Internet Marketing, SEM, News, Sports, Videos, and Politics Blog
Web 2.0
Unblocking MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, And Hi5
Mar 6th
Unblocking MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Hi5. It isn’t difficult, in the end. Basically all you need is to find a decent free proxy server, which hasn’t been banned yet by network admins.
Once you find the proxy, you simply enter the address of MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, or Hi5 and off you go. Of course surfing will be a bit slower than if you weren’t using a proxy.
Here are some of my favorite proxy and unblocker servers:
They were all working last time I checked, but that could change in a hurry.
Mixx And Commongate
Jan 23rd
I have been checking these two social networking websites out a bit. They are both well-designed tools for submitting news. They both appear to be based around blog content (which is a good idea to me).
So far neither of the websites seem to have huge installed userbases, but this is understandable.
I am doing my best to participate to at least enough of a degree to see if the system can work for traffic generation, or if content production will mainly benefit the site owner. As social networks evolve, the monetization issue becomes paramount. If you can at least expose your commercial blogs to a bigger audience, the time spend creating content on their domain might pan out.
Saga Zone – Social Networking For Over 50 Set
Oct 31st
Everyone knows how much the teeny boppers love MySpace and Facebook, but they aren’t exactly the kind of sites that a more genteel and older crowd would enjoy. So, British insurer Saga has decided to make a new social networking website just for that crowd.
Saga Zone aims to attract those aged over 50 to the burgeoning social networking sector currently dominated by younger users.
It will enable users to create their own profiles, contact friends or join online groups and web forums.
The site has been running in trial mode for four months and has so far attracted 13,000 members.
The oldest “zoner” to date is 87-year-old Thelma Hind, from Bangor in Northern Ireland.
“Social networking sites, like Saga Zone, can be a real lifeline for older people who can sometimes feel cut off and lonely,” she said.
This is definitely an idea who’s time has come.
“Classy” Companies Can Get Away With Crap Advertising
Sep 26th
If you’re a big hitter like Forbes, you can block access to your articles by making people click on a “Welcome Screen”, which most sane people actually call “an interstitial ad”. If you were regularjoeswebsite.com, you could never get away with something as crappy as that. And therein lies a remarkable paradox. The bigger the company, the more they can appear “spammy” online without it pulling down their numbers any.
So if you plan on covering every inch of every page of your website with ads, you better make sure you’re a newspaper or something similar. Any of the old media companies can get away with, including displaying bestial popups and the like. So can you if you play your cards right.
The only time you’ll run into real trouble is if you have no online or offline rep and you try the same approach as the bigshots. You’ll look like you don’t belong. Since you aren’t known as a website where people find great info, you have much less leeway to get away with when it comes to monetization.
Netscape Becomes Propeller
Sep 25th
Now that is sort of comical. The former portal at Netscape.com has now been moved to Propeller.com and the Netscape domain has been re-directed to a subdomain at AOL. That really is progress. The one-time brainchild of Jason Calacanis is still ostensibly alive at the new address, but you have to wonder if maybe the zest for life isn’t long gone by now.
It’s good to see the top story is “The Stolen Election of 2004.” At least Propeller will keep the same shrill political debates going for the immediate future.
Spammers have now lost another perfectly good resource to drop links at.
CSS Makes Life Easy
Apr 16th
One of the greatest innovations in web development, for my money, has to be the introduction of CSS. Learning CSS is not terribly difficult, and it makes designing any type of website an extremely easy process for almost anyone. The best part about CSS is that how such small amounts of code can translate into very powerful styling.
I’m not that hot at CSS, but I’m getting better in recent months. The process of learning for me is to get right in there and try. If you get your hands dirty, you’re more likely to learn. But I’m constantly surprised at just how powerful stylesheets really can be. Plus, they keep your presentation layer seperate from the rest of your web app.
Learning CSS is going to take years, or rather I should say that mastery will take years. But it will be worth it because the standard continues to thrive. CSS should be around for a long, long time.
MySpace Sues A Big Spammer
Jan 24th
MySpace has been rumored to be getting tougher on spam, and now a new lawsuit indicates this is true. And it looks like MySpace spam has a lot of the same players as email spam. The defendant named in the newest case, is no stranger to email spam, either.
Social-networking site MySpace announced today it has filed suit against Richter, calling him the mastermind behind millions of spam “bulletins” sent to MySpace users’ accounts without their knowledge.
MySpace said those bulletins, allegedly sent between July 2006 and December 2006, violate state and federal laws, including California’s anti-spam statute and the CAN-SPAM Act, which Richter publicly supported at its passing.
Indeed the CAN-SPAM law is what MySpace is using to sue Richter over. Richter also phished accounts, which is also illegal. All in all, Richter is alleged to net several million per month so there’s no guarantee that these suits will hurt him at all.
MySpace Expands Into Europe With French Website
Jan 9th
Many people have mentioned the possible demise of Myspace, but it doesn’t appear like it’s happening anytime soon. The website is already considered to be the world’s third largest and now they’re expanding into Europe with a French-language site. France has a huge social networking crowd, but MySpace has lost pace to competitor Skyblog.
According to latest data from comScore Media Metrix, which measures Internet traffic, Skyblog had 7 million unique visitors in France in November, compared with 1.3 million for MySpace.
MySpace is expanding into other parts of Europe, as well. In Germany, MySpace’s beta site has more than 2.4 million monthly unique visitors and will likely launch in a few weeks. An Italian site should be live within a couple of months, the spokesman added. MySpace’s Ireland site is still in beta mode.
Netscape’s Traffic Plummets
Nov 20th
I guess just about anyone could see this coming. Valleywag calls this post the Calacanis Effect and shows some leaked internal traffic numbers that show the re-designed Netscape has gone straight in the crapper. I guess there was no question that such a mediocre website, which pushed out its’ main constituency would end up in this boat.
Except Netscape visitors, most of whom only stuck with the neglected portal out of habit, were the worst subjects possible for Jason’s radical experiment. Traffic the week of June 18th, before the Netscape team remade the front page, was 137m pageviews. The following week, as Netscape decommissioned areas such as news and weather, it declined to 115m. The new front page, a clone of Digg.com, went live on June 29. The first full week after the change, traffic had plummeted further, to 72m pageviews. The Comscore numbers, which help advertisers allocated their budgets to different internet properties, mirror this decline.
At this point, you honestly have to wonder how long (or short) it will be before AOL pulls the plug on this experiment. The social news website at Netscape hasn’t seemingly evolved at all in its’ 4 or 5 month stint, and it’s obvious to anyone that it won’t grow at all. The Calacanis model just didn’t work out. Paying the so-called “top contributors” to turn in news stories is no guarantee of building a thriving site, and this case, it certainly hasn’t.
Just Who Uses Social Websites?
Oct 10th
Recent reports concerning the demographics of social websites like Myspace have been showing different results than many people expected. In fact, the people were older than most would have expected. Myspace has a great number of people over the age of 35.
As top social networking sites mature and become more popular, their visitor age profiles are also on the rise. More than 50 percent of all MySpace users are now over the age of 35, according to ComScore Media Metrix.
The basic premise concerning the increase in age of the users is that MySpace has hit the “mainstream” to a degree, and more people are using it as part of business. Facebook, naturally, skewed towards a younger audience, because of their previously closed registration process.
Frankly, I can’t imagine what any of these over 35 year olds are even doing on MySpace.