Internet Business

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.

Noticed this picture on the shoemoney website, it shows Jeremy Schoemaker holding a $500,000 check. Now first off, nobody usually gets a commission check for such a round figure, and the check is not really a big life size check, because if you look at the reflection in his black hummer, his hand is not holding anything. Still, it would be interesting to find out how much he earns from Azooogleads, he does advertise them quite heavily on his blog.
[update]: Didnt notice, but on the shoemoney site, it actually says “This is not a real check it was for a Magazine Ad”

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.

The MiriBlack Directory appears to be a free reciprical link directory which uses the phplinkdirectory script. I like the template it uses and also how it groups websites according to the google pagerank. I am not sure what miriblack means, the directory appears to have quite a few sites listed. I will post back and let you know how the site submission process goes.

Dnjournal reported the final exchange of three high value adult domain names which were sold via moniker at the internext adult expo. Interracialsex.com sold for US$150,000 handjob.com sold for US$90,000 and kinkysex.com sold for US$88,500. Proof that there is still a lot of money being made in the online adult industry.

According to the dnjournal weekly sales report, the tandberg.com domain sold for US$1.5 million to a company that had a revenue of US$131 million in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The first domain registrar Network Solutions, registrar to some of the best domains on the internet, according to techcrunch was reportedly acquired by a private equity firm General Atlantic. Whilst the price has not been officially disclosed, it is rumored to be around US$800 million.

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.

According to the jensense website, Google look to be changing their payment structure for google referrals so that you earn US$5 when the person you refer earns US$5, and also if they earn US$100 within the 180 days, you earn US$250. The details are not confirmed by google yet and do not appear on the google website, but Jennifer Slegg is a well known figure in the world of contextual advertising,  so I am only assuming that she has received some information from Google on the changed payment structure. Now what I would like to also see is a 88×31 button ad option, this is a very popular ad size, so I have no idea why they did not adopt it, instead the smallest graphic ad they have is 110×32 as below.