a collection of newsgroups to which users post and respond. A company by the name of Guba is extracting media file such as video and image from the Usenet and allows uses to view them without downloading them. So, if you are looking for a favorite TV show or just a clip by an artist you like, Guba would be a good place to start looking.

There are 2 other sites I recommend for video content which are InnerTube and YouTube

Technorati tags: Guba Usenet TV Newsgroups Media

Searching - can you find what you want?

Some of my friends are constantly asking me to find something for them on the web.
Even though I tried to send them to google (yep that is a verb now) their request, I usually end up doing it for them. How hard can it be to find what you are looking for online? It shouldn't be if you follow some simple guidelines:

1. Choose keywords carefully
Take a moment to figure out your search words. Do they have another meaning that's more common then what you are looking for? So, if I were looking for information on how to build a book shelf I would avoid using the word "book" and instead search for "building shelf".

2. Use advanced search features
most search engines have advanced searching feature that allow you to specify words that must be included in the search results and words that should not appear in them.
Google's advanced search is available from their home page and allows you to filter search results in a very clear manner.




3. Use Google's auto completion feature
Google suggest is a pretty old google tool that shows you the number of search results as you type. This helps you to remove words that have no results and add other words that have more results. This is especially useful when you only have a single word and google suggests what other words to add to your search to refine it.


4. Google is not the only search engine out there
While Google is the most popular search engine, some other options might be more suited if specific information is what you are looking for. I tend to use Wikipedia when I am not just looking for an item but would like to get a definition of it and not just search results.
Or maybe use flickr when searching for an image. technorati is a very good place if searching for a blog

That's all for now but more information on search techniques will be posted here soon.



Technorati tags: Search Google Flickr Wikipedia Technorati

Google NoteBook

Just release Google Notebook is an unclear product. On the one hand it offers direct competition with del.icio.us and other bookmarking services but on the other it asks you to download a browser extension and does not support tags. Is this the big surprise Google has prepared for us? I am sure that we will see this product adding features and growing but it feels like it was released too soon. Compared to Google Trends which was also released week it's just not good enough. Speaking of Google Trends, you can see that the USA is not the most dominant country in searching for the new product. Could it be that the Internet is international?



Technoraty tags: Google Notebook Trends del.icio.us Bookmark

YouTube - Video sharing site

As Internet bandwith increases, we see more and more video content uploaded to websites and shared. YouTube which started in early 2005, is considered the dominant playere in the video sharing solutions online. What YouTube does is allow you to watch videos uploaded by others (only if they decide to share it with everyone), rate them or upload your own and share it.
With many other players such as Google Video entering this market, it's going to be hard work for YouTube to keep their market share. I just could not resist the urge to comapre Google Video with YouTube using the new Google Trends tool and the results can be seen here.

Another 2 great soures of video content would be Guba as well as InnerTube

Nintendo WII - next generation game console

In the E3 conference that shows the latest developments of gaming consoles, Nintendo presented what is considered by experts to be the next generation of gaming console remote.
the WII is a new gaming console whose remote includes motion sensors that allow interaction with the games by moving and rotating the remote. For example a user playing a sword game can hold the remote as if he is holding a sword and swing it around which will be copied to the game itself.
All gaming console companies such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have been working hard to make games more interactive and it seems like Nintendo is far ahead of its competitors. Take a look at the pictures and videos at the WII site to understand the potential.

What do you think? Is it going to change our gaming interaction?

del.icio.us - social bookmarking

I am probably not the first to tell you about del.icio.us but after opening an acount there last night I thought it deserved recognition here as well. del.icio.us is a place to manage your bookmarks online and share them with friend or just about everyone. Like many web 2.0 applications, del.icio.us tries to give you control of some sort of aspect of the online experience (in their case it's bookmarks) in a web site that can be accessed from any computer with Internet connection. del.icio.us is tag based which means that you can assign tags to each bookmark added and see your links in a tag cloud.

What I liked most about del.icio.us is the way they integrate to your browser. In a very clear instructions page they show you how to add 2 buttons to your browser. One that shows your bookmarks and the other for adding new ones.

Are you using del.icio.us? Are you using some other sort of online bookmark management tool? Let me know.

What does the boss really think about you?

I have come across a very nice tool that monitors network traffic and shows information that can be understood by non technical people. ICQsnif is an extremly powerful tool initially designed for system administrators, or at least this is what Ufasoft claims. ICQsnif is capable of sniffing (which is the network-wise equivalent to phone-tapping) traffic over your network and allows viewing the data of emails, MSN/Yahoo/ICQ messangers as well as web pages. this means you can listen to other people (I am not sure of the legal implications of this, but I've been told that the system administrator probably has some legal excuse for it) as they chat, email or browse the web. ICQsnif allows you to scan your network for computers and then decide which ones to listen to. In a modern day office network (also known as a switched enviornment) network traffic is not broadcast over the entire network but sent directly from computer to computer, this prevents us from listening to other computers without turning on a feature named "arp spoofing" which might be detected by some anti-trojan appliances.

It's the weekend - some cool video games

The weekend is upon us and it's time for some fun and not just work.
here is a link to a very nice site I visited named Retro64
Most of their games give the feeling of the old and loved Commodore 64.
My personal favorite was Platypus even though my score was not that high.

Have a nice weekend.

Google Trends - what are we searching for?

In Google's press release made today , Google Trends was announced to the public.

What is Google Trends?
It is a graphic reporting tool that shows search keyword popularity over time by country/city and language. Google Trends enables users to learn how popular a particular search term has been on Google over time and see the relevant news articles that ran on that subject.

So, why should I be impressed?
What impressed me so much about Google Trends was the face that I could compare several words and phrases one against the other to see how attractive they were for users searching for information at Google's search engine. Another interesting feature of it is by showing news relevant to the search with relation to the graph's timeline to see how news affect the public's interest.

Who is it good for?
In a recent article published on the subject of Investment by Internet traffic reports, a report was created comparing the traffic of Google VS Yahoo and correlated to their share value over that report time frame. I think the same method can be implemented using Google Trends even on companies that are not only Internet based by the interest the public shows them. Another market this tool targets is that of marketing managers around the world. For example if a company specializing in VOIP was looking for markets to target their marketing budget they would be surprised to find that the USA is not even in the top 10 list of these searches but countries such as: India, Indonesia and the Philippines as can be seen in the following picture:




Summary
Another amazing tool by Google has hit the market. I can't wait to see the impact it will have on use all (especially people whose title is marketing something).
Can you think of another use for this? Let us know.

Goowy - next generation personalized dashboard

Web based desktops are considered to be the next thing of the Internet. a web based desktop (or webtop) is a website that manages your emails, bookmarks, pictures, files and other data that you use on a daily basis.

Webtops are available from several companies such as Netvibes or Live.com from Microsoft but a new company named Goowy is starting to change this market by providing a flash based interface which looks and behaves like a real application.



After spending several hours playing with Goowy's demo account, I thought it was still a bit immature but had the potential to become a great application to be used by anyone who accessed the web from more then one computer.

The most exciting feature Goowy had to offer was a centralized IM window that allows you to configure it for using MSN, AOL, Yahoo and ICQ messengers all at the same time.

Try it for yourself at their demo account or just register and configure your own Goowy webtop.

CBS launches site to play sponsored TV shows online

CBS has taken a bold initiative today as it launched a site that broadcasts it's shows online named Innertube. CBS's leading shows such as CSI and survivor can be watched online as well as other shows by the network. The site is funded by showing commercials and advertisements along the shows and before them.

Big hurray to CBS for this act which I believe will soon be followed by it's competitors.

3 internet sites to take to a deserted island

After talking to someone who recently published a book about an engineer that is stranded on a deserted island, I started thinking about life in a deserted island with a computer and 3 websites to choose from. I know it's a silly thought, but what are the 3 most influencing websites that I would choose?

How about this list:
Pandora, streaming personalized music so I don't get bored
Gmail, so I can communicate with the world
Google, for finding information

Is that really what I need?
Shouldn't I choose a site that will provide me with reading material or useful information? Maybe a gaming site that can amuse me. It's a tough choice to make.

What are your 3 sites?

File compression

Most users who wish to send a large file via email use software to compress it.
Compression is a way to decrease the size of a file without affecting the way it looks to the user after decompression. There are quite a few algorithms to compress files, some are file type specific and "understand" what the file structure looks like, while others are more generic and handle all file types. The most common compression software used today are winzip and WinRar.
A new Israeli company by the name of Infirma claims to compress files using it's new compression software better then anyone else in the market by "understanding" the content of the file to be archived and utilizing one of several algorithms most suited for the job.


Are you using another software not mentioned here? is it any good?

Let income tax pay for your vacation

On most countries, traveling abroad for a convention or a professional event is considered a tax reductable expanse for those of us that are self-employed. This is actually, where the beta site of Eventful becomes really handy.
Planning a vacation in New-York? Search for a lecture or a convention nearby, and deduct all of your expanses. Eventful holds a comprehensive list of events all over the world, indexed nicely in a web 2.0 technology.

Eventful also lets you publicize your own events or demand an event from a registered performer.

Best of April posts

A new tradition is getting started today, the month's best of posts.
At the beginning of each month, we will post an update of the best posts of the previous month.
Here are April's best

April 5th: Riya - Photo album with face recognition
A photo album site that allows identifying people inside the pictures automatically.

April 13th: Google calendar
An online calendar by google with gmail integration.

April 16th: 2006 Browser wars
A post on various browsers available.

April 22th: Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia
The free online encyclopedia written and edited by everyone.

April 25th: Catch 33 - a fun online game
Sometimes you need to have fun as well.

April 28th: Traffic based investment
discussion of the way site traffic reports relate to share prices of internet companies

Making money online

The Internet is offering a wide variety of opportunities to make money online.
As more users use the Internet on a daily basis for more then search and emails (which are the 2 most common uses), more business models based on user participation enable you to make monetize it.
Examples of this include:
1. Shutterstock - an image bank that allows users to upload their pictures and get paid whenever someone downloads their pictures. If you are an amateur photographer, this might be a good way for you to earn from your hobby.
2. Amazon's Mechanical Turk - is a bank of simple tasks that requires human attention. Accept tasks ranging from $0.01 to $10 and make money fast.
3. Google Answers / HelpShare - knowledge base sites that allow you to register to provide answers for a fee.
4. Rent a coder - If you are a developer, you can sign here to offer bids on projects offered by other users.

If interested in more ways to make money online, I suggest you check out the following article about Traffic based investment. This artice explains a new method of comparing online companies by their public traffic reports.