I am in the process of moving my blog here onto my domain and am busy working out where to host it to, to use wordpress or stick with blogspot etc.
Amidst all this I have not been able to make my regular quota of postings on my blog. Please bear with me for another week.
Thanks
I came across a nice article titled "Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn" and below are the 10 ways that he lists down of how one could use LinkedIn
Every time I think about the simple fact if or not I should push my network harder to add more member's on my AGLOCO network (currently at 18 members) - I always come up with a single argument my common sense simply says if you don't have to pay for it they why not give it a try.
I have taken it on me as a challenge to say that I will have at least 100 members on my network before the ViewBar gets released and for this I need help from you folks ...
So my readers if you are not already on AGLOCO get registered right now - follow this link to register
Have not heard of AGLOCO yet - read my posts here
Best wishes to all my readers for a happy and prosperous new year 2007.
If you did visit my BLOG in the last week you might have noticed that there has not been a single posting since 22/12 - reason was that we were traveling and I did not want to let blogging come in way of that :-)
We visited Aachen in Germany and Paris during last week and came back tired and exhausted late last night.
I have almost completed my travelogue for our visit to Amsterdam last weekend and will post it soon. I propose to utilize some time tomorrow for writing down a little about our trips last week and from Tuesday onwards it back to work and regular blogging :-)
I should have probably put up a note before I went off on vacation but apologies for not having done that.
Wishing a great new year ahead for all of you.
When I read about PayPerPost, it appeared to me to be a good idea simply because it gave me one approach to earn money (yes guys I dint start blogging for the sheer fun or anything like that). One of the blogs that I visit regularly is John Chow Dot Com and I saw that he had gotten active about PayPerPost and had even requested for a review of his site there. As is usually the case with me I started analyzing a little more about the concept of PayPerPost.
I think that PayPerPost has done a great job to identify a new 'breed' of advertisers - the bloggers. Every product in the market is trying to advertise to the visitors to a blog, but PayPerPost is trying to address the bloggers itself. Don't have any data but I think the blogging community is a reasonably closed community (more on this thought sometime later) - If you simply analyze a set of visitors to a blog the chance that the visitor is a blogger himself is very high.
So what does PayPerPost offer - If you look at a blogger who has his site running he is definitely looking at options of monetizing his blog by carrying advertisements of others. But the important observation which I think might have led to the PayPerPost business model is the discovery of the need / opportunity of bloggers using each other's blogs to drive up traffic for their co-bloggers.
But I think that there are some possible problems in the business model of PayPerPost which I highlight below. Feel free to contradict !
Top 5 problems that I see are,
Over the last few weeks John Chow Dot Com has been one of the sites that I have visited regularly. When I visited a few days back I saw that John has posted about his tryst with Pay Per Post here and here and that got me thinking a little more seriously of why I was visiting his site. When he asked for a review of what I think about his site I thought it would be a good idea to capture my thoughts.
Plus points of John Chow Dot Com
The first thought that came to my mind when I saw a mail from AGLOCO in my mail box today about their target to reach 10 Mn users on their network by end June 2007 was the 'Netork Effect'.
Wikipedia defines Network Effect as,
The network effect is a characteristic that causes a good or service to have a value to a potential customer dependent on the number of customers already owning that good or using that service. One consequence of a network effect is that the purchase of a good by one individual indirectly benefits others who own the good - for example by purchasing a telephone a person makes other telephones more useful. This type of side-effect in a transaction is known as an externality in economics, and externalities arising from network effects are known as network externalities. The resulting bandwagon effect is an example of a positive feedback
loop.
If I were to summarize the key points of Network Effects, they would be
Before you go any further - if you have not already signed up sign up today - sign up here
It has been over 3/4 weeks since I signed up and I get a thank you mail today from AGLOCO - the first thought that came to my mind was that the ViewBar must have been released, but no....
I was really unhappy at what I got from them - nothing useful at all ! The theme of the mail was to support them to in their campaign to sign up 10 Mn customers by end of June 2007. Sure if I did not want to grow their network, why would I ever get on to the network in the first place.
But AGLOCO needs to realize two things - my route to make money needs two steps
A couple of weeks ago I made a posting to the Digg site and as most of you would expect failed to log even a single Digg. Nothing too bad about it, probably almost everybody starts this way. I simply reasoned that my content was not good enough to receive any Digg's and thought of writing more interesting and relevant content. Made a few more postings and still had absolutely no luck and started thinking why this was happening.
As may be a few other's was easily able to find a few holes in the way Digg works in ranking the pages that get submitted to Digg. At that point the sole thought that came to my mind was that Digg's way of page ranking as solely dependent on only one factor - 'how fast does a posting get its first few votes'. If you can log the first few votes, the rest is simply herd mentality after that. In more cases than not, its only a matter of time before such a posting moves up the ranking.
Did not really delve too much into that topic, but today as I saw that Digg was getting revamped was curious to know what changes one could expect. During this search exercise, I came across two more interesting posts titled "The Digg Economy" and "Will Digg get flanked?" today which I thought covered relevant points.
In the posting "Will Digg get flanked?" suggestions that are made out to Digg are,
India stormed to one of their most memorable wins of all time amid historic scenes at the Wanderers, wrapping up a comprehensive 123-run victory on the fourth day of the first Test. This was a feat that not anybody really believed the Indian team could pull off particularly in its current form !
I din't watch the match so don't really know what happened on the ground but some comments !
We visited Amsterdam over the weekend - a quick whirlwind trip it was, but both me and my wife were happy that we did cover all that we planned to. Definitely liked the city but a tad costly though !
I propose to write a slightly detailed travelogue in the coming days - interested in reading it, pls drop me a mail and will share it with you when I am done.
Today morning as I first decided to wear a white with cross back stripes and a black pant but getting match a tie from my smallish collection it was quite a difficult task. Have been in situations similar to this before, for example
If you use Google Finance to track your portfolio you might be interested to know that the front page has been changed. The page has 5 sections now,
It has been over 3 weeks since I registered to AGLOCO and I got about 16 members into my chain since then. Well my efforts are still on to get more people, but are my efforts at full steam - definitely no !
I read John's post titled "You Rank In The Top 0.03% Of All Members" and this made me check my account for my ranking. I was in the top 1.89% of the users on AGLOCO and this was quite not the number I intended to see. John with over 1400 members is in the top .03% and me with my paltry 16 members am still within the top 2% of the users.
I tried to understand this number a little bit and I came to some of the following observations
1. As John says 80% of the users on the AGLOCO network are not literally 'working' to enhance the network in any way. They are just dead weight at least in so far as enhancing the benefits of the network goes.
2. If this is the case I disagree to John's point that he will have to harder to retain his rating. I think it depends on what type of users get added into the system as a result of new additions. If all that gets added is the dead weight, even without doing anything his rating will continue to remain more or less at the top
3. Is the delay (I dont know if its a delay simply because the AGLOCO website says nothing) in coming out with the ViewBar might simply take off the sheen in the whole additions and hype that AGLOCO has received in the last few weeks.
4. If I need to get my referrals install the ViewBar after they have forgotten about the whole thing it will be very possible that my conversion rate would be no better than say 30-40% of my network size.
5. One benefit or getting the ViewBar out early would have been that I could have used real time data of the earnings to get more referrals into my network. No better that real $$$ to make a statement
If any of my readers are still without an AGLOCO account - Register yourself NOW !
Definitely agree with Michael Arrington that the Swivel website is probably one of the 'freshest' ideas that I have seen in the recent past. My initial comments are towards how interesting it is !
If there is one site where you can have some fun and still pick up some 'information' I would vote Swivel 7 or 8 / 10.
As I read the post one statement "I already see a lot of fairly useless data included on the site, which makes the good stuff harder to find. As the active community grows the better data will hopefully rise to the top via the rating and feedback system" got me thinking towards identifying the key factors that would decide how successful it is.
1. What is the ratio of visitors to a site contribute (you can probably term them as active) by feeding back / ranking the data and content they see. My hunch is it should not be more than 10-20% for the top sites.
2. In the way page ranking works I think the relevance and correctness of the ranking any data / content gets is dependent on only one factor - how fast does it get its first few votes. After the first few votes are in, its only a matter of time before that content moves up the ranking. Some possible suggestions to make the ranking a little more relevant and useful,
Swivel Co-founders Dmitry Dimov and Brian Mulloy start off by describing their company as "YouTube for Data” If you trying to understand what the company does that must be a great one liner explanation. Swivel is to data what YouTube is to video. You can probably share anything which you think would make sense to somebody other than you - stock prices, your investment strategy, what trends you see for the mobile telecommunication world, commodity prices etc etc. Once the submission happens other viewers of that data can rate, comment, bookmark. Automatically this means that there is a ranking that is put on each piece of data that gets in - well yes so probably it does a little more than YouTube.
Before I move any further let me try to see how different this would be from the other page ranking sites
I was just looking at the statistics on my web traffic today and found a interesting fact today - 90% of my traffic uses Mozilla as the web browser.
(At this point another interesting statistic that pushes Microsoft to the place where it is in the desktop market is that about 70% of my traffic uses Microsoft Windows. The remaining 25% is split between Mac and Linux variants)
Although I made the browser switch about a year or so ago, the above statistics made me a little curious of what exactly people think about Mozilla and why it is grabbing market share from Microsoft Internet Explorer at a furious pace.
Some statistics first ....
Just read a posting on GigaOM that Google has invested in Meraki Networks.
Meraki says their goal is to enable a grassroots movement of small wireless ISP's by providing them everything they need to get started. Towards achieving this Meraki aims to provide an integrated package of software, hardware, and management services that make it possible for everyday people to build mesh networks and become Internet service providers. Meraki's platform is an afforable and simple way to connect communities, apartment complexes, or business districts to the Internet at low cost. Meraki has the following support
Those goals match to what Google has been stating about their plans for their WiFi networks — deliver wireless broadband for cheap and outside the confines of the current telco/cable industries.
But why does Google want to do something like this is what I fail to understand - why does a company specializing in search and data related solutions bother about the acceptance and ease of wifi solutions. I personally think that Google is wasting its money and resources in promoting resources of this nature
Assuming that all goes well with a company like Meraki what can be achieved does'nt look attractive enough to me at least for Google to invest.
I had mentioned two possible options in my earlier post here that Google could employ to monetize the acquisition of YouTube and am happy to see that both those options have been implemented.
Context Setting
In the earlier era, broadcast companies used to invest millions of dollars to create high-quality content shows and make their money selling advertising space during those shows and by licensing that content to a variety of local channels. That distribution model is changing as people turn to the Internet for their programming.
The situation in which the broadcasters are today is somewhat similar to what the print media publishers were a few years ago when the internet became popular. The print media publishers survived that change by embracing the move to internet by adapting their content and distribution to include the internet as a another channel.
As the scenario changes some top of the mind questions that come up are,
CBS, one of the first networks to deliver original, high-quality content to the Internet, agrees. According to David Poltrack, president of CBS Vision, "we're discovering that you can make money by building short-form programming off the show." He thinks bite-size, shorter content offerings that build off the prime-time television show are the way forward.
