Let’s look at an example…

Marvin wants to start a new gaming web site. He wants that web site to earn $50,000 within 18 months. He made a list of topics he wants to cover. He decided on a posting schedule. He read many productivity articles and decided to write articles in advance. He made sure to have the tools recommended to get things down quickly yet efficiently. He made a list of potential ad network and advertisers. He was able to do this from previous sites. Microsoft, who invests heavily in online marketing, was one of the companies he made considerable income from in the past. He made sure to make a note to keep up with contacts with Microsoft while networking for other prospective sponsors. Marvin carefully picked out the content management system he wanted to use, the design, and he made special care to pick hosting he can grow with without having to worry about his site being turned off during traffic spikes.

Marvin put his plan into action. He started writing articles. He started Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts. His friends’ lists were growing. Soon, his articles were being linked to and his traffic numbers increased. The productivity articles he read were spot on because he efficiently produced content and reached his goal.

When his traffic numbers were high enough, he began to approach Microsoft about sponsorships, game betas, etc. He also approached Sony, EA, and other console and PC game developers. The response wasn’t what he hoped. Most of them didn’t respond at all. After exchanging emails back and forth with someone from Microsoft he finally received an answer as to why they would not advertise with him as they had done in the past. The contact at Microsoft said that he did not feel Microsoft would receive a decent return on their investment due to the community views of the site.

Marvin was confused. His content was quality and unique. He didn’t understand what the Microsoft contact was talking about. Frustrated, he talked to his wife. She thought about it for a moment, and gently explained that Marvin connected himself closely with Apple lovers. Not only were they Apple lovers, they were Microsoft haters. She pointed to Twitter updates and links by those he interacted with most on Twitter, Facebook etc. There are applications that make this very easy to see. What was clear was that the people he interacted most online were pro Apple and Microsoft haters. Marvin pointed out that his articles received decent comments and he protested because he is a happy PC user. His wife pointed out that he also has a Mac and it doesn’t matter he enjoys his PC. His friends are anti-Microsoft. They would be throwing money away advertising with him.

Guilty by association

If you’re paying attention, you’ll realize that Marvin lost advertising revenue from Microsoft and PC game developers. His online connections limited him to console game companies only and realistically only console game developers that do not make PC games. His once attainable goal of $50,000 in 18 months is no longer attainable. By associating with people who were in direct conflict with what he wanted to achieve, he stumped his own growth.

What the Microsoft contact noticed is that his tweets about his articles could not possibly be well received by his friends, limiting the share value. Why invest money in Marvin’s site when sites such as Team Xbox or GameSpot exist? When writers tweet their articles their friends are on board because they are of like minds. The friend value and the odds of ROI are much higher advertising elsewhere.

What would probably be a better match for Marvin is to review iPhone games. Would he be able to make $50,000 in 18 months? Most likely not but his audience would match his content. Something is out of whack. It is up to Marvin to figure out what it is.

You can’t escape it…

To have success you have to be able to make the right decisions and maintain it. Perhaps Marvin selected those people to increase his traffic short-term but in the end, he ended up diluting his ability to earn money long-term. Unfortunately for Marvin, it will take months to undo his error. Advertisers aren’t stupid. Marvin will have to change the core people he interacts with and permanently keep it that way. Otherwise, he’ll lose advertisers again. Companies are very used to people jumping through hoops for money. This is not something that can be undone easily. In the end, he wasn’t productive in achieving his goals, was he?

Pick your friends, offline and online, wisely because they are a direct reflection of you.

Why Microsoft isn’t “scared”

Chrome OS and Microsoft target very different audiences (regarding computing). True, Microsoft was able to capture a large portion of the low-end internet user audience by default but Microsoft’s true target is businesses and those who need connectivity with their business offerings. The Chrome OS, as advertised, is for the light internet user. When I say light, I am not describing time. They use email, they connect to social sites, they browse the web, etc.

What about the millions of people who make videos, put them on their computers, use video editing software to edit them, then upload them – retaining a copy on their computer? What about pictures you take with your phone or digital camera? Most people store them on a computer. How many people blog and keep a copy of databases on their computer in case of disk failure?

And let’s not forget the people who play video games. Console gaming is fun but there are some games that do not play well on a console. Considering the number of good games coming to the PC, Microsoft does not have to worry about web-only computers. They have other concerns they should focus on.

So, what will happen?

Usually people purchase computers based on what they want to do with them and the price of the computer. The cost of computers dropped to the point almost anyone can afford one. The real question: if you have two computers, one doing significantly more than the other for slightly more money, which would you pick? The Chrome OS is perfect for kids, for example, but eventually most kids will want to do more with their computer than browse the web and check email.

But more important, the wise person does not keep everything online. The lazy person won’t think about the implications of everything being stored online until it is too late. A person serious about their online data has multiple backups, perhaps online and on their hard drive for the blog, email, videos, pictures, etc. If the data is important then it should be treated as such. How many horror stories does one have to read about someone losing everything because taking precautions to ensure it does not happen to you as well?

There is a clear market for this type of computer. I will most likely pick up one for travel if the price is right. It is a security precaution to travel with a computer that doesn’t have important data on it. It also seems like a good computer for beginners. There is a niche for Chrome OS…

That does not mean that those who purchase a Chrome OS computer won’t have a PC, Mac or another computer with an OS that does more. There isn’t much difference between the Chrome OS computer description and smart phones, is there?

Written by: Tyme White | Follow Tyme on Twitter | Be Friends on Facebook

Everyone who thinks it’s so funny to say “BUY A MAC!” when I ask for PC advice, my faves are a tribute to you! http://twitter.com/jsmooth995/favorites

If you go to his Twitter favorites it is about people complaining about their Macs. o_O As a PC owner it gets old seeing Mac people look down on PC users. People should pick a computer based on their needs, not as a status symbol. I personally use a PC because:

• I like to build computers, tweak it etc.

• I have many more options for software (since I beta test a lot of software) for the PC vs. Mac.

For example, I might dabble and play War Hammer to test out their PvP and they don’t make it for Macs. Have I thought about purchasing a Mac since I will be video editing? Yes. Do I also realize that would be an expensive investment to use for one thing? Yes. Am I satisfied with how Apple handles security issues (not that I am with Microsoft but at least they do on a scheduled regular basis provide updates)? No. Microsoft has their security issues but so does Apple. A 12 year old found a security issue in iPhone:

This was in iPhone version 2.1 (5F136), the currently shipping version. Since I have no access to beta of non-released firmwares I can’t test to see if it has been fixed since then. For those who care, this is bug 6267416. I don’t have much hope for it being fixed soon, because my security bug 5368148 from July of 2007 is still marked as open, and still unfixed in 10.5.5.

Anything that circumvents security access is a security flaw. I’m sure there is a logical explanation for why there is a security issue (or any issue) open since July 2007. I’d love to know how many bugs/security issues there are and how long they’ve been open.

This behavior doesn’t only happen with Apple products. I see weekly someone dissing another person for not using WordPress. Someone asks a legitimate question about Text Pattern and the response: use WordPress. Someone mentions they are having issues with MovableType but would like to do X and the response: use WordPress.

I think people should think about answering the damn question. How is it helpful, if someone is looking for help or advice, to recommend they abandon what they like and use something else…without answering the question? How would you like it if you took your car in to get a diagnostic and the mechanic said, “Buy a Honda” instead of helping you with your specific problem? Or you go to the doctor and instead of examining all your options he suggests removing the body organ? You bring someone of a different race to meet your parents. Their response: You should have brought an X girl/boy.

Yeah.it.is.just.as.messed.up.telling.a.PC.user.to.buy.a.Mac.

Competition is good and it’s wonderful that as consumer we have a choice to use a PC, a Mac or use both. Linux, et al offer more options. It’s good that people are using different products. Variety is good.

And if you give a recommendation, please answer their question. They’ll appreciate it.

lie
–noun
1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.

I started with a definition to make sure we are on the same page. Note the definition: deliberate intent to deceive. If the statement is deliberate the person is making a conscious choice to lie, to try to deceive the person(s) they are interacting with. In my experience, lies come to the surface because keeping up the facade of the lie is too much trouble.

Of course sometimes the lie is told to bide time and that’s the lie I’m talking about today. The whopper that Microsoft told to delay their employees from knowing Valentine had one foot out the door when Vista was complete.

The contract called for him to start on September 11. Valentine surely told his bosses of this fact. And yet Microsoft did not announce his departure until September 5, less than a week before he started.

So why would Microsoft lie about Valentine’s employment status? In July and August, Microsoft’s programmers were on a death march to complete Windows Vista.

What was the lie? That Valentine was taking a new job within the company after shipping Vista. Unfortunately, the contract with Amazon was signed in June, the lie was told in August. Microsoft lying isn’t that big of a deal, almost expected some would say. Let’s not forget that Valentine went along with the lie. He looked his team in the face every day with the knowledge he was jumping ship. This is not one lie, it’s a string of lies maintained for months. I would imagine quite a few people were in on this lie. He worked for Microsoft for 19 years, seven of those on Windows. The lie shows how fragile things were for his team during that time, if they were unable to handle the truth. He was paid handsomely for his deceit:

The deal called for him to get a $1.7 million signing bonus, a $150,000 salary, another $500,000 bonus, and 400,000 shares of Amazon.com (now worth almost $30 million).

Makes one wonder how much he was making at Microsoft. That’s a lot of money and I bet you’re saying you’d figure it out for that kind of money, right? Well, if he could lie to people for months what stops him from doing the same thing to Amazon? Valentine wasn’t in the strongest position transferring because Vista has always been plagued with problems, even in beta.

That’s my point: a liar doesn’t make exceptions. Eventually a liar will lie to anyone to benefit his/herself. It’s only a matter of time.

I’m glad the truth finally came to light. I thought it was kind of odd that Valentine was being re-assigned at that time. It didn’t feel right….because it wasn’t. I suppose this would make a good Quofda question: in the same situation would you lie to everyone?

Our goal is to become the matching and recommendation technology of the internet. Our focus is on leveraging machine learning techniques to improve consumer and business user experiences with large corpora of data. We live in a world of too much information and we’re trying to create the solution.

Wait, to sit on a throne they would have had to successfully release Persai and have fame. Lemme rephrase that…Sure is easy talking shit when you haven’t done a damn thing yourself yet.

I honestly can’t fathom what they are developing that Google couldn’t drop kick in 30 days or less. Simply because Google is sitting on all that information already. And Microsoft. And Yahoo. And Amazon…wow, this could be a long list. No reason not to try though, more power too them. I’m sure they’ve thought this all out and Persai will be damn near perfect once it is released. As much shit as they talk on Uncov it has to be. Ted had some words to say about Guy Kawasaki, of Truemors fame(?), having tips on a successful startup. Check it:

Just got done reading Kawasaki taking shots at what seemed to be uncov in Entrepreneur magazine. Some quotes: “the blogosphere trashed Trumors, but that’s good for us” and “some blogger kid who needs to move out of mom’s house and start dating”. I just LOLd the trash talk but what I don’t get is this incohert advice he’s spewing. Tips on building a successful startup: “hire a coder from the midwest” WTF?

See, Persai has to be on point. If not, that would make the them worse that Kawasaki. Let’s face it Kawasaki had his fame and is slowly fading (IMO) but he had success and many people still respect him. The Persai guys would be failing right out the gate, but they’d have their professional freedom and that’s all that matters, right [kyleshank.com link no longer active]?

I’m starting a company for the professional freedom and not much else (trust me we’re riding ourselves into the ground). I want to build great products and dream up solutions. Money would be nice but it takes a back seat to professional happiness.

Guys talking smack about Web 2.0 companies. Persai is in production but once launched will (hopefully) change how people use and manage content. They are in the Bay Area. It’s taking forever to be released. Boring blog. Fits the Web 2.0 profile so well they started backing away from the term.

Good luck. You’re gonna need it.

There is a problem: what do you do if you want to monetize your site and advertising companies you use rely on third party statistics that are not accurate? Alexa is known for being inaccurate (more to forecast trends than actual stats). What does a blogger/writer do if Alexa is showing inaccurate stats and the advertising company you use relies on Alexa and other third party services? Good question.

Since I use Text Link Ads on this site I decided to ask Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads, how the company deals with issues like this. Seriously, I manage my site and the more information I have the better I can do it.

Tyme: Alexa obviously has accuracy issues – all of them do. Anything with a toolbar can be gamed. Technorati has their issues too. For example, if a site has a high number of inbound links because the blogger requested people to write a review of their site, which many feel is another way of “gaming” the system. Does TLA and Review me have other methods in place to ensure that sites are judged fairly? If so, can you share a little bit about how sites are judged/priced?

Patrick: We agree Alexa is not a perfect solution for gauging a website’s traffic. A perfect example is a blog devoted to Apple users whose user base will be heavy FireFox users not using the Alexa toolbar. Because of this the Alexa ranking for this blog will be disproportionately high compared to say a blog about Microsoft. We understand this so Alexa ranking is not the only criteria we use when pricing our publisher’s websites for our products.

We use a combination of: The website’s theme, location of the ads, number of ads to be sold, Alexa ranking, Technorati rank, and a measure of the website’s link popularity. We have an algorithm that prices our inventory based on these many criteria. The results are never perfect but by taking in six data points it can help even out some of the disparities that happen with Alexa data alone.

Six different data points – that makes me feel better but I can see where more metrics will have to be used to better screen sites initially because those things can be gamed. Getting your site accepted might be a challenge but honestly, it should be. If you’ve already been accepted, how do you make sure your site is getting the best advertising deals?

Text-Link Ads [linkbuildingblog.com no longer active] has a blog with a wealth of information on how to optimize your site and increase traffic. Subscribe to the feed. After going through the blog, do the one thing most people don’t do. Take some responsibility in the monetization of your site and work with the advertising company to get the most out of it. That’s the main point of this entry. Most people slap code on the sidebar and then complain on how it doesn’t perform. Or worse, move the ads around for a month and because there isn’t instant change become frustrated. I see my relationship with TLA like a partnership and I expect them to do their part and I have a responsibility as well. I actually have to manage my site and work with them for optimal success. If you are using a company that you can’t interact with, well…why would you do that?

I had a question, I asked, I received an answer. When I start optimizing this site I will (after looking over the blog) most likely have some more. I know one thing, I’m not going to throw code up blindly and pray it works.

“I want to apologize for the dereliction of duty to our company’s number-one platform, the PC, in terms of gaming,” he told a crowd still recovering from the previous evening’s award ceremony. “We’ve been a little distracted for the past few years,” he said, referring to the company’s drive to release the Xbox 360. “Mea culpa, we’ve been busy.”

This isn’t anything new. Microsoft is always dropping the ball on something. Sorry apologies aren’t working for me but I am glad they remembered they created a platform that should have games on it.

I miss the days when there were so many games I had to save up to get them all. Or there just wasn’t enough time in the day to play them all. Unfortunately their change of heart has to do with righting a wrong. It’s about money…PC games and Vista. Here’s an example:

As with the next-generation gaming consoles, Vista will have parental controls for gaming built in. Unlike most current parental control methods, the system doesn’t block games based on their overall rating; rather, it will allow parents to disallow play based on specific game content descriptors, like “blood and gore” or “strong sexual content.” Parents will also be able to regulate how much time their children can play games, with an Outlook-like schedule that lets them restrict gaming to certain hours of the day.

Microsoft needs people to buy Vista. What better way to appeal to the parents than addressing the safety of children?

Ok, maybe I’m being cynical but I’m sick of Microsoft talking about what they are going to do. Do it.

I don’t know if CoolTechZone made this up or was given false information but the point is false information was posted to the web. This is a growing trend and unfortunately bloggers are having a good time with it. Bloggers are purposely making up stuff and posting it as a joke. And we wonder why journalists don’t take bloggers seriously?

I noticed another trend…snarky blogs. I know, I have a lot of nerve talking because I can rip something or someone apart but I always try to do it respectfully. I try to be open-minded and fair. I admit when I am wrong. I’m not perfect but I do try hard to find a balance between having fun with blogging, keeping it real, no ass-kissing and attempting to be accurate. I am always mindful of the fact that people read what I write and I am fortunate that I have readers that trust me. That trust didn’t happen overnight, I had to work for it. I would never purposely do anything to jeopardize that. Like stupid meaningless posts that might suck people into believing it because they trust me.

Of course there are bloggers that don’t care about trust. They don’t think about the after affects of what they’ve written…until it’s too late.

He said the same thing I did – the problem rests with the company that control the ad revenue…nip it at the bud. In this case, it’s Google. If you read my blogs you know I am not pleased with Google right now. This is an example of why I’ve just about lost patience with Google.

Instead of buying companies and expanding, fix current problems first. Get rid of scrapers, prosecute them. Take a strong stance. Clean it up already…what are you waiting for? Shutting down sites only bandaids the problem. The site will be back in another form this time targeting someone else.

Google needs to take responsibility for their product. I’d love to know how much they’ve paid out to scrapers. If I was an advertiser I would be extremely cautious about using Google because of where my ad might end up.

Let’s be fair, I had the same problem with Microsoft. When companies expand prior to fixing what is broke, the user ends up with the short stick, every time. I hope that Om’s popularity will bring more attention to this issue and force Google (and other ad networks) to clean up their act.

That is a portion of a post that the owner of Talk A Good Game left on The Microsoft Show. Shortly after that post, he said after the chaos was over, he was going to close the doors on his business. Essentially, I’m watching a business go out the door backwards on my web site. Not that I didn’t warn people what was going to happen. The irony is…if Bob Andrews paid attention to blogs, he wouldn’t be in the position he is in now. That’s karma for you. Let’s back up and see what happened…

The short version: He took pre-orders on Xbox 360 he cannot fill. Instead of keeping his clients informed, he picked the path of silence. This caused his clients to start searching. The end result? He’s being called a scammer, he is going to have a huge chargeback bill (if this happens his merchant account will be in jeopardy), this clients are not going to get their orders…and all his clients wanted was to be kept informed.

This is why companies need blogs. Yes, he could have begun updating his site earlier but that does not give the reader the opportunity to comment. He said in his comments he received 16,000 emails. Do you think there would have been that many comments on a company blog? Highly unlikely because the questions would have been addressed and answered.

I took a lot of flack about my thoughts on the difference between blogs and web sites. Blogs (in my opinion) is a type of web site that allows comments. Both have their place, both are needed. Blogs do not work in all types of situations. This is why companies need to have a plan before they launch a blog.

In this case, Bob Andrews needs a blog.

These lose/lose situations don’t have to happen. It takes more than a good idea to successfully run a business.