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I have AppleCare but it may turn out battery expansion is covered anyway. Laptop seems to work fine with plug. I've complained a number of times of OS X Leopard intermittently failing to sleep on my MacBook Pro and my PowerMac G5 (a disease it must have gotten from Windows) - so perhaps it overheated.
I park 100+ domains. From January 1 to May 31, 2009, I earned $114.56 with a 2% CTR at my domain parking service, SEDO - even after working for several months to optimize returns with them.
| Uniques | Clicks | CTR | EPC | RPM | Earnings |
| 107,662 | 2,153 | 2.00% | $0.05 | $1.06 | $114.56 |
Prior to SEDO, I tried other domain parking services. Other than a brief window with one service's high returns that later faded, I have found SEDO's returns to be comparable.
In June, I began redirecting all my parked domains to the Amazon home page or Amazon Kindle page (Kindle pays a 10% referral fee) via Amazon Associates. For an example, go to http://gpsbeacons.com or http://commontunes.org
From June 24th to August 24th, 2009 (just two months compared to the five months at SEDO above), my parked domains generated 209,424 clicks, referred sales for $2,184.27 in merchandise at Amazon and earned $156.51, approximately a 3.4x improvement over SEDO.
In other words, I earned more in two months with a simple redirect to Amazon Associates than I earned in five months of keyword optimization at SEDO.
Keep in mind, I have not done any keyword or domain optimization to target specific Amazon categories, products or sections.
It makes me wonder what value the domain parking industry is able to bring customers at this point.
Update: The link to Why Craigslist is such a mess!
September Wired Magazine's "The Tragedy of CraigsList" (not yet online) by Gary Wolf calls the popular site "firmly stuck in 1999" saying its main failure is refusing to evolve.
Similar to a 2006 SXSW panel, Wired proposes five mostly serious alternative designs to improve the site.
I'll give a few brief excerpts but to read the article, you'll either need to buy the issue or wait for it to appear online:
Craig Newmark started a galactic garage sale with millions of users, a killer business model and revenue to match. So why is the site such a wreck?
Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even user names. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do?
...
Revenue from newspaper classified ads is off nearly 50 percent in the past decade, a drop that comes to almost $10 billion. Only a fraction of this loss is because of Newmark's company, but as the largest online classified site, craigslist is easy to blame.
Because he is the founder of a remarkable Internet company that also happens to be helping the nation's dailies go out of business, Newmark's opinion is eagerly sought, and he spends an increasing amount of time at conferences and international meetings, where he attempts to answer questions about how to best defend the public interest in an era of cheap and ubiquitous media. As we watch the birds on the patio of Reverie, Newmark tries out some of the phrases he is hoping to use in the coming months as he unfolfs the lessons of craigslist. "My big mission is to help make grassroots democracy as much a part of our government as representative democracy," he says.
I'll link to the full article when it is available online at Wired.
Add Mike McGinn to your Facebook profile photo via The Needle's profile customization feature:
I've written a blog post sharing ideas for community newspapers to use Facebook applications to expand their revenue opportunities online, particularly important given this report that the average online reader generates $46 in revenue vs. more than $600 from the average print reader.
As community news organizations grow more vulnerable to financial pressures, current approaches to Web publishing seem increasingly inadequate. To succeed now, news organizations must be willing to think more broadly about their identity and the role of their efforts online. Simply republishing the news on a Web site or a Facebook page will not sufficiently address the revenue needs of most organizations in this climate.
The traditional print publishing model provided a monopoly of sorts that forced advertisers to pay a premium to reach readers who were conditioned to a one way/consumption model for journalism. The evolution of the Internet has changed all this. Advertisers have a variety of options and readers want to consume and participate in the media in new ways.
The rise of social networks and the frequency of link sharing among friends on services such as Twitter and Facebook has not only eroded the editorial role but also contributed to the preexisting general information overload. Improvements in mobile technology are changing the way that readers consume news and the time and space in which publishers have to reach them with content and more importantly, ads. Competing for the "information bandwidth" of overwhelmed readers has never been more competitive while their attention span has never been shorter - and Twitter hasn't even yet saturated the mainstream.
Among oft-mentioned culprits, many publishers blame CraigsList for harming their financials; yet, few tried to leverage their trusted relationship within their communities to offer a competitive product and experience. Instead, most clung to a paid classifieds model online inside cluttered advertising portals. Readers clearly favored the simpler, free CraigsList. CraigsList has a lot of shortcomings but found niches in which to support itself, whereas community news sites simple ceded (and continue to cede) the valuable community service which is classified listings. There are other examples as well, e.g. auctions, city guides, referral services, knowledge bases, dating services, et al. While mindset was the prohibitive factor preventing news organizations from seizing these opportunities, limitations in technology expertise and capacity also remained a complicating factor.
In most communities, news organizations still have one key advantage: a valuable brand and familiar trust with readers.
It's past time for community news publishers to expand their brands from reporters of news to hosting online town centers that attract and retain the trust and loyalty of their communities. The decline of the newspaper revenue model, the Internet and the evolution of social media are figuratively calling out for publishers to step into this role.
Let's wash down the quasi-legal seizing of more shareholder assets with a link to Simon the Cat's video catalogue on YouTube and his website. Here is his latest, Fly Guy:
About a year after my startup, GiftSpot.com, was acquired by GiftCertificates.com, they ran into apparent funding problems and had a massive down round with a 500:1 reverse split. That means, if you had 500,000 shares, you would now own 1,000 shares. It's essentially, a quasi-legal takeover of the company by the new funders. It's not clear whether or not a bankruptcy filing would have been a more equitable approach and/or how management's own holdings were treated at the time. The company hasn't released much, if any, additional information. My co-founder moved to New York to work with the new company and I never heard much from him again - he gradually became unreachable.
Recently, I received notice that GiftCertificates is undergoing a 2500:1 reverse split. That 1,000 shares would now constitute less than a share. Another quasi-legal takeover of the company by the new funders. The company has not released enough information about its finances for anyone to judge whether these reverse splits have been prudent, necessary or equitable. Is it the same funders again doubling down? Or, is it new funders, serving the old funders a dose of their old medicine?
I suspect that GiftCertificates unclaimed certificate balance represents a lot of money (tens to hundreds of millions of dollars) unless the company has been appropriating these funds over time - another activity whose legality could come into question at a later date.
It sure would be nice if GiftCertificates would release more of its books for shareholders to review.
The #seattle hashtag might be a very interesting place for seattle residents to follow grassroots tweets from around our community. Unfortunately, sites such as News4Seattle read in RSS feeds from every news site and repost links to their site with ads placed around links to the original page.
While some participation by news sites is helpful, News4Seattle continues to spam our local hash tag with more than 20 posts per hour. They add nearly no value.
You can report them as a spammer to Twitter by tweeting "@spam @news4seattle" but so far I've seen no action taken by Twitter.
Unfortunately, blocking News4Seattle does not remove them from hashtag searches.
It would be nice if Twitter set rate limits on Hash Tag use so that no one user can present more than 5-10% of hash tag content if it's already posted in the past hour.
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