Well when I first checked the Alexa ranking in June 09, the rank was 3,674,345.
It is now the start of November 09 and alexa shows the rank has increased to 2,361,639, so it has effectively jumped about a million sites up the ladder.
Not great progress, but every little bit helps, so long as the changes are in a positive direction.
Google also recently did a pagerank update. The pagerank for this forum remains at a PR1.
A good site for checking your pagerank, if you do not have the google toolbar installed is http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
I also ordered a 88×31 banner from bannersmall.com. It will be interesting to see how that turns out.

Just purchased and installed the Thesis Theme from diythemes.com It was very easy to install.
I looked for ages on the internet to find a coupon code to make the purchase, but could not find one that was not expired, so eventually I went ahead and purchased the theme at the full normal price. There were a few sites that offered some sort of cashback, but you had to provide your licence details, etc and I was not comfortable doing that.
Anyhow over the next few weeks, I will play around with customising the look of this site.
You can purchase the thesis themes at diythemes.com

Some very interesting information sourced from the technorati website.

The World Live Web is incredibly active, and according to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.

Not sure how many of those blogs may be spam blogs, but those sure are amazing statistics. Would also be interesting to see the breakdown of properly hosted blogs with their own domain vs those hosted using free blog services.

John Chow, root of all evil,  is holding a contest to win a Nintendo Wii. Even though I never win anything, I am entering the competition. The competition is sponsored by 1234pens.com, online retailer of promotional pens and more details can be found here. It will be interesting to see how this content boosts his ranking for the term “root of all evil” one of his posts currently ranks position number 51 in google for the term.

Looks like John Chow has done it again and outdone himself to beat last months blogging income of US$3,440.66. For the month of february, the shortest month of the year, he has managed to double his previous months income, to a record $7,011.05 which is not bad for a blog. I am sure once he breaks the technorati top 100, his income will hit the five figure mark, not to mention all the cool gifts he will probably be receiving in the mail.
His income from Reviewme.com was one of the top earners for his blog. There have been quite a few reviewme reviews of late which does have the potential to turn readers off, but not me, I am happy to see that he is making more money, and I dont mind reading a few advertising type posts in between the content.

Well a few days ago, in my review of John Chows blog, one point I mentioned as being highly unfair was what at the time seemed like a permanent banning of his blog from digg. Well it appears that JohnChow is now allowed back on digg according to this post. There are a lot of players in the social media space, notably netscape.com and technorati WTF which has recently launched. In my opinion, Digg can no longer rely on its position of supremacy and ignore the valuable traffic that popular bloggers like John Chow can deliver. Neil Patel posted a list of members who were also unbanned from Digg,  which includes, text link ads, v7n. digital point, etc.
According to techcrunch, the ban had been lifted as digg has implemented a way to detect group voting and prevent such voting from driving pages to the digg homepage.

If you havent already done so, wordpress have released wordpress 2.1.1 which has about 30 bug fixes. Details can be found here.

I have been meaning to do a review of johnchow.com for a while now, but have always put it off, well here it is. Johnchow.com is one of my top two favourite blogs.  What is a dot com mogul I hear you ask? Well in this post, John states it as someone who works full time on the internet and makes at least US$10,000 from the internet, and amongst other things, “You must be willing to help dot com mogul wannabes” And to sum it up, in my opinion, therein lies an essential ingredient to the key of his success. John regularly shares with his readers what it takes to succeed on the internet. He does a regular review of how much he makes and the various revenue streams. This kind of information is gold, for the month of January, he made US$3,440.66, his success in blogging saw him gain exposure in several newspapers in Canada.

One of John’s goals is to make it into the Technorati Top 100, I personally have absolutely no doubt that he will achieve that goal if he continues along his current path. Aside from webmaster tips, he does the occassional review on tech gadgets,  cars, general news stories and of course his famous dining experience pictures. Now I would never visit a food blog, but I really enjoy reading his food posts.  The food I eat when I dine out doesnt look anywhere near as exquisite as the pictures on his site, but then I guess I dont dine at such fancy restaurants.  Whilst some of the stories are new,  some you may have seen elsewhere, but it is always interesting to read the John Chow spin on things, he does add his own unique commentary to stories.

One of the bad milestones of his blog was when he got banned from digg. I was totally shocked, his blog is a top quality site, how could it possibly be banned from digg. Whatever the reason, I do think it is unfair, whatever he was doing wrong in the eyes of digg, he should be given the opportunity to address those issues and have the ban removed. After all, it is quality sites like johnchow.com that give valuable exposure to digg, the traffic is not all just one way.

For new readers, I would suggest reading through some of the top posts. You should also check out his youtube videos.  You can check out his dance moves, a cool video where he makes funny comments at people doing a walk/run up this canadian mountain, and also another cool one where he crashes the airshow. I think it would be cool to see more new videos.

I would strongly suggest adding the johnchow blog to your RSS feed if you have not already done so.

Well, linkbait, basically writing really creating interesting stories that will result in other blogs linking to you, and getting voted on at social media sites like digg, netscape, etcand it  is quite the artform.  Andy Hagan has a guide to creating linkbait here, the section on promotion is quite good. My two favourite bloggers who I believe are quite good at the art of linkbaiting are Shoemoney and John Chow.  Both those bloggers whilst not full time bloggers, they do work on the internet as a full time activity, and are definitely worth checking out.

Wordpress 2.1 Ella, in line with the jazz theme, named after Ella Fitzgerald was released on January 22. Details on all of the features can be found here. I have yet to familiarise myself with the new features, but the control panel, does have a somewhat different look to it, though the differences do not appear to be major.