June 28th, 2008
“When will the day come that I can make enough money from my blog to leave my stupid-ass job!”
Isn’t that the secret hope of every blogger? There are of course some popular blogs out there but the reality is that it’s hard to build steady traffic that will generate enough income from the ads displayed on your blog.
As an alternative, a blogger can be hired to write for a specific product and get paid for the article. This is all in the sphere of viral advertising and aims in producing a word of mouth effect that will advertise the product without the use of (expensive) traditional media.
Many services have been created to establish relationships between bloggers and advertisers. I had the chance to try a couple of them as an advertiser (since I release a few products a year), and had a first hand experience how things work.
Sponsored Reviews
Very pleased with this service. It has an easy to use interface, top notch bloggers participate although there is a wide range in the prices. Partly here applies the usual “you buy what you pay for”.
ReviewMe
Didn’t make any impression to me, positive or negative. The service works great but their blog pool isn’t as refined as the one at Sponsored Reviews. Used it once then quit.
Social Spark
This has more of a social network feel than any of the other services mentioned here. It’s relatively new and got into it recently. They have custom terms like “spark” and “prop” and to be honest I’ve already got tired of hearing those words over and over again. This service has more controlled payouts for bloggers but potentially offers greater volume of work.
Pay-per-post
Never used it, never seen someone else use it – just mentioning it because I found the website.
Making money through your blog is a worthy effort, especially if you keep high standards for your work. That way you’ll be making a living while having quality content to show-off and your integrity intact.
Posted in Services | 2 Comments »
June 28th, 2008
I know I’m late for X-mas stories, but what if I told you that Santa Claus was kidnapped by Martians!
Ehh, that drew your attention, right? That’s a nice setup for a movie – especially if it’s low budget and people UI (under the influence…) are creating it 
Synopsis:
Martians, upset that their children have become obsessed with TV shows from Earth which extoll the virtues of Santa Claus, start an expedition to Earth to kidnap the one and only Santa. While on Earth, they kidnap two lively children that lead the group of Martians to the North Pole and Santa. The Martians then take Santa and the two children back to Mars with them. Voldar, a particularly grumpy Martian, attempts to do away with the children and Santa before they get to Mars, but their leader Lomas stops him. When they arrive on Mars, Santa, with the help of the two Earth children and a rather simple-minded Martian lackey, overcomes the Martians by bringing fun, happiness and Christmas cheer to the children of Mars.
More info: Wikipedia, IMDB
Need I say more? This is definitely one of the all time classic b-movies. I just found it on Joost in and couldn’t help myself writing a post. I first saw it on late midnight TV and was laughing my balls off (sorry for the expression, just stating the facts). Then I found it in a DVD store for $1 and always regretted for not buying it. And now we can all can see it online for FREE!
You can even download it from Archive.org
Cult movie fans, feast your eyes with this galore delight!
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June 15th, 2008
Recently I recovered a lost memory of my early childhood. Browsing though Joost I stumbled upon “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids“, and simply remembered that I was watching this in the 80′s re-runs and just hadn’t thought of it since.
Now I know that this was created in the 70′s and had as primary target group the black american kids living in the ghettos, it is described as “the educational adventures of a group of Afro-American inner city kids” after all. I didn’t mind watching it though as a kid and must admit that watching it again now was more than a pleasant experience.
It’s interesting to see that after all these decades
so little has changed in the everyday lives of children.
I was surprised with the quality of the artwork, while Bill Cosby‘s narration is smart, honest and funny. But most importantly I appreciate his effort to try to make the next generation a better one with the simple lessons presented in the series. Of course later on all the efforts of this show and sesame street were wrecked by gangsta rap but that’s another story. Oh well, what can you do…
I’d like to insist a little more on the educational spin of the series as I can’t help wondering where did all this enthusiasm on kids shows has gone. Today we’re bombarded with 3D cartoons that have the standard “good guys vs bad guys” storyline and in most cases involve monsters and aliens. Most importantly you can watch an hour of WOWing imagery and not get anything to think about afterwards. Is that the best they could come up or is it an elaborate plan to turn kids into passive viewers from the beginning?
For me, it’s shows like “Fat Albert” that lifted up the bar when I was young and had higher standards for what I chose to entertain myself later on in life… If you want a taste of “the good old days” catch a few episodes available for free at a Joost near you 
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June 2nd, 2008
Portable web servers have been around for years. And since installing Apache on Windows hasn’t always been a smooth procedure, many developers have tried to find ways to setup Apache for Windows in a self-contained environment, one could port into any windows system and use as a sandbox for his/her projects.
I personally was stuck with an old installation of phpdev for some time but I felt bad using it as it seemed too quirky and uncontrollable.
Then I used a Linux virtual machine, an Ubuntu installation with the popular LAMP setup being a breeze to install, but that dragged my system resources and I always got annoyed by the latency.
Recently I rediscovered XAMPP – I knew it as part of the portable apps line-up but never really got my hands dirty with it. I suppose it wasn’t as fine polished then to notice…
Visit the homepage: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
If server management isn’t your thing but you like server-side (~PHP) programming, this is the tool for you. You can really work like on a proper server with PHP, MySQL installed and experiment with your web applications. Run your code, create databases… Crash everything, burn it to the ground and simply delete the server folder and start all over again
It also has some extra features, a FileZilla FTP server and a Mercury mail transport system for whoever wants to make use of those kinds of services. I remind you that we are talking about portable software – that means all this can run from a folder on your computer with no installation. It looks like a regular program, it runs like a regular program but it acts like a server. Great!
Of course XAMPP isn’t without competition. Other alternatives you might want to look at are:
Wamp, Server2Go and Sambar. To be honest I haven’t gone as far as testing those so I can’t elaborate on their features.
XAMPP is so lightweight and well-featured I don’t even consider an alternative at the moment.
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May 21st, 2008
The year is 1997. I was a grad student in Mathematics and spent most of my day in the computer labs trying to learn as much as I could about that new Internet “thing”…
The idea of having a part of my works online, promoting my stuff 24/7, was intriguing (as I assume it was/is for all of you…). But owning a server those days was so extravagant as trying to build a garage rocket launcher. So the immediate decision would be to use shared hosting – and there where heaps of hosts out there even those early days.
And then it happened – my first interaction with free web hosting. Why pay for something when it is offered to you for free? Sure you’ll have ads on your page you can’t control, your web space is limited, you can upload only certain types of files and your URL would be something in the likes of http://subdomain.domain.com/username/ … but who cares! You’re online and you’re staying there for FREE!!!
My first “serious” webpage was uploaded on Geocities.com. I had another webpage for fun stuff (hey, maybe it was the predecessor of this site!) at InternetTrash. I used other free hosts as well in the years to come but I must admit that I haven’t used a free host for a website since 2001. The servers where too crowded, the scripting support was little (if any at all) and the space was too bounding for my “big plans”.
But it wasn’t just me that had that perception of free hosting. I think this was one of the adjustments Web 2.0 brought along. Free hosting is good in theory. But in practice there is simply too much crap floating around in those servers. Anyone can upload a webpage for free and claim anything. That brought down the credibility of the whole online community. So when the Internet got it’s face lift with the Web 2.0 directives (around 2003), all those Frontpage sites uploaded on free hosts had to be slain.
It wasn’t just about the visual aspect (yes, those sites where ugly). It wasn’t even about the financial matter of forcing you to pay for the hosting and URL you got for free. It was about setting a higher standard for the user experience and giving the real professionals the credibility they deserved.
Free hosts are too slow and too limited to run sufficiently most of the websites we have today. As the years progressed static pages and CGI scripts gave way for dynamic PHP pages and AJAX applications. The web had to evolve and free web hosting was not up to the challenge – the limited resources was its bottleneck and the reason of its own demise.
Not to say that free hosts don’t exist today. To my surprise I found that some of the older free hosts (>10 years old) are still in business:
But today’s free hosting is mostly transparent and is intended for personal use (as it ought to). There is free hosting to publish your photos (Flickr, Photobucket), or to post your writings (WordPress, Blogger), or to upload your videos (YouTube, Vimeo). Now, free hosting is all about leisure activities…
For other more important online activities you’ll have to show some professionalism in your presence and not rely on a free host. No one trusts you if you are so cheap that you don’t want to spend the $5/month for a basic hosting package plus $10 a year for a domain name (that’s it, believe me, I know).
Still insist and you will see the consequences of no one taking you seriously fall upon you. Top search engine placements will be more difficult, link exchanging will be limited and click-through rates on your ads will sore. Even the brightest mind can’t convince on a free host – and that’s absolutely normal. As in real life, how smart can you be if you act like a freeloader?
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