web2.0

I have a confession to make.

I am into “Blogging” more than I am actually into blogging.

By that I mean that I am more interested in the whole area of writing blogs, promoting content, internet marketing, search engine optimization,keyword research and that sort of thing - rather than actually writing on my blogs.

Just the same as I am more into the technology and ideas behind Flickr - rather than photography and actually taking photos.

It’s kind of like when, after playing guitar for 15 years or so I would go to see a band play and spend more time and concentration on seeing what chords were being played rather than enjoying the music.

Writing witty posts and having fun has been replaced with the technical aspects of PHP blog plugins, search engine hacking and trying to get some extra cash from what I was writing at the same time. There was a time that I was making about $3 per day from 1 page - until Mr Google blocked the ads that were being displayed as they were against their terms of service.

I have a lot of knowledge in “this here head of mine” and it’s time I did something major with it - so here is my promise to myself I made recently:

To have 100 websites active by the end of the year that earn me money.

And - the websites will be low maintenance, self perpetuating and income generating too. I don’t have the time to spend slaving over continual blog posts or networking with other “like minded professionals” either. I just want the cold hard cash!

It will take time to get this up and running - but the seeds are out there already and growing. I now have to decide on a few things to move forward. They are technical stuff like whether to use full domains like www.megatao.com or use subdomains like moneysite1.megatao.com. There are pluses and minuses to both though - but I will not bore you with the details.

I am not going to be able to quit my day job with this scheme - but if it works and I can bring in some spare cash then I will be more than happy.

There is some initial outlay for web hosting and domain names (100 domains = aprox £500 per year!) but I would hope to recoup this easily within the first month of the 100 sites being live.

Then I can go for 200 sites by this time next year!

Twitter is one of those services that I still don’t quite “get”.

• You post little updates in 147 characters or less and follow other peoples updates, or they follow you.
• You can even choose to follow the updates of people that don’t follow you too - so if Bill Gates used Twitter - you could get his updates!
• Twitter asks you “What are you doing?” and you answer the question.

I just came across this little video that does a good job of explaining what Twitter is and what the goal of the service is.

Its quite helpful in describing what it is supposed to be used for and has opened my eyes to it a little - but really, Twitter is much more than what is shown in the video. It can also be used as a tool to network with like minded people and gather information, comment and up to date news about almost any subject. I am starting to use this more at the moment than other stuff and its quite addictive. Especially as you can get to it from your mobile phone, your PC and other internet enabled mobile devices.

If you give it a go, then Follow Me On Twitter too!

So, unless you have been asleep all day or are reading this from another country; the main chat of the day has been “did you feel it last night?”.

I am of course referring to the Earthquake/tremor that happened at around 4 minutes to 1 this morning. The epicentre of the event was near Lincoln, which is about 105 miles from where I live - but not far enough that I didn’t feel the earth move and rumble for about 6-8 seconds.

I was just getting to the best part of reformatting my PC at this point (the bit where I realise that XP won’t validate its serial key as genuine again) when I mistook the ground shaking and windows rattling to be a ghost suddenly appearing behind me and tugging at my chair! By the time I had realised what was going on, my wife had jumped out of bed thinking it was a burglar trying to break in through the upstairs window and then rushed into see the kids to make sure they were ok.

We pulled ourselves to our senses, settled the one child that woke and my wife popped back into bed whilst I went back downstairs to see if I could find any information about the tremor on the Internet.

01:03 - My first port of call was the BBC News website. This was totally lacking any information - but bearing in mind it was only just after 1am and a few minutes after the event, I was not surprised that nothing was there.

01:05 - Reuters, Sky News and ITN news were then visited - but again, nothing to be seen.

01:06 - I logged onto my Twitter account and sent the following message:

I then jumped to the Twitter Public Timeline and picked up a message from Chris Alcock:

I did send him a reply, but he never replied to me though. I then saw a message referring to the tracking of tweets with the word “Earthquake” in on the TwitterSearch.com page and headed on over to see a glut of messages from various parts of the world reporting the quake and reflecting on the experiences of the people in the UK. Some poor chap was being sick at the time and missed it all - but he later informed me it was not a self inflicted sickness

01:15 BBC news page shows a “Reports coming in of earth tremor in west midlands area” ticker message but no real story to be seen. Still no word from the other news sites either!

01:16 I followed a link from the TwitterSearch.com list to TwitterVision and kept an eye on the BreakingNewsOn user based in the Netherlands who were providing the most information throughout the evolving news.

01:20 Twitter keeps serving up good links and information from people including the real information about the quake:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008nyae.php

01:20 An old BBC news story about a UK quake from 2007 makes the top of the “most read” section to the ridicule of Twitter users:

01:25  The BBC post a Breaking News article with basic information about the quake and “more to follow” appears but it is all very vague and information lacking.

Conclusion

Twitter users beat the major news networks on the head last night!  I appreciate that any news story being reported by someone such as the BBC has to be checked, validated and double checked and validated before it even gets anywhere near being reported - but nearly half an hour before anything was put up is pretty poor.  The messages on Twitter were reporting the quake being in different places at different times and strengths, but until quality links were provided to actual data, this is par for the course.

Twitter might not be to everyones tastes, including mine at times, but it was very good at getting information quickly and easily from a large variety of people and services.  Twitter can be good fun if you know people on there but it can also be a lonely place too.

If you want to learn about Twitter, read the excellent guide by Caroline Middlebrook and then follow me!

If you come here often you may have noticed that I have started to introduce Google Adsense into my blog.

Google Adsense is a Pay-per-click based form of advertising whereby the page owner gets a (small) fee paid for each advert clicked on by a reader. There are also some pay-per-view advertisements too, but they are seldom seen.

I feel that I put quite a lot of effort into writing things for my blogs and it is not unrealistic to assume that I would want to profit from people who might want to follow advertising based on the content I provide. I have been writing for Geeklimit for a while now and each of my posts has Adsense embedded. So far I have achieved a sum so measly that I could not even buy a coffee with it! In fact, all of the income I have received has been from Geeklimit so far.

I have been reading sites like ProBlogger, run by Darren Rowse for a while now and have seen that a living can be made from Adsense based income. There are tricks to getting Adsense to work the best for you and there are plenty of sites out there that will tell you the best places to put the adverts and how to target them according to your content.

ProBlogger also put me on to a forum based site called EarnersForum where internet based entrepreneurs discuss means and methods of making a living online. it makes very interesting reading and there are people out there who obviously make thousands a month from websites based on the Adsense formulas. And once they have created one site - they can just apply the same theory to another and double their income!

I have decided that I would like to “jump on this bandwagon” and will be looking to set up a site based around Adsense advertising. Not as a real income generator but more as an experiment on how it works and whether it is possible. It all seems “too easy to be true” that a site could generate me extra money so that my wife would not have to work part time or something like that.

I have to take a lot of things into consideration when approaching this, like visibility in Google and other search engines. Using high paying keywords and targeting Adsense on those keywords to generate the most income from each click. The web is flooded with sites set up in this manner already and choosing to make a site based on say, MySpace Video Codes would be foolish as there are millions of results in Google and getting anywhere near the top of that list would be a near impossible task.

The main problem is finding that niche area, getting a good domain name and generating the site based on all the various criteria. I have a few things in mind for the content but need to find that niche before I jump into anything. Most people don’t search past the first few pages of a Google search before they start delving further into the sites themselves. Getting to the top of that list is probably the most important thing - but achieving that goal may be a different matter.

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, income, problogger

I just read a little article over at BlogLines whom I use to read my RSS feeds online.  They are asking for Freedback - and no, thats not a spelling mistake - about their Bloglines product.

Freedback is a term used to establish communication between the user and the website provider.  Think of it like giving someone constructive criticism.

My Freedback to Bloglines would be this:

• The site is fast, neat and easy to use.
• I rely on it to do my job (research etc).
• It has become an integrated part of my surfing experience.
• At the moment I don’t think I would change anything!  Maybe just a different color scheme chooser or something…

Bloglines will track this post and collect my Freedback (hopefully) and maybe things will change if enough people report an issue with the same thing or request the same feature.

On the same note - you can leave me Freedback too.  Just leave a comment or write a post and mention Taoski or Megatao.  I will pick it up through my Bloglines feeds!

I promised myself a long time ago that I would quit Blogger and get my own domain name, install Wordpress and start doing my own stuff.

I did half of that, well - sorta.  I did quit Blogger and I have moved to using Wordpress but I am still hogging on somone elses domain and don’t have any creative control over my template here.

http://www.taoski.com had already been taken, http://www.photao.com has been taken too, so I have been looking around at other possible domain names.  I decided that I did’nt want to go for http://www.taoskiblog.com as I don’t want to be limited to just a “blog” type domain name.  I also wanted to get myself a “cool” and “web 2.0″ sounding name such as Flickr or Labelr or something like that.

The only thing I have come up with a the moment is http://www.spangl.com.  “Spangle”.  Not too sure on it though.  I think the idea came from the obscure title of one of Nick’s postings.

But I have been thinking.

Are domain names so important now?  Most of the sites I come across are through links on http://del.icio.us or through other peoples blogs and Google.  I can’t think of that many occasions where I have given links to people by word of mouth.  So would it really matter if my domain was http://www.taoskis-wonderful-blog.com or http://www.tao-was-ere-again.com?

So, you missed the train to work, the dog ate your laptop and your iPod ran out of batteries.  Time to slope off back to your house and do some tea drinking tele-working.  There are numerous web-based applications that can replace or augment your PC based software.  Mos of them allow collaboration of some sort and are available where ever you can get access to a browser.

Here is a list I have made of the main players broken down by application type. If you have any more to contribute - leave me a comment.

Calendar:
http://calendar.google.com
http://30boxes.com

Word Processing:
http://www.writely.com
http://www.ajaxwrite.com
http://www.zohowriter.com
http://writeboard.com

Spreadsheet:
http://www.irows.com
http://numsum.com
http://www.editgrid.com
http://www.numbler.com

Presentation Software:
http://www.thumbstacks.com

PDF Making:
http://www.pdfonline.com/index.htm
http://www.expresspdf.com
http://www.rss2pdf.com

Drawing/Photo Editing Software:
http://pixoh.com/
http://www.flickr.com
http://www.pxn8.com/

Flowcharting Software:
http://gliffy.com/

Project Management Software:
http://www.basecamphq.com/

Complete Office Suite:
http://www.goffice.com

Clipboard:
http://cl1p.net/

Bookmarks:
http://www.del.icio.us.com
http://www.spurl.net/