neverblog.net

Overview

For those of you unfamiliar with the site woot.com, you owe it to yourself to check it out. Basically, the concept of Woot is that they buy a certain quantity of a particular item, then start selling it at 1am EST until it sells out, or until 1am EST on the next day. Oh yeah, the price is rediculously low, and shipping is always a flat $5, whether it’s a USB key or a 42″ plasma TV.

Obviously, most of the stuff Woot puts on their site sells out. In fact, it’s not unknown to have a Woot be sold out by 1:30am, a mere half and hour after posting. Time, clearly, is of the essence where getting a Woot-deal is concerned, and that’s where the Daily Woot Widget comes in. With the widget, you can easily insert the daily Woot item into your blog’s sidebar. Since it’s a widget, you can customize the title in the Sidebar Widgets menu of your WordPress wp-admin panel. Additionally, I’ve added in functionality to let you specify the width that you want the widget to be, so that it’s compatible with your sidebar’s unique dimensions.

Please keep in mind, if you try this widget out, that it is still very much in the beta testing phase. This is my first widget, so if some of the sidebar integration messes up your entire sidebar, don’t blame me, or at least don’t tell me you’re blaming me. Also, if you do encounter and bugs or “accidental features,” please fill out a comment and let me know.

Installation

Download the Daily Woot Widget (292) and copy the woot.php file to your /plugins/widgets/ WordPress directory. Then go into the plugin admin page and active the Daily Woot widget. Customization is available on the Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets admin page.

The following is a sponsored review of The Bubblenator, a website that allows you to put thought or speech bubbles on any picture on the web.

When you first arrive at The Bubblenator site, it’s quite obvious that it’s a gimmick to drive traffic to the site online-casinos.com–heck, even the URL is based off that site. However, if you can ignore the fact that it’s clearly a page designed to create advertising for the online casino website, the bubblenator feature itself is pretty cool. You can put a thought or speech bubble anywhere in a picture that has a URL, then you can resize the bubble and add whatever text you want. All in all, it’s a pretty nifty way to waste time on an otherwise slow day.

Once you’ve got your picture all formatted, you can export the HTML for copying and pasting into your website, blog, etc. The good news is it’s all free; the bad news is the image modification is done with a Flash app hosted from the online-casinos site, so if the site goes down, so will your image. Also, there’s an annoying bit of code at the end that (surprise!) leads you back to the online-casinos site. Despite these limitations, The Bubblenator is definitely an interesting and fun way to waste some time. Of course, as an ad for online casinos, part of the point is wasted on those of us in the United States, where it’s illegal to gamble for real money (and stupid to gamble for fake money). Until those laws are changed, however, you can still take advantage of the completely unrelated, yet undeniably fun, Bubblenator.

cat, dog, bubblenator, caption, cartoon

The following is a sponsored review of Lunarpages Coupons, a blog that maintains a list of actively available coupons for Lunarpages hosting.

Upon visiting the site, the first thing that I noticed is that it very clearly and obviously displays the coupon codes for Lunarpages, as the site’s name would have you believe. The codes are updated monthly, and there have been recent updates. Clearly, this is not a scam in the sense that someone is actually trying to run ad revenue through a spammy blog with the enticement of ‘coupon codes.’ Furthermore, it’s clearly run by a real person, not some content aggregator. For these reasons, the site and it’s aim of listing out money-saving coupons for web hosting is an admirable goal.

However, seeing as the site has put out a campaign to build public awareness of its existence, one would hope for an additional amount of content on the site besides just the codes. After all, as far as I can tell, without being to critical, the only relevant content on the entire site is basically three lines:

“28offplus2″ - $28 Off Plus 2 Free Months
“Save35″ - $35 Off
“Save50OnDed″ - $50 Off on dedicated servers

Now, that’s not to take away from the fact that updating the site regularly means that it is not only a one-time blog post about a deal that may expire the next day, or twenty minutes later. It takes a certain degree of dedication and consistency to do so. But the other thing that preplexes me is this: if I want a coupon code, a simple Google search for that company plus the term ‘promo code’ or ‘coupon code’ usually yields the results I need. In fact, since Google allows sorting by date, you can narrow your results to find the latest posts about coupons anyway. So, in the final analysis, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a Lunarpages Coupon blog, but it may not actually provide a significant service that would make it a good bookmark for repeat use.

The following is a compensated review for PokerStars for Mac.

If you’ve ever played online poker, you’re probably familiar with PokerStars.com, one of the most popular poker sites on the Web. The ‘Mac-friendly’ poker reference site PokeronaMac.com, is reporting that the Mac version of PokerStars’ downloadable PC client will be hitting the Web soon. If you want, there’s a place to voice your support of the new Mac version, and press PokerStars for its release.

Now, it’s pretty neat that PokerStars is choosing to support a Mac client, especially in light of the fact that most new Macs will run Windows just fine. It speaks to the volume of PokerStars’ subscriber base that they have seen a significant demand for a Mac client from their customers. However, what I don’t understand about PokerStars or many of the other popular poker sites is simply why a well-written Java client is not the standard. Java will run on Mac, Windows, and even Linux, and it’s this sort of thing that the sometimes cumbersome, always lethargic language was designed for. There’s no offline play in the downloadable clients of any of the companies, as far as I know, so it seems that there’s no reason to use the player’s computer as the source of the application, when a universal client-server language exists that is universally compatible with all desired target platforms.

In spite of this note (and perhaps someone from PokerStars will care to comment), I think it is pretty nifty that the Mac client will be coming out. I’m only a little hesitant because there doesn’t seem to be a release date on PokerStars.com or PokeronaMac.com for the Mac client, and this wouldn’t be the first time that such a project never appeared after a lot of advance publicity. I certainly hope this isn’t the case here, but only time will tell. Until then, hope springs eternal!

mac, poker, pokerstars, pokerstars.com, poker on a mac

The Motley Fool is reporting that Google is being sued by American Airlines for selling sponsored ads targeted at the keyword ‘American Airlines,’ a trademark of the airline. Here’s an excerpt from the full article, located on Fool.com:

To understand the situation a little better, fire up Google and punch in “American Airlines.” Google’s AdWords program serves up sponsored results along with the organic search-engine results. Online advertising accounts for as much as 99% of Big G’s revenues — it’s clearly a big part of the Google model.

Your mileage may vary, but when I searched this morning for “American Airlines” (in quotes, but it works just as well without them), I saw several third-party ads. The most prominent ad, at the top of the page, is for AMR’s own AA.com website. However, the column on the right features rival airlines and portals that promise discounted airfares.

The ads themselves don’t feature the American Airlines brand. However, the ads wouldn’t be on the page if the sponsors hadn’t bid on the trademarked term. To be sure, I logged into AdWords and saw that I could bid on the term “American Airlines” for as little as $0.04 per click. (Minimum bids vary depending on ad quality, even within the same keywords.)

Is this right? Is this wrong? The only thing for sure is that a lot of money is weighing on the answer.

What will make this one really juicy for the lawyers is that, with most searches on the web being case-insensitive (as far as I can tell–if someone knows differently, please feel free to comment), the trademarked term ‘American Airlines’ and the perfectly reasonable search for ‘american airlines,’ aka airlines offering service in america, are one and the same in a search engine’s mind.

Obviously, the larger issue is whether or not things like ‘Disneyland’ can be bought as a search term when trademarked by a company, but it’s a little more interesting in the case of American, whose decades-old choice of a name designed to build brand recognition might actually confound an already complicated issue even more.

Another interesting point that the article makes is that, if trademarks are ruled off-limits in advertising media like Google, it will also allow the trademark holder to withhold advertising funds from Google for those particular terms, as there would be little reason to advertise for a search term when no competitor could:

It is easy to see that Google could lose a lot of money if it caves in on these cases. If no one else is allowed to bid on “American Airlines” and other AMR trademarks, AMR has no reason to bid on it, either. It is the top organic search-engine result.

Of course, on a more personal level, I will be interested to see how this case is resolved, and what effect, if any, it will have on the blogosphere, many of whom rely heavily on Google AdSenseâ„¢ for their blog’s revenue stream.

adsense, adwords, google, american airlines, american, airlines, lawsuit, trademark, trade mark

There has been quite the buzz recently about Google’s recent move to encourage use of the rel=”nofollow” tag on paid links. Matt Cutts, whose blog offers an insider look at SEO in the Google world, argues that buying links to boost page rank should be prevented, as it constitutes deception of the search engine’s algorithm, and prevents it from serving the most relevant links to searchers.

The Official Google Blog also has an article about the nofollow attribute, which clearly states that incoming links from sites that Google deems have been paid for will not be ‘credited’ towards the target site’s page rank. Now, my point here is not to argue that Google should be allowing comment spam and other obvious and highly exploitable means of link-spamming. However, the fact that Google (and now Yahoo! and MSN Search) have decided to support and enforce the nofollow attribute as the default for paid links means that the three major search engines on the Web, through which most of the people that find information on the Web locate the sites and content they want, have taken the stand that money shouldn’t be able to buy recognition on the Internet, or at least better search results on the Internet.

While this attitude seems quite reasonable, and is garnering a lot of support throughout the blogging community, where spam is an ever-present problem (thank you Akismet, 10,000+ pieces of junk automatically filtered and counting), few seem to be regarding it as the fundamental cultural paradigm shift that it represents. In the ‘real’ world, companies with large amounts of capital can fund massive marketing campaigns, using their clout to eliminate poorer and weaker competitors. It is a simple reality of capitalism that money continues to be used to buy influence in the offline world; in fact, large firms constantly flood the market with print, radio, and TV ads that cost billions per year across the board. Why is it then, that Google and other online search giants have decided that paying to be noticed is deceptive and wrong? Is it a moral stand against a cutthroat practice, or merely another assertion of corporate domination over a particular market by its largest players.

I, for one, will be curious to see how the forces at play in the market affect the decision Google has made on paid links, as sites like ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads will have to decide whether to conform with Google’s ultimatum, risking the wrath of their advertising clientele, or to leave the nofollow attribute out of their links, thereby risking losing publishers who fear a declining page rank. All in all, I think the decision made by Google to filter search results by non-paid links only is noble, but it ignores the larger reality of our society, which is that money drives people to content all the time.

Take, for example, the recent advent of Gofbot.com, a site operated by McDonald’s as part of a marketing campaign featuring fake newscasts proclaiming Gofbot to be ‘bigger than the Big Mac.’ The point of the campaign, and the fake page counter on Gofbot.com, which always resets to 4 hits, is that nothing is bigger than the Big Mac, a tried and true ‘American classic.’ However, if you look it up, Gofbot has a relatively decent (for a site with NO content) Alexa ranking of 352,306, driven solely by the TV campaign and the buzz it created. The page takes you to McDonald’s website after you’ve seen the mini presentation, and voila! McDonald’s has paid to send you through a link to their site. And they did it by circumventing Google and placing their high-priced advertisement in a market that already accepts that money buys the attention of people in our society.

When you consider that the Web doesn’t live as an entity by itself, and that search engines are but one way that people are driven to websites, it certainly complicates the issue that Google is taking such a clear stand on. I would love to see a world in which advertising dollars don’t make you more relevant for a particular search term, but I’m not sure Google’s moral stand can survive in a world where money already buys the attention of millions of consumers every day.

SEO, google, search, paid links, gofbot.com, mcdonalds, mcdonald’s, msn search, yahoo, advertising, online advertising, nofollow

Thanks Akismet. In the less than two-year history of this blog, the erstwhile spam-blocking service has filtered 10,000 pieces of spam for me. Compare this to the roughly 250 actual comments I’ve gotten, and you’ve got an idea of the pain and suffering that email administrators and others who deal with spam daily have to go through.

akismet, spam, blog

The following is a sponsored review of WebCockpit 1.0. I’m not really sure what WebCockpit is, since the main page of the site only indicates that it is some sort of philosophical or mental technique for becoming more productive in life and work. Apparently, the book Simpleology 101 teaches you how to work smarter, not harder, and this website is the ‘Web 2.0′ accompaniment to it.

However, the site is incredibly vague, and mostly looks like a get rich quick scheme. Besides a few vacuous quotes about how great Simpleology is, and how it will help you get rich and buy a nice new car, there’s no actual content indicating why or how the product might work, or anything else that convinces me to inquire further.

To actually inquire further, you need to give the site your name and an email account, in order to “verify you are a real person.” I, for one, am not one to give out information on the internet to incredibly sketchy looking sites that won’t be at all specific about the product they’re hawking.

Now, I’m willing to believe that there is a chance that this site isn’t just a pyramid scheme or a cheesy self-help site designed to exploit the gullible, but the site authors are going to need to be a lot more forthcoming with this kind of info before I give away my name and email address. Also, all the talk of ‘no committment’ when giving your email scares me, since there is obviously no commitment implied in giving out your email address. Sooo, why insist that there’s no catch?

As always, should the makers of the site decide to change the appearance of the site, they are welcome to contact me and I will re-review the site free of charge, but I would highly encourage more transparency on the main page.

Those of you who know me know that I’ve been in a relationship for over five years now, so you’re probably wondering where I’m coming from on this eHarmony thing. Well, a couple of months ago I got curious about why eHarmony rejects people, after seeing a chemistry.com commercial. I took eHarmony’s loooong test, and got ‘in’ to the club. After blogging about my experience, and a little about why eHarmony supposedly rejects people, I got a bunch of comments, not to mention constant emails from eHarmony encouraging me to meet people they’ve matched me with. Of course, I have no intention of spending my own good money on something like online dating, but if I get the $60 I need (or a lower amount and someone finds me a good promo code), I promise to meet at least 3 of the people on the list, find out if they’re compatible, and report back on this blog. C’mon, it’s for a good cause!

eharmony, rejected, reject, dating, online dating, dating site, chemistry, chemistry.com, chipin

The following is a sponsored review of Iceberg On Demand, a web-based platform for creating individualized applications without advanced coding knowledge.

Iceberg On Demand markets itself as a tool for non-technical computer users to create applications for a almost any need, with no actual coding involved. According to the site’s main page, this includes things like workflow management, relational databases, and other common business application needs. In fact, Iceberg On Demand will come with several bundled ‘free applications‘ that are all common apps in the service and sales industries. Specifically, Iceberg will be including a human resources app, advanced CRM, project management, rostering, knowledge base, recruitment manager, booking engine, timesheet and billing, and a bug tracking app. All of this sounds pretty nifty, so I definitely would like to see a demo.

And there’s the catch. The most you can do with Iceberg right now, besides watch a short video on the site’s front page, is sign up for the upcoming beta by submitting your email address. I think this software sounds like it could be pretty impressive, and I’m excited to try it out when it becomes available, but it’s difficult to do an actual review of how it works until I can try it. In the meantime, I’m interested in Iceberg On Demand’s potential, but I’ll have to wait for the actual product launch to see how it all pans out.

custom app, application, crm, project management, timesheet, billing, bug tracking, iceberg, iceberg on demand