For the record, this post is not at all about The New York Times. Almost all of the major news sites do something similar.
Here is a completely random URL from a post in The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/us/13emissions.html?bl&ex=1189915200&en=ece3e83bef34f856&ei=5087%0A
I think I found that one by clicking through from Google News or Yahoo! News. The stuff after the question mark is junk they use for statistical tracking. I don’t like being a statistic. Plus, I don’t like including weird numbers that I’m not sure what they stand for in a link. Instead, when I put links into my blogs and happen to think about it, I try to stript the URL down as much as I can and still end up at the page I’m linking to. In the case above, it can be stripped down to this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/us/13emissions.html
That’s quite a bit smaller, cleaner, and easier to read. Plus, since I have no idea what those values are that are getting sent in the first URL, I’m not completely comfortable including them in a link. Are they personally identifying? Probably not. But it is easy enough to get rid of it and not have to worry about what might be hiding there.
Mahalo started up recently. If you haven’t heard about it, it is Jason Calacanis’ most recent way to make a fortune on the internet.
It is a human-powered search engine. Mahalo has real people decide what should show up when somebody searches for a term like Playstation 3.
If they haven’t built a search results page for that search phrase, they give some suggested search results pages they have created that might be similar and then list results from Google for the actual phrase you were looking for. You can see it for the phrase “be a good dad“.
It is a pretty interesting concept and could be a pretty interesting resource if they can get enough good people to build the results sets.
It is interesting and fun. I don’t expect it to change the search world but who knows.
It is in alpha right now. That’s not even beta yet. Calacanis posted a couple Tweets asking for somebody to create a Mahalo.com Wikipedia page since his kept getting deleted.
Apparently, somebody was able to get it done.
Since when did Wikipedia become a press release site for alpha websites. Silly. Sad.
Posting frequency was down. Page views to my main blog were down. May was an uninspired month full of home projects trying to get ready for the baby girl that we are having in October and lots of questions about how I want to run my blogs.
The grand total earned in May was $154.22. Almost exactly the same as last month. Here is where the money came from.
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AdSense $42.63
- TLA $108.30
- Amazon $3.29
A lot of the projects are done and I have answered several of my questions…but not all of them. I also did not get an overtime project that would have swallowed June so I’m looking forward to getting back on track.
I made a few decisions about HOW I try to make money during this last month. I tried Auction Ads on a few of my blogs. I love the concept but it just didn’t perform at all for me. I’ll be taking it down sometime soon.
I’m also going to get rid of the Amazon Contextual Links that I am using on a couple blogs because the little pop ups annoy me and for under $4/month I’m not willing to use something that annoys me. I’ll probably be giving up on Amazon entirely moving forward. I’ll leave any old links but not be adding new ones for a while.
I signed up with Commission Junction again. My wife started using SnapFish and we love it. It meets a huge demand that we have had since switching to a digital camera a couple years back. SnapFish goes through CJ, so I’ll do a little work promoting them and see if anything happens. I’m also going to look for a couple other companies that I would like to talk about that have affiliate programs.
I tried using CJ in the past and had nothing happen during my first year but I get much more traffic these days so maybe it will work out better this time.
As far as the actual content, I really want to work on writing a higher percentage of “articles” as opposed to “thoughts.” I’m not 100% sure how I differentiate between the two but I want to focus on thinking about that on everything that I write this month.
I also need to work on getting more consistent with posting frequency…especially on all of the blogs other than my main one. I need to try to hold myself to a schedule and get at least 2 or 3 posts per blog per week.
I read something today that got me thinking. Believe it or not it was this article about Mischa Barton getting hospitalized because or a reaction to medication that I read on Yahoo! News.
It got me thinking about how information spreads between new news sources like blogs and old offline news sources.
Here is how my thinking went:
Who is Mischa Barton? Oh, some lady on some TV show that I don’t watch.
How did this get on Yahoo! News? Ah, the Yahoo! News article is really a Reuters article that Yahoo! posted. That’s a very old school, newspaper way of purchasing content.
How did Reuters learn about this and why is there so little information? They read TMZ.com. The Reuters article says:
Actress Mischa Barton, former star of the hit television series “The O.C.,” was taken to a Los Angeles hospital after suffering a reaction to medication, the celebrity news Web site TMZ.com reported on Monday.
Why didn’t Reuters link to the original article? Reuters clearly read the original TMZ article since they quote directly from it for most of their article. Would it have killed them to link to the original article on TMZ.com? I came up with two answers for that.
Reuters is used for offline newspaper articles and dropping a link into offline print is awkward at best.
Reuters does not want to be associated with a celebrity gossip site of the likes of TMZ.com. At the time of this writing, the Recent Posts listed under the Mischa Barton article are:
Not exactly Pulitzer stuff, but if Reuters is going to get their celebrity news from the more entertaining news sources, they should embrace them…or at least link to them.
I’m of the opinion that if you are going to quote an online source for distribution to other online sources, than you should link to the source. This is the internet after all. Let me go read what was really said.
Maybe Reuters should offer versions of their articles with links for online distributors to use and without links for offline. Or maybe they should just give up the offline version without links all together. After all, aren’t newspapers dying?
I love the Twitter Maintenance picture. It’s very cute:
But seriously. Could somebody take the screwdriver away from the cat so we could all get back to being social. I see more of that cat these days than the site itself. On the plus side, this must mean Twitter is either doing some stuff or is about to need to do some stuff to increase capacity. I would go look for their blog but unless it was related to the bit of sloppiness a few days back, they don’t mention anything else.
1) The internet is built on computers and computers love binary. Your computer and all the servers around the world will just love you if you talk in their native language.
10) It will not take long to come up with all of the items in your list.
Special bonus item:
11) Most of the time there really aren’t 10 things worth talking about in most top 10 lists anyway.
Here’s another special bonus item:
100) Since it was so easy to come up with the first 10 items, you can practically scratch your butt and end up at 100 items…and top 100 lists are really the better way to go anyway when you have the time.
After my recent post about being frustrated with the ads at StatCounter and their prompt handling of the situation, I though I should write a post about why I have stuck with them for over 1 1/2 years.
I love the front page of the stats. I love seeing all of my sites and the stats for the current day, previous day, current month and life time total. I haven’t seen that global network stats snapshot on any other package.
I know that might be a pretty strange reason to prefer a stat program, but between that and the very intuitive (for me anyway) navigation between the various reports, everything just feels very easy to use.
I also like how easy it is to set a cookie with one click that will make StatCounter count your own pageloads.
And now I have another reason. They care about their customers. For a company as popular as StatCounter to not only see my post complaining about something but also to care enough to ask for more information and then take action based off of that makes me feel very good as a StatCounter user.
Little things like that go a long way.
WordPress 2.2 is available for download.
It looks like widgets are built more into the core of WordPress now instead of needing a plugin. They also made it possible to import posts and comments from the most recent version of Blogger. If you were on the fence about switching from Blogger to WordPress, that should help push you over the edge.
They also had over 200 bug fixes.
I had decided to skip 2.1.3 since I knew 2.2 would be coming out soon. I think I’ll wait a week or two before upgrading. I’m not really worried too much about problems. I just don’t see myself taking the time to do it for a little while which will work out well because if any real problems pop up with 2.2 there should be a 2.2.1 out soon.
Here is the official announcement with all the details.
Update: There has been a very prompt resolution to the problem below. When I originally made the complaint I expected StatCounter to have been aware of all the ads that they serve. Apparently that isn’t the case. But Aodhan from StatCounter managed to find this post and ask for some screen prints and source code when I sent it to him, they agreed that the ads were bad and apologized about it on their blog and removed the ad. Very impressive quick reaction to something I posted on such a small blog. I also happened to see a different, non-expanding ad for SuperPages that must have replaced the one I show the screen shot of below.
Thanks StatCounter.
I’ll start using their forum if I see something like that again now that I know that it might make a difference.
I’ll leave the original so that everybody can see what happened and how quickly they responded.
[Here is the start of the original]
I am so sick of the little expanding ads that expand right over the stats on the report screens of StatCounter. When I click the close button for the ad I am way up in the upper right hand corner and when I move back toward the stats section to click on a link to a different report, the ad expands again.
I’m all for big ads, annoying ads, flashing ads, whatever on a site providing a free service. Ads don’t really ever bother me. But when the ads start to physically inhibit my ability to use the site, I will start getting annoyed and looking for other services. I’m actually already getting similar stats from a few other places (FeedBurner, MyBlogLog, Performancing (testing and just never got rid of it) ). I also hated the ads StatCounter had that started talking to me loudly when the page loaded.
I already quit using ESPN because I do not like their ads.
Update: Here is a screenshot of the ad that is annoying me. Aodhan, I’ll send this and the source code to your email:
After a comment from Maria asking me not to give up on Twitter, I decided to add a couple more friends and try using TwitBin which I learned about from Kent Newsome when he said:
This is the application I’ve been looking for to make Twitter use more integrated with my browser.
I like the plugin quite a bit. It lets you view all of the little (what would they be called, twits?) twits from the public pool or just your friends.
My only complaint is that when you click on the links from those individual twits, they always open in the current window and the current tab. I’m not really sure why a Firefox plugin would not interact more friendly with the Firefox tabs.
But there is good news. The feature will be added soon.
I did notice something about Twitter itself that seems like it has changed recently, too. I love that. People can still post links to there own stuff, but it should prevent a little bit of spam.
Maybe Twitter can be the place to post life fluff like I thought MySpace would end up being.