Dot Com Note

Microsoft has an upcoming free web analytics tool code named Gatineau. The Gatienue project page is located here. You can sign up for an invitation to be a beta teaster.  However, you have to create an adCenter, the Microsoft version of the Google’s Adsense, account for $5 if you don’t have one.

This is a direct challenge to Google’s Analytics. Few year ago we would have believed that Microsoft could cause damage to Google just it did during the early days of the web. However, that stage has passed. Microsoft is now only an OS and Office application company. Gatineau is still a threat to independent on-demand web analytics vendors.

Gatineau will end up as an analytics tool for the adCenter customers. It will not be as popular as Google Analytics.

Non Profits also need money, resources, and buzz. Your non profit organization must have an online-presence to raise money, recruit volunteers, and create awareness. However, you don’t have to spend thousands to put your worthy cause on the web. There are some excellent social web tools that you can use for free.

Our old friends Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are there for you to create profiles for your organization. These sites are also good for recruiting volunteers for your cause. Facebook will put your profile in your city’s network by default.

Care2 is a social network to bring social changes. It has almost eight millions users. Create your group there and reach like-minded people. It has features geared towards participatory democracy and promoting social changes. For example, you can sign petitions or create your own petitions. It is a must check out for any body who wants to make a difference.

Fundable is a fund raising web applictions that accepts non-accredited non-profit organizations. You can set up a fund raising page for any cause. You set your goals and people pledge money for your cause. If you cannot reach your goal, fundable deletes all the pledges and nobody pays anything.

Instead of communicating with your group using emails and instant messaging, you can use CircleUp. You can send a message to your entire gorup and instead of getting hundreds of replies in your inbox, you get all the replies neatly organized by CircleUp. You don’t have to register for replying to a CircleUp message.

VolunteerMatch brings people together. As the name suggests, it matches good people with good causes. It has over two million users.

Technorati Profile

A Wiki is a Web 2.0 tool, right? It is a collaborative tool for people to add and edit contents. A Santa-clara based company has launched a drag-and-drop wiki called PikiWiki with a touch of social web. I will call it a social wiki.

After you sign in, you will get a blank page. You can drag and drop files from your desktop to the blank page. Pictures are resized and placed on the page where you dropped them.

You can customize the page using available themes and add text blurbs. I am sure they will introduce more themes and widgets in the future.

After you finish creating the page, you share the page with others in your network for editing. If you wish, you can make the page read-only. PikiWiki is free, at least, for now.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, wikis must have collaboration capability. Create a free page in PikiWiki and avoid paying for wiki pages.

Create a list of top 10 science fiction bloggers, top 10 celebrity bloggers, top ten humor bloggers, etc. That is what NxE has done with their top 50 most influential bloggers.

Topping the list is Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media that owns popular blogs like Gizmodo and Lifehacker. He also owns the porn blog Fleshbot. Fleshbot’s Alexa ranking stands at 5,000.

The most popular political blog in the list is Zuniga’s Dailykos, a progressive blog under attacks by conservatives. Ariana Huffington and Michelle Malkin also sit on the top 20 list. But they are better known as columnists and commentators rather bloggers.

Listed on the 20th position is one of the oldest blogger on the Net, Jason Kottke. Jason writes about anything and everything and he is doing it almost daily since 1998.

The list includes authoratative Google voices by Matt Cutts. Webmasters analyze Matt’s writings to glean information about Google and search engine optimization.

I was glad to see one of my favorite blogger Steve Pavlina in the list. He is a personal development blogger but his 2006 article “How to make money from your blog” has inspired thousands to try out their writing skills.

I like the list and some of the blogs I subscribe to are mentioned in the last.  The list is a good one in the sense that it covers bloggers of a wide variety of topics. It is a kind of Who’s Who of the blogging world.

A ZacJohnoson’s post about an affiliate network NeverBlueAds.com caught my eyes. He has earned almost $11,000 using their affiliate ads in August. I have not heard about NeverBlueAds before. My few affilate ads are from ClickBank. So, I decided to check them out through other blogs and webmaster forums.

A new blogger Mike Mikey Dot Com is very enthusiastic about NeverBlueAds. In a few days he has already earned around $80. He is blogging about NeverBlueAds for the last few days.

NeverBlueAds has CPA (cost per action) ads only, just like ClickBank. You can also earn commissions by recruiting new affiliates. I checked out a few webmaster forums and found their reputation to be good. You are assigned an affiliate manager who keeps you informed about new and top converting offers.

Their ad catalog is massive and they have some high paying offerings. I will signup for an account this weekend and replace some of my ClickBank ads with their ads and report you my experiences with them in some future post.

If you have a site that generates a fair amount of traffic, you can boost the traffic by changing the layout and the design of the site. John Chow  talks about how his site traffic has increased after he changed the theme. Some of his fellow bloggers have also gotten the same results after changing their sites’ looks. I have also noticed traffic boosts in my popular free classified site after layout and theme changes.

Why do people visit your site after you give it a complete makeover? John’s theory is that many infrequent visitors will come to check out your site for the new looks. How do these infrequent visitors know about your site’s new look? Do they network and ask each other if a site’s look has changed or not? I don’t know the answer.

If you are just starting out, don’t spend too much time on a site’s design. Start with a simple and aesthetic design and stick with it for at least six to twleve months. Change the design after you start getting a decent amount of traffic.

Technorati, the internet search engine for blogs, added a new feature called Topics. The homepage shows a frequently refreshing list of new blogs. A tabbed view shows blogs categorized into six topics: Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life. You can tab to a different category of your choice on the homepage and review blogs in that particular topic

It is a kind of annoying. By the time you zero on a headline, the page is refreshed and you have to look for it again. A better idea would be to use a digg like feature for the homepage.

I like Jonathan’s My Money Blog. This guy is honest, down to earth, and he is full of practical ideas. He has opened up his financial life to his website visitors and he preaches ideas that he practices to save and make money. His famous series is how to make money using your credit cards.

Today in my RSS reader I saw his post about money back rebates and how a San Jose Mercury Reporter had dug out 1,300 unopened rebate forms from a dumpster. You can read the full story here.

I also hate rebates. I am glad that BestBuy is offering more instant savings and has moved away from their infamous rebates. Other electronics and office supply retailers are slowly following BestBuy’s direction. I have never received any money from my rebates. I will either forget to submit it before the due date or forget to follow up after their ridiculous six to eight weeks waiting period.

If the retialers are sincere about honoring rebates, they will move to a complete online version for redeeming rebates. Staples offers electronic filing and tracking of rebates but I don’t know their turn around time.

Hey, this is an excellent startup idea. Develop a rebate redemption application, pitch it to a few angel investors, and work with retailers by offering two weeks turn around time for cash back to the customers.

I am sure somebody has thought about this idea before but retialers are not interested in redeeming a large percentage of rebates. The unique selling point of a rebate clearing house is how low its rebate redemption rate is.

A new breed of sites is showing up in the Web 2.0 horizon that wants you to create your life story online and save it forever. You use blogs, family pictures and videos to build a timeline of your autobiography. You share your contents with friends and family members and invite them to join your life’s inner circle. Notables are Our Story and Story of My Life.

Our Story collects relevant pictures from the web and incorporates into the event you are writing about. If you are describing your recent visit to Hong Kong, the site will gather pictures related to Hong Kong from the web for you to incorporate into your events.

Users blog their life story in Story of My Life and share it with friends and family. You are encouraged to purchase “Forever Space” to preserve your online autobiography forever.

A college kid collects a million dollar by selling pixels on a web page and the gold rush begins. Forums spring up discussing a new wave of advertisement on the web. Thousands of sites with hundred of variations hawk pixels on their web pages. Advertisers fall into the trap.

Today, the Alexa traffic rank of milliondollarhomepage is 48,000. It will continue to decline. Now a new wave has started with wikis. Advertisers are rushing to buy pages without realizing the value of these sites. And moron reporters are also falling into the trap. These sites will suffer the same fate.

Why do you visit a website? Besides making a purchase, you visit a web site to get information or accomplish some tasks, connect with your friends or express your feelings. The pixel sites only offered a page full of pixels. Do you want to stare at pixels? Do you want to stare at the home page of a paid wiki site to check out some random pages?

The Wikipedia is the largest storage of encyclopedic knowledge with more than 1.4 billion words in 253 languages. And it continues to grow. There are niche wikis on travel, history, politics, etc. Even your 12 year old daughter knows where to go online for her homework assignment help. There is no reason to go to a paid wiki site.

Advertisers, wake up and ask yourself why visitors will visit one of the paid wiki page that you just purchased from somebody who thinks his invention is the next best thing since slice bread. It is even ridiculous to call these sites as wiki sites.

These paid wikis are not even wikis. Wikis are online collaborative applications that allow users to add and edit contents collectively. Wikis are online repository of information where topics are linked together for a user to navigate all related topics.

Advertisers, what you are paying is a free MySpace page for $100. I give credits to the creators for touting free MySpace pages as wiki pages. You can go to Squiddo and start creating your free Squiddo lenses or article pages. You will get a better return on your investment because Squiddo pays to popular lens creators.

Look at your paid wiki pages. It looks just like the home page of paid wiki sites, with their logos, menus, site names etc. The page even doest not look like your own page. A better investment will be to pay $60 for a your own domain name for 10 years and redirect a Google Blogger account to your domain. You will be able customize the look and feel of your blogger pages.

If you really want to pay $100 for a page, ask the following questions. Do you get a page that you can customize to the extent you want? Does the site have a model that will bring visitors for a reason other than staring at the site’s home page? What does the site give back to its user community?

Now you have it. Chase the gold rush with these paid wiki pages, and you will end up without any gold. Prospect the web and you will find gold nuggets.